THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE
ENGLISH FAMILY*
Research undertaken during the last twenty years or so has shown
that the co-resident familial group in rural England in the early
modern period was nuclear rather than extended;1 that the bond
between family and land was weak,2 as were wider ties of kinship;3
that villagers in need relied on institutionalized relief rather than
on the assistance of their kin;4 that rural society was highly
mobile;5 that children often left home in their teens and spent a
* The first version of this article was presented as a paper to the Anglo-American
Conference on the Medieval Economy and Society held at Norwich in July 1986. I
am grateful to the participants in the conference and to many medievalists and early
modern historians who read or heard later versions of this article for their valuable
comments and criticisms. I also thank the School of History of Birmingham University,
the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and Wolfson
College, Oxford for helping me to conduct this study. Last but not least I wish to
thank Ann Ussishkin from Tel Aviv University for reading and editing this article.
1
P. Laslett, "Mean Household Size in England since the Sixteenth Century", in
P. Laslett and R. Wall (eds.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972),
pp. 125-59.
2
A. Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978), pp. 80-101.
3
K. Wrightson, "Kinship in an English Village: Terling, Essex, 1500-1700", in
R. M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 313-32;
R. A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (London, 1984), pp. 39-62. For a
different view on the strength of familial ties in early modern England, see Miranda
Chaytor, "Household and Kinship: Ryton in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries",
History Workshop Jl., no. 10 (1980), pp. 25-60; D. Cressy, "Kinship and Kin Interaction in Early Modern England", Past and Present, no. 113 (Nov. 1986), pp. 38-69.
4
L. Stone, "The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England: The
Patriarchal Stage", in C. E. Rosenberg (ed.), The Family in History (Philadelphia,
1975), p. 21; P. Laslett, "The Family and the Collectivity", Sociology and Social
Research, lxii (1979), pp. 432-42; T. Wales, "Poverty, Poor Relief and Life-Cycle:
Some Evidence from Seventeenth-Century Norfolk", in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship
and Life-Cycle, pp. 351-404; W. Newman-Brown, "The Receipt of Poor Relief and
Family Situation: Aldenham, Hertfordshire, 1630-90", ibid., pp. 405-22.
5
P. Laslett and J. Harrison, "Clayworth and Cogenhoe", in E. Bell and R. L.
Ollard (eds.), Historical Essays Presented to David Ogg (London, 1963), pp. 157-84,
repr. and rev. in P. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 50-101; J. D. Chambers, Population, Economy and Society in PreIndustrial England (Oxford, 1972), pp. 44-7; P. Spufford, "Population Movement in
Seventeenth-Century England", Local Population Studies, iv (1970), pp. 44-9; P.
Clark, "Migration in England during the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth
Centuries", Past and Present, no. 83 (May 1979), pp. 57-90; K. Wrightson and D.
Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (London, 1979),
pp. 74-82.
4
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
few years as living-in servants before establishing new households
and starting their own families;6 that women married rather late
in life and some never married at all.7 The characteristics of the
English familial system in the early modern period were initially
thought by historians to be a new development: John Hajnal
assumed that in medieval England marriage was universal and
that women married at an early age;8 Lawrence Stone maintained
that during this period rural society was highly kin-oriented
and that extended kin ties were important.9 These and similar
views held by early modern historians on the nature of the medieval familial system were largely drawn from George Homans's
study of English villages in the thirteenth century, published in
1941.10 However, more recent studies by medievalists cast considerable doubts on many of Homans's observations about the peasant family in medieval England. They have produced evidence
suggesting that nuclear rather than extended families predominated in medieval villages;11 that the bond between family and
land was already broken, in East Anglia in the thirteenth century
and elsewhere in the post-plague period;12 that extended kin ties
6
Ann S. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge,
1981), pp. 11-31,49-120; J. Hajnal, "Two Kinds of Pre-Industrial Household Formation Systems", in R. Wall, Jean Robin and P. Laslett (eds.)> Family Forms in Historic
Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 65-104; R. Wall, "Leaving Home and the Process of
Household Formation in Pre-Industrial England", Continuity and Change, ii (1987),
pp. 77-101.
' J . Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective", in D. V. Glass and
D. E. C. Eversley (eds.), Population in History (London, 1965), pp. 101-43.
8
Ibid., pp. 117-20.
'Stone, "Rise of the Nuclear Family", p. 14.
10
G. C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.,
1941; repr. New York, 1970). See also G. C. Homans, "The Rural Sociology of
Medieval England", Past and Present, no. 4 (Nov. 1953), pp. 32-43; G. C. Homans,
"The Explanation of English Regional Differences", Past and Present, no. 42 (Feb.
1969), pp. 18-34.
11
E. Hallam, "Some Thirteenth Century Censuses", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., x
(1958), pp. 349-55; B. Dewindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth:
Structures of Tenure and Patterns of Social Organization in an East Midlands Village,
1252-1457 (Toronto, 1972), pp. 246, 280-1; E. Britton, "The Peasant Family in
Fourteenth-Century England", Peasant Studies, v (1976), pp. 20-7; E. Britton, The
Community of the Vill: A Study in the History of the Family and Village Life in
Fourteenth-Century England (Toronto, 1977), pp. 10-67.
" B. M. S. Campbell, "Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land Market in
a Fourteenth-Century Peasant Community", in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and LifeCycle, pp. 87-134; R. M. Smith, "Families and their Land in an Area of Partible
Inheritance: Redgrave, Suffolk, 1260-1320", ibid., pp. 135-95; Rosamond J. Faith,
"Peasant Families and Inheritance Customs in Medieval England", Agric. Hist. Rev.,
xiv (1966), pp. 77-95.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
13
5
14
were rather weak; that the rural population was highly mobile;
that servants in husbandry were quite common;15 and that the
medieval marriage pattern, at least from the thirteenth century
onwards, might have been fairly similar to the early modern one.16
These findings were interpreted by Peter Laslett and especially
by Alan Macfarlane to imply that the English familial system
hardly changed between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries.17
This view accords well with the current historical fashion of
stressing continuity over change, but it does not accord, however,
with the medieval evidence drawn from the manorial court rolls
of medieval England.
Manorial court rolls are an excellent source for the study of
the family. The villagers appearing in these records are often
noted in relation to a close relative (husband, father, mother,
brother or sister). This information, as well as similar surname
forms, can be used to link to families the majority of individuals
mentioned in the court rolls. Many of the families reconstituted
in this way had been composed of relatives who shared the same
household, as well as those who resided in separate households.
Thus the peasant family can be viewed not only as a co-resident
unit, but also as a group of relatives living in the same village or
parish. Furthermore, since the court rolls also provide quantifiable data about various kin interactions, indicating both cooperation and conflict, it is possible to trace the functions of the
13
R. M. Smith, "Kin and Neighbours in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk Community", Jl. Family Hist., iv (1979), pp. 219-56; Judith M. Bennett, "The Tie that Binds:
Peasant Marriage and Families in Late Medieval England", Jl. Interdisciplinary Hist.,
xv (1984), pp. 111-29; Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families
in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986), pp. 79-89.
14
J. Ambrose Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the
Medieval English Village (Toronto, 1964), pp. 129-82; R. H. Hilton, The Decline of
Serfdom in Medieval England, 2nd edn. (London, 1983), pp. 33-5.
15
E. A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth
Century (Oxford, 1956), pp. 283-318; M. M. Postan, The Famulus: The Estate Labourer
in the Xllth and XIHlh Centuries (Econ. Hist. Rev. Supplement no. 2, Cambridge,
1954); R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford,
1975), pp. 30-6.
16
R. M. Smith, "Some Reflections on the Evidence for the Origins of the 'European
Marriage Pattern' in England", in C. Harris (ed.), Sociology of the Family (Keele,
1979), pp. 74-112; R. M. Smith, "Hypotheses sur la nuptiatite en Angleterre aux xiixiv siecles", Annales E.S.C., xxxviii (1983), pp. 107-36.
17
P. Laslett, "Characteristics of the Western Family Considered over Time", in
Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love, pp. 47-8; Macfarlane, Origins of English Individualism, pp. 80-163. In a more recent book Macfarlane claims that the unique individualistic familial system was in fact quite old by the thirteenth century: A. Macfarlane,
Marriage and Love in England, 1300-1840 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 321-44.
6
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
family in medieval village society and to analyse the relationships
between its members.
The investigation of kin ties and interactions observed in court
rolls from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries indicates, as I
aim to show, that the familial system in English villages during
this period underwent a major transformation, caused by demographic, economic and institutional changes.
I will begin the study with a detailed examination of the court
rolls of the west midland manor of Halesowen (which was conterminous with the parish) between 1270 and 1500, and then collate
the findings with evidence assembled by various historians from
the records of many other contemporary manors in different parts
of the country.
Data from the Halesowen court rolls suggest that the majority of
households in the medieval period contained only nuclear families,
even though households with families that were extended both
horizontally and vertically were also quite common. (The expression "nuclear families" — as opposed to "nuclear households" —
is used here and throughout this article to mean lacking kin within
the manor.) For example Thomas de Notwyck, a smallholder
from the township of Hunnington, was summoned by the court
in 1295 to answer for his mother who was living in his home
under his responsibility.18 Such co-resident extended families
constitute 16 per cent of the 1,041 families reconstituted from
the court rolls between 1270 and 1400.19
Although conjugal family households predominated in medieval
Halesowen, as in other early modern rural parishes, effective
kinship ties were far from being confined to the members of the
conjugal family. In order to estimate the range of these ties,
various regular kin interactions, recorded in the court rolls
between 1270 and 1400, were noted and classified according to
the familial relations of the villagers involved. These include
pledgings, land transactions, trespasses, broken agreements, con18
Court Rolls of the Manor of Hales, 1270-1307, ed. J. Amphlett, S. G. Hamilton
and R. A. Wilson, 3 vols. (Worcs. Hist. Soc, Worcester, 1910-33; hereafter Court
Rolls of the Manor of Hales), i, p. 339.
19
Z. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and
Demography in Halesowen, 1270-1400 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 83.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
7
cordances, hue and cry, assaults, debts, false claims, sheltering of
undesirable persons, pledges for good behaviour, custody, pension
agreements, and payments of marriage and fornication fines.
In the court rolls from 1270 to 1400,6,200 interactions between
kin were identified. Of these, 3,363 (54 per cent) were performed
by the members of the conjugal family and 2,837 (46 per cent)
by more distant kin,20 namely uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces,
in-laws and cousins. Interactions between distant kin are underrepresented in this sample, as court rolls obviously make it easier
to trace close kinship. The fact, therefore, that they still compose
46 per cent of the intra-familial interactions obtained from the
court rolls, suggests that effective kin ties in medieval Halesowen
extended beyond the conjugal family, even though they did not
extend very far. Cousins constitute the largest kin group for any
one individual, yet interactions between cousins amount to only
6.4 per cent of all observed intra-familial contacts.21 We must
attribute this figure to the lower frequency of interaction between
cousins, since the difficulty of identifying distant kin in the court
rolls would not be an adequate explanation. The very fact, however, that effective kin groups in Halesowen did extend beyond
the conjugal family had significant social and economic consequences. To show this, we have first to investigate how networks of kin in the village were created in the pre-plague period.
In pre-plague Halesowen, the bond between family and land was
strong, as the bulk of the tenants' land was transmitted through
inheritance and marriage rather than through the land market or
the landlord.22 This bond affected both the settlement patterns
of young villagers and the spatial location of the kin groups, and
promoted a high degree of co-operation and cohesion among its
members.
20
For a full breakdown of the figures, see Z. Razi, " T h e U s e of Court Rolls
Evidence for the Measurement of Kin Ties and Relationships", in Z. Razi and R. M .
Smith (eds.)j Medieval Village and Small Town Society: Views from Manorial and Other
Seigneurial Court! (Oxford, forthcoming 1994).
21
On the appearance of cousins in the court rolls of another medieval manor, see
Smith, "Kin and Neighbours in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk Community", p. 254.
22
Z. Razi, "Family, Land and the Village Community in Later Medieval England",
Past and Present, no. 9 3 ( N o v . 1981), p. 2 8 .
