Conversion of rents in kind and in labour into cash in eastern England (c. 1050–c. 1300)
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Texte intégral
1Close discussion of conversion of rent is rather thin in the recent historiography for medieval England. There was, however, a relatively early, vibrant, if somewhat occasional, exploration of this as a theme, with some key works on commutation of labour services (Postan) and on rent in kind and money rent (Kosminsky).1 Prior to that work, at the end of the nineteenth Century and at the beginning of the twentieth Century, commentators such as Vinogradoff, Round, Gray, Levett, and others, all of whom were seeking to describe aspects of lordship and of the obligations owed to lordship did, of necessity, describe processes of commutation and the conversion of rent, often as part of a fuller discussion of changes in the nature of lordship and of villeinage in the high and late middle ages.2 Of more recent vintage has been work on tenant obligations and lordly exactions, as well as upon resistance to lordship and on exchange. In particular, the themes of the transition debate, continued in the Brenner debate, also encouraged close attention on rent and the transition from feudal rent to money rent.3
2All such approaches have generated some relevant information but, I suspect, anglophone historians will need to return to some of the themes first explored in the 1920s and 1930s. Kosminsky, in particular, set about a thorough analysis of the nature of rent in thirteenth-century England, using the Hundred Rolls, an enquiry into public rights in private hands conducted by central government under Edward I. Kosminsky’s analysis generated a series of highly germane observations not the least of which was the comment that, contrary to the earlier work of H.L. Gray, evidence for a varied distribution of money rent by the high and later middle ages may signal absolute differences in rent type rather than varying chronologies in the conversion of rent.4 There exist then numerous potential chronologies and approaches in discussing the conversion of rent in medieval England; it is also possible to chart some of the processes which encouraged such a conversion or, rather, conversions. At the same time it is important to recognise that some of the rent types found in the late middle ages are not products of conversion but are persistent elements of ‘rent’, already centuries old by the end of the thirteenth Century.
3Thus, we can distinguish (1) the relationship between rent and pre-Conquest forms of taxation from the transformation of a situation based upon taxation, organised by central government, to one based upon substantial elements of rent, including converted money rent; (2) the changing relationship between lord and tenant and its consequence for the nature of obligation, including the moments of separation from direct management by lords who, as lessors in, say, the twelfth Century and in the last decades of the fourteenth Century, looked increasingly to obligations payable in cash; (3) we also need to consider processes of colonisation which established clear distinctions between ancient tenures and newer tenures, distinctions which were of considerable relevance for the nature of rent owed. Most obviously (4), we should also consider the transformation of labour in kind, commutation, into money rent. This last has attracted a good deal of historical interest, and has a reasonably developed, if early, historiography, though the actual nature, extent and chronology of commutation remains far from certain.
Sources and regional context
4In so far as this paper offers a focus upon eastern England, and East Anglia in particular, we can make a number of fairly general observations which have relevance for the following discussion of rent and its conversion in the period. The first point to note is that the proportion of free tenants in eastern England had, from before the eleventh Century, been considerably greater than in other parts of the country; secondly, the region is generally considered to have been one of precocious commercialisation with a significant circulation of money from the ninth and tenth centuries; by the high middle ages the region was also characterised by a high and increasing population density. By extension, tenant landholding was significantly fragmented, with a large number of smallholdings occupied by small nuclear families. Further, the region was relatively advantaged in cereal production, especially in barley and wheat production.5 Finally, lordship in the region included both major lordships, including estates of the great lay lords, abbatial houses and bishops, but also smaller lordships, including lay and ecclesiastical lordships of no more than a single manor. Together these features contribute to create a distinct regional identity for the East Anglian economy, though with some inevitable variety even within the region; that distinction had implications for the organisation of rent and the chronology of its development. That said, we can also suggest more general features of the development of rent which might apply in other parts of England; from time to time in what follows some attempt will be made to draw out such general observations.
