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‘Legal Windows Onto Historical Populations’? Recent Research on Demography and the Manor Court in Medieval England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

L.R. Poos  and
R.M. Smith
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Extract

The stategic role played by population movement, and its interaction with agrarian environment, in current theories of medieval economic development stands in sharp contrast to the relatively sparse direct evidence that can be marshalled to elucidate demographic change in medieval England. Indeed, work done to date has relied largely upon indirect indicators such as rents, prices, and wages or landscape changes associated with processess of reclamation, colonization, settlement resiting, shrinkage and desertion.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , Spring 1984 , pp. 128 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1984

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References

1. A summary of the types of arguments usually marshalled in this context can be found in Hatcher, John, Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (London, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The most recent summary of the landscape archaeologist's perspective is Taylor, Christopher, Village and Farmstead (London, 1983)Google Scholar.

2. One of the earliest exercises in local manorial history by a legal historian, and still one of the better of this genre, was first published in 1894: Maitland, F.W., ‘The History of a Cambridgeshire Manor,’ reprinted in Cam, H.M., ed.. Selected Historical Essays of F.W. Maitland (Cambridge, 1957) 16–40Google Scholar.

3. E.g., Raftis, J.A., ‘Social Structures in Five East Midland Villages,’ Economic History Review, 2d ser., xviii (1965) 83–100Google Scholar; Raftis, J.A., Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Medieval English Village (Toronto, 1964)Google Scholar; Raftis, J.A., Warboys: Two Hundred Years in the Life of a Medieval English Village (Toronto, 1974)Google Scholar; DeWindt, E.B., Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth: Structures of Tenure and Patterns of Social Organisation in an East Midlands Village, 1252–1457 (Toronto, 1972)Google Scholar; Britton, E., The Community of the Vill: A Study in the History of the Family and Village Life in Fourteenth-Century England (Toronto, 1977)Google Scholar.

4. For a thoughtful, level-headed review of these difficulties, see Wrightson, K., ‘Medieval Villagers in Perspective,’ Peasant Studies vii (1978) 203–17Google Scholar.

5. Razi, Z., ‘The Toronto School's Reconstitution of Medieval Peasant Society: A Critical View,’ Past and Present 85 (1980) 141–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Razi, Z., Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980)Google Scholar.

6. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 12.

7. Ibid. 12–23.

8. This discussion will presume that village and manor were coterminous (i.e., that there was reasonable congruity between the manor as tenurial and administrative unit and village as physical community) and that both leet and regular manor court records have survived, for any community under study; in practice, of course, this is often not the case and introduces further complications.

9. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 2–3.

10. For a specific study, see Smith, R.M., ‘Some Thoughts on “Hereditary” and “Proprietary” Rights in Customary Land in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England,’ Law and History Review i (1983) 95–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for more highly suggestive preliminary findings, Beckerman, J.S., ‘Customary Law in Manorial Courts in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1972)Google Scholar.

11. The inference of declining resident population at Redgrave was made on the basis of observing that approximately thirty percent of customary tenants died with no surviving male or female offspring, whereas in a stationary population one would expect this in no more than twenty percent of parents' deaths. For more on this point, see Wrigley, E.A., ‘Fertility Strategy for the Individual and the Group,’ in Tilly, C., ed., Historical Studies of Changing Fertility (Princeton, 1978) 133–54Google Scholar; Smith, R.M., ‘Some Issues Concerning Families and their Properties in England, 1250–1800,’ in Smith, R.M., ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. For a detailed study of land transfers in Redgrave, see R. M. Smith, ‘Families and Their Land in an Area of Partible Inheritance: Redgrave, Suffolk, 1260–1319,’ in Smith, Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, supra note 11.

13. Smith, ‘Issues Concerning Families and Their Properties,’ supra note 11.

14. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 25.

15. Ibid. 3.

16. Raftis, ‘Social Structures in Five East Midland Villages,’ note supra 3, 90–93.

17. Poos, L.R., ‘Population and Resources in Two Fourteenth-Century Essex Communities: Great Waltham and High Easter, 1327–1389’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1984) 95–97Google Scholar.