8
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
In Halesowen, as on many other manors, children who reached
maturity in their parents' lifetime often did not have to wait for
their decease in order to settle in the village. Some acquired land
through marriage, while others obtained it from relatives or the
land market.23 Thomas Lovecok, for example, a half-yardlander
from Hasbury, provided his eldest son John in 1342 with "a plot
to build upon" and nine selions of land in the three common
fields which he had acquired from another tenant in 1333.24
However, as land was scarce in the pre-plague period, many
tenants settled their eldest children on the family holding or on
land adjacent to it. Alan Tadenhurst, for example, in 1281, gave
his heir Richard "a croft and a small piece of new land outside
the door of the house".25 Fathers sometimes shared the holding
equally with their married children, and the formal division of
the holding often coincided with the tenant's retirement.26 When
the tenant retired, he and his wife usually moved to a cottage
and the heir or heiress took up the main house. In 1322, for
example, William Osborn, a half-yardlander from Warley,
granted his entire holding to Alice, his daughter and heiress, and
to her husband William Hunt, who had lived on the holding since
1313, together with "the principal house, the barn and the
garden". His son-in-law undertook to provide him and his wife
with a cottage, a cow and sufficient sustenance, "as long as he
lives".27 However, a widower tenant often remained in the main
house and was provided with a small room by the heir or heiress
who moved in.28 The occupation of many tenements by more
than one conjugal family was not merely a temporary phase in
the life cycle of tenants' families, but rather a permanent phenomenon. The two households of the older and younger generation
often did not merge when the tenant died, as in the pre-plague
period many widows, who were entitled to keep one-third of the
holding for life, often remarried and remained on the family
23
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p p . 50-60; E . Miller a n d J. H a t c h e r , Medieval
England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086-1348 ( L o n d o n , 1978), p p . 136-7.
24
Birmingham Reference Library (hereafter B.R.L.), 346301, 346263; Homans,
English Villagers, p p . 145-6.
25
Court Rolls of the Manor of Hales, i, p . 177.
26
F o r examples from other c o n t e m p o r a r y villages, see H o m a n s , English
Villagers,
p p . 146-9; Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, p p . 6 4 - 8 .
27
B . R . L . , 346242, 346234.
28
Such an arrangement, for example, was made between Roger le Per, a middling
tenant, and his son Thomas when the former retired in 1333: B.R.L., 346263.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
9
farm.29 Furthermore in Halesowen, as in many other villages in
which impartible inheritance was practised, tenants used patrimonial land when purchased land was not available, to endow noninheriting children and other relatives.30 Thus on many holdings
and the land adjacent to them, the main house was surrounded
by cottages occupied by single as well as married relations of the
tenant. For example, during the years 1295-1305, the ancestral
yardland holding of the Alwerds in Ridgeacre was occupied by
Hugo Alwerd and his family, who held the bulk of the land; by
his eldest brother William who renounced his right to inherit the
holding in return for a cottage and maintenance for life;31 by his
mother Agnes and her second husband William; by his younger
brothers Thomas and Philip and their families and by his sister
Lucy and her daughter, who all held smallholdings adjacent to
the family tenement. All in all, the Alwerds' holding was occupied
by six households. In the 1330s the half-yardland holding of the
Geffrey family in Oldbury was occupied by four households,
while the quarter-yardland holding of the Fisher family of the
same township supported two households in the 1340s. Unlike
quarter-yardland farms, cottage holdings were seldom occupied
by more than one family, and those which were often belonged
to artisans. Between 1309 and 1316, for example, the cottage
holding of the Collins in Hawne was occupied by the tenant
Thomas Collins and his wife and by his daughter Christiana and
her husband, who shared the cottage with them. Both Thomas
and his son-in-law were fullers.32
Obviously, as the population of Halesowen was growing in the
pre-plague period and land was in short supply, it was impossible
to provide land for all the children who reached maturity.33 There
is ample evidence in the Halesowen court rolls, as in the records
29
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p p . 6 7 - 8 ; P . Franklin, "Peasant W i d o w s ' 'Liberation' and R e m a r r i a g e " , Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxix (1986), p p . 186-204;
J. Ravensdale, "Population Changes and the Transfer of Customary L a n d on a
Cambridgeshire Manor in t h e Fourteenth C e n t u r y " , in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship
and Life-Cycle, p p . 197-225.
30
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p p . 55-64; Britton, Community of the Vill,
pp. 60-4; Franklin, "Peasant W i d o w s " , p p . 200-1; Janet Williamson, "Norfolk: T h i r teenth C e n t u r y " , in P . D . A. Harvey (ed.), The Peasant Land Market in Medieval
England (Oxford, 1984), p p . 92-4; Miller a n d Hatcher, Medieval England, p p . 136-9;
Hanawalt, Ties that Bound, p p . 75-6; E . King, Peterborough Abbey, 1086-1310: A
Study in the Land Market (Cambridge, 1973), p p . 123-4.
31
Court Rolls of the Manor of Hales, i, p . 3 1 7 .
32
B.R.L., 350353.
33
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 27-32.
10
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
TABLE 1
LOCAL RELATIVES OF THE 1315-1317 HALESOWEN TENANTS
LIVING OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSEHOLDS*
Nos. of relatives
Nos. of
tenants
t
A
4
3
0
13
47
10
Largeholders (about a virgate
and more)
Middling holders (about half
14
18
18
13
75
a virgate)
Smallholders (about a quarter
12
15
7
4
5
43
of a virgate)
Cottagers (0-2 acres)
30
15
4
1
50
42
44
37
33
31
Totals
215
•Source: Birmingham Reference Library (hereafter B.R.L.), 346201-320.
2
8
5+
16
12
28
of many other contemporary manors, that sons and more often
daughters of tenants, especially of land-deficient tenants, left the
village.34 Yet, as land was scarce in other villages too, many of
them preferred to remain in Halesowen, where familial ties gave
them a better chance of gaining access to land. And although the
plot of land which non-inheriting children eventually obtained
was often quite small, it none the less enabled them to settle on
the manor and raise their own families there. This settlement
pattern created a large number of kin groups composed of several
conjugal families whose members resided in separate but often
closely situated households.
The size of these kin groups, however, varied considerably in
pre-plague Halesowen. Table 1 shows that in the 1310s the
number of local relatives of a tenant living outside his household
was determined by his economic condition. While 83 per cent of
the large and 57 per cent of the middling tenants noted in the
court rolls in 1315-17 had more than two relatives, only 21 per
cent of the smallholders and 2 per cent of the cottagers had more
than two relatives in the parish. Furthermore, whereas all the
large and middling tenants had relatives in Halesowen, 28 per
cent of the smallholders and 60 per cent of the cottagers had
none. The number of relatives of land-deficient tenants is
34
Ibid., pp. 30-1; Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, pp. 130-52; Dewindt, Land and
People, pp. 176-7; Britton, Community of the Vill, pp. 146-50; Hallam, "Some Thirteenth Century Censuses", pp. 355-7; Judith Bennett, "Medieval Peasant Marriage:
An Examination of Marriage Licence Fines in the Liber Gensumazum", in J. Ambrose
Raftis (ed.), Pathways to Medieval Peasants (Toronto, 1981), pp. 219-21.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
11
undoubtedly somewhat underrated because of the low frequency
of their court appearances. But in pre-plague Halesowen, as
probably on many other contemporary manors, such tenants must
have had far fewer kin than the larger landholders; many of the
former, unlike their better-off neighbours, never survived more
than one generation since their children died or emigrated and
their holdings were acquired by others.35
Thus land shortage in pre-plague Halesowen exerted a centripetal force on many peasant families, as more and more of their
members settled on and around the ancestral holding. At the
same time it also exerted a centrifugal force on land-deficient
families, as an increasing number of their children had to emigrate. It was thus found that, among the tenants living on the
manor in the 1310s, 19.5 per cent had no relatives other than the
members of their households, and all of them were either smallholders or cottagers.
It is likely that the strength of the family-land bond in preplague Halesowen, which created a high kin density, also promoted a high degree of kin co-operation and cohesion. This
hypothesis can be tested by analysing acts of pledging which
involve a personal commitment and also an element of risk.36
The 215 tenants noted in the court rolls between 1315 and 1317
were involved, during the term of their residence on the manor,
in 1,435 such acts. Of these, 32.8 per cent were intra-familial.37
Yet this figure conceals the true role of kin in pledging, because
of the considerable involvement of largeholders in this courtrelated activity.38 We can see from Table 2 that such tenants were
35
Razi, "Family, Land and the Village C o m m u n i t y " , pp. 4-5; Razi, Life, Marriage
and Death, p p . 94-9.
36
Razi, "Family, Land and the Village C o m m u n i t y " , p . 28. For a discussion of
the institution of the personal pledge in t h e manor court, see Raftis, Tenure and
Mobility, pp. 101-2; J. S. Beckerman, "Customary Law in Manorial Courts in t h e
Thirteenth Century" (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1972), pp. 238-41.
37
T h e percentage of kin pledging estimated from t h e pre-plague court rolls of
Holywell and Redgrave is 23 and 11 respectively. See Dewindt, Land and People,
p. 246; Smith, " K i n and Neighbours in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk C o m m u n i t y " ,
p. 224. T h e lower estimate of intra-familial pledges obtained from Holywell court
rolls is undoubtedly due t o the fact that Halesowen court rolls which survived in
abundance provide much better genealogical data than the fragmentary court records
of the Huntingdonshire manor. Such an explanation, however, cannot account for the
substantial difference in the percentage of kin pledges estimated from Redgrave and
Halesowen court rolls, since the records of the two manors are of a similar quality.
38
See also D e w i n d t , Land and People, p . 247; Smith, " K i n and N e i g h b o u r s in a
Thirteenth-Century Suffolk Community", p. 226.
12
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
TABLE 2
ACTS OF PLEDGING WHICH INVOLVE A PERSONAL COMMITMENT
AND AN ELEMENT OF RISK, PERFORMED BY THE 1315-1317 TENANTS*
Nos. of
tenants
Nos. of
pledges
47 (21.9%) 997 (69.5%)
Largeholders
Middling holders
75 (34.9%) 323 (22.5%)
69
(4.8%)
43 (20.0%)
Smallholders
(3.2%)
50 (23.2%)
Cottagers
46
215 (100.0%) 1435 (100.0%)
Totals
•Source: as Table 1.
Nos. of
Percentage of
Lntra-familial intra-familial
pledges
pledges
19.5
194 (41.2%)
65.3
211 (44.8%)
59.4
41
(8.7%)
54.3
25
(5.3%)
32.8
471 (100.0%)
involved in 67.6 per cent of all pledges, but of these only 19.5
per cent were with kin. In contrast to largeholders, the percentage
of kin pledges of middling, small and cottage tenants, who were
involved to a much lesser extent in pledging, was 65.3, 59.4 and
54.3 respectively.39 The fact that largeholders were far less
involved than smaller tenants in intra-familial pledging does not
necessarily imply that they were less kin-oriented. As a result of
their economic position in the village, they were involved in
litigation and other court business, both as suitors and as court
and village officials, far more frequently than other tenants.40
Their contacts involved so many villagers, that their own relatives
could not possibly have formed anything other than a small
minority. When a pledge involving an element of risk was
required by the court, the less-well-off tenants, constituting 78
per cent of the landholders, supported and relied on their kin
more often than on villagers unrelated to them.
In addition to pledges, the court rolls provide further evidence
about the supportive role of kin, namely in cases concerning the
elderly and the poor. Pension contracts recorded in the court
rolls and breaches of such agreements give us some insight into
the treatment of the elderly in medieval villages.41 During the
3
' I n Redgrave largeholders were involved ten times less frequently in pledging
with kin than smaller tenants: Smith, " K i n and Neighbours in a Thirteenth-Century
Suffolk C o m m u n i t y " , p . 226.
40
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 76-8; Dewindt, Land and People, pp. 206-41;
Britton, Community of the Vill, pp. 94-102; Anne Dewindt, "Peasant Structures in
Fourteenth-Century King's Ripton, 1280-1400", Mediaeval Studies, xxxviii (1976),
pp. 244-61.
41
Homans, English Villagers, pp. 152-7; Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, pp. 42-8, 71-4;
Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 29-30; Razi, "Family, Land and the Village
Community", pp. 7-8; Elaine Clark, "Some Aspects of Social Security in Medieval
(cam. on p. 13}
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
13
period 1270-1348, 61 maintenance agreements were recorded in
Halesowen court rolls between elderly peasants and those who
took over their land. Of these, 34 were between parents and
children, 6 between grandparents and grandchildren, and 20 (32.8
per cent) between more distant kin. Only one of the 61 contracts
was between non-kin and it includes a condition unparalleled in
any other maintenance agreements between relatives. When
Thomas at the Heath handed over his holding, in 1305, to John
Baker and Edith his wife, they undertook, in addition to paying
him 12d. annually, to take him into their household "if by chance
poverty, sickness or hard times fall upon him".42 This suggests
that elderly villagers preferred kin as partners to retirement contracts not only because they were morally bound to support them,
but also because they were expected to do more for them than
strangers.
