1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (5 page)

So long as the guardian has the wardship of the land, he shall maintain the houses, parks, preserves, fishponds, mills and other things, and keep his land stocked with ploughs and wainage such as the agricultural season demands
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Magna Carta, Clause 5

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n 1215 nine-tenths of the population of England lived in the countryside. Most families lived and worked on small farms, as they had since time immemorial. Nearly all kept animals and grew crops, especially the grain for making their daily bread and ale. Regional differences in soil and climate meant that the precise balance between arable and pastoral was infinitely varied. Summers then were on average 1°C warmer than they are now, winters were milder and rainfall lower. The warmer climate meant that vineyards were planted as far north as Ely, and crops were grown higher up hills and mountainsides than is usual today.

If there was such a thing as a typical family farm, it was between ten and thirty acres in size, with husband, wife and three children. Since records show that better-off farmers had on average more children than the poor, birth control of sorts was practised, probably coitus interruptus. The study of excavated bones shows that people grew to a healthy size: the average adult male was five foot seven tall and had good teeth. A farmer with ten acres was able to produce enough to feed his family, pay rent to his lord, taxes to the king, and tithes to the Church and still have a surplus to sell at market to buy pottery, iron tools, ornaments and ale. In every village several women brewed and sold ale. It was those who farmed less than five acres, or who had no land at all, who suffered when the harvest was poor, when grain prices soared and their wages as labourers or craftsmen no longer sufficed. Faced with starvation they turned to acorns, once the poison had been leached out of them, and to weeds as famine foods. Fortunately in John’s reign, there was only one year, 1203, when the harvest failed.

The typical family lived in a two-roomed timber-framed house standing within a plot of land, known as a croft, of up to an acre in extent. There was plenty of room for a vegetable and fruit garden as well as outbuildings for poultry and other livestock, all surrounded by a bank and a ditch. The house had a thatched roof, clay floors, and clay or wattle and daub walls, windows with shutters, and an open hearth in the larger room.

By modern standards farm animals were small. Sheep were about the size of the modern-day Welsh-mountain sheep, and cattle weighed only half as much as their modern equivalents. But most male farm animals were castrated so that they put on weight. Castrated bullocks, known as oxen, could pull the heaviest carts; castrated rams, known as wethers, produced the heaviest fleeces; castrated cockerels, capons, were fattened for the table, and so were castrated boars. Cattle and sheep provided meat, milk, leather, wool, tallow for candles and manure for fields, as well as vellum and parchment for writing. Poultry gave meat, eggs, feathers and quills. Preserved foods such as bacon, sausages and cheese were especially useful. Bees were kept for honey, and horses as well as oxen for pulling carts and ploughs. Woodland provided fuel and building materials, as well as acorns and beech mast, the seeds of the beech on the ground, to feed pigs, animals which could convert virtually anything into meat for humans. Even dry leaves were rolled up and made into faggots for the fire at home. In areas where woods were few and far between, peat provided fuel. In Norfolk peat was dug on such a scale that the resulting pits created the inland lakes known as the Norfolk Broads. These farmers wasted nothing. Even their own excrement was recycled as manure.

Arable farming was a methodical process, painfully slow to our eyes. While a modern tractor might take a day to plough twenty acres, in 1215 this would have taken forty days. Farmers sowed by hand, scattering seed as they walked their fields. To frighten off birds, dead crows – scarecrows – were hung over newly sown fields. Modern organic farming has returned to some of the practices of those days – weeding by hand, for instance. Rotation helped to eradicate crop-specific weeds, and traditionally farmers followed a three-course rotation:

Traditionally harvest started on 1 August, the festival of Lammas, which took its name from the church service of ‘loaf mass’ when loaves made with the first ripe corn of the year were consecrated. Harvesting was done by hand with a sickle, and usually lasted well into September. But harvesting handful by handful, though desperately slow, had one advantage. It allowed farmers to mix two crops – for example the mixture of wheat and rye known as maslin – on the grounds that even if the weather meant that one cereal did badly, the other might do better. With the advent of mechanised harvesting, this kind of insurance against harvest failure was no longer possible. Once harvested, the stooks were bound up and carted off to the barns, while gleaners moved on to the fields. Some spikelets of grain were set aside for next year’s seed; the rest were threshed, winnowed to separate the grain from the chaff, then ground and used to make porridge or bread.

Woods too were farmed in rotation by a system known as coppicing: trees were cut back to produce new growth. By cutting to a number of differently timed cycles, for example, every five, ten or fifteen years, coppicing produced a constant supply of wood of different thicknesses.

These farming practices were age-old, based on the trial and error of countless generations. But it would be wrong to think of the English countryside as an unchanging world in which time stood still. Over much of England and eastern Scotland the landscape itself had been recently transformed. What we tend now to think of as the archetypal English landscape, a countryside of villages and market towns – the England of the Archers, of Ambridge and Borchester – is a recent creation. Throughout Britain and Ireland the truly ancient human landscape was one of hamlets and isolated homesteads, with very few towns, most of those ports, and no villages. By 1215 that had changed. Over large parts of Britain the previous two or three centuries had witnessed farmers abandoning the dispersed settlement pattern in which they and their predecessors had lived for millennia. Instead they now huddled together in villages. In some villages each house stood in a plot identical in size and shape to its neighbours, and all in a neat row along a street or around the village green. Such uniformity betrays the hand of the planner. Someone compelled people to move and that, presumably, was the lord of the manor, for there is no doubt that most of these new group settlements were associated with a manor house and a church, itself paid for by the lord’s family. However, some villages reveal a more higgledy-piggledy layout, and here the move to a single centre was probably the outcome of many individual decisions taken over a prolonged period. What forces persuaded these farmers to leave their homesteads in favour of the new-fangled settlement pattern?

