MEDIEVAL ENGLISH SOCIETY
http://history.wisc.edu/sommerville/123/123%2013%20Society.htm
Domesday Book provides a wealth of information about English society in 1086. It lists about 13,000 towns,
villages and tiny hamlets. The basic unit in Domesday Book was the manor - since this showed who owned the
land and controlled its inhabitants.
At the time of Domesday Book, more than 90 per cent of the English population (of about two million) lived
in the countryside. Even with the vast mass of the population engaged in agriculture, almost all the cultivable
land had to be farmed because output was so low - about four times the amount of seed sown. (To feed one
person for a year on wheat required about two acres of land - today's yields would produce the same from 1/3 of
an acre.)
The average holding of a peasant family during the 14th century was about 12 to 15 acres, but many poor
cottars survived on less than five acres - supplementing their income by working as laborers.
Wheat was preferred for human food consumption, but other crops were also sown: barley - the basic
constituent of ale; oats - for the livestock that manured the land; peas - both as a source of protein and because
they increased the soil's fertility if alternated with grain crops.
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Fish also played an important part in the medieval English diet. No place in England is more than about 100
miles from the sea, and its many rivers also provided freshwater fish.
The Cuckoo Song
[Summer is arriving,
Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springeth the wude nu —
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteth afer lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu;
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, well singes thu, cuccu:
Loudly sing cuckoo!
Seeds are growing, meadows blowing,
And woods renewing —
Sing cuckoo.
Ewes bleat after lambs,
Cows low for calves;
Bullocks are shying, bucks are leaping,
Merrily sing cuckoo.
Cuckoo, cuckoo; well may you sing cuckoo,
You should never stop singing cuckoo].
Ne swike thu naver nu;
Sing cuccu, nu, sing cuccu,
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!
One of the earliest surviving examples of English verse, dating from the early 13th century, The Cuckoo song shows the
rural concerns of an agricultural country.
Social classes
Land and social structure in Medieval England.
[The column on the left shows the approximate proportion in the population; the column on the right, the rough proportion of land
held or farmed (though not necessarily owned; villeins held their land from a lord who owned it); slaves have no right hand column as
they had no land]
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The Free
At the top of the English social scale stood the king and nobility. Senior churchmen (abbots and bishops) were
also barons with noble status. About 200 of these men formed England's ruling elite. Crown, nobility and church
owned about 75% of English land.
Immediately below the nobility were knights. Knighthood was not hereditary; instead, men were made
knights as a reward for outstanding service or because they had become wealthy enough. (By the 14th century,
there
were
about
1,000
knights,
owning
land
worth
on
average
₤40
per
annum.)
[Until the later 14th century, noblemen and knights spoke a different language from the common people - an
increasingly corrupt form of French, quite unlike the basically Germanic speech illustrated in The Cuckoo Song.]
Effigy of a Suffolk knight
c. 1330
The other class of freemen were "sokemen" (or socmen.) Roughly one in six of
the population were sokemen, and they owned about twenty per cent of the land.
They were especially numerous in East Anglia. Sokemen held in socage; they had
security of tenure provided they carried out certain defined services often
including light labor services and paying a fixed rent. Their land was heritable.
The Unfree
The largest class of the population were villani. (Those born to servile status were also called nativi.) About
four in ten people were villani tied to the land. They did not own the land but farmed their own holdings (about
45 per cent of all English land,) which they were allowed to occupy in exchange for labor services on the
landowner's demesne.
The exact services required from villani varied in accordance with local
customs and agreements. A common arrangement was three days work
each week (more in harvest time). During the 12th Century the villani were
keen to have their labor services commuted to money rents, but labor
services remained widespread.
A lower class of villeins were known as bordars or cottars. These
occupied very small plots of land for personal use, which like the villani
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they did not own, but for which they had to pay rent and/or labor services. Although they constituted about one
third of the population, bordars only occupied about five per cent of the land.
At the very bottom of the social scale were slaves who owned no land at all. These constituted slightly less
than one in ten of the population at the time of Domesday Book. During the 12th Century many of these slaves
were given holdings and became bordars.
Social and economic change meant that these classes were far from fixed - villeins could buy free land, and
freemen could slip into villeinage.
In the course of the Middle Ages the tendency was for the peasants to become freer but poorer - as
population expansion outstripped the growth of agricultural productivity, reducing the size of average
landholdings; this also had the effect of reducing the price of hired labor; lords could find it more efficient to hire
cheap labor (paid per task) than to enforce labor services on reluctant serfs/ villeins (paid per day).