Poverty was an endemic and acute problem in pre-plague
villages, as many peasants had little or no land at all.43 Poor
peasants could find some employment during the peak periods,
and at harvest time they were allowed to glean, but most of the
year they lived by begging and by pilfering food, firewood and
anything which helped them to survive.44 Therefore both the
landlord and the peasant community attempted, through the
manor court, to reduce the number of the poor in the village and
to control their activities. Unlike other villagers, poor peasants
who committed offences were often expelled from the manor,
and those who were permitted to stay were required not only to
Cn. 41 ami.)
England", Jl. Family Hist., vii (1982), pp. 307-20; Hanawalt, Ties that Bound,
pp. 229-40. Macfarlane has argued recently that, since children in medieval villages
did not support their parents in old age, elderly tenants had to lease, mortgage or sell
their holdings. Although elderly tenants sometimes leased and alienated land, there
is no evidence that this was as common as Macfarlane claims. See Macfarlane, Marriage
and Love in England, p p . 115-16.
42
It is stated in the court entry that John Baker and his wife had no inheritance
claim to Thomas Heath's holding and consequently they could not have been related
to him: see Court Rolls of the Manor of Hales, ii, p . 513.
43
Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England, pp. 230-42; R. H. Hilton,
A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (London,
1976; repr. Cambridge, 1983), pp. 142-4; M. M. Postan and J. Z. Titow, "Some
Economic Evidence of Declining Population in the Later Middle Ages", Econ. Hist.
Rev., 2nd ser., ii (1950), pp. 221-46.
44
W . O . Ault, " B y - L a w s of Gleaning a n d t h e P r o b l e m of H a r v e s t " , Econ. Hist.
Rev., 2 n d ser., xiv (1961), p p . 2 1 0 - 1 7 ; Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p p . 3 7 , 7 8 ;
J. A. Raftis, "Social Structures in F i v e East Midland Villages", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2 n d
ser., xviii (1965), pp. 92-3.
14
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
pay a fine but also to bring pledges for good behaviour. The
manor court also fined those who harboured undesirable poor
peasants.45 In 1313 Lucy Couper, for example, the daughter of a
smallholder from Hunnington, who had been expelled from the
manor and later returned, was ordered by the court to bring
pledges for good behaviour. She brought her brother John, who
was also harbouring her in the family cottage, and her uncle
Henry Oniot, another smallholder of the same township.46
Between 1270 and 1348, 151 native-born Halesowen villagers
were noted in the court rolls as taking refuge with local tenants;
at least 128 (85 per cent) of them did so with their relatives. This
suggests that, during the period under study, kin was the main
agent for poor relief in the parish.
The existence of a functionally extended family in pre-plague
Halesowen had some significant economic consequences. Since land
was essential for the survival not only of individuals but also of
their kin, whose support was indispensable to them, the peasants
were reluctant to alienate land. Those who did so only sold small
amounts of land at each transaction, and often only when they
were forced by dire economic circumstances, as the harvestsensitive nature of the pre-plague land market clearly indicates.47
As a result, the volume of transactions in the inter-peasant land
market was small and their frequency rather low.48 However, as
the demand for land during this period was growing with the rising
population, land prices must have rocketed. This undoubtedly
further inhibited the peasants from selling land because of the
difficulty of recouping it in such a market. Therefore villagers
encumbered with debts, as many of them were during this period,
were assisted by relatives, who had an interest in keeping the land
45
Raftis, Tenure and Mobility,
p p . 130-8; D e w i n d t , "Peasant Structures in F o u r -
teenth-Century King's Ripton", pp. 262-4.
46
B . R . L . , 346233-6.
Campbell, "Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land M a r k e t " , p p . 109-11,
116; Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p p . 37-42; I. Kershaw, " T h e Great Famine and
Agrarian Crisis in E n g l a n d " , Past and Present, no. 59 (May 1973), p . 38; D . G. Watts,
"A Model for the Early Fourteenth C e n t u r y " , Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xx (1967),
p p . 543-4; Smith, "Families and their L a n d " , p p . 151-2.
48
Razi, "Family, Land and t h e Village C o m m u n i t y " , p . 4 ; King, Peterborough
Abbey, p p . 115-17; Faith, "Peasant Families a n d Inheritance C u s t o m s " , p . 86; Anne
Dewindt, "A Peasant Land Market and its Participants: King's Ripton, 1280-1400",
Midland Hist., iv (1977-8), p p . 143-4. I n East Anglia t h e villagers usually dealt with
smaller units of land but the turnover of the transactions was considerably higher
than in the Midlands: see Campbell, "Population Pressure, Inheritance and t h e Land
M a r k e t " , p p . 87-134; Smith, "Families a n d their L a n d " , p p . 135-97.
47
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
15
in the family. Only when peasants failed to obtain such assistance
did they mortgage, lease or sell land. Thus the cohesive and
supportive familial system impeded the development of a fully
fledged land market in pre-plague Halesowen, and the underdeveloped nature of this market reinforced the family's grip on
the distribution of land and enhanced its supportive role.
Obviously the family did not protect all the villagers against
the erosive effects of the land market. Land-deficient peasants,
who were often financially embarrassed in the pre-plague period,
were also bailed out by kin. But in lean years it must have been
more difficult for them to obtain such help, since their own
relatives were also struggling to keep body and soul together.
Consequently at such times many smallholders and cottagers had
to sell their holdings. The erosion of the small tenants' landed
resources left many of them without any relatives in the village,
and further reduced their chances to keep on their holdings. This
gave the substantial tenants an opportunity of enlarging their
holdings and increasing their market production. This clearly
happened in the short term, as largeholders predominated among
the purchasers of land in pre-plague Halesowen. However, since
this land was eventually redistributed to their non-inheriting
children and other kin, rather than accumulated, there was no
increase whatsoever in the size of large family farms between
1270 and 1348.49 Therefore, by inhibiting sustained land accumulation, the extended familial system in pre-plague Halesowen
impeded the development of a more efficient agrarian organization
and reinforced the small-scale nature of peasant production.
In order to evaluate the significance of the findings about the
family in pre-plague Halesowen, evidence about kinship in other
contemporary villages is needed. Unfortunately the only comprehensive study of kinship available for comparison is that of the
Suffolk manor of Redgrave done by Richard Smith.so This study
strongly suggests that the familial system on the East Anglian
manor was significantly different from that in Halesowen.
Although Smith observed extended family networks in Redgrave,
49
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p p . 95-8; King, Peterborough Abbey, pp. 123-4.
Smith, " K i n and Neighbours in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk C o m m u n i t y " ,
pp. 219-56; Smith, "Families and their L a n d " , p p . 135-97.
50
16
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
they were less common and less enduring than in Halesowen.51
While in Redgrave inter-sibling court contacts indicating both
co-operation and strife lasted in most cases (78 per cent) less than
ten years, in Halesowen such contacts were usually life-long.52
Moreover, while in Redgrave 10.7 per cent of the pledges
recorded in the court rolls between 1259 and 1297 were intrafamilial, in Halesowen, as Table 2 shows, the percentage of such
pledges recorded in the pre-plague court rolls was 32.8. In addition, whereas a high frequency of intra-familial pledging prevailed
among 37 per cent of the tenants in Redgrave, such frequency
prevailed among 78 per cent of the tenants in Halesowen.53 These
differences in the pledging patterns of the two manors suggest
that the peasantry was more kin-oriented in Halesowen than in
Redgrave.
It is likely that the familial organization on the two manors
varied because of the different economic and demographic conditions prevailing there. First, the distribution of landholdings
differed considerably on the two manors. In Redgrave smallholders predominated, as 44 per cent of the tenants had less than
two acres and 33 per cent had between two and six acres, whereas
in Halesowen such tenants constituted only 42 per cent.54 Secondly, the inter-peasant land market in Redgrave was considerably more intensive than in Halesowen. Between 1260 and 1319
the amount of land exchanged on the market in Redgrave was
larger than the total amount of customary land on the manor.5S
In contrast, the total amount of land exchanged on the Halesowen
land market between 1270 and 1348 was probably only a small
fraction of the total amount of customary land on the manor.56
51
Smith, "Families and their Land", pp. 186-95; R. M. Smith, "Transactional
Analysis and the Measurement of Institutional Determinants of Fertility: A Comparison of Communities in Present-Day Bangladesh and Pre-Industrial England", in
John C. Caldwell, Allan G. Hill and Valerie J. Hull (eds.), Micro-Approaches to
Demographic Research (London, 1988), pp. 227-40.
52
Smith, "Families and their L a n d " , p p . 184-94. In Halesowen court rolls between
1270 and 1349, 86 pairs of landholding brothers have been identified: Razi, Life,
Marriage and Death, p . 35. An examination of their court contacts shows that 61 (71
per cent) of these maintained such contacts over a period of twenty years or more.
53
Smith, " K i n and Neighbours in a Thirteenth-Century Suffolk C o m m u n i t y " ,
pp. 222, 224, 242-3.
54
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 43; Smith, "Families and their Land", p. 43.
55
R . M . Smith, "Some Issues Concerning Families a n d their Property in Rural
England, 1250-1800", in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, p . 20.
56
A crude estimate indicates that, between 1270 and 1348, 700 acres were permanently alienated in 310 transactions, and 560 acres were leased for terms of more than
two years in 224 transactions. Unfortunately t h e amount of customary land on t h e
(corn, en p. 17)
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
17
Furthermore the structure of the land market on the two manors
was also quite different. In Halesowen 43 per cent of the preplague recorded land transactions were leases for terms of more
than two years, while in Redgrave the overwhelming bulk of the
transactions recorded between 1260 and 1320 were permanent
alienations.57 These differences in the intensity and the structure
of the land market had a direct effect on the family's role in
redistributing land on the two manors. Of the total amount of
land transferred in Halesowen between 1270 and 1348, both post
mortem (after tenants' death) and inter vivos (between living tenants), about 83 per cent was transmitted through the family.58
By contrast, in Redgrave between 1305 and 1319, probably only
46 per cent of the tenants' land was transferred through the
family.59 Thirdly, the population density and the extent of migration on the two manors varied greatly. Halesowen, a manor of
about 10,000 acres, had a population of about 1,250 at the beginning of the fourteenth century, while the population of Redgrave,
a manor of 2,751 acres, amounted in the 1280s to about 2,5OO.60
Although these are only crude estimates, they suggest that population density in Redgrave was seven times higher than in Hales(n. 56 ami.)
manor is not known. None the less, since the area of the manor included some 10,000
acres, it is likely that a few thousand of these were customary land. Razi, Life,
Marriage and Death, p . 70.
57
Ibid., p . 96. Richard Smith kindly communicated to me that leases constituted
less than 10 per cent of transactions in Redgrave. In the Norfolk manor of Coltishall,
as in Redgrave, the percentage of recorded leases was quite low, amounting to only
8 per cent of all the land transactions: Campbell, "Population Pressure, Inheritance
and the Land Market", pp. 120 n. 58, 131-2. By contrast on the Hampshire manor
of Titchfield, as in Halesowen, the percentage of recorded leases for two years and
more during the same period amounted to 38: D . G. Watts, " T h e Estates of Titchfield
Abbey" (Univ. of Oxford B.Litt. thesis, 1958), table 12.
58
Razi, "Family, Land and the Village Community", p. 4.
59
T h e data obtained by Smith on land transactions in Redgrave indicate that 50.3
per cent of the amount of land transferred on the manor was transmitted through the
family. This estimate does not include 201 extra- and 32 intra-familial transactions
in which the size of the land transacted is not given: Smith, "Families and their
L a n d " , p. 157. However, if we include these transactions in the statistics by assuming
that their dimensions were similar to those known, the amount of land transmitted
by family members amounts to 45.7 per cent.
60
In 1289 there were 403 tenants in Redgrave and, as the mean family size was
estimated at 6.1, the population of the manor was at that time probably about 2,458:
Smith, "Families and their L a n d " , p . 140; R. M . Smith, "English Peasant LifeCycles and Socio-Economic Networks" (Univ. of Cambridge P h . D . thesis, 1974),
p. 104. In Halesowen in 1315-17 there were about 215 tenants and, since the mean
family size was estimated at 5.8, the population of the manor at that time was about
1,247: Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 93.
18
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
owen. Furthermore it seems that the population of the East
Anglian manor was considerably more mobile than in Halesowen.
Of the 174 landholding families identified in the court rolls of the
west midland manor between 1270 and 1282, 71 per cent were
still in residence some seventy years later.61 By comparison, of
the 395 different surnames noted in a 1289 Redgrave rental and
the 1290 court rolls, only 51 per cent still appear in the court
rolls twenty years later.62 Obviously the turnover of surnames is
a very crude measure of geographical mobility, yet it nevertheless
suggests that the population may have been five times more
mobile in Redgrave than in Halesowen.
