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Ordinary people in country and town

There were probably between 1.5 and 2 million people living in England in 1066. The Domesday Book tells us that nine-tenths of them lived in the countryside. It also tells us that 80 per cent of the land used for farming at the beginning of the twentieth century was already being ploughed in 1086.

Life in the countryside was hard. Most of the population still lived in villages in southern and eastern parts of England. In the north and west there were fewer people, and they often lived apart from each other, on separate farms. Most people lived in the simplest houses. The walls were made of wooden beams and sticks, filled with mud. The roofs were made of thatch, with reeds or corn stalks laid thickly and skillfully so that the rain ran off easily. People ate cereals and vegetables most of the time, with pork meat for special occasions. They worked from dawn to dusk every day of the year, every year, until they were unable to work any longer. Until a man had land of his own he would usually not marry. However, men and women often slept together before marriage, and once a woman was expecting a child, the couple had no choice but to marry.

The poor were divided from their masters by the feudal class system. The basis of this "manorial system" was the exchange of land for labour. The landlord expected the villagers to work a fixed number of days on his own land, the "home farm". The rest of the time they worked on their small strips of land, part of the village's "common land" on which they grew food for themselves and their family. The Domesday Book tells us that over three-quarters of the country people were serfs. They were not free to leave their lord's service or his land without permission. Even if they wanted to run away, there was nowhere to run to. Anyway, a serf's life, under his lord's protection, was better than the life of an unprotected wanderer. Order and protection, no matter how hard life might be, was always better than disorder, when people would starve.

The manorial system was not the same all over the country, and it did not stay the same throughout the Middle Ages. There were always differences in the way the system worked between one estate and another, one region and another, and between one period and another. Local customs and both local and national economic pressures affected the way things worked.

The manorial system is often thought to be Norman, but in fact it had been growing slowly throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. The Normans inherited the system and developed it to its fullest extent. But the Normans were blamed for the bad aspects of the manorial system because they were foreign masters.

In the early days of the Conquest Saxons and Normans feared and hated each other. For example, if a dead body was found, the Saxons had to prove that it was not the body of a murdered Norman, If they could not prove it, the Normans would burn the nearest village. The Norman ruling class only really began to mix with and marry the Saxons, and consider themselves "English" rather than French, after King John lost Normandy in 1204. Even then, dislike remained between the rulers and the ruled.



Every schoolchild knows the story of Robin which grew out of Saxon hatred for Norman rule. According to the legend Robin Hood lived in Sherwood Forest near Nottingham as a criminal or "outlaw", outside feudal society and the protection of the law. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and he stood up for the weak against the powerful. His weapon was not the sword of nobles and knights, but the longbow, the weapon of the common man.

In fact, most of the story is legend. The only thing we know is that a man called Robert or "Robin" Hood was a wanted criminal in Yorkshire in 1230. The legend was, however, very popular with the common people all through the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although the ruling class greatly disliked it. Later the story was changed. Robin Hood was described as a man of noble birth, whose lands had been taken by King John. Almost certainly this was an effort by the authorities to make Robin Hood "respectable".

Most landlords got their income directly from the home farm, and also from letting out some of their land in return for rent in crops or money. The size of the home farm depended on how much land the landlord chose to let out. In the twelfth century, for example, many landlords found it more profitable to let out almost all the home farm lands, and thus be paid in money or crops rather than in labour. In fact it is from this period that the word "farm" comes. Each arrangement the landlord made to let land to a villager was a "firma": a fixed or settled agreement.

By 1300 the population was probably just over four million (up to the nineteenth century figures can only be guessed at), about three times what it had been in 1066. This increase, of course, had an effect on life in the country. It made it harder to grow enough food for everyone. The situation was made worse by the Normans' love of hunting. They drove the English peasants out of the forests, and punished them severely if they killed any forest animals. "The forest has its own laws," wrote one man bitterly, "based not on the common law of the kingdom, but on the personal wishes of the king."

The peasants tried to farm more land. They drained marshland, and tried to grow food on high ground and on other poor land. But much of this newly cleared land quickly became exhausted, because the soil was too poor, being either too heavy or too light and sandy. As a result, the effort to farm more land could not match the increase in population, and this led to a decline in individual family land holdings. It also led to an increase in the number of landless labourers, to greater poverty and hunger. As land became overused, so bad harvests became more frequent. And in the years of bad harvest people starved to death. Among richer people, the pressure on land led to an increase in its value, and to an increase in buying and selling. Landowning widows found themselves courted by land-hungry single men.

Unfortunately, agricultural skills improved little during this period. Neither peasants nor landlords had the necessary knowledge or understanding to develop them. In addition, manorial landlords, equally interested in good harvests, insisted that the animals of the peasantry grazed on their own land to enrich it during its year of rest. Many villagers tried to increase their income by other activities and became blacksmiths, carpenters, tilers or shepherds, and it is from the thirteenth century that many villagers became known by their trade name.

Shortage of food led to a sharp rise in prices at the end of the twelfth century. The price of wheat, for example, doubled between 1190 and 1200. A sheep that cost four pence in 1199 fetched ten pence in 1210. Prices would be high in a bad season, but could suddenly drop when the harvest was specially good. This inflation weakened feudal ties, which depended to a great extent on a steady economic situation to be workable. The smaller landed knights found it increasingly difficult to pay for their military duties. By the end of the thirteenth century a knight's equipment, which had cost fifteen shillings in the early twelfth century, now cost more than three times this amount. Although nobles and knights could get more money from rheir land by paying farm labourers and receiving money rents than by giving land rent free in return tor labour, many knights with smaller estates became increasingly indebted.

We know about these debts from the records of the “Exchequer of the Jews”. The small Jewish community in England earned its living by lending money, and lived under royal protection. By the late thirteenth century these records show a large number of knights in debt to Jewish money lenders. When a knight was unable to repay the money he had borrowed, the Jewish money lender sold the knight's land to the greater landholding nobility. This did not please Edward I, who feared the growth in power of the greater nobility as they profited from the disappearance of smaller land­holders. He had wanted the support of the knightly class against the greater lords, and it was partly for this reason that he had called on them to be represented in Parliament. Now he saw the danger that as a class they might become seriously weakened. The Jews were middlemen in an economic process which was the result of social forces at work in the countryside. While the economic function of the Jews in providing capital been useful they had been safe, but once this was no longer so, the king used popular feeling against them as an excuse to expel them. In 1290 the Jewish community was forced to leave the country.

Feudalism was slowly dying out, but the changes often made landlords richer and peasants poorer. Larger landlords had to pay fewer feudal taxes, while new taxes were demanded from everyone in possession of goods and incomes. As a result many could not afford to pay rent and so they lost their land. Some of these landless people went to the towns, which offered a better hope for the future.

 


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 2131


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