1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (6 page)

Meanwhile, the England of 1215 was undergoing a managerial revolution. For many generations past the magnates, those who owned many manors, had lived off the rents and services owed them by their tenants. Their richer tenants, men of gentry status, would take over a whole manor or even several manors. Leases at rents fixed for a term of several lifetimes were common, and tended to turn into hereditary tenures. From the magnate’s point of view this had its advantages. It gave him a predictable income and kept administration costs to a minimum. There was no need for anyone to keep detailed records. This absence of records is why it is virtually impossible to write an economic history of the early English countryside.

What would happen to wealthy landlords who spent far more than they could afford and got into debt? The story of Samson, abbot of Bury St Edmunds from 1182 to 1211, as told by one of his monks, Jocelin of Brakelond, is revealing. Samson’s predecessor, Abbot Hugh,

This was the situation that faced the new abbot immediately after his election. How could the monks climb out of the vicious cycle of escalating debt? Was it possible to run their estates more profitably? Could they re-negotiate the leases? Was demand for foodstuffs increasing as the population rose? Jocelin describes a first step in the process, one in which he himself was involved.

If prices were increasing, then would they not do better if they took their manors into their own hands, instead of leasing them out, appointed bailiffs and reeves to run them, then sold the surplus on the open market? This, at any rate, was what Abbot Samson did during the 1180s and 1190s, and so did a few other of the more enterprising and efficient lords.

Then, early in King John’s reign, prices rose sharply, doubling or even trebling in the first five years of the new century. An ox, which could be bought for forty pence in the early 1190s, now cost eighty pence. The sudden and, to all appearances, unprecedented rise in the cost of living at the beginning of the century meant that great landowners would have found it impossible to maintain the style to which they were accustomed unless they followed Samson’s example and revolutionised the methods by which they managed their estates. And this was what they did. Many lords encountered fierce opposition from their tenants when they re-negotiated leases which fell in, and even fiercer when they tried to cancel them. Jocelin recounts one such case:

But Abbot Samson resisted this pressure from the local bigwigs, and explained why in a lengthy speech. He was, after all, a famous preacher able to give sermons in Latin, French and English, including Norfolk dialect. The local establishment then offered him a large sum of money to renew the lease of Cosford, but Samson still refused. It required determination (and often forensic skill in the law courts) to resist the pressure and prudent thought for the future to say no to the presents they tried to give him. But gradually, both at Bury St Edmunds and on other estates, the new measures were pushed through.

The rich could now get richer, but the new system was far from being problem free. From now on the lord’s expenses and profits were bound to vary from year to year. This made it easy for his officials to cheat him unless a close check was kept on their activities, so on each manor a detailed record of the year was kept, then checked together with similar returns from the other manors by auditors who represented the central administration of a great estate. The earliest such records to survive were drawn up from 1208 on the instructions of the bishop of Winchester, King John’s good friend Peter des Roches. As one satirist of the time put it, the bishop was ‘slack at scripture, sharp at accounting’. Other estates followed the practice of the businesslike bishop. The survival of masses of these accounts dating from around 1250 to 1400 means that historians know a great deal about the economy of the great estates during that century and a half.

Thirteenth-century auditors had a policy-making as well as a fraud-detecting role. They often noted that those who owed labour services worked without enthusiasm and suggested it might be better to hire wage labourers. In the summer everyone was expected to help with the lord’s harvest, but he had to lay on a generous feast to mark the occasion. Was it worth it? the auditors asked. They fixed targets for each manor, and took investment decisions, whether to replace equipment, for instance, or build new barns. The barley barn built at Temple Cressing in Essex around 1230 is still in use today. The landlords’ solution to the crisis of inflation meant that to run their estates they now required a whole army of professional treasurers, auditors, bailiffs, receivers and their clerks. Such people needed to learn their trade, and by the early thirteenth century there was a school of business administration at Oxford.

Yet the managerial revolution did little, perhaps nothing, to raise crop yields. By modern standards they remained very low indeed. The earliest surviving manorial accounts show that most lords were content to let a half or a third of their arable land lie fallow, leaving their sheep to manure it, plough the rest with ox teams only once or twice before sowing, and then sow only two to four bushels of seed an acre. By these methods they achieved returns of just three or four times the amount sown – in contrast to modern yields of more than twenty times the amount sown. Since these records relate to the home farms – the demesnes, as they were then called – of the greatest estates in England, it was always assumed that the yields obtained by their tenants or other lesser landholders were even lower, in the belief that the wealthiest would have employed the most advanced agricultural techniques.

But recent research has questioned this assumption. It has discovered that in relatively densely populated regions such as parts of Norfolk more intensive methods were employed, and higher yields achieved. Instead of letting some of the arable land lie fallow, it was all, or virtually all, cultivated. Crops such as peas were grown in great quantity and used not only to add nitrogen to the soil but also as fodder for animals kept in stalls, whose manure was collected and then spread on the soil just before ploughing – much more efficient than relying on grazing animals, whose droppings were often washed away by rain. By ploughing more often, and by speeding it up – using horses instead of oxen to draw the ploughs – and by more frequent weeding, they could achieve over twenty bushels an acre, a yield entirely comparable with that obtained by Norfolk farmers in the eighteenth century.