It is likely that, since the proportion of land-deficient villagers,
the intensity of the land market and the mobility of the population
were considerably higher in Redgrave, its kin density must have
been much lower than in Halesowen. In other words, while in
Halesowen the majority of the villagers had relatives in the vicinity of their households, in Redgrave they did not. In Halesowen
peasant families were functionally extended; in the East Anglian
settlement, nuclear. In fact, in the course of the thirteenth century, peasant families both in East Anglia and the west midlands
were subjected to similar pressures of rapid population growth,
rising rents, land and food prices, and falling wages and living
standards. These pressures, however, had a much stronger impact
on family structure in Redgrave than in Halesowen, because in
Redgrave, already at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the
population density and the proportion of smallholders must have
been considerably higher than in Halesowen. As a result, by the
second half of the century, the bond between land and family in
Redgrave was largely eroded and with it kin density and cohesiveness declined.
Studies of kinship in pre-plague villages comparable with those
of Redgrave and Halesowen are not available.63 However, there
is no reason to suppose that the family structures observed in the
two communities were unique. Studies of other contemporary
61
Razi, "Family, Land and the Village Community", pp. 4-5.
" I am grateful to Richard Smith for giving me these figures.
Judith Bennett's recent study of kinship in pre-plague Brigstock (Northants.) is
of little use for this purpose because it is based on the court interactions of only two
rich families joined by marriage. No evidence at all is brought to show that the
behaviour patterns of these two families were commonly shared by other well-to-do
villagers, or by less well-off families in Brigstock. See Bennett, "Tie that Binds",
pp.111-29.
63
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
19
manors in different parts of the country indicate that many of
their social, economic and demographic characteristics were similar to those of Redgrave and Halesowen. It is plausible", therefore,
to use the evidence about kinship drawn from the court rolls of
the two manors as a basis for some tentative broad generalizations
about the familial system in pre-plague England.
It appears that, in most of the villages of central-southern,
midland and northern England, cottagers and smallholders constituted only a substantial minority;64 the bulk of the land was
distributed through blood and marriage, despite the existence of
a brisk land market;65 and although the peasants were by no
means immobile,66 the majority of the landholding families had
strong roots in their native villages.67 Consequently it is likely
64
Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England, pp. 206-30; M. M. Postan,
"Medieval Society in its Prime: England", in M. M. Postan (ed.), The Cambridge
Economic History of Europe, i, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1966), p. 360; Hilton, A Medieval
Society, pp. 11-124; C. C. Dyer, "Social Structure: E, The West Midlands", in H. E.
Hallam (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ii (Cambridge, 1988),
pp. 669-70; H. E. Hallam, "Social Structure: D, Southern England", ibid., pp. 650-60;
J. A. Raftis, "Social Structure: C, The East Midlands", ibid., pp. 636-40; E. Miller,
"Social Structure: G, Northern England", ibid., pp. 686-90. In the newly settled
pastoral and forest districts, and in highly industrialized areas, the proportion of
smallholders was higher. None the less they did not predominate to the same extent
as in Redgrave and many other East Anglian manors, with the probable exception of
Somerset in the south and Lancashire in the north. See Hatcher and Miller, Medieval
England, p. 143; Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England, pp. 223-40;
Dyer, "Social Structure: E, The West Midlands", p. 669; Hallam, "Social Structure:
D, Southern England", pp. 656-60; Miller, "Social Structure: G, Northern England",
p. 686.
65
Rosamond Faith, "Berkshire: Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries", in Harvey
(ed.), Peasant Land Market in Medieval England, pp. 113-35; D. Roden, "Studies in
Chiltern Field Systems" (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1965), pp. 113-20, 150-9,
236-43; D. Roden, "Inheritance Customs and Succession to Land in the Chiltern
Hills in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries", Jl. Brit. Studies, vii (1967),
pp. 1-12; Dyer, "Social Structure: E, The West Midlands", pp. 671-2; Miller, "Social
Structure: G, Northern England", pp. 697-8; Franklin, "Peasant Widows", p. 187;
P . D . A . H a r v e y , A Medieval Oxfordshire Village: Cuxham, 1240-1400 (Oxford, 1965),
p p . 122-8; Hilton, A Medieval Society, p p . 161-6; Raftis, Tenure and Mobility,
p p . 6 3 - 9 2 ; D e w i n d t , Land and People, p p . 43-54; Cicely H o w e l l , Land, Family and
Inheritance
in Transition:
Kibworth
Harcourt,
1280-1700
( C a m b r i d g e , 1983),
p p . 2 3 7 - 4 5 ; Miller a n d Hatcher, Medieval England, p p . 138-9; H o m a n s , English Villagers, p p . 195-207.
66
There are only a few studies of geographical mobility in the regions under
consideration, and they do not provide any quantitative estimate: see Raftis, Tenure
and Mobility; Raftis, "Social Structure: C, The East Midlands", pp. 642-7; Dewindt,
Land and People, p p . 176-83.
67
In the Leicestershire manor of Kibworth Harcourt no landholding family left the
village between 1280 and 1340: see Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance, p. 142. In
Holywell-cum-Needingworth (Hunts.), of the 66 families noted in the court rolls
between 1275 and 1299, 89 per cent appear also in the court rolls of the 1330s; in
(cant, on p. 20}
20
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
that kin density in these villages was high and the functionally
extended family predominated. On the other hand, in the far
more densely populated and economically diversified area of East
Anglia, and probably also in the south-east and south-west, holdings tended to be fragmented and quite small, the land market
was very intensive and the population highly mobile.68 Therefore
the family-land bond in these rural areas must have been rather
weak, the kin density quite low and nuclear families predominant.
The nuclear structure of the peasant family in these regions was
probably also due to the weakness of manorial organization and
control, which facilitated the mobility of the rural population and
(n. 67 cont.)
Warboys (Hunts.), of the 94 families noted in the court rolls of the 1290s, 79 per
cent appear also in the court records of the 1330s. These estimates are based on lists
published in Dewindt, Land and People, pp. 172-4; J. Ambrose Raftis, Warboys: Two
Hundred Years in the Life of an English Medieval Village (Toronto, 1974), pp. 68-115.
68
For the economy, see J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150-1500
(London, 1980), pp. 22-7; J. Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of
Cornwall, 1300-1500 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 29-36, 218-57; F. R. H. Du Boulay,
The Lordship of Canterbury: An Essay on Medieval Society (London, 1966), pp. 114-17.
For population density and movements, see R. M. Smith, "Human Resources", in
G. Asthill and A. Grant (eds.), The Countryside in Medieval England (Oxford, 1988),
pp. 188-208; H. E. Hallam, "Population Density in Medieval Fenland", Econ. Hist.
Rev., 2nd ser., xiv (1961), pp. 71-81; H. E. Hallam, "Population Movements in
England, 1086-1350", in Hallam (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, ii,
pp. 515-20,532; Campbell, "Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land Market",
pp. 87-94; B. M. S. Campbell, "Population Change and Genesis of Commonfields on
a Norfolk Manor", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxiii (1990), pp. 174-92; L. R. Poos,
"The Rural Population of Essex in the Later Middle Ages", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd
ser., xxxvii (1985), pp. 515-30. For migrations, see L. R. Poos, "Population Turnover
in Medieval Essex: The Evidence of Some Early Fourteenth-Century Tithing Lists",
in L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith and K. Wrightson (eds.), The World We Have Gained:
Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford, 1986), pp. 1-23; Hatcher, Rural
Economy and Society, pp. 98-9, 220-2; Hatcher and Miller, Medieval England,
pp. 41-5; Hallam, "Some Thirteenth Century Censuses", pp. 356-60. For the distribution of peasant holdings and the inter-tenant land market, see Kosminsky, Studies
in the Agrarian History of England, pp. 214-30; E. Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of
Ely (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 130-53; Du Boulay, Lordship of Canterbury, pp. 114-62;
A. R. H. Baker, "Open Fields and Partible Inheritance on a Kent Manor", Econ.
Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xvii (1964-5), pp. 1-22; B. M. S. Campbell, "The Complexity
of Manorial Structure in Medieval Norfolk: A Case Study", Norfolk Archaeology,
xxxix (1986), pp. 225-61; Barbara Dodwell, "Holdings and Inheritance in Medieval
East Anglia", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xx (1967), pp. 53-66; Williamson, "Norfolk:
Thirteenth Century", pp. 31-102; H. E. Hallam, "Social Structure: A, Eastern England", in Hallam (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, ii, pp. 594-620; H. E.
Hallam, "Social Structure: B, South-Eastern England", ibid., pp. 621-34; J. Hatcher,
"Social Structure: F, South-Western England", ibid., pp. 675-85; Marjorie Keniston
Mclntosh, Autonomy and Community: The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200-1500 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 97-103; Eleanor Searle, Lordship and Community: Battle Abbey and
its Banlieu, 1066-1539 (Toronto, 1974), pp. 109, 185.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
21
69
the early development of a peasant land-exchange system. Obviously this geographical distribution of family patterns in preplague England is somewhat crude. Yet none of the studies of
villages in central-southern, midland and northern England provide any evidence for the existence of a nuclear rather than a
functionally extended familial system. Admittedly Jan Titow
argued that the family-land bond on the pre-plague Somerset
manor of Taunton was undermined by a high rate of remarriage
among tenants' widows.70 Similarly Rosamond Faith claims that
in Brightwalton, unlike other Berkshire manors studied by her,
family inheritance had already largely declined fifty years before
the Black Death.71 Neither of these observations, however, bears
close scrutiny. The assertion about the decline of inheritance in
Brightwalton is incompatible with the fact that, of the 49 families
noted in the 1284 customal, 88 per cent survived until the Black
Death.72 As far as Taunton is concerned, the remarriage of widows
could not possibly have undermined the tie between family and
land, because only about one-tenth of all the holdings redistributed on the manor during the period studied by Titow were
acquired in this way.73 Although evidence for the existence of
villages which had nuclear familial organization in centralsouthern, midland and northern England is not available, the
possibility that such evidence might be found in the future cannot
be ruled out.
It is also possible that in certain districts of pre-plague East
Anglia, as well as in the south-east and south-west, demographic
and economic conditions were more conducive to a functionally
extended rather than to a nuclear familial organization. Indeed
there is evidence suggesting that this was the situation in some
East Anglian villages. The extent of the Essex manor of Havering
in 1251 indicates that, as in Halesowen, the villagers settled their
kin on their holdings; consequently kin density must have been
quite high.74 In 1251, for example, seven members of the Pecok
family held land directly from the landlord and the eighth was a
M
P. R . Hyams, " T h e Origins of the Peasant Land Market in England", Earn.
Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxiii (1970), p . 25; H o m a n s , English Villagers, p . 204.
70
J. Z. Titow, "Some Differences between Manors and their Effects on the Condition of the Peasant in the Thirteenth C e n t u r y " , Agric. Hist. Rev., x (1962), pp. 7-13.
71
Faith, "Berkshire: Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries", p. 132.
72
Faith, "Peasant Families and Inheritance C u s t o m s " , p. 90.
73
Titow, "Some Differences between M a n o r s " , p . 8 .
7
* Mclntosh, Autonomy and Community, p. 95.
22
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
75
subtenant. A similarly high density also prevailed on the Norfolk
manor of Sedgeford in the last quarter of the thirteenth century.76
The fact that there were East Anglian villages with a high as well
as with a low kin density in the second half of the thirteenth
century suggests that, at an earlier period, when the region was
less densely populated and market forces were weaker, all the
villages there had a high kin density. It is reasonable to assume
therefore that, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the functionally extended familial system prevailed throughout rural England.
Our investigation so far suggests that the familial system in
pre-plague England was susceptible to demographic and economic
pressures. In the thirteenth century, under the impact of such
pressures, peasant families in certain parts of the country were
largely nuclearized, as were many of the land-deficient families
in areas where the functionally extended family prevailed. During
the same period, according to Georges Duby, similar pressures
also nuclearized the extended family system in the densely populated rural areas of the Continent.77 In the post-plague period
this process was reversed on the Continent, but in England it
continued. To show and explain this, we must first use the
evidence obtained from the post-plague Halesowen court rolls,
and then the evidence from the records of other manors.
In some respects the Halesowen court rolls, like the court records
of other manors, become less informative in the post-plague
period and especially during the fifteenth century.78 The institution of the personal pledge, which had been in decline in the
second half of the fourteenth century, completely disappeared
after 1400. Moreover, although the manor court continued in the
fifteenth century to deal with interpersonal disputes over debts,
trespasses, broken agreements and other matters, it ceased to
record the details and the outcome of such cases. The frequency
75
Ibid., p p . 112-16.
Williamson, "Norfolk: Thirteenth C e n t u r y " , p p . 100-1 and n. 60.