5Most of the material that can be directed at the particular question of the peasantry’s experience and conception of seigneurial demands dates from the late twelfth Century through to the early fourteenth Century, and is especially rich, in its variety, from the later thirteenth Century. That said, significant sources, which cast light upon aspects of seigneurial exaction, survive from earlier centuries, notably of course Domesday Book and the great monastic surveys of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. In the majority of instances, throughout the period, the range of sources allows us to describe the nature and evolution of seigneurial exactions in this period. An important distinction exists between the content of the earlier and the later material, which reflects significant changes in seigneurial policy, estate management and common law. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, the most substantial lords were content to lease their manors and demesnes. With rising population and a period of inflation in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, lords recovered their demesnes and took them into direct management. As part of this process, the great landlords encouraged legal reforms that forced distinctions between a free and an unfree tenantry. The period of high farming, the golden age of demesne farming, which dominates the thirteenth Century, is reflected in the content of the sources. In the period before direct management, surveys record the names of free tenants and their obligations to the lessor. Here we shall concentrate the bulk of our attention on the earlier and middle period, chiefly from the eleventh Century through to the thirteenth Century, with some reference forward to developments in the fourteenth Century. It is evident that, by the time we have detailed accounts and surveys, in which we can continue to chart processes of rent conversion and commutation which are highly relevant to this discussion, a considerable extent of conversion of rent had already occurred, the detailed history of a great deal of which is largely hidden from us. In what follows, an attempt will be made to chart some of these developments, in particular with a discussion founded on the relation between money rent and labour rent in this period. Before we turn our attention to conversion, we should note that what we also see is the persistence of certain rents throughout our period, a persistence that exists alongside elements of change. In advance of the discussion of conversion of rent, and in particular the commutation of labour services, it will be useful to identify the continuity of money rents and certain food rents into the high and late middle ages.
Money rents
6Some rents, identifiable as such by the high and late middle ages, were ancient and had their origins in obligations once owed to the state, so-called regalian rights or soke. Thus, for instance, landlords enjoyed the profits from private jurisdictions. The right to hold views of frankpledge generated fines for breaches of assizes of bread and ale, for non-attendance, or for petty misdemeanours. Payments arising from pre-Conquest payments owed to the Anglo-Saxon state and based upon units of that state—the county and its divisions, the hundred and the hide—had also corrupted into private rents by the high middle ages. Thus, royal taxes and the revenue from royal jurisdictions, granted to local lords in the eleventh Century, persisted into the high and late middle ages where they appear, attached in their divisions to individual holdings, as small money payments. The Danegeld, for instance, a levy inevitably associated with eastern England, was gifted to the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in 1021 while, in the mid-eleventh Century, Edward the Confessor had donated the revenue from the jurisdiction of eight-and-a-half hundreds to the abbey.6 The revenue from such jurisdictions was generated by a variety of dues; these included sheriff’s aid (a gratuity owed to the sheriff), averpeni (commuted carrying-service or averagium), wardpenny (commuted guard duty), foddercorn (rent-in-kind once owed as provision for the royal household), and hidage (a general ‘tax’ originally payable according to size of landholding). The most important of these dues was probably hidage, a revenue paid to the hundred, the immediate unit of jurisdiction. Such obligations had originally attached to free or socage land and are the subject of considerable attention in calendars compiled by estate owners in the twelfth Century. By the end of the twelfth-century, however, these obligations had often attached themselves to land held in villeinage.7 But, most importantly, they continued to exist as money rents, often attached as small elements to holdings which were once units of Anglo-Saxon geldable units.
Food rent
7Food rents constitute, by the high and late middle ages, what Neilsen has termed the relic of ‘an ancient System of exploitation’.8 Food rents were simple renders of produce from the tenantry for the benefit of the household of the lord and are most in evidence in the earliest sources. Although, by the twelfth Century, food renders had lost their significance in the manorial economy relative to money rents and labour services, vestigial food rents continued in the form of small renders to the lord, often at Christmas and at Easter.9 Testimony to the antiquity of such rents, they tended to attach to the older, pre-Conquest, tenures. Thus, for instance, on the Westminster Abbey manor of Birdbrook (Essex), only the virgated holdings continued to owe food rents into the fourteenth Century.10 On the Norfolk manor of Walpole, the larger customary tenures owed substantial food rents in the thirteenth Century. The extent of Walpole, of 1222, records that customary tenants of sixty acre holdings owed four hens, twenty eggs, as well as ploughing services and a substantial money rent (10s.).11
8On some estates, food rents owed by the tenantry were converted, at quite an early date, into money rents. On the estates of Christ Church Priory, for instance, the rents were probably largely in monetary form by the thirteenth Century.12 In other circumstances, lordships might continue to insist upon the persistence of food renders, even when the more general trend was to develop an economy founded on coin. This is evident in the later developments of seigneurial management, notably the leasing of demesnes, where those manors which owed food rent sometimes continued to include an element of the same in the new leasing arrangements. Thus, for instance, on the estates of Peterborough Abbey, grain liveries returned to manors did not decline in the period between 1125 and 1310; instead, they remained an important part of the estate’s economy, based as they were on particular manors which maintained an obligation of that kind, and, as King notes, reflected a policy that was not especially responsive to the market.13
9Evidence from the estates of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds also illustrates this persistence and its lack of consistency. Leases of the manors of Elveden and of Ingham illustrate the disparities in lordly policy as regards different forms of render. The grant of a lease of the two manors for twelve years from the abbot to one Ralph Brian in 1160 and a later lease, c. 1200 of the same two manors, to Solomon of Whepstead help illustrate the distinction between the two manors. In the more detailed lease taken by Solomon it is recorded that, for Elveden he owes food-farms twice a year for his lease while for Ingham his obligation is owed in money (£20 per annum to the cellarer and 60 shillings to the abbot, as well as hay for the dormitory). This division reflects a wider abbatial policy in that a twelfth-century reorganisation of the estate’s management included the revision of obligations so that only 16 vills continued to owe substantial food farms.14 A Century and more earlier, as the survey of abbot Leofstan (1045-65) reveals, food farms were far more generally employed on the abbey’s estates.15
10Examination of money and food rents illustrates the varied chronologies of the conversion of rent and the evident lack of a systematic and unilinear process of change. Historians may have saught such a history in the commutation of labour rent, and it is to this central element of the conversion of rent that we should now turn our attention.