The secret was evidently in the intensive use of labour: many hands at work weeding, stone-picking and spreading manure. For most wealthy landlords, however, as their auditors could have told them, there was no point in achieving higher yields if it meant higher labour costs. The low yields on their estates made good financial sense. Peasant farmers, however, were their own labour force, and could count on the unstinting help of their wives and children. Since approximately three-quarters of the arable land of England was occupied by tenant farmers of this kind, it looks as though over most of the country average yields were higher than those obtained on the demesnes of the well-recorded great estates.

In other ways, too, the resources of the countryside were exploited more intensively than before. By 1215 England was significantly more mechanised than it had been a hundred years earlier. The windmill was invented in the twelfth century. This bold and brilliant design involved the whole mill building being raised on a post so that it could be turned by means of a long tail-pole to keep the sails facing into the wind. The earliest known windmills were built along the south and east coasts of England. Farmers might choose to grind their own grain by hand at home, but increasingly they had the option of taking it to the mill. In the same century waterpower was used for the first time in the cloth-making process, to drive hammers in fulling mills. (Fulling was the process whereby woven cloth was pounded in troughs filled with water and fuller’s earth or alum to thicken and felt it. At the same time more and more watermills were being built or upgraded by use of vertical wheels which required cogs to transfer waterpower to the millstones in the mill. It was much more efficient than having a horizontal wheel lying in the water channel and turning the millstones directly, but it required investment both in machinery and in building ponds and weirs to ensure a flow of water sufficient to turn a vertical wheel. Mill owners now competed with each other for business, offering better rates or a faster service than their rivals. This was why Abbot Samson, having invested a tidy sum in building a windmill for his abbey, ‘boiled with fury and could hardly eat or speak’ when he heard that the dean, too, had built a windmill. The dean said he had built it on his own freehold property and the wind was free for anyone to use, but Abbot Samson compelled him to dismantle it.

Improvements in harness and vehicle design meant that horses became more and more useful. In the Roman world horses had rarely been used for pulling anything heavier than a light chariot, but during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries horses were increasingly used for ploughing and hauling loaded carts. Horse-drawn carts and ploughs could go at least half as fast again as those pulled by oxen. Although horses could not cope with such heavy loads as oxen, their speed meant that they could be used with more flexibility. To speed traffic on its way, hundreds of new bridges were built and old wooden bridges were replaced with stone. The bridge-building programme was important enough for it to require regulation in Magna Carta (Clause 23). It also meant that for the first time since Roman times the road traffic system had been significantly upgraded.

The old Roman roads had not been maintained for centuries, but where there were towns and villages to be served the ten thousand miles of the Roman network remained in use. Four ancient roads were regarded as the great highways of Britain: from east to west, the Icknield Way; from south to north, Ermine Street; from south-east (Dover) to north-west (Chester), Watling Street; and the longest of them all, Fosse Way running from Caithness in north Scotland to Totnes in Devon. The foundation of new towns such as Bristol, Coventry and Oxford from the late Saxon period onwards meant that many new cross-country roads came into existence.

A medieval road, unlike engineered and metalled Roman and modern roads, hardly existed as a physical object. It was a right of way leading from one town or village to another. If it was much used it became a clearly visible track across the countryside. If the track was obstructed or became impassable in wet weather, travellers still had a right of way. They were entitled to leave the track and move on, even if they trampled down crops in the adjoining fields. Roads like this needed very little maintenance, but most local communities recognised that it was in their own interests at least to ensure that they were passable. If they were dilatory, they might well find the king prodding them, especially if it concerned one of the four great highways for which the Crown had a special responsibility. Icknield Way and Watling Street crossed at Dunstable and in 1285 Edward I forcefully reminded the priory and townspeople of their ancient obligation:

The kings of England, accompanied by their households, a baggage train of ten to twenty carts and dozens of packhorses, were always on the move around the country, rarely stopping for more than two or three days in any one place. Their government, it as been said, was ‘a government of the roads and roadsides’. Unimpressive as they might seem to us, the roads of medieval England met the requirements of government as well as the demands of the market.

We will and grant that all cities, boroughs, towns and ports shall have all their liberties and free customs
.

Magna Carta, Clause 13

W
ith these few words, in a document known as a letter patent drawn up in 1207, King John announced his foundation of Liverpool, a newly planned town alongside a tidal creek known as ‘le pool’ in the Mersey estuary. Liverpool was to have a remarkable future, but there was nothing at all remarkable about its foundation. Between 1066 and 1230 more than 125 towns were founded in England, with Arundel, Boston, Chelmsford, Devizes, Egremont, Harwich, Kingston-upon-Hull (later called Hull), Lynn (later King’s Lynn), Morpeth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Okehampton, Portsmouth, Reigate, Salisbury, Truro, Uxbridge, Watford and Yarmouth, on the Isle of Wight, among them. The number had doubled since the Norman Conquest, which represents a faster rate of town foundation than in any other period of comparable length in English history. Looking back from post-industrial Britain we might think that medieval England was an overwhelmingly rural country. That is not how they saw it at the time.