G. D u b y , "Medieval Agriculture, 900-1500", in C. M. Gpolla (ed.), The Fontana
Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages, (Glasgow, 1972), p . 184.
78
For a general discussion of the changes in the practices and procedures of the
manor court in the post-plague period, see Beckerman, "Customary Law in English
Manorial Courts", pp. 114-16, 239-41.
76
77
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
23
of the villagers' court appearances accordingly declined and the
court records provide less information about their personal contacts, especially those indicating co-operation and support.
However, while the record of interpersonal litigation in the
fifteenth-century court rolls is rather laconic, that of land transactions and conveyances is more detailed and informative than in
earlier court rolls. Such entries and the results of enquiries about
land titles, held frequently during this period, provide the necessary genealogical data for tracing the familial ties between the
local tenants despite the high turnover of surnames. Therefore,
although the fifteenth-century court rolls are less informative
than those of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they still
allow us to observe the tenants on the manor and many of their
social and economic activities, to reconstitute their families and
to study their landholdings.
The abundance of land available to the peasants in Halesowen,
as a result of the sharp decrease in the population size, greatly
relieved the pressure on their patrimonies.79 Their adult children
and other kin no longer clustered on and around their ancestral
holdings, but settled on vacant holdings in their native townships
or in other settlements on the manor. John Perkins (fl. 1361-91),
a yardlander from Ridgeacre, for example, endowed his eldest
son Simon in 1384 with a half-yardland in Warley, which his wife
Alice had inherited from her father Richard Osberon. In 1386 he
granted to his second son Richard the Thomkins's half-yardland
holding in Oldbury, which he had acquired from his brother
Thomas Perkins in 1370.80 As family members ceased to crowd
on and around the ancestral holding, many cottages which had
been occupied continuously in the past remained vacant and
became dilapidated.81 The centrifugal force exerted on peasant
families by the abundance of land after 1349 did not stop at the
borders of the manor. While many children of Halesowen tenants
left home to occupy vacant holdings on the manor, others left
79
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 99-109.
B.R.L., 346363-6, 346349.
81
In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Halesowen manor court frequently
issued orders to tenants to repair such buildings. Such orders were usually ignored.
Similar court orders can be found in the court rolls of many other contemporary
80
manors. See for example C. Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The
Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680-1540 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 241-2; A. Jones,
"Bedfordshire: Fifteenth Century", in Harvey (ed.), Peasant Land Market in Medieval
England, pp. 185-6.
24
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
and settled in neighbouring parishes, probably on land vacated
by their kin. Unlike the previous period, many of the peasants
who left Halesowen after the Black Death came from middling
and well-to-do families. In the 1350s John Green, the son of one
of the largest landholders on the manor, emigrated to the nearby
manor of Northfield, as did, in 1377, William the son of William
Hill, another substantial tenant.82 The emigration of young villagers, and the high mortality caused by the outbreaks of the plague
between 1349 and 1375, greatly increased the number of deceased
Halesowen tenants who had no children to succeed them on the
manor. In the pre-plague period, 13 per cent of the tenants whose
deaths were recorded in the court rolls had no children to succeed
them, but the percentage rose to 39 in the period 1350-1400.83
None the less the survival rate of tenant families in the second
half of the fourteenth century remained quite high, since 60 per
cent of the tenants in Halesowen at the end of the fourteenth
century were descendants of tenants who / had resided on the
manor at the beginning of the century.84 This was a result of the
extent and nature of immigration to the manor during the years
1350-95, when the population influx to Halesowen increased and
many of the newcomers were related to deceased local tenants
whose holdings they inherited or acquired through marriage.85
Thus, despite the high rates of mortality and emigration, many
Halesowen tenant families were saved from extinction during this
period by relatives who moved to the manor. It would seem that
family land was much sought after by immigrants because it was
cheaper, it provided them with a better title and it enabled them
82
B.R.L., 346338, 346355.
In the court rolls between 1270 and 1348, the death of 320 tenants was recorded;
278 (86.9 per cent) of them had children on the manor who succeeded them. However,
among the 129 tenants whose deaths were recorded between 1350 and 1400, only 79
(61.1 per cent) had children who succeeded them.
84
In the court rolls of 1397-9, 142 tenants are noted, 85 (59.8 per cent) of them
descended from the 245 tenants identified in the court records of 1315-17.
85
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 117-21. When I analysed the court rolls
between 1351 and 1395, I found that 42 of the 226 immigrants who settled in
Halesowen were the descendants of villagers who had previously emigrated from the
manor: ibid., p. 121. Additional genealogical evidence obtained from the fifteenthcentury court rolls reveals that another 46 of the immigrants who settled in Halesowen
in the period had a blood relationship to local families. All in all, 88 (39.8 per cent)
of the immigrants to Halesowen during this period were the descendants of local
peasants.
83
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
25
TABLE 3
KINSHIP LINKS BETWEEN HALESOWEN TENANTS 1315-1500*
1315-17
1397-9
1421-5
1498-1500
Nos. of tenants
215
142
120
99
Related to others
173(80.5%) 109(76.8%)
72(60.0%)
34(34.3%)
Unrelated to others
42 (19.5%)
33 (23.2%)
48 (40.0%)
65 (65.7%)
•Source: B.R.L., 350359-60, 346236, 346375-6, 346394-5, 346402-61, 347146.
to be absorbed more easily into the village community.86 Moreover, by taking over such land, newcomers also gained relatives
who could assist and co-operate with them.
As many old Halesowen landed families survived to the end of
the fourteenth century, the kin density on the manor remained
fairly high. We can see from Table 3 that of the 142 tenants
identified in the court rolls from 1397 to 1399, 76.8 per cent were
related to each other. Our statistics show that the percentage of
landholders related by blood and marriage falls only slightly from
80.5 in 1313-15 to 76.8 in 1397-9. However, the sample of tenants
obtained from the court rolls of 1397-9 overestimates the kin
density on the manor, because most of the kinless tenants were
smallholders and these are under-represented in the sample.87
Such tenants constitute 24.6 per cent of the sample, while the
percentage of land-deficient families reconstituted from the court
rolls between 1350 and 1400 is 35.88 If we had a more representative sample, the percentage of kinless tenants might rise from 23.2
to 30.3.89 It is likely, therefore, that the percentage of tenants
with kin in Halesowen fell from 80.5 in 1315-17 to 69.7 in the
years 1397-9. Moreover the average size of the kin group on the
manor was also reduced during the second half of the fourteenth
86
Ibid., pp. 120-4; Razi, "Family, Land and the Village Community", pp. 25-6.
On various Westminster manors in the post-plague period, tenants were required to
pay higher entry fines for holdings to which they had no inheritance right: see Barbara
Harvey, Westminster Abbey and its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1977),
pp. 225, 302-4.
87
Among the 33 kinless tenants identified in the court rolls 1397-9, one ( 3 per
cent) was a large tenant, 6 (18.2 per cent) were middling and 2 6 (78.8 per cent) were
smallholders.
88
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 147. A similar reduction in the population of
smallholders has been observed by Hilton in other west midland manors: see Hilton,
English Peasantry, pp. 39-40.
89
In order to correct the bias in our sample, I constructed a hypothetical sample
in which smallholders constitute 35 per cent. Then I estimated the number of kinless
tenants according to their proportion in each group of tenants in the observed sample.
As a result the percentage o f kinless tenants rises to 30.3.
26
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
century. Whereas the percentage of tenants with only one relative
in 1315-17 was 20.5, in 1397-9 it rose to 32.3. Although the kin
density in Halesowen decreased somewhat in the second half of
the fourteenth century, the bond between family and land was
maintained. This can be deduced from the land transactions
recorded in the court rolls of 1351-1400, which show that the
bulk of the tenants' land on the manor continued to be distributed
through the family.90 Since extended families still predominated
in Halesowen in the second half of the fourteenth century, ties
between relatives who were not co-residents continued to play
an important role in village society, as the court rolls from this
period indicate.91 In 1376 Philip Thedrich, for example, and his
first cousin Richard Jordan, substantial tenants from Cakemore,
leased from the abbot the demesne lands in the township.92 The
twenty-four interactions between them, noted in the court rolls
from 1370 to 1392, suggest that they closely co-operated in the
running of their farms, which included land in three townships.93
Middling and smallholders were also noted in the court records
for various intra-familial contacts, but less frequently. Although
the size of the kin group on the manor decreased in the second
half of the fourteenth century, the mean annual frequency of
recorded kin contacts increased by about 45 per cent.94 It would
seem that this happened because the peasants, who faced a severe
labour shortage during this period, had to rely, more than in the
past, on the economic co-operation of their relatives.95
The court rolls in the second half of the fourteenth century
provide less information about the welfare system on the manor.
However, it is still possible to investigate the role of the family
in supporting the elderly. In the pre-plague period almost all the
90
Razi, "Family, Land and the Village C o m m u n i t y " , pp. 16-20.
" Ibid., p p . 27-30.
92
B.R.L., 346354.
" B . R . L . , 346349-71.
94
Of the 6,200 kin interactions recorded in the court rolls between 1270 and 1400,
3,885 were noted from 1270 t o 1349, and 2,315 from 1350 t o 1400. For the years
1270-1348, t h e court records of seventy years are available, a n d for t h e period
1350-1400 the records of forty-eight years. Therefore the mean annual n u m b e r of
recorded kin contacts in t h e pre-plague court rolls is 55.5, and 48.2 in t h e postplague ones. However, since t h e population in the second half of the fourteenth
century declined by about 40 per cent, the mean annual number of recorded deaths
must have risen b y 44.7 per cent. See also Razi, "Family, Land and t h e Village
Community", pp. 28-9.
95
Ibid., p p . 31-3. A high degree of co-operation between t h e peasants was also
observed on other west midland manors: see Hilton, English Peasantry, p p . 37-53.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
27
tenants who contracted formal pension agreements made them
with kin, two-thirds with children or grandchildren and a third
with more distant relatives. In the period 1350-1400, 43 such
contracts were recorded, 20 (46.5 per cent) with children or
grandchildren, 19 (44.2 per cent) with more distant relatives and
4 (9.3 per cent) with non-kin.96 Although the percentage of
tenants retiring from the land who formed pension contracts with
non-kin rose in the second half of the fourteenth century, the
family, undoubtedly, remained the chief agency for supporting
the elderly in the village. Poor peasants, unlike retiring tenants,
hardly appear in the post-plague court rolls, since the manorial
court ceased to expel such people. The court rolls continued
occasionally to record the names of poor tenants who could not
afford to pay death duties, but such references do not inform us
how the poor fared during this period. However, since there is
evidence that the villagers in the second half of the fourteenth
century relied on the support of their kin in everyday life and in
old age, there is no reason to suppose that they did not do so
when they fell on hard times.
Information about familial relationships in Halesowen is much
scantier in the fifteenth-century court rolls, as we have already
noted. None the less the high proportion of intra-familial land
transfers recorded in the court rolls of 1401-25 indicates that the
bond between family and land still prevailed on the manor during
this period.97 Moreover the genealogical data obtained from the
court rolls suggest that kin density in Halesowen in 1421-5
remained fairly high, as we can see from Table 3. 98 Therefore it
is likely that the functionally extended familial system also con96
A sample of 124 pension agreements obtained by Richard Smith from t h e postplague court rolls of manors in the south-east midlands shows that 52 per cent of the
agreements were between kin. By contrast only 12 per cent out of 273 pension
contracts recorded in the court rolls of manors in the south-east and East Anglia,
during the same period, were intra-familial. T h e figures were kindly given to me by
Richard Smith. Undoubtedly these figures grossly underestimate the incidence of
pension agreements between kin because Smith has used mainly surnames to establish
the familial relationship of the parties to these agreements. See Razi, "Family, Land
and the Village Community", pp. 13-20.
97
Intra-familial transactions constituted 55.4 per cent of all the land transactions
recorded in 1401-10, 74.4 per cent in 1411-20 and 54.5 per cent in 1421-30: Razi,
"Family, Land and the Village Community", p. 17.
98
1 found that 60 per cent of the tenants noted in the court rolls of 1421-5 were
related by blood and marriage. It is difficult to assess the accuracy of this estimate
since the fifteenth-century court rolls do not provide sufScient data to distinguish
between middling and poor tenants.
28
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
tinued on the manor during the fifteenth century. However, it
did not last long.
In the 1430s there was a drastic fall in the proportion of intrafamilial land transfers recorded in the court rolls. Such transfers
constituted 60.6 per cent of all the land transactions registered in
1401-30, but only 20.4 per cent in 1431-40. We can see in Table 4
that the percentage of intra-familial transfers remained at a low
level until the end of the century. If we take the whole period
from 1351-1500, the percentage of intra-familial transfers fell
from 57 in the years 1351-1430 to 23.4 in the period 1431-1500."