The village can be seen as a rational response to population growth. In 1086, when the Domesday survey was made, the population of England was probably about 2.25 million. By 1215 it had risen to somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million. The population continued to grow, reaching 6 million or so by 1300, when England was as densely populated as it would be in the eighteenth century. One response to population growth was to expand cultivation. Large areas of forest, fen, marsh and upland were cleared, drained and farmed. Some of it was potentially good soil, as in the rich silt belt around the Wash. The monks of Glastonbury reclaimed thousands of acres in the Somerset Levels, creating high-quality meadow by building dykes and diverting river courses. But there was a limit to the physical expansion of cultivation. The Domesday Book shows that seven or eight million acres were already under the plough in 1086 – almost as many as in the 1950s. By 1215 some farmers, such as those who made clearings in the Sussex Weald, were struggling to make the best of soil that would always remain poor.

An alternative to expansion was greater efficiency. By living together in a village community, farmers could co-operate more effectively. In conjunction with his neighbours, the farmer who owned only two oxen was able to take advantage of the most up-to-date farm machinery, the heavy plough drawn by eight oxen. Because heavy ploughs were much harder to turn than the old-fashioned scratch plough, it made sense for the land they worked to be divided into long narrow strips so that ploughs were turned as infrequently as possible. Each householder held many strips scattered throughout the two large fields attached to each village. By this method good and bad soil was shared out fairly, and all lived more or less equidistant from their work. Also, in this way the risks were spread.

This co-operative system meant that working the land had to be regulated by rules common to all. Manorial courts undoubtedly helped the lord of the manor to control and take profits from his tenants, but they also settled disputes between villagers and issued by-laws on matters of common concern, such as the use or abuse of grazing rights on common land. A relatively rich farmer, for example, had to be prevented from grazing too many animals on the common. Each year one common field lay fallow, while the other grew winter and spring-sown crops. Any change in the balance between arable and fallow required the village to reach a consensus. Thus, economic rationality created a real village community – though not everywhere in Britain. East Anglia and Kent were two of the most densely settled parts of England, yet in both regions villages remained rare. Here homesteads straggled along the edges of common land, presumably to prevent good arable land from being wasted by being built on. Throughout the west of Britain too, where pastoral farming remained more important than arable, people continued to live and work in the ancient – and more independent – fashion.

The existence of planned villages demonstrates the capacity of lords to assess the economic situation and calculate the levels of investment needed to make radical innovations. In this climate of financial rationality, it was possible to reckon that using slave labour was not cost-effective and should be abandoned. Slavery in Britain had not disappeared with the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. On the contrary it was still flourishing when William I conquered England in 1066. As in Roman times much of the hardest work was done by slaves: ploughing by male slaves, grinding corn with hand mills by slave women. In a slave-owning society, such as Anglo-Saxon England, a master who killed his own slave was guilty of a sin, but not of a crime. Slaves were bought and sold at market – human flexibility meant that one healthy male might cost as much as a plough team of eight oxen. Captured slaves were among the most desirable profits of war. But William I came from Normandy, where slavery was already a thing of the past, and he disapproved. He put an end to the slave trade. Gradually slaves became more expensive to acquire. For centuries an occasional rich lord on his deathbed had been moved to free slaves as an act of Christian piety, but now – at long last – traditional notions of charity went hand in hand with the profit motive. In return for burdensome, often full-time services as ploughmen and shepherds, slaves were freed and given small tenements. By the 1120s Englishmen looked upon slavery as a barbarous custom happily no longer practised in their modern and civilised society. A hundred years before Magna Carta granted rights to freemen, an even more fundamental kind of freedom had been established.

The lords of the Magna Carta generation were able, however, to win a victory in the law courts whose effect was to create serfdom – a condition which many have believed to be just a new kind of slavery. Economic and social circumstance inevitably meant that some people were much less free than others. Those tenants who owed rent in the form of long hours of work on their landlord’s estates had little freedom of choice about how they spent their days. A tenant who was not allowed to leave his holding or give his daughter in marriage without his lord’s permission – a permission for which he had to pay – felt a frustrating lack of freedom. Such tenant farmers were significantly less free than those who owed cash rents and could earn their money as they chose. Some tenants were prosperous farmers; others were churls or peasants. It had always been part of the morality of kingship that the king and his courts would protect freemen against unjustified oppression – but never to the extent that they would help ‘peasants’ loosen the ties that bound them to their lords. So, the king’s judges formulated a new set of rules whose effect was to disbar half the population of England from access to the public courts. Those tenants who owed the heaviest services to their lords were told that they did not have the right to have their disputes heard in the royal courts as freemen did. In this sense they were unfree, and legally classified as serfs or villeins; and so were their children and their children’s children. From now on their disputes, whether with each other or with their lords, could only be heard in the manorial courts – the lords’ own courts.

Records kept by these courts, the court rolls, survive from the late thirteenth century onwards. There is no doubt that this arrangement suited the landlords. ‘The churl should always be well plucked for he is like a willow that sprouts better the more often it is pollarded.’ Even so, in law there were limits to the oppression of serfs by their lords. No lord was legally entitled to kill or mutilate his serf, as owners could their slaves. Although a serf and his family were in effect bought and sold when the land on which he lived, his villein tenancy, was bought and sold, no individual serf was separated from his or her family and taken to market to be sold in the way that slaves – human cattle – had been. Serfs were not slaves. But they felt unfree, and with reason. A long struggle lay ahead, in which the great rebellion of 1381, the Peasants’ Revolt, was the principal landmark, before serfdom was at last ended, although it has never been formally abolished.