4 - Land and Livelihood

Summary

The manor of Burton is in circuit six miles exceeding good ground, both arable land, meadow and pasture

(Survey of Burton Lazars, 1563)

The outlying estates

Whatever debates were engaged in with regard to the paradox of a begging order administering an estate, there can be no doubt that these lands, once granted, were the property of the hospital in the Holy Land and that, in the first instance, the English brethren merely managed them as agents of the mother house. Their fundamental duty, in the early years, was to return an agreed measure of income from the province to their superiors, a relationship that was constantly subject to tension since the master-general was unable to rely on his estates in Palestine because of the ebb and flow of the Crusade. Similarly, for the order of St John this ‘collection and transfer of funds … was from the start the raison d’être of the Hospitallers establishment in Europe’. The vast majority of the provincial lands were in England, and though there were also holdings in Scotland, it appears that the Lazarites never established footholds in Wales or Ireland.

In its capacity of land management the order of St Lazarus faced some major economic and political challenges. First, how to administer an estate that had grown up sporadically over a very wide area, often with small, isolated pockets of land. Second, how to exploit that estate given the changing economic climate of medieval England. Third, how to justify and utilise its income in view of the declining emphasis placed on crusading in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the controversial loyalty of Boigny to the French royal house. The Hospitallers, with ‘neutral’ bases on Cyprus and Rhodes, did not face the last of these problems to quite the same extent, but the economic and managerial difficulties were certainly shared. Writing about monastic estates in Leicestershire at the time of the Dissolution, Jack has warned pessimistically that ‘Very little can be said of Burton Lazars. The long list of villages … in which it held small rents suggests that its property was not very concentrated.’ The statement is partly true. The order did, indeed, hold a good deal of dispersed land. But it also consolidated a valuable demesne at Burton Lazars, which stood it in good stead until the time of the suppression.