18. For a fuller account, see R.M. Smith, ‘Kin and Neighbors in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk Community,’ Journal of Family History (1979) 219–56, and Smith, R.M., ‘Explaining Network Structure: An Exchange-Theoretical Approach to Some Thirteenth-Century English Evidence’ (unpublished paper presented at the Social Science History Association's annual conference at Bloomington, Indiana, November, 1983)Google Scholar.

19. For a general account of the polltax evidence, see Beresford, M.W., Poll Taxes and Lay Subsidies (Canterbury, 1963)Google Scholar.

20. Poos, ‘Population and Resources,’ supra note 17, 97–100. These rolls' survival is roughly as complete as those of Halesowen at the same period.

21. One recent attempt to assess the importance of relative degrees of underrepresentation in the court-roll evidence, though still using only evidence internal to the court rolls themselves, may be noted here. Judith Bennett, using a categorization of individuals appearing in manor courts from communities with different economic contexts, found that persons associated with ‘families’ who participated in the villages' official hierarchy (‘Rank A’) were between two and four times more likely to appear in recorded court transactions than those who were not so connected (‘Rank C’). Average appearances per male were, in Brigstock (Northants), 30.0 (Rank A) and 7.9 (Rank C) between 1287 and 1348; in Iver (Bucks) 14.7 and 6.1 (1287–1349); in Houghton-cum-Wyton (Hunts) 7.8 and 3.3 (1288–1349). Bennett, J.M., ‘Gender, Family and Community: A Comparative Study of the English Peasantry, 1287–1349’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1982) 194, 276, 331Google Scholar.

22. These data yield annual totals of resident adolescent and adult males. For a detailed analysis of tithingpenny payments as a source for demographic analysis for seven mid-Essex manors, see Poos, ‘Population and Resources,’ supra note 17, 63–94.

23. Russell, J.C., British Medieval Population (Albuquerque, 1948) 92–117Google Scholar; cf. Hollingsworth, T.H., Historical Demography (London, 1969) 375–88Google Scholar.

24. Gottfried, R.S., Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth-Century England (Leicester, 1978) 187–203Google Scholar.

25. Thrupp, S.L., ‘The Problem of Replacement-Rates in Late Medieval English Population,’ Economic History Review, 2d ser., xviii (1965) 101–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 32–34.

27. Ibid. 33.

28. Ibid.

29. Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy supra note 1, 28.

30. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 83–89.

31. Ibid. 33–34.

32. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, supra note 24, 187.

33. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 43.

34. Ibid. 35–36, n. 30.

35. E.g., Dyer, C.C., Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540 (Cambridge, 1980) 229–30Google Scholar.

36. Poos, ‘Population and Resources,’ supra note 17, 135.

37. These rules for calculation of mortality after families in a parish have been reconstituted were defined by Gautier, E. and Henry, L., La population du Crulai (Paris, 1956)Google Scholar ch. 8 and were implemented with minor modifications by Wrigley, E.A., ‘Mortality in pre-Industrial England: The Example of Colyton, Devon, over Three Centuries,’ in Glass, D.V. and Revelle, R., eds., Population and Social Change (London, 1972) 243–74Google Scholar.

38. A precise set of criteria are defined for determining what constitutes continuing residence: continuing to baptize or bury children up to age fifteen, or death of spouse, or remarriage, for example.

39. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 43–45.

40. The difficulties surrounding the allocation of a plausible distribution of ages of entry into property complicated the interpretations of adult mortality on manors of the Bishopric of Winchester which were studied by Postan, M.M. and Titow, J.Z., ‘Heriots and Prices on Winchester Manors,’ reprinted in Postan, M.M., Essay on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge, 1973) 150–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For studies of social and economic-status-specific differentials in life expectancies for historical populations see, for example, A. Perrenoud, ‘L'inégalité sociale devant la mort à Geneve au XVIIéme siécle,’ Population, numéro-special (1975) 221–43, and Derouet, B., ‘Une demographic sociale differentielle,’ Annales: E.S.C. xxxv (1980) 3–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. Coale, A.J. and Demeny, P., Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (Princeton, 1966) 2–4Google Scholar. Relating e20 to e0 in this way involves assuming that the relationship between adult mortality and mortality in younger age groups was similar to that embodied in the Princeton Model West tables. For a discussion of this point, see Schofield, R.S. and Wrigley, E.A., ‘Infant and Child Mortality in the Late Tudor and Early Stuart Period,’ in Webster, C., ed., Health, Medicine and Mortality in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1979) 61–95Google Scholar; in a medieval context, Ohlin, G., ‘No Safety in Numbers: Some Pitfalls of Historical Statistics,’ in Floud, R.C., ed., Essays in Quantitative Economic History (Oxford, 1974) 65–66Google Scholar.