Commutation of labour rent
11The most significant and oft-considered feature of conversion of rent relates to the comutation of labour services into money rent. This has been taken, especially by early commentators, to herald or to illustrate a change of a substantial kind in the nature and organisation of medieval society.16 In eastern England, as throughout other parts of the country, we can certainly both chart a move from labour service and find evidence for some persistence of labour service into the later middle ages.
12Here we need first to consider some of the more familiar processes which led to commutation of labour rent in later periods. We can make certain distinctions here, the chief of which are: (a) the commutation of labour rent into money rent, and (b) the piecemeal and occasional conversion of labour rent, typically through a year by year ‘sale of works’. Most early commentators on the conversion of rent and the commutation of labour services were chiefly interested in the process by which labour as rent was directly and deliberately translated into a money-based equivalent. It was once assumed that the moneyrent evident by the late thirteenth-century in manorial accounts, and appearing as redditus assisae (assized rent), was no more than the commuted element of one-time labour rents. However, as Kosminsky points out, employing a much earlier argument of Vinogradoff, such a general observation cannot work since we can point to at least two significant origins of money rent, one of which certainly resides in a process of commutation (mal, mol or mail) and one of which (gafol) does not.17 Kosminsky also notes that research by Levett on the manorial records of the bishopric of Winchester illustrates the early origin of redditus assisae. Levett describes a general persistence in extent of rents of assize, money rents, in the manorial accounts into the fifteenth Century and sees this as strong evidence for a lack of connectedness between the commutation of labour services and an increase in redditus assisae since ‘an arithmetical comparison of the rents and of the works rendered or sold throws no light upon the problem of commutation’.18 In fact, to follow Smith, writing on the Kentish estates of Christ Church priory, the redditus assisae sections of accounts includes both long-standing money rent and commuted labour rent.19
13If there is no doubt, as we have also already seen, that a good deal of money rent, evident in accounts from the second half of the thirteenth Century, was not the product of a process of earlier commutation, it is also evidently the case that some money rent was indeed the product of such. It is, then, to mal, in contrast to gafol, that we should turn our attention. We can, in exploring commutation of labour rent, set out a number of processes and quite separate chronologies.
(a) Early commutation of labour rent into money rent
14The first relates to a deliberate, if not systematic, decision to replace some or all labour rents, often on a tenant-by-tenant basis, with money rent. As Neilsen, in her key and unsurpassed study of customary rents, describes, that process of commutation was so early that its cause and extent cannot be adequately described. Instead we are left, by the high and late middle ages, with the relics, in the reference to and identification of a series of apparently quite arcane financial obligations, of a process that is largely hidden from us. ‘The names given them [i.e. customary rents in lieu of labour services] are English names with a certain ring of antiquity about them’, writes Neilsen who, though she finds more evidence for the distribution of these ‘rents commuting labour services’ in the eastern counties, is not inclined to see this as evidence for a speedier process of commutation in the east of the country. She instead describes the existence of this interesting variety of rents, including those that commute individual or particular obligations, as vestiges of piecemeal decision-taking on the demesne rather than a product of ‘the impelling force of any general tendency towards money rents’.20 Thus, to offer some examples, Neilsen describes rents commuting parts of week work (hedernewech), of work in the lord’s woods (woodpenny, woodsilver, etc.), of weeding (wedselver), of hedging (heggingselver), of carting (averpenni) and the like.21
15This piecemeal commutation also occurred on an individual basis and for what were often quite personal reasons. Some few charters of emancipation or manumission survive from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and offer a number of insights into the nature and expectation of emancipation of this period, including the release of individuals from their servility to attend on crusage.22 In addition, entries in the king’s court also illustrate a process of piecemeal commutation.23 The process of enfranchisement also inevitably led to commutation of those services identified as essentially servile, with a reduction of the element of labour, perhaps to boon works (precariae) of a kind typically owed by free tenants, such as sokemen or socmanni, in favour of money rent (censum).24
(b) Sale of works