Yet these figures underestimate the decline in the role played by
the family in the devolution of land during the fifteenth century.
From a study of the acreage of land which changed hands, rather
than just the number of transfers, it appears that the amount of
land transferred through the family fell from 71 per cent in the
years 1351-1430 to 26 per cent in 1431-15OO.100 This drop, it
appears, was not due to a sudden change in the attitude to family
land. Many land conveyances recorded in the court rolls in
1431-1500 include clauses which show that the peasants continued
to aspire to retain their land in the family. For example, in 1458
Thomas, the son of William Kelmestowe, came to the manor
court to take his father's half-yardland. After paying the death
duties and the entry fine, he transferred the holding to his brother
John Taylor and Juliana his wife, on condition that if John died
childless the holding would pass to their sister Milicentia, and if
she also died childless it would revert to Thomas's own daughters,
Agnes and Johanna.101 Yet the majority of the peasants during
this period failed to keep their land in the family because they
had no children or other heirs in the parish.
The erosion of the family-land bond during the years
1431-1500 is reflected also by a sharp fall in the survival rate of
peasant families noted in the court rolls. While 60 per cent of the
landholding families noted in the court rolls from the 1310s
survived to the 1390s, only 24 per cent of the families identified
in the records from the 1410s survived to the 1490s. The period
99
Razi, "Family, Land and the Village C o m m u n i t y " , p . 17.
During the period 1351-1430, about 5,100 acres of customary land were transferred in Halesowen inter vivos and post mortem; of these 3,621 acres (71 per cent)
were transferred through the family. However, between 1431 and 1500 about 6,450
acres changed hands on the manor; of these only 1,680 (26 per cent) changed hands
between family members.
101
B.R.L., 346837.
100
Widow
4
1431-40
7
1441-50
5
1451-60
9
1461-70
10
1471-80
5
1481-90
3
1491-1500
Totals
43
6
•Source: B.R.L., 346399-461.
Kin
Post Mortem
TABLE 4
12
14
16
21
15
20
9
107
5
7
6
3
10
3
4
38
_
3
2
7
9
3
2
26
Non-kin
Kin
In
lord's
hand
A
Inter vivos
2
1
2
2
2
3
12
Surrenders
to the
lord
25
23
17
10
26
19
19
139
Grants
by the
lord
LAND TRANSACTIONS RECORDED IN HALESOWEN 1431-1500*
49
56
47
53
73
53
40
371
Totals
10 (20.4%)
15 (26.8%)
12 (25.5%)
13 (24.5%)
21 (28.8%)
9 (16.0%)
7 (17.5%)
87 (23.4%)
kin
Total
30
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
1431-1500 witnessed the disappearance of many peasant families
who had been resident in Halesowen for generations.
The failure of most families during the years 1431-1500 to
retain their holdings for more than one generation considerably
increased the availability of land in Halesowen. The amount of
land exchanged in the inter-tenant land market rose from 792
acres in the years 1351-1430 to 1,498 acres in 1431-1500. Similarly
the land granted by the lord rose from about 1,025 acres in
1351-1430 to about 2,363 acres in 1431-1500. Although these
estimates are quite crude, they suggest that the (amount of land
available to the peasant during the years 1431-1500 doubled.
Consequently, enterprising tenants were able to accumulate more
land than ever before. Thomas Dedrich inherited, probably in
1432, his father's half-yardland holding in Cakemore.102 Thomas,
a robust and grasping peasant, rapidly increased his holding.103
In 1436 he obtained from the abbot a vacant holding of a messuage
and half-yardland in Cakemore for which he paid a low entry
fine of 5s. In 1444 he bought from Thomas Yardley a messuage
and a yardland also located in his native township.104 Thus in
twelve years the size of Thomas Dedrich's holding quadrupled.
In 1477 Thomas inherited from his nephew Philip Dedrich, who
died childless, a messuage and a yardland and a half in the
township of Langley, which he immediately transferred to his
son John.105 In the last quarter of the fifteenth century Thomas
Dedrich and his son John probably farmed at least four messuages
and 90 acres of customary land. Large tenants like the Dedriches
probably farmed larger holdings than the ones observed in the
fifteenth-century court rolls because leases and transactions in
free land were not recorded in these documents. Although enterprising peasants were able to accumulate more land than ever
before during this period, many such ventures did not last very
long. In the absence of children and other relatives in Halesowen,
some large landholders sold the land they had bought on the
market or had obtained from the lord, when they grew old. For
102
B.R.L., 346400.
T h o m a s Dedrich is noted in the rental and court rolls of 1499; at that time he
was about eighty-eight years old and still active as a farmer. H e was frequently noted
in the court rolls for assaulting his neighbours, for trespass and for overburdening
the common pastures with his beasts. H e was one of the largest brewers on the manor
and served often as a juryman and ale-taster.
104
B.R.L., 346402, 346409.
105
B.R.L., 346435.
103
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
31
example, Thomas Draper was in his fifties in 1441, when he sold
30 acres he had obtained from the abbot in 1431-2.106 Other
elderly tenants continued to farm their large holdings by
employing hired labour. However, after their death, their land
was either sold, often piecemeal, by their widows, or reverted to
the landlord and was then redistributed by him to new tenants.
In the 1350s and 1360s Thomas Curtiler, for example, increased
the size of his holding in Hawne from 15 to 45 acres. After his
death, probably in the late 1470s, his widow Alice sold 8 acres
and 9 strips to Robert Pepwall in 1480, and the rest of the holding
to two other tenants in 1484.107 Of the forty substantial holdings
of 45 acres and more which were built up during the period
1431-1500, only twelve (30 per cent) survived more than one
generation.108 It appears therefore that, despite the abundant
supply of land in fifteenth-century Halesowen, sustained land
accumulation was slowed down by the failure of peasant families
to produce heirs.
The low survival rate of peasant families had a marked effect
on the density of kin on the manor. We can see in Table 3 that,
while 60 per cent of the tenants identified in the court rolls of
1421-5 were related by blood and marriage to other tenants, this
is true of only 34 per cent of such tenants recorded in the court
rolls of 1498-1500 and the rental of 1499/15OO.109 Furthermore
the genealogical data obtained from the court rolls between
106
B . R . L . , 346399, 346400, 346407.
Thomas Curtiler inherited half a yardland in 1430, bought another half a yard
in 1456 and obtained from the abbot his third half-yardland in 1462: B.R.L., 346398,
346419, 346723, 346438, 346442.
108
This has also been observed in other contemporary villages: see D y e r , Lords
and Peasants in a Changing Society, p p . 136-7; Faith, "Berkshire: Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Centuries", p p . 136-7, 157-8, 193-4; P. Glennie, "In Search of Agrarian
Capitalism: Manorial Land Markets and the Acquisition o f Land in the Lea Valley,
C.1450-C.1560", Continuity and Change, iii (1988), pp. 18-19, 23. For further data on
land accumulation in late medieval villages, see R. H . Hilton, The Economic Develop107
ment of Some Leicestershire Estates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford,
1947), pp. 94-105; Dewindt, Land and People, pp. 122-9; Raftis, Warboys, pp. 177-92;
Jones, "Bedfordshire: Fifteenth Century", pp. 215-19; Frances Davenport, The Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor, 1086-1565 (Cambridge, 1906), pp. 86-95;
Campbell, "Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land Market", p. 125; Mclntosh, Autonomy and Community, pp. 124-6; Tim Lomas, "South-East Durham: Late
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries", in Harvey (ed.), Peasant Land Market in Medieval England, pp. 309-16; R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth
Century (London, 1912), pp. 96-7.
1OT
The only medieval rental for Halesowen which has survived is for 1499/1500:
B.R.L., 347146.
32
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
1431-1500 reveal that during this period, unlike the previous
one, a similarly low kin density was common to all strata of
village society.110 Since the majority of peasants in Halesowen
during this period did not have any relatives in the parish outside
their household, the functionally extended familial system —
which had previously prevailed on the manor — must have ceased
to operate. Many of the peasants must have had relatives in
neighbouring parishes, but it is most unlikely that they relied on
them and co-operated with them to the same extent as before —
when these relatives were also members of the same community.
This is clearly reflected in our records in the behaviour of retiring
tenants. From the 1430s, unlike the previous period, few of them
were supported by kin. Between 1431-1500 the manor court
recorded 36 land transactions in which elderly tenants surrendered their holdings to new tenants and then received half back
for life. Although no pension terms were recorded in these cases,
it is plausible that the 36 retiring tenants were supported by the
villagers who took their holdings.111 Of these 36 elderly tenants,
9 (25 per cent) surrendered their holdings to their kin and 27 (75
per cent) to individuals who were apparently unrelated.1121 also
found that these 27 elderly tenants did not have any relatives on
the manor when they retired. For example, in 1482 William
Adams, who was in his seventies, transferred his yardland holding
to his neighbour Richard Brown the smith, and received half of
110
Similar phenomenon have been observed also in late seventeenth-century Terling, Essex: see Keith Wrightson, "Kinship in an English Village", in Smith (ed.),
Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, pp. 316-23.
111
In the fifteenth-century Halesowen court rolls only one pension contract is
recorded. It is highly unlikely that no other such agreements were made on the manor
during this period, but for some reason the court ceased to register them. This also
happened in the contemporary manorial courts of the bishops of Worcester: see C. C.
Dyer, "Changes in the Size of Peasant Holdings in Some West Midland Villages,
1400-1500", in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, p. 289. The only fifteenthcentury contract was recorded in Halesowen court rolls in 1470. John More surrendered his half-yardland to his son John and then received half of it back for life. John
junior also undertook to support his elderly father. B.R.L., 346341. In the thirteenthand fourteenth-century court rolls many pension agreements were also recorded in
conjunction with such land transfers. I therefore assumed that any land transaction
recorded in the fifteenth-century court rolls, in which an elderly tenant surrendered
his holding and then received half of it back for life, also included an unregistered
pension agreement.
112
A similar estimate has been made from a study of 114 post-plague pension
contracts, of which 72 were from the period 1400-57, recorded in the court rolls of
East Anglian and east midland manors: see Clark, "Some Aspects of Social Security",
pp. 310 n. 4, 315 n. 11.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
33
it back for life. William's only son died in 1473 and his granddaughter Agnes, who lived in a neighbouring parish, came to the
Halesowen court in 1482 only to quitclaim her rights in the family
holding.113
We have seen so far that the functionally extended familial
system, which continued to operate in Halesowen for many years
despite the marked post-plague demographic and economic
changes, broke down in the fourth decade of the fifteenth century.
In order to explain the nuclearization of the family in Halesowen
it is necessary, first, to find out what happened to peasant families
in other contemporary villages.
Studies of post-plague manors in central-southern, midland and
northern England reveal that the bulk of the tenants' land was
transmitted outside the family, and that the turnover of tenants'
families was very rapid.114 It appears, therefore, that on these
manors, as in Halesowen, the bond between family and land was
broken in the post-plague period. Admittedly, in a study of the
land market on a number of Derbyshire and Somerset manors,
Ian Blanchard estimated that between 56 and 82 per cent of all
the transactions recorded during the period 1365-1520 were intrafamilial.115 But this estimate cannot be accepted, not only because
it is based on a dubious interpretation of the evidence, as Smith
has shown, but also because it is incompatible with the demographic data obtained from the court rolls of these manors.116 If
113
B.R.L., 346440.
Faith, "Berkshire: Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries", pp. 121-58; Faith,
"Peasant Inheritance Customs", pp. 89-91; Glennie, "In Search of Agrarian Capitalism", p. 29; Jones, "Bedfordshire: Fifteenth Century", pp. 199, 200-1, 203, 216-18;
Dewindt, Land and People, p. 134; Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance, pp. 240-1,
249; Harvey, Westminster Abbey, pp. 324-7; Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing
Society, pp. 281, 302; Lomas, "South-East Durham: Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries", pp. 297-301; J. A. Tuck, "Tenant Fanning and Tenant Farmers: A, The
Northern Borders", in E. Miller (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales,
iii (Cambridge, 1991), p. 592; E. Miller, "Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: B,
Yorkshire and Lancashire", ibid., p. 609; P. D. A. Harvey, "Tenant Farming and
Tenant Farmers: G, The Home Counties", ibid., pp. 672-3; E. Miller, "Tenant
Farming and Tenant Farmers: I, The Southern Counties", ibid., pp. 717-18.
115
1. Blanchard, "Industrial Employment and the Rural Land Market, 1380-1520",
in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, p. 274.
"'Smith, "Some Issues Concerning Families", p. 60.
