Free born Englishman
Before 1066 land in England was owned not by wealthy landlords, nor by the state, nor even by the monarchy, but rather by free peasant proprietors, or ‘coerls’. Each family cultivated its own smallholding and undertook communal activities within their own village. The ceorl was an independent ‘free born Englishman’, subject only to the king, to whom he had to provide military service when required, and the only tax was an annual ‘food rent’, a quantity of provision sufficient to maintain the king and his retinue for a day.
This system was beginning to break down even before the Norman conquest. The Saxon kings rewarded supporters by making them ‘thegns’ or territorial lords, and bestowed charters transferring to the thegns the rights of claiming military service and food rent from the peasants. In some places, when harvests failed, thegns would take over land in return for providing relief from hardship, and were paid in labour instead of food rent.But extensive common lands remained, and all the people of a district or village shared the right to these lands.
The Norman yoke
The Norman occupation changed all this. William the Conqueror handed out the land of England as spoils of war to his victorious mercenaries, and as a result, ownership of land was no longer absolute, but rested on permission of the king, the ultimate owner. Parts of the kingdom were kept by William for himself ‘in demesne’, and the rest was divided among about 180 barons, on the understanding they would provide knights for battle when the need arose. In turn the barons retained a portion of the land allotted to them as their own demesne and divided the rest among knights, each of whom was under a military obligation to the barons (and thus to the king). The churches and monasteries also retained demesne lands and sub-let the rest of their holdings.
As for the conquered Saxons, they became serfsall that was left to them was survival in exchange for servitude.Where the population resisted they were annihilated, and their villages burnt, and for decades after 1066 great swathes of England especially in the North remained depopulated.
The feudal system
The nobility, naturally, kept the best land for themselves.Villagers were required to give up a set number of days to work the lord’s demesne land, and to serve as foot soldiers if there was war. There were many other rights and obligations, varying from place to place, more often preserved by custom than written into formal statute. The village peasants were obliged to grind their corn at the lord’s mill, and if they wanted to marry, they would first have to beg the lord’s permission, and pay a tribute.
But though in relation to the lord of the manor they were serfs, in relation to each other the peasants were a self-governing community. In most places, the landscape they worked was very unlike that of modern rural England. There were no hedges or fences; the cultivated land was a single large open field, and every year a communal gathering of villagers at the manor-court or court-leet would allot to each man several narrow strips, taking care to share out the good and bad land equally, and on these narrow strips each villager tried to grow enough food to feed himself and his family.
The nobility were expected to provide basic assistance, in cases where the deserving poor became ill, or a man died and left a widow and children.As for the undeserving poor, they did not last long. Anyone who did not work or who committed a transgression was brutally punished or executed, or outlawed and left to starve to death in the woods or wastelands.
A rudimentary legal system did provide some limited safeguards for the common people, and above all ‘habeas corpus’ ensured that no man could be held in prison without being charged and put on trial by a jury of his peers. But the lord held power in his manor, and in many a case was, in practice, judge, jury and executioner.
And always and forever there was the church, which claimed its tithes from the poor, made its own laws and held its own courts, made certain that the common people remained illiterate, controlled public and private morality, and built splendid cathedrals.
The commons
Beyond the open field was unenclosed common land, where the villagers had rights, granted not by statute but by immemorial custom, to cut the long grass to make hay, to gather fuel from the woodland, or to graze their cattle if they had any.There were also vast forests, but these belonged to the king and only the king and his nobility were allowed to hunt the deer, wild boar, rabbits, and other game. Poaching was a national sport, but punishable by death.
This system was, to a degree, sustainable. The villagers were allowed to gather wood for fuel, but only the twigs and branches they could reach with a shepherd’s crook or a haymaker’s hook, and this meant that the woodlands were not destroyed and would continue, winter after winter, providing fuel for the poor.
It was nevertheless a subsistence economy. The villagers on their narrow strips, with rudimentary implements and limited farming methods, could barely grow enough to feed themselves.There was little travel or trade between communities, let alone nations. What wealth the king and barons gathered to themselves was more often the pillage of war (the main purpose of the later crusades) than the produce of local economies. Only the monasteries grew rich, and were hated for it.
The Black Death
The Black Death changed everything. It reached Europe in 1347 when contaminated bodies were hurled by catapult over the city walls in the siege of Caffa in the Crimea. The plague arrived in England in 1348, landing at Melcombe in Weymouth bay and spreading rapidly across the country. When the plague reached one village, people fled in panic to the next village, and then the next, and so death struck down one community after another. A third or more of the population perished, causing distress and social upheaval on an unimaginable scale.
Because of severe labour shortages, the working people who survived found themselves everywhere in a stronger economic position than before. A class of free yeoman farmers emerged, who paid rent on land and cattle, and in turn offered employment to farm labourers. There was rapid transition towards a wage economy, and bonds which for centuries had tied peasant workers to the villages in which they were born were loosened.Itinerant workers and their families moved from village to village, selling their labour, without either the restraints or protections of the feudal system.