16If some of the earliest evidence for commutation offers a sense of piecemeal adjustment to individual decision-making, we should also recognise that, classically, the more general movement of commutation has been identified as a product or Symptom of longer-term economic and institutional change, itself occasioned by a combination of exogenous and endogenous forces, the former including changing climatic conditions and broad population movement, the latter involving lord-tenant relations, marketing opportunities, and seigneurial strategies. That some of this general trend must have happened early, in eastern England as possibly in other parts of the country, has been long recognised. It has been suggested that in the Anglo-Saxon countryside all manner of men performed labour rents and that vestiges of those obligations persisted into the high and late middle ages. In fact, for both the free and unfree, boon works appear to have been a durable relic of an ongoing process of commutation, a process which affected free tenures earlier than it did unfree tenures.25 Douglas, for one, has argued that in the documents of the late eleventh Century (including Domesday Book), and of the early twelfth Century, we find evidence for ‘the gradual transformation from an economy of natural husbandry to one of money payments’.26 He points to the distinctions between tenures, between molmen, socmanni and liberi tenentes, evident in the early surveys and in Domesday Book, and to the lack of consistent pattern across estates and manors which, according to his analysis, is evidence for a highly irregular development of commutation, an irregularity occasioned by ‘local conditions’.27 The presence of a rent-paying tenantry, of censuarii, of those akin to molmen (by implication those who pay rent or mal),28 in Domesday Book in the late eleventh Century also illustrates this fragmented pattern of apparent development in money rent. Harvey also explains this in terms of geographical distinction, with those paying money rents tending to hold their land in areas of relatively late colonisation.29
17It is, though, in the records which first malte substantial appearance in the thirteenth Century that we find our fullest evidence for large-scale commutation. In forcing a distinction between the occasional commutation of labour rents and some more ‘general tendency’, Neilsen pointed to the ‘much more important evidence of the custumals and account rolls regarding the sale to villagers of the whole number of spring, summer, autumn, and winter works (opera vendita)’.30 By the time of the first manorial accounts, in the second half of the thirteenth Century, we can certainly find plenty of evidence for the sale of work, that is of labour service against which a financial equivalent was attached. Some of this sale of work was again occasional and temporary; other elements were longer-term and more general.
18To begin with the occasional sales, it is clear that, year on year, demesne officials sold or commuted works by allowing the tenant to pay a financial compensation in lieu of performance of the actual work. As Postan noted, in his famous essay on the chronology of labour services, ‘isolated and exceptional changes in labour services could occur at any time’.31 On the Westminster Abbey manor of Birdbrook (Essex), in the early fourteenth Century, all ploughing, carting and autumn work was valued at 1d. per work (opus) while winter work and mowing was priced at 0.5d per work. The extent to which works were sold varied greatly from year to year; in particular sales of work at Birdbrook were highest in years when the harvest was bad. Sales of winter work exceeded 700 ‘works’ on only five occasions in the first three decades of the fourteenth Century, reflecting both the limits on the use of work in poor conditions and the relative abdundance of cheap labour.32 That this decision rested in the hands of the lord and his officials is generally evident and sometimes quite explicit. On the estates of the prior of Christ Church in Kent, for instance, thirteenth-century custumals describe the services owed, offer comutation rates for the work undertaken and note, against relevant services, that ista servicia facientur vel dabuntur precio, si domino placet.33
19As well as a variable employment of commutation as a temporary adjustment of demesne policy, the manorial accounts and custumals also indicate a longer term diminution in labour service in favour of money rent. On the estates of the bishop of Ely, the extent of sold works shows a general increase in the second half of the thirteenth Century.34 However, it would be wrong to suggest a universal and unilinear direction to this process. Postan, many years ago, reminded us that a simple and direct history of commutation will and should elude us; instead, using the twelfth-century surveys and some later material, as he argued, do not reveal anything akin to a ‘continuous and uninterrupted process’.35 In certain other parts of the country, perhaps especially in the south-eastern country of Kent, labour service had never enjoyed the sort of prominence which allows us to speak of a transition from one form of rent to another or to a widespread process of conversion or commutation. Το quote R.A.L. Smith,
The gabulum or gafol, a money rent, had been paid in Kent from time immémorial, and by the latter half of the thirteenth Century the mala, paid in commutation of ancient services and dues, formed an appreciable part of the total income of Christ Church [Canterbury].36