42. Wrigley, E.A. and Schofield, R.S., The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, 1981) 230–31Google Scholar.

43. See the discussion of implications of different mortality and fertility combinations in ibid. 236–48.

44. See, among a huge body of literature, Anderson, M., Approaches to the History of the Western Family (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Laslett, P., ‘Characteristics of the Western Family Considered over Time,’ in Laslett, P., Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977) 12–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, supra note 42, 402–83. The concept of the European marriage pattern was first articulated in a seminal paper by Hajnal, J., ‘European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,’ in Glass, D.V. and Eversley, D.E.C., Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London, 1965) 101–43Google Scholar. Hajnal observed (ibid. 117–19) that the fourteenth-century English polltax listings point to a ‘non-European’ marriage pattern among the rural English medieval population. More recent work, however, has altered this impression from the polltax evidence: cf. Poos, ‘Population and Resources,’ supra note 17, 140–58.

45. Gross reproduction rates of 3.1 to 4.1 would be needed to sustain intrinsic growth rates of close to 0.5 percent per annum in the absence of considerable net immigration: Coale and Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables, supra note 41, 26–31. In contrast, gross reproduction rates in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were most typically in the range of 2.0 to 2.3: Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, supra note 42, 528–29.

46. Homans, G.C., English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1941) 133–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. See Wrigley, ‘Fertility Strategy,’ supra note 11 and Smith, ‘Some Issues Concerning Families and their Properties,’ supra note 11. Cf. Schofield, R.S., ‘The Relationship Between Demographic Structure and Environment in Pre-Industrial Western Europe,’ in Conze, W., ed., Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas (Stuttgart, 1976) 147–60Google Scholar.

48. Britton, E., ‘The Peasant Family in Fourteenth-Century England,’ Peasant Studies Newsletter v (1976) 2–7Google Scholar.

49. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 55.

50. Ibid. 55–56.

51. Ibid. 57.

52. Razi's raw data indicate that approximately seventy-five percent of families in observation had at least one son (ibid. 55). Yet this sample of ‘observable’ sons include those as young as twelve years (the age at swearing into tithing), and we should make some adjustment for deaths of sons between that age and fathers’ deaths. Of course, we have no data on paternal deaths in the necessary form; but if we employ the adult mortality level that Razi calculated (though problematic), the 590 families with one or more sons aged twelve and older would probably be diminished to about 513 with one or more sons aged twenty and older, or sixty-five percent. This calculation is based upon deaths occurring from exact ages ten to twenty years as a percentage of survivors to exact age ten in Model West life table, mortality levels 1–3: Coale and Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables, supra note 41, 2–4.

53. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 63.

54. Ibid.

55. For this debate, see Scammell, J., ‘Freedom and Marriage in Medieval England,’ Economic History Review, 2d ser., xxvii (1974) 523–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Searle, E., ‘Freedom and Marriage in Medieval England: An Alternative Hypothesis,’ Economic History Review 2d ser., xxix (1976) 482–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scammell, J., ‘Wife-Rents and Merchet,’ Economic History Review, 2d ser., xxix (1976) 487–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Searle, E., ‘Seigneurial Control of Women's Marriage: The Antecedents and Functions of Merchet in England,’ Past and Present 82 (1979) 3–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brand, P. A. and Hyams, P.R., ‘Seigneurial Control of Women's Marriage,’ Past and Present 99 (1983) 122–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Faith, R., ‘Seigneurial Control of Women's Marriage,’ Past and Present 99 (1983) 133–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Searle, E., ‘Seigneurial Control of Women's Marriage: A Rejoinder,’ Past and Present 99 (1983) 148–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. The estimated crude marriage rates have been obtained from Razi's measures of population totals based on quinquennial totals of resident males over twelve years of age appearing in the court proceedings (Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 25), doubling them and adding a further thirty-three percent to account for women and all persons under the age of twelve. But, because merchet was a liability only of customary tenants, we have used Razi's estimate of the proportion of entire population represented by customary tenants, that is, two-thirds of overall population (ibid. 10). (As it is likely that customary tenants (as opposed to free tenants) were disproportionately more fully represented among those appearing in manorial courts, the resulting calculation of crude marriage rates are, if anything, an overestimate.) Setting recorded servile marriages corrected for incomplete document survival (ibid. 48) against these estimates of servile population fields the following crude marriage rates by quinquennium:

57. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, supra note 42, 531–35. Like most crude demographic measures, this rate is not absolutely satisfactory when used comparatively in this manner, as it takes no account of factors such as proportions of population at marriageable ages, customs pertaining to remarriage, and so on.

58. Poos, ‘Population and Resources,’ supra note 17, 159–84. The procedure employed in this case was slightly different from that for the Halesowen data. Observed events (recorded servile marriages in surviving court records) have been set against a time at risk (the interval of time elapsed between the court session at which the marriage was recorded and the next previous court session, as it is envisioned that a pre-contractual exchange of vows, regarded by canon law and perhaps also popular opinion as the initiation of a valid marriage, preceded licensing in the manorial court and solemnization in facie ecclesie). This gives quinquennial figures for annual rates of recorded servile marriages. Quinquennial resident population totals have been calculated from tithing-penny figures for resident males aged twelve and older; servile populations have been estimated as two-thirds of total populations, because this is roughly the ratio of tenancies recorded in 1328 as having at least some customary land or molland to all tenancies.

59. At Redgrave, 326 tenants held customary land in 1289 (Redgrave rental, University of Chicago Library, Bacon MS 805). It is unlikely that these tenancies related to a base unfree population of less than 1,000 persons, then, and one would expect between 400 and 900 marriages over this period if crude marriage rates were similar to early modern levels. Marriages recorded in Regrave court rolls, University of Chicago, Joseph Regenstein Library, Bacon MSS 1–15.

60. The evidence for this comes from the Myntling Register: Spalding Gentlemen's Society Library, Spalding, Lincolnshire. It is possible to relate the merchets paid by bond women in these five manors (440 in total during 1252–1300) to estimates of the bond population of the individual manors for points in the late thirteenth century. For these estimates, see Hallam, H.E., ‘Some Thirteenth-Century Censuses,’ Economic History Review, 2d ser., x (1958) 340–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This results in crude annual marriage rates per thousand of 2.1 (Pinchbeck), 2.3 (Spalding), 2.5 (Weston), 1.7 (Moulton), and 2.2 (Sutton), or a ‘global’ mean annual rate of 2.1 per 1,000.

61. As closely as can be reconstructed at the time of merchet payment, 15.8 acres was the mean acreage held. Poos, ‘Population and Resources,’ supra note 17, 159–84.

62. For a detailed discussion of the social distribution of land in late thirteenth century Redgrave, see Smith, ‘Families and Their Land,’ supra note 12.

63. Part of the recent debate between Eleanor Searle and Rosamund Faith on the function of merchet in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries centered around whether the obligation was primarily a function of tenurial status or an issue of personal unfreedom. It would obviously be unrealistic to insist too strongly upon either aspect of the custom, as clearly both considerations were present, and a noteworthy minority of participants in recorded servile marriages (substantial, for example, at Waltham and Easter) failed to appear in any tenurial contexts in the surviving records. But the quantities of properties involved in marriages whose participants did appear as tenants were considerable. In Redgrave, seventy-five (28%) of the servile marriages can be directly associated with gifts of land to the bride at her marriage. In Waltham and Easter, approximately one-fifth of the recorded marriages were associated with property transfers to the bride in the decades before the Black Death. Of course, court-roll evidence is likely to be generally less forthcoming in the matter of marriage endowments made in moveable goods rather than land. Furthermore, in Redgrave there is suggestive evidence that the licenses were themselves not unconnected with either the property-holding status of their parents or the size of dowry they obtained. Of the girls who cannot be shown to have a connection with a landholding family (thirty cases), eighty percent paid licence fees under 1s. Only thirty-two (30.3 %) of the 139 girls whose fathers' landholdings can be documented at the time of their marriages paid licence fees of 1s. or less. Of the girls receiving dowries (thirty-three cases) of over half an acre of land, seventy-three percent paid licence fees over 2s., whereas only forty-two percent of those with dowries smaller than this (forty-two cases) paid fees over 2s.

64. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 64–71.

65. Hilton, R.H., ‘Freedom and Villeinage in England,’ in Hilton, R.H., ed., Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social History (Cambridge, 1976) 191Google Scholar.

66. They believe this interpretation to be justified by the evidence concerning disputed marriage contracts in the surviving records of medieval English ecclesiastical courts. See, for example, Sheehan, M.M., ‘The Formation and Stability of Marriage in Fourteenth Century England,’ Medieval Studies xxxiii (1971) 228–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Helmholz, R.H., Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar.

67. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 64.

68. Houlbrooke, R.H., Church Courts and the People During the English Reformation, 1520–70 (Oxford, 1979) 76Google Scholar. For rather higher numbers of pregnancies relative to ‘incontinents’ and adulterers that did not involve pregnancies, see Wrightson, K. and Levine, D., Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (London, 1979) 125–27Google Scholar. However, in the presentments in an Archdeaconry of Colchester act book for the period 1600–42 relating to the Essex parish of Kelvedon, cases concerning fornication and adultery were much more frequent than bastard births and extramarital pregnancies: Sharpe, J.A., ‘Crime and Delinquency in an Essex Parish, 1600–1640,’ in Cockburn, J.S., ed., Crime in England, 1550–1800 (London, 1977) 109Google Scholar.

69. This issue is considered in more detail in Smith, R.M., ‘Illegitimacy, Customary and Common Law and Ecclesiastical Definitions of Marriage: Some Late-Thirteenth and Early-Fourteenth-Century English Evidence’ (a paper presented to the Cambridge Historical Society at Girton College, Cambridge, May 3, 1983)Google Scholar.

70. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 64.

71. As, for example, could be done with the evidence in Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love, supra note 44, 116–17. In a sample of twenty-four parishes the decadal ratios of recorded marriages to illegitimacies varied between 5.7 and 8.2 from 1580 to 1640. The ratio implied by the Redgrave evidence during 1260–1319 is 3.4.

72. This unfortunate error was made in Smith, R.M., ‘English Peasant Life Cycles and Socio-Economic Networks’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1974) 456–57Google Scholar. These results were cited with approval by Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, supra note 5, 70, as evidence of high levels of illegitimacy in communities other than Halesowen.

73. See the remarks of Wrigley, E.A., ‘Marriage, Fertility and Population Growth in Eighteenth-Century England,’ in Outwaite, R.B., ed., Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage (London, 1981) 155–63Google Scholar.

74. See the remarks in Smith, R.M., ‘Some Reflections on the Evidence for the Origins of the “European Marriage Pattern” in England,’ in Harris, C., ed., The Sociology of the Family: New Directions for Britain, Sociological Review, monograph xxviii (1979) 96Google Scholar and Macfarlane, A., ‘Modes of Reproduction,’ in Hawthorn, G., ed., Population and Development: High and Low Fertility in Poorer Countries (London, 1979) 112–13Google Scholar.

75. This latter view seems to be an unnecessary cry of despair in Bennett, J.M., ‘Spouses, Siblings and Surnames: Reconstructing Families from Medieval Village Court Rolls,’ Journal of British Studies 23 (1983) 45–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76. See L.R. Poos, ‘Peasant “Biographies” From Medieval England,’ in N. Bulst and J.P. Genet, eds., Medieval Prosopography: Proceedings of the Bielefeld Conference, December 1982 (forthcoming), influenced greatly by ground rules for work in later centuries presented by Wrightson, K., ‘Villages, Villagers and Village Studies,’ Historical Journal xviii (1975) 632–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.