The Medieval English economy
The economy was overwhelmingly agricultural. Towns functioned as commercial centers, but long distance
trade was still undeveloped.
Medieval Europe had very poor roads: potholes could be large enough to overturn a cart. In wet weather, the
roads became extremely muddy - not until the late 14th century were city streets cobbled with stones.
Consequently,
shipping
by
sea
or
river
was
far
more
efficient
than
land
carting.
Some developments in shipping did occur. In particular, the introduction of the
cog - a transport ship that rode low in the water. Cogs were steered by a side
oar and powered by a combination of oars and one yard sail. Its strong cross
beams allowed for the transportation of greater quantities of cargo than earlier
ships.
These ships were short and stubby by modern standards, and the relatively
large breadth to keel ratio made them difficult to maneuver.
The introduction of the magnetic compass during the 12th Century
considerably
improved
navigation.
Although England's maritime trade
grew during the 13th Century, international trade and commerce was
dominated by the cities of Italy. Their commercial expertise and loan
facilities enabled them to obtain special concessions from the English
government.
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England's main export was wool. During the later Middle Ages, England increasingly exported finished cloth, but
raw wool was the primary export during the 13th Century.
Cotswold lions, long haired sheep whose wool dominated English medieval output.
English agricultural methods and productivity remained stagnant throughout the Middle Ages. The "strip"
system of farming was equitable and extremely inefficient. Yields of grain per acre remained stagnant.
Food production was only increased by bringing more land under the plow - a process that stopped once
all available waste land had been improved.
The introduction of the windmill (in place of the watermill)
increased the efficiency of grinding grain for its operation
continued even when the water was frozen or streams low.
English population
The population of Europe as a whole grew in the period
1000 to 1300. This coincided with the so-called "Medieval
Warm Period," when the average temperature of Northern
Europe was warmer than for 2000 preceding years, and far
warmer than in the "Little Ice Age" that followed it. England's
population increased from somewhere between 1.25 and
2.25 million at the time of the Norman Conquest, to at least 4
million (and possibly well over 6 or even 7 million) by 1300.
The Growth in English population
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Much of the growth in population took place in the North of England. This area recovered from the
devastation inflicted by William I, helped by the warmer temperatures and a longer growing season.
A number of new towns were founded - including Leeds (1207) and Liverpool (1229.)
English medieval towns were very small by modern standards. Only London with a population of about
35,000 by 1300 was a large city. England's second city, Norwich grew from about 6,000 inhabitants in 1086 to
about 10,000 in 1300.
Population expansion and social conditions
Because the number of people was growing while agricultural yields remained stagnant, people had to
expand onto marginal land to increase food production. Forests were felled, marshes drained and arable crops
planted in poor soil that had previously been used as pasture. Existing land was sowed more frequently and left
fallow less often.
These techniques expanded production initially, but yields tended to fall over time. The cutback in the
area available for livestock decreased the volume of manure obtainable for fertilizing the soil.
More people meant smaller acreage of land per person and this led to "harvest sensitivity." In years of poor
harvests (such as the wet summers of 1315-1316) insufficient grain was grown and the poor starved.
More people also meant more laborers and low wages. Landowners therefore had no reason to enforce
servile labor. By 1300, slavery had died out and unfree tenures were becoming less common. (About one in two
peasants was a villein in 1300, where two in three of those in Domesday Book were villeins.) However, there
were still considerable variations in different areas of the country, and even within regions. In the North-west,
for example, servile tenures predominated, while in Kent wealthy free peasants were the norm.
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A medieval peasant's house. Wood was in short supply in medieval
England so only the frame of the house was constructed of timber.
There were no foundations, but the timbers were sometimes placed
on
stone
supports
to
discourage
damp
and
rot.
The spaces in the walls were filled with branches and twigs, caked
together with mud, and the whole surface was then coated with a
limestone wash to render them waterproof. This system was called
"wattle and daub."
The roof was generally thatched with straw. The floor was simply earth, which was covered with straw
(periodically thrown out and replaced) to reduce dust and dirt.
The internal floor-plan tended to be very simple - the house was divided into a byre for livestock and supplies,
and a living area for people with a central hearth. Generally, there was no chimney - smoke merely escaped
through a hole in the roof.
Increased population made peasants freer but poorer. By the late 13th Century, however, the evidence is
clear that peasants preferred free tenure, even in areas where many free smallholders were very poor. Peasant
uprisings from the mid 1200s almost always included demands for free status.
High food prices and low wages made landowners richer, especially if they applied efficient management
techniques. Accounting procedures grew more sophisticated, and new literature on agricultural improvement
appeared.
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