20That said, even in Kent the prior at Christ Church did oversee a large-scale commutation of labour services for money rents in the thirteenth Century, but one that fluctuated somewhat according to the changing circumstances of the early fourteenth Century.37 Elsewhere we are aware of much earlier decisions over the management of estates which forced, or perhaps applied, distinctions between manors and thereby imposed quite discrete chronologies of change as regards the nature of rent and obligation in the high and late middle ages. On the Peterborough Abbey estates, by the early twelfth Century the estate can be divided between those manors which owed rent in grain and money, and those manors which owed their lord money rent. This division, explained by a chronology of endowment and by the estate’s geography, was reflected not only in the general rendere owed to the lord but in the nature of rent paid by the tenants, with those manors closer to the Abbey owing food renders and their tenants providing a greater proportion of labour services, while those manors which were further away from the centre of the lordship owed money rents and the tenants there offered fewer labour services relative to their money rents.38
21In addition, we might also make similar observations for irregular customary dues. As, to follow Hyams, the significance of irregularity as a measure of unfree status became more and more evident in the thirteenth Century, so the reliance upon the nature of such obligations as evidence of that status became increasingly important. Hyams observes that ‘twelfth-century lords had seldom drawn a general distinction between their free and unfree dependents when making extraordinary levies’;39 but in the thirteenth Century the distinction between, say, tallage owed by villeins and auxilium owed by freemen came to have real significance. Obligations paid in fixed amounts payable in coin were deemed to be contrary to a servile condition.40 The familiar levies of merchet (marriage fines), and heriot or relief (death duties), which were increasingly associated with unfree tenure by the thirteenth Century, were also, clearly, obligations owed by free tenures.41 To varying degrees, in part dependent upon legal status, these obligations were payable as money rather than obligations in kind. Importantly, such payments owed by free tenants appear to have been fixed. The unfree also owed such irregular dues to their lords. In their case, merchet and heriot (frequently the best beasi but also payable as a money equivalent) could vary in nature and in size. On some estates lords resisted the inclination to allow their unfree tenants to pay obligations such as heriot in cash. On the estates of the abbey of Westminster, for instance, it was only in the late fourteenth Century that the monks came to accept as common a money payment in place of the delivery of livestock.42 Where fines such as merchet were collected in cash, we are struck both by the irregularity of the payments, but also by what may be a growing acknowledgement on the part of lords that a systematic levying of fines through a regular process promised more than the ad hoc collection of arbitrary sums aimed at perpetuating tenurial status. On the Bury St Edmunds manor of Hinderclay, for instance, merchet payments c. 1300 varied between 3d. and 8od., though there was some significant concentration of payments in sums between 1s. and 3s. Other fines gleaned from the unfree for fornication and the hearing of illegitimate children (legerwite and childwite) also display a certain regularity of size whilst tallage, a fairly arbitrary sum payable by the unfree, had, on many manors, established a certain uniformity by the late thirteenth Century and was strongly reminiscent of common aid paid by all manner of tenants in the twelfth Century and, no doubt, before.43 Finally, lords might also have hoped to enjoy financial benefits from the exchange of land amongst their tenantry. Entry fines, or gersuma, were payable by tenants of unfree land who wished to transfer land inter-vivos. These fines could vary significantly and were dependent upon the market, the perceived value of the land, and the desire of lords to tax their tenants both high and low. The profits from active land market, channelled through seigneurial courts, could offer a significant fillip to the profits of landlords—a feature which has been particularly noted in eastern England by the end of the thirteenth Century, where a combination of demography and economy may have encouraged such a market by at least the early thirteenth Century.44
(c) Landholding, colonisation and changes in tenure
22An important distinction which certainly helps inform our understanding of the distinctions between rent types and their chronologies relates to landholding. Here we can make three main points, all of which are to a degree inter-related. The first point to note is that colonisation of new land tended to generate money rent, even in the late Anglo-Saxon period, more than it did labour rent or rent in kind and this process continued, during a period of population expansion, into the thirteenth Century; secondly, lords may also have managed to impose new servile, essentially uncertain labour obligations upon their tenantry in the first two centuries after the Conquest, and the net effect may have been to reduce the proportion of money rents on some manors and their constituent holdings relative to labour rent; and thirdly, that in more than one sub-period of the high and late middle ages, leasing arrangements occasioned a shift from hereditary tenures and their customary obligations, including labour rent and rent in kind, to contractual tenures, leaseholds, held for something close to a true economic rent. We will deal briefly with each of these three categories.