114
34
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
the proportion of the intra-familial transactions was as high as
Blanchard has estimated, the majority of the families which resided on these manors in the 1400s should have survived until the
1510s. Yet the male replacement rates obtained from the court
rolls of the same manors imply that, during the fifteenth century,
between one-third and two-thirds of the peasant families disappeared from these manors during every generation.117 Therefore
we have to assume that in the Derbyshire and Somerset villages,
as in others in central-southern, midland and northern England,
the family-land bond was eroded during the post-plague
period.118
The above studies provide more evidence about the nature of
the family-land bond in the post-plague period than about the
exact time when this bond was broken. Faith and Lomas claimed
that the sharp fall in the proportion of intra-familial land transfers,
observed in the records of Berkshire and Durham manors immediately after the Black Death, indicates that the family-land bond
was broken at that time.119 This claim cannot be accepted since
Faith and Lomas used a method which considerably underestimated the number of intra-familial transfers recorded in the postplague court rolls. In fact, because their findings are distorted by
the demographic changes which occurred after the Black Death,
they provide no clue as to the exact time at which that bond was
broken.120 This can be discovered, however, by observing the
changes in the residence patterns of peasant families in the post117
Blanchard found that the male replacement rate of tenants in Derbyshire villages
fell from 0.7 in the 1410s to 0.4 in the 1440s and to 0.3 in the 1470s. In Somerset
villages replacement rates remained at 0.6 to 0.7 up to the 1440s, before falling to
0.4 in the 1470s. Blanchard, "Industrial Employment and the Rural Land Market",
p. 261 n. 115.
118
A low percentage of intra-familial land transactions and a rapid turnover of
tenants' families were observed also in post-plague court rolls of East Anglian manors:
see L. R. Poos, "Population and Resources in Two Fourteenth-Century Essex Communities: Great Waltham and High Easter, 1327-1389" (Univ. of Cambridge Ph.D.
thesis, 1983), p. 245; Campbell, "Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land
Market", p. 121; Mclntosh, Autonomy and Community, pp. 120-1,132; R. H. Britnell,
"Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: C, Eastern England", in Miller (ed.), Agrarian
History of England and Wales, iii, p. 629; H. S. A. Fox, "Tenant Fanning and Tenant
Farmers: J, Devon and Cornwall", ibid., pp. 726-8.
" ' Faith, "Berkshire: Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries", pp. 129-30, 132, 136,
149, 154-5; Lomas, "South-East Durham: Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries",
pp. 206, 299.
120
Z. Razi, "The Erosion of the Family-Land Bond in the Late Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Centuries: A Methodological Note", in Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and LifeCycle, pp. 296-300.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
35
TABLE 5
DISAPPEARANCE OF SURNAMES OF RESIDENT FAMILIES FROM THE
COURT ROLLS OF HOLYWELL-CUM-NEEDINGWORTH, WARBOYS AND
HALESOWEN 1350-1449*
Disappearance of surnames
(as percentages)
HolyweU
Warboys
Halesowen
1350-9
14.3
6.9
6.1
4.9
1360-9
1.6
2.8
1370-9
6.3
16.8
12.8
1380-9
3.0
9.5
3.3
6.9
1390-9
3.2
7.1
1400-9
19.8
23.8
7.5
9.9
1410-19
14.3
6.6
1420-9
7.9
15.8
9.1
1.0
21.7
1430-9
1.6
1440-9
4.8
14.8
23.4
Totals
100(63)
100(101)
100(175)
•Sources: B. Dewindt, Land and People in Holyviell-cum-Needingworth: Structures
of Tenure and Patterns of Social Organization in an East Midlands Village, 1252-1457
(Toronto, 1972), pp. 172-4; J. Ambrose Raftis, Warboys: Two Hundred Years in the
Life of an English Medieval Village (Toronto, 1974), pp. 68-165; B.R.L., 346324-420.
plague period. The court rolls of the Huntingdonshire manors of
Holywell-cum-Needingworth and Warboys and those of Halesowen between 1350 and 1449 record the surnames of 86, 143 and
243 resident families respectively. Of these surnames, between
71 and 79 per cent disappeared from the records between 1350
and 1449.121 Table 5 presents the percentage of surnames which
disappeared from the court rolls of the three manors during each
decade. Obviously the disappearance of a surname from the court
rolls does not necessarily mean that a resident family became
extinct, since its holding might have been occupied by a tenant
with a different surname, who was nevertheless related to the
121
Sixty-three surnames (73.2 per cent) disappeared from Holywell court rolls, 101
(70.6 per cent) from Warboys and 175 (72.0 per cent) from Halesowen. In the preplague period the extinction rate of peasant families on the three manors was much
lower. In the records of Holywell and Warboys between 1251/2 and 1349, 100 and
136 surnames are noted respectively. From Holywell records during this period 45
per cent of the surnames disappeared and from Warboys 40 per cent. In the court
rolls of Halesowen, between 1270 and 1349, 229 surnames are noted, of which 34
per cent disappeared from the records during this period. The data about the residence
pattern of families in Holywell and Warboys were taken from the lists in Dewindt,
Land and People, pp. 172-4, and Raftis, Warboys, pp. 68-165; I excluded from Raftis's
list 30 surnames which are apparently fictitious, and 8 surnames from Dewindt's list
which represented only one individual, appearing once in the records.
36
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
previous tenant by blood or marriage. Consequently an estimate
based on the number of surnames which disappeared from the
post-plague court rolls would exaggerate the extinction rate of
peasant families. It does, however, enable us roughly to observe
the fluctuations in this rate. We can see from Table 5 that, as
long as the family-land bond was maintained in Halesowen, the
extinction rate of surnames was quite low but, when this bond
was broken in the 1430s and the 1440s, the rate accelerated
considerably.
A similar correlation between the strength of the family-land
bond and the turnover of resident families must have prevailed
in other villages too. It is thus a reasonable assumption that this
bond was broken in Holywell and Warboys during the years
1400-30, when the extinction rate of families increased sharply,
as we can see in Table 5. Cicely Howell's list of resident families
on the Leicestershire manor of Kibworth Harcourt from 1280 to
1700 shows a similar trend. Although some old families disappeared after the Black Death, more than half of them still resided
on the manor in the 1400s. Yet most of these families disappeared
from the manor during the years 1410-40, when the turnover of
peasant families increased sharply.122 It would seem, therefore,
that in Kibworth Harcourt, as in Holywell, Warboys and Halesowen, the family-land bond was not eroded before the first
decades of the fifteenth century.
The evidence above suggests that the family-land bond in the
villages of central-southern, midland and northern England was
eroded at the end of the fourteenth and during the first half of
the fifteenth centuries. This erosion probably coincided with a
sharp fall in the kin density and with the nuclearization of the
family in these villages. These changes were apparently caused
by a sharp rise in the extinction rate of resident families.
To explain this phenomenon we have to investigate the reproduction rate of peasant families in post-plague villages. This can
be done by calculating male replacement rates from the court
rolls, namely the ratio of deceased tenants to the adult sons who
survived and remained on the manor. Such rates calculated from
post-plague court rolls tend to fall far below unity. (Unity is
122
Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance, pp. 240-1, 249. In Yorkshire and Lancashire the family-land bond was also eroded at the end of the fourteenth and the
beginning of the fifteenth century: Miller, "Tenant Fanning and Tenant Farmers: B,
Yorkshire and Lancashire", p. 609.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
37
achieved when one father is replaced by one son.) In Halesowen
court rolls from 1350-99 the male replacement rate is 0.697, but
in 1401-30 it falls to 0.504 and in 1431-1500 to 0.400.123 It is
true that similar figures have been calculated from only a few
additional manorial court rolls.124 Yet we can reasonably assume
that, on numerous other manors, male replacement rates would
have also fallen far below unity. We can infer this from evidence
that in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the majority of
holdings on these manors were not transmitted by inheritance,
meaning that there were no resident heirs. If these declining
replacement rates are to be attributed solely to high mortality
and low fertility, one would expect to find a population decrease
of 40 to 60 per cent per generation.125 Since this is obviously not
the case, the declining replacement rates of tenant families, and
consequently the reduction of kin density, must be attributed not
only to the population decline, but also to the high mobility of
the rural population.
It has been argued that in post-plague Languedoc declining
population and high mobility also reduced the kin density in rural
areas yet, unlike England, the peasants countered this trend by
reconstituting extended familial groups — the frereche.126 In contemporary rural Tuscany "the peasant family maintained a solid
numerical base and an extended structure" despite demographic
decline and stagnation.127 Furthermore we have seen that in
Halesowen immediately after the plague, and probably also in
many other villages, there was also an attempt to maintain
extended kin groups. In this period migration slowed down the
123
Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 119. In 1401-30, 61 deceased tenants were
succeeded by 32 sons and, in 1431-1500, 75 tenants were succeeded by 30 sons who
remained on the manor.
124
Blanchard, "Industrial Employment and the Rural Land Market", p. 261 n.
115; Sylvia Thrupp, "The Problem of Replacement Rates in Late Medieval English
Population", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xviii (1965), pp. 109-11. It is important to
remember that male replacement rates calculated from fifteenth-century court rolls
are considerably overestimated because the manor court rarely recorded the death of
tenants whose holdings were escheated to the lord in the absence of any next of kin
on the manor. Such under-registration of tenants' deaths probably explains why so
many of the tenants whose deaths were recorded in the fifteenth-century court rolls
of the Norfolk manors of Martham and Hevingham were succeeded by sons. See
Campbell, "Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land Market", p. 127 n. 68.
125
T. H. Hollingsworth, Historical Demography (London, 1969), pp. 222-3.
126
E. Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1966), pp. 160-8.
127
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, " 'A une pane e uno vino': The Rural Tuscan Family
at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century", in her Women, Family and Ritual in
Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), p. 57.
38
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
rate of resident families' extinction, since many tenants who had
died childless were succeeded by immigrating relatives. But in
the late fourteenth and at the beginning of the fifteenth centuries
this trend was arrested and migration accelerated, rather than
slowed down, the decrease of kin density. This happened because,
unlike Languedoc and Tuscany, many of the peasants in England
were still unfree in this period.
It is impossible to measure the number of unfree peasants in
England in the late fourteenth century, but we can gain some
quantitative idea of their proportion in the rural population from
earlier records. Kosminsky estimated that, in the four midland
counties covered by the Hundred Rolls of 1279, 63 per cent of
the peasant landholders were unfree.128 There were, indeed,
marked local and regional variations in the ratio of unfree to free
tenants in England at that period.129 None the less it is quite
possible that, in the other highly manorialized counties of centralsouthern, midland and northern England not covered by the 1279
survey, the proportion of villein tenants also amounted to almost
two-thirds of all the peasant landholders.130 The subsistence crises
between the 1290s and the 1320s must have caused some increase
in the overall proportion of unfree tenants, for in many villages
the cottagers and smallholders, who were mostly free peasants,
suffered a higher mortality rate.131 On the other hand, in the
immediate post-plague period, the overall proportion of unfree
tenants must have declined through migration, even though this
was not yet on a massive scale because the demand for land in
most areas was still quite strong.132 It is, therefore, reasonable to
128
Kosminsky took, from the returns for Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, a sample of 6,757 peasant households of which 4j249
(62.9 per cent) were villein: see Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England, pp. 205-6.
"'Hilton, Decline of Serfdom, pp. 19-26; R. H. Hilton, "Social Structure of Rural
Warwickshire in the Middle Ages", in Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 125-30.
130
Edmund King estimated that the overall proportion of unfree tenants in England
in 1279 was 40 per cent: see E. King, England, 1115-1425 (London, 1979), p. 50.
Subsequently Hatcher argued that only a third of the households in England at that
time were those of villeins. This estimate is lower than King's because Hatcher took
into consideration non-peasant households as well. See J. Hatcher, "English Serfdom
and Villeinage: Towards a Reassessment", Past and Present, no. 90 (Feb. 1981),
pp. 6-7.
131
Hilton, Decline of Serfdom, p. 27; Postan, "Medieval Agrarian Society in its
Prime: England", pp. 612-13.
132
J. H a t c h e r , Plague, Population and the English Economy ( L o n d o n , 1977), p p . 3 2 - 3 ;
Bolton, Medieval English Economy, p p . 2 0 9 - 1 2 .