Wages were driven ever higher. Inevitably there were attempts to restore control, and laws were passed to limit wage levels.Suddenly the economy was booming. There was a huge expansion in sheep farming and wool production, initially exported as a raw commodity to the continent. Soon thousands of small village enterprises were producing the finest woollen cloth in Europe, and the wool merchants became the greatest power in the land.
Other forms of trade flourished, above all local markets, where travelling entrepreneurs would sell household goods and the latest luxuries. These also offered amusements, regarded as cruel by modern tastes, and wanton by the contemporary church, but adding liveliness to a society still living in the shadow of death – the plague was to return to afflict each generation for another three hundred years.
In this new world, there was vastly more opportunity and wealth, but also growing divisions between the wealthy and the poor. Those who were left behind had no safety net at all.
With large profits to be made from wool, the old nobility and the rising merchant classes started to replace arable farmland with pasture, and worse, to encroach on common land, starting the long process of fencing and hedging that was to destroy the subsistence economy, depopulate villages, and drive the poor off the land and into the towns.Often they did this without legal sanction, in outright defiance of the laws.And yet it happened all the same, and the poor seemed powerless to prevent it.
The Peasants’ Revolt
In the year 1381, thirty three years after the first outbreak of the Black Death, the king decided to impose a new tax. He needed cash to finance foreign adventures, and the taxation systemwas no longer providing sufficient income to satisfy the lifestyle of the king and his court.
So, for the first time, the central government decided to impose a poll tax directly on all its citizens. Worse, this tax meant that everyone, rich or poor, would pay exactly the same amount. The injustice of this added fuel to the fire in an already volatile society. At the villages of Fobbing and Brentwood in Essexvillagers decided not to pay, and forced the tax collectors to flee for their lives. Resistance spread rapidly, and the Peasants’ Revolt was underway.
Casting off the yoke of bondage
Radical clergymen and craftsmen took the side of the common people. Pre-eminent among them was John Ball, a renegade priest, and when the rebels gathered at Blackheath on the outskirts of London, John Ball addressed them:
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.
Land and tenements to be divided among the commons
In June 1381 the rebels marched into London, occupied the city, and struck off the heads of the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Treasurer, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The rebels expected that the boy king Richard II would listen to their grievances, and treat them with justice. (Such tragic optimism would characterise popular rebellions for the next six hundred years).
The king, accompanied by the Mayor of London and a group of armed retainers, rode out to meet the peasant army which was camped at Smithfield under the leadership of Wat Tyler. There are different versions of what happened next, but the Anonimalle Chronicle tells us something of the hopes of the peasants. Like John Ball, Wat Tyler called for all people to be treated by the State as equal under the law, demanding that ‘there should be no outlawry in any process of law, and that no lord should have lordship save civilly, and that there should be equality among all people save only the king.’
Wat Tyler went further, attacking the abuses of the church and calling for church land and buildings to be returned to the people: ‘all the lands and tenements now led by them [the bishops] should be confiscated, and divided among the commons, only reserving for them a reasonable sustenance. ’And finally he called for an end to the feudal system of peasant bondage, insisting that ‘there should be no more villeins in England, and no serfdom or villeinage, but that all men should be free and of one condition.’ [1]
Wat Tyler did not have to wait long to receive his answer. He was stabbed to death by the Lord Mayor’s retinue. The furious peasants drew back their bowstrings, but the boy king had the presence of mind to save his own life by a desperate promise that he would agree to all the demands. The mayor rushed off for reinforcements, and the leaderless rebellion, mollified by the king’s promises, dispersed.
Now that the immediate threat had passed, the king and the nobility turned quickly to vengeance. Walsingham, in Historia Anglicana, records the king as announcing: ‘Serfs you were and serfs you are; you shall remain in bondage, not such as you have hitherto been subject to, but incomparably viler. ’This time, he kept his word.
The seeds of defiance
Even in defeat some remained defiant. In St Albans, where Wat Tyler’s men had stormed the Abbey, William Gryndecobbe, a rebel leader, said ‘Fellow-citizens, whom now a scant liberty has relieved from long oppression, stand firm while you may, and fear nothing for my punishment since I would die for the cause of the liberty we have won, if it is now my fate to die.’
These words and those of John Ball and Wat Tyler reverberate down the centuries. Again and again the social reform movements of the poor (Robert Kett’s rebels in the 1540s, the Levellers and Ranters and Diggers in the 1640s, the followers of Thomas Spence and Tom Paine in the 1790s, the Owenites and Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s, the followers of Henry George in the 1870s) returned to these core ideas: that once there was a golden age of social equality, of justice and prosperity, when land was held in common. This common ownership was the birthright of every free-born Englishman, but the birthright had been stolen by the rich and powerful, and injustice and poverty was the result.
Sources
Marion Shoard, This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside, 1987.
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages, 1957.
[1] Villeins were the most common type of serf in the Middle Ages, renting a house and land, required to farm the land of the lord as well as their own, and forbidden to move away without the lord’s consent.