23As already discussed in an earlier section, there is clear evidence in the eleventh-century surveys, including Domesday Book, that rent-paying tenancies existed and that their numbers tended to concentrate in areas of relatively late or prolonged colonisation. In those areas where a Settlement of the waste occurred in the centuries before Domesday, Harvey has suggested that relatively privileged tenures emerged, giving rise to the molmen and sokemen whose numbers are far greater in eastern England.45 She also suggests that this process of colonisation was fostered by lords who encouraged their tenantry by removing certain obligations and through a process of manumission.46 The implication must also be, as already discussed above, that such a process of manumission had direct implication for the nature of obligation placed upon the tenantry.
24In later centuries, not least in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as population increased, a further wave of colonisation, often small-scale and intermittent, tended to generate money rents, often attached to assarts, odd acres extracted here and there from the waste. These we see as a developing list of rents in manorial accounts, as rents of assize and new rents, and also in the detail of thirteenth and fourteeth-century reniais. The extent of money rent, often recorded as rent of assize, might thereby also increase in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in line such with movements of late and piecemeal colonisation. Levett describes this process on the Winchester estates and we can see similar processes at work in eastern England.47
25One of the uncertainties of the historical interpretation of the thirteenth Century concerns the extent to which lords were able to re-establish rents or to impose them afresh upon a peasantry in a period when population was rising and opportunities for direct exploitation of demesnes was especially great. A Century earlier, in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, it has been assumed that there was a general and widespread reduction in the liberty of the peasant tenantry; this, it was once argued, was especially the case for those peasants who had once been effectively free tenants, sokemen or socmanni, many of whom took on increasingly servile characteristics.48 Again such developments would have implications for the conversion of rent, not least as rent, in its form and nature, was increasingly identified, as a common law of villeinage took shape in the late twelfth and early thirteenth Century, as a guide to tenurial status.49
26It is certainly the case that lords were increasingly careful in the preservation of forms of rent and landholding. On more than one estate earlier processes of leasing out of demesne and parcels of land, of the granting of charters for colonisation of the waste, and of a general laxity of direct management had occasioned a weakening of direct control which, by the end of the twelfth Century, lords were coming to react against. Famously, at Bury St Edmunds, the late twelfth Century abbot, abbot Samson, undertook a major review and recording of his abbey’s estates; reflecting a desire to regain authority of its possessions, the approach taken at Bury was also found elsewhere and reflected the same general concerns.50 The Constitution of Archbishop Hubert Walter for Ramsey, c. 1200, sets out the management failings of the monks of Ramsey and warns against, inter alia, allowing the conversion of customary land into free land and the extension of leasehold farms.51 Certainly at Ramsey the extent of the success of the monks in (re-)imposing themselves upon a thirteenth-century tenantry may be reflected in their capacity, by the thirteenth Century, to move back and forth between money rent and labour rent so that, according to Raftis, ‘The number of lands ad censum [in the early fourteenth Century] may have been much more extensive a generation earlier’.52 Postan also described a chronology of labour service which included a reimposition of labour services in the thirteenth Century after an earlier period of commutation.53
27The replacement of hereditary tenures with contractual leaseholds, sometimes for short terms, but often and with increasing frequency for long and life-terms, is a significant feature of tenurial change in the late medieval English countryside and has important implications for any discussion of conversion of rent. This process is often associated with the post-Black Death period, and a retreat from the direct management of demesnes,54 but it is also evident on some estates by the second half of the thirteenth Century. While this might be, as at Ely in the second half of the thirteenth Century, a policy of landlords who remained closely involved in the running of their demesnes, it is also the case that the rise of the contractual leasehold and its associated money rent was also a feature of both early and later retreat from direct management of the demesnes55. On a number of ecclesiastical and monastic estates across England, including estates in the east of the country, we see an introduction of the leasing of holdings, for a variety of terms. This process grew apace in the second half of the fourteenth Century as is evident from a number of studies of estates and of individual manors.56 But it is also clear, as already noted, that the introduction of contractual rents began much earlier and had significant implications for the conversion of labour and kind into money rent.
Conclusion
28The chronology of conversion of ‘rent’ was not a constant; there is no moment of conversion and, in fact, in some instances, there is no actual conversion of rent.57 The persistence of elements of food rent, for example, into the high and late middle ages is illustrative of one element in this history. We might note also a series of overlapping chronologies which chart the history of rent types and also help explain their various conversions, where these occurred.