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
39
assume that, in the 1370s, servile tenants still constituted a substantial minority of the peasant landholders in the regions under
consideration. In Warboys, for instance, at least 55 per cent of
the tenant families in this period were unfree, and in Halesowen
they formed 40 per cent.133 While still a substantial minority in
the 1370s, serfs had nearly disappeared from English villages by
the early sixteenth century.134 As the uprising of 1381 failed to
abolish serfdom, it is plausible to explain this process, as Rodney
Hilton suggested, by a massive migration of serfs during the late
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.135 Indeed, in the court rolls of
the Cambridgeshire manors of Crowland abbey, the annual
number of recorded flights of serfs rose from 1.1 in the years
1350-1400 to 2.5 in the years 1401-30.136 On the post-plague
east-midland manors of Ramsey abbey, the migration of serfs
became an exodus in the first half of the fifteenth century.137 No
133
Raftis identified in Warboys court rolls, between 1370 and 1379, 89 tenant
families: see Raftis, Warboys, p. 121. Of these families at least 49 were unfree. I
arrived at this figure by comparing the list of families reconstituted from the court
rolls and that of emigrating serfs in the pre- and post-plague period, compiled by
Raftis, ibid., pp. 116-21, 145-50. In pre-plague Halesowen between 64 and 69 per
cent of the tenant families were unfree: Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 10. In the
1370s the percentage of villein families on the manor fell to 40. Undoubtedly on many
manors in the regions under consideration, as in Warboys, the majority of the tenants
were still unfree in the 1370s. For example, about 70 per cent of those whose status
is specified in Wiltshire inquisitions in the period 1349-75 were villeins: Miller,
"Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: I, The Southern Counties", p. 710.
134
Hilton, Decline of Serfdom, p p . 55-8. See also D y e r , Lords and Peasants in a
Changing Society, p . 2 7 0 ; D a v e n p o r t , Economic Development of a Norfolk
Manor,
pp. 83, 96. Recently, however, Diarmaid MacCulloch has found that there were serfs
on 400 manors in 30 counties in 1485 and on 104 manors in 21 counties in 1560.
From these data he has argued that the survival of serfdom was considerable in the
Tudor period. This claim cannot be accepted, since MacCulloch has not demonstrated
that the proportion of serfs on these manors was a significant one. See D. MacCulloch,
"Bondmen under the Tudors", in Claire Cross, D. Loades and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds.),
Law and Government under the Tudors (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 91-111. Moreover new
studies confirm Hilton's assertion about the considerable decline of serfdom in later
medieval England: see Tuck, "Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: A, The Northern
Borders", pp. 593-4; Britnell, "Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: C, Eastern
England", pp. 621-2; E. King, "Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: D, The East
Midlands", in Miller (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, iii, pp. 631-2, 635;
Dyer, "Social Structure: E, The West Midlands", p. 639; Miller, "Tenant Farming
and Tenant Farmers: I, The Southern Counties", pp. 710-11.
135
H i l t o n , Decline of Serfdom, p p . 5 5 - 8 .
136
F. M. Page, The Estates of Crowland Abbey (Cambridge, 1934), p. 149. Britnell
found that in many other manors in eastern England emigration of serfs was especially
noticeable at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries,
when manorial custom was crumbling rapidly: Britnell, "Tenant Farming and Tenant
Farmers: C, Eastern England", p. 621.
137
Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, pp. 153-66.
40
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
doubt the combination of the sharp rise in real wages and the
steep fall in rents and land prices in the late fourteenth century,
as well as the erosion of the landlords' coercive powers in the
fifteenth century, facilitated the exodus of serfs.138 Some unfree
peasants left their home manors and settled in distant places, but
the majority, as our sources clearly indicate, settled in nearby
villages and towns.139
The pursuit of freedom not only intensified the migration of
serfs in this period, but also changed its nature. Previously many
emigrating serfs had probably returned to their home manors to
take up family land, even though this meant that they also
returned to their former unfree status. In both pre-plague Warboys and Halesowen, a third of the male serfs, whose departure
from the manor, with or without permission, was recorded, subsequently returned.140 Unfortunately there are no data about the
serfs' movements in Warboys in the second half of the fourteenth
century but, of the 16 serfs whose departure was recorded in
Halesowen court rolls between 1350 and 1390, 5 (31.2 per cent)
subsequently returned to the manor. Moreover, among the 206
immigrants settling in Halesowen between 1351 and 1395, at least
138
F o r t h e erosion of t h e landlords' control over tenants, see C. C. D y e r , " A
Redistribution of Incomes in Fifteenth-Century E n g l a n d ? " , Past and Present, n o . 39
(Apr. 1968), p p . 11-33; Barbara J. Harris, " L a n d l o r d s and Tenants in England in t h e
Later Middle Ages: T h e Buckingham E s t a t e s " , Past and Present, no. 4 3 (May 1969),
pp. 146-50; Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 64-9; Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, pp. 275-9. For wages, rents and land values in the late fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, see Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, pp. 31-55,
71; Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society, pp. 283-97; D. L. Farmer, "Prices
and Wages, 1350-1500", in Miller (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, iii,
pp. 495-525.
139
Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance, p p . 4 4 - 6 ; D y e r , Lords and Peasants in a
Changing Society, pp. 366-7; R. K. Field, "Migration in the Late Middle Ages: The
Case of Hampton Lovett Villeins", Midland Hist., viii (1983), pp. 30-48; Jones,
"Bedfordshire: Fifteenth Century", p. 221; Davenport, Economic Development of a
Norfolk Manor, p. 97; P. McClure, "Patterns of Migration in the Late Middle Ages",
Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxii (1979), pp. 167-82; Raftis, Tenure and Mobility,
pp. 167-82; Raftis, Warboys, pp. 147-50, 265; Dewindt, Land and People, p. 179;
Tuck, "Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: A, The Northern Borders", p. 505;
Miller, "Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: B, Yorkshire and Lancashire", p. 599;
Britnell, "Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: C, Eastern England", p. 621; King,
"Tenant Farming and Tenant Farmers: D, The East Midlands", pp. 626-7.
140
In Warboys court rolls between 1290 and 1347, the names of 80 identifiable
male serfs are recorded: see Raftis, Warboys, pp. 145-6. By checking the court appearance of these serfs (ibid., pp. 14-40), I found that 18 of them (30 per cent) returned
to Warboys. In Halesowen court rolls between 1292 and 1348, the names of 68
emigrating male serfs are noted; 24 of them (35 per cent) returned to the manor.
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
41
141
88 (42.7 per cent) were related by blood to local villein families.
However, the proportion of such immigrants fell to 18 per cent
in the years 1396-1420, and to 6.5 per cent by 1440.142 During
the same period there was also a drastic fall in the number of
emigrating serfs who returned to Ramsey abbey manors.143 It
appears therefore that, at the end of the fourteenth and in the
fifteenth centuries, emigrating serfs and their descendants rarely
returned to their home manors.
As a consequence of the changing rate and nature of serfs'
migration during this period, in turn reflecting changing opportunities in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, numerous
landed villein families disappeared from the villages in which they
had lived for generations. Many families disappeared quickly,
while others died out more slowly. During the period from 1400
to 1458 at least 70 serfs emigrated from Warboys, 66 per cent of
them in 1400-29. As a result, of the 80 families noted in the court
rolls of 1400-9, 16 villein families (20 per cent) disappeared from
the manor altogether, and 12 villein families (15 per cent)
remained on a much reduced scale until 1458.144 The extinction
of old villein families must have greatly lowered the kin density
in their native villages, even if such families constituted a much
smaller proportion of the peasant families than in Warboys. Of
the 120 tenants identified in Halesowen court rolls between 1421
and 1425, 72 (60 per cent) had relatives on the manor and 20
were unfree. The disappearance of 10 villein families during the
1430s left 8 other families related to them with no relatives in
Halesowen and, as a result, the number of families with relatives
fell from 72 to 54. Thus the extinction of 10 villein families in
the 1430s, constituting only 8.4 per cent of the tenant families in
Halesowen, reduced the kin density from 60 to 45 per cent.
The kin density in the villages of central-southern, midland
and northern England was significantly decreased during the three
decades following the Black Death, yet it remained sufficiently
high to sustain an extended familial system. However, these
villages were still populated in this period by many unfree peasants. Many of these serfs took advantage of the demographic,
141
See above, n . 8 5 .
The names of 62 immigrants were noted in the Halesowen court rolls of
1396-1420, and 46 for the years 1421-40.
143
Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, p . 157.
144
These figures are calculated from data obtained by Raftis: see Raftis, Warboys,
pp. 68-115, 121, 147-50.
142
42
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
economic and political circumstances in the late fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries to attain free status by migration. The serfs'
exodus during this period uprooted numerous villein families
from villages in which they had lived for many generations, and
drastically reduced the kin density in these villages. Thus the
extended familial system in many parts of the country was nuclearized in the later Middle Ages as a result not only of impersonal
demographic and economic forces, but also of the serfs' determination to become free.
Although peasants' households in medieval England were probably predominantly nuclear, their families were none the less
functionally extended. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the
extended familial system must have prevailed everywhere and
remained the norm in most parts of the country until the later
Middle Ages. The nuclearization of the peasant family began in
the thirteenth century in East Anglia and possibly also in the
south-east and south-west, and was completed in the rest of
lowland England in the late fourteenth and the first half of the
fifteenth centuries. It appears that the familial system in England
was nuclearized both in pre- and post-plague villages, even
though the demographic and economic conditions of these periods
were so radically different. This probably occurred because the
extended familial organization in the post-plague period disintegrated under the impact of the exodus of serfs, who constituted a
sizeable section of village society in many parts of the country.
Obviously these hypotheses need to be verified by further studies
of kinship in medieval England. None the less the evidence
presented in this study casts serious doubts upon the view that
the familial organization in English villages hardly changed at all
between 1200 and 1700. Like any other social institution, the
peasant family was susceptible to economic, demographic and
political changes.
Taking into account the population growth and the land shortage of the sixteenth century, kin density in villages must inevitably have increased, since more land was transmitted through the
THE MYTH OF THE IMMUTABLE ENGLISH FAMILY
43
family than in the previous century and the turnover of landholding families decreased.145 This does not necessarily imply, however, that the functionally extended familial system was
reconstituted everywhere. Familial organization in East Anglian
villages in the early modern period probably remained nuclear,
as the studies of Terling and Earls Colne suggest.146 Yet, as
Gwyneth Nair's study of Highley in Shropshire shows, the functionally extended familial system was reconstituted in some sixteenth-century villages, in which it must have been nuclearized
in the later Middle Ages.147 But in other villages, such as Cheshunt
in Hertfordshire, the familial system during this period remained
nuclear.148 There are good reasons to suppose that, in the majority
of the villages of central-southern, midland and northern England,
the extended familial organization was not reconstituted in the
early modern period. The kin density in these villages must have
been too low to sustain such a familial system, because of more
polarized landholding, a more intensive land market, and a higher
mobility especially of juveniles than in the central Middle Ages.
Without the support of extended kin networks, the peasants in
early modern England were more exposed to market forces and
less capable of keeping hold of the land than in the Middle Ages.
145 D y e r j "Changes in t h e Size o f Peasant Holdings", p p . 285, 2 9 2 - 3 ; Blanchard,
"Industrial Employment and the Rural Land Market", p. 265; W . G. Hoskins, The
Midland Peasant: The Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village (London,
1957), p . 196; Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance, pp. 2 4 8 - 9 .
146
Wrightson, "Kinship in an English Village", p p . 3 1 3 - 2 3 ; Macfarlane, Origins of
English Individualism, pp. 6 8 - 9 . It has recently been shown that Macfarlane greatly
underestimated the strength of the family-land bond in early modern Earls Colne:
see G. Sreenivasan, " T h e Land-Family Bond at Earls Colne (Essex), 1550-1650",
Past and Present, no. 131 (May 1991), pp. 9 - 1 0 . Yet the percentage o f intra-familial
land transfers in Earls Colne during this period (46) is almost identical to the percentage o f such transfers in pre-plague Redgrave (46). Therefore it is likely that the
familial system in t h e Essex village in the early modern period was nuclear rather
than functionally extended.
147
Gwyneth Nair, Highley: The Development of a Community, 1550-1880 (Oxford,
1988), pp. 6 5 - 9 . Blanchard has argued that peasant households in several Somerset
and Derbyshire villages in the sixteenth century were extended, despite the fact that
they had became nuclearized in the previous century. But a rise in the number o f
extended family households observed b y Blanchard does not necessarily imply that
the kin density in these villages was high. See Blanchard, "Industrial Employment
and the Rural Land Market", pp. 264-7.
148
In sixteenth-century Cheshunt t h e wealthiest 2 0 per cent o f the tenant landholders held 7 0 per cent o f the land and in volume terms the land market was about
four times more important than inheritance. In these conditions t h e kin density in
the parish must have been quite low. Glennie, "In Search o f Agrarian Capitalism",
pp. 18-21.
44
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 140
Therefore, if the late medieval process of familial nuclearization
was indeed not reversed in most early modern villages, this
process was an important factor in facilitating the development
of capitalistic agrarian organization in England.
Tel-Aviv University
Zvi Razi