29In recognising this variety we also need to ponder the reasons for it. In certain instances the policies of lordship and the expectations of their estate management must have helped determine a chronology of conversion, both serving as a restraint to changes in the nature of rent and, in other respects, encouraging and leading developments in the form of rent and obligation, as for instance, in the move to contractual tenancies and money rents on the estates of the prior of Ely in the thirteenth Century.58 An important distinction in this respect exists between those lordships which persisted in their regard for labour services (and which, thereby, may have encouraged a resistance to fragmentation and the free sale of peasant holdings) and those who perceived their advantage to lie in an active land market and the entry fines this could generate. But no lord in the region could have operated with absolute authority; the dictates of external forces, including a growing quasi-industrial population, changing commercial and climatic conditions, and the availability of coin must all have helped occasion the subtle shifts and nuances which we can observe in our record. By the thirteenth Century also obligation in the form of rent had a significance that was more than simply economic, but legal as it pertained to free and unfree status. Finally we should also note that a great deal of the information employed here relates to the larger monastic and ecclesiastical States, especially in eastern England. In other parts of the country and, within the same region, on different kinds of estate, there were additional subtleties which will also have influenced rent conversion.
Notes de bas de page
1 E.A. Kosminsky, “Services and money rents in the thirteenth Century”, in Economic History Review, 5, 1935, p. 22–45; M.M. Postan, “The chronology of labour services”, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1937, 4th ser., 20, p. 169–93 [reprinted in M.M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy, Cambridge, 1973, p. 89–106] (from which subsequent references are taken).
2 P. Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, Oxford, 1892; id., The Growth of the Manor, London, 1905; J.H. Round, Feudal England, London, 1895; A.E. Levett, The Black Death on the Estates of the See of Winchester, Oxford, 1916 (Oxford Studies in social and legal history, vol. 5, P. Vinogradoff [ed.]); H.L. Gray, “The commutation of villain services in England before the Black Death”, English Historical Review, 29,1914, p. 625–56.
3 The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London, 1976; T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds.), The Brenner Debate. Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge, 1985.
4 Kosminsky, “Services and money rent”, p. 26–7.
5 For a general discussion of seigneurial exactions in the region and some general points of context see P.R. Schofield, “Seigneurial exactions in eastern England”, in Pour une anthropologie du prélèvement seigneurial dans les campagnes médiévales (xie-xive siècles), i. Réalités et représentations paysannes, M. Bourin and P. Martínez Sopena (eds.), Paris, 2004, p. 383–409.
6 The Kalendar of Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds and related documents, R.H.C. Davis (ed.), Camden, 3rd series, LXXXIV, 1954, p. xvi.
7 See, for instance, R. Faith, English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship, London, 1997, p. 212.
8 N. Neilson, Customary Rents, in Types of Manorial Structure in the Northern Danelaw, Oxford, 1910 (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. 2, P. Vinogradoff [ed.]), p. 15.
9 For example, Custumals of Battle Abbey in the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II (1283–1312) from MSS. in the Public Record Office, S.R. Scargill-Bird (ed.), Camden Society, 1887, p. 98–9.
10 At the beginning of the fourteenth Century, the unfree tenants of quarter-virgates at Bird-brook owed, in addition to other rents, 6 or 7 hens at Christmas and 8 eggs at Easter, Westminster Abbey Muniments 25444 and following.
11 D.C. Douglas, The Social Structure of Medieval East Anglia, Oxford, 1927 (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. 9), p. 259, Appendix ii.
12 R.A.L. Smith, Canterbury Cathedral Priory, a Study in Monastic Administration, Cambridge, 1969, p. 116,119. For similar observations from the west of the country, see C.C. Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society. The Estates of the Bishop of Worcester, Cambridge, 1980, p. 74–5.
13 E. King, Peterborough Abbey. A Study in the Land Market, Cambridge, 1973, p. 146–50.
14 For the leases, see D.C. Douglas, Feudal Documents from the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, London, 1932, p. 135 (document no. 145); R.H.C. Davis (ed.), The Kalendar of Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds and Related Documents, Camden, 3rd series, LXXXIV (1954), p. 119–21 (document no. 77); for the reorganisation of food farms, see ibid., p. L. The terms of lease to Solomon Whepstead are also recorded in the feet of fines for Suffolk for 1202, and with fuller detail of the food renders, Feet of Fines for the County of Norfolk, 1201–1205, for the County of Suffolk, 1199–1214, B. Dodwell (ed.), London, 1958, p. 178–9 (document no. 371).
15 English Historical Documents, iii, 1042–1189, D.C. Douglas and G.W. Greenaway (eds), Oxford, 1953, p. 88 off. For further discussion of the same, see S. Harvey, “England before the Norman Conquest”, p. 20–1.
16 M. Postan, “Chronology of labour services”, p. 89–91 contrasts the position he adopts with ‘a series of purely conventional assumptions’ (p. 89).
17 A. Kosminsky, “Services and money rents”, p. 27, citing P. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 329 and id., Villeinage in England, p. 291, 307.
18 A.E. Levett, The Black Death on the Estates of the See of Winchester, cit. n. 2, p. 19.
19 R.A.L. Smith, Canterbury Cathedral Priory, cit. n. 12, p. 116.
20 N. Neilsen, Customary Rents, in Types of Manorial Structure in the Northern Danelaw, Oxford, 1910 (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. 2, P. Vinogradoff [ed.]), p. 48, 49.
21 Ibid., p. 50–6.
22 A detailed study of charters of emancipation is presently being conducted by Professor P. Hyams, Cornell University. Early comment on such charters is to be found in A.L. Poole, Obligations of Society in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Oxford, 1946, p. 30–34. For the crusading example, see Poole, Obligations of Society, p. 32.
23 See, for instance, Curia Regis rolls, 1233–1237, p. 489 (entry no. 1927), where Robert de Bulehaleleih’claimed protection of writ in seizure of land as a freeman quod nunc est liber, set per redemptionem; set ante redemptionem illam fuit villanus.
24 See, for instance, J.A. Raftis, The Estates of Ramsey Abbey, Toronto, 1957, p. 48, n. 103.
25 Neilsen, Customary Rents, p. 48, 59–60.
26 D.C. Douglas, The Social Structure of Medieval East Anglia, cit. n. 11, p. 90
27 Ibid., p. 85.
28 See also, for instance, S. Harvey, “England before the Norman Conquest”, in H.E. Hallam (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ii. 1042–1350, Cambridge, 1988, p. 17–18; also F.W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, Cambridge, 1897, p. 57–8.
29 S. Harvey, “England before the Norman Conquest”, p. 17–20.
30 N. Neilsen, Customary Rents, cit. n. 20, p. 49.
31 M. Postan, “Chronology of labour services”, cit. n. 1, p. 93.
32 Westminster Abbey Muniments 25395–25500.
33 R.A.L. Smith, Cathedral Priory, cit. n. 12, p. 122.
34 E. Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely. The Social History of an Ecclesiastical Estate from the Tenth Century to the Early Fourteenth Century, Cambridge, 1951, p. 94.
35 M. Postan, “Chronology of labour services”, cit. n. 1, p. 100.
36 R.A.L. Smith, Canterbury Cathedral Priory, cit. n. 12, p. 116. For general discussion of rent and labour service on the estates of the Priory, see ibid., p. 113–27.
37 R.A.L. Smith, Canterbury Cathedral Priory, cit. n. 12, p. 117,119,126.
38 E. King, Peterborough Abbey, cit. n. 13, p. 140–3,164.
39 P.R. Hyams, King, Lords, and Peasants in Medieval England. The Common Law of Villeinage in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Oxford, 1980, p. 191.
40 Ibid., p. 184fr.
41 See, for instance, Davis (ed.), Kalendar, p. xxxvi-xxxvii.
42 B.F. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and its Estates in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1977, p. 272–3.
43 Davis (ed.), Kalendar, p. xxxvii.
44 R.M. Smith, “Some thoughts on ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Proprietary’ rights in land under customary law in thirteenth and early fourteenth Century England”, Law and History Review, 1,1983, p. 117.
45 S. Harvey, “England before the Norman Conquest”, cit. n. 28, p. 19.
46 S. Harvey, “England before the Norman Conquest”, cit. n. 28, p. 18–20.
47 A.E. Levett, Black Death, cit. n. 2, p. 14–16.
48 See, for instance, F.W. Maitland, Domesday, cit. n. 28, p. 61–5; see also R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship, London, 1997, p. 215–6.
49 P. Hyams, King, Lords, and Peasants, p. 194–7 and above p. 66–7.
50 The chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, H.E. Butler (ed.), London, 1949, p. 28–9, 99–105.
51 A. Raftis, Estates of Ramsey Abbey, p. 100–5.
52 Ibid., p. 222.
53 M. Postan, “Chronology of labour services”, cit. n. 1.
54 See, for instance, B. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and its Estates, Oxford, 1977, p. 244ff.
55 For the early use of contractual rent at Ely, see E. Miller, Abbey and Bishopric of Ely, cit. n. 34, p. 109–111.
56 See, for instance, R.A. Lomas, “Developments in land tenure on the prior of Durham’s estate in the later middle ages”, Northern History, XIII, 1977, p. 27–43; P.R. Schofield, “Tenurial developments and the availability of customary land in a later medieval community”, Economic History Review XLIX, 1996, p. 250–67.
57 For a much earlier assessment which offers a broadly similar conclusion see M.M. Postan, “The rise of a money economy”, in M.M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture, cit. n. 1, p. 28–40, and especially, p. 37ff
58 E. Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely, cit. n. 34, p. 109–111.
Auteur
-
Phillipp Schofield
Université du Pays de Galles, Aberystwyth University
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