Land and Family extract
Table of Contents
1 The peasant land market and the Winchester pipe rolls by P.D.A. Harvey
2 The bishop’s estate
3 Units of property
4 Tenures
5 Entry fines
6 Families and their land
7 Transfers within families
8 Buyers and sellers
9 Accumulation
10 Conclusions
Extract from Land and Family
Taken from Chapter 1: The peasant land market and the Winchester pipe rolls
From some manors significant series of court rolls survive complete or nearly complete over many decades. Where this is the case they provide a better record of the transfers of customary, unfree, land than any but the fullest series of charters can give us of transfers of free land, whether by free or by unfree tenants. Partly this is because it is such a full record; in theory, and mostly in practice, every change in the tenure of unfree land had to be made in the manorial court and entered on the court roll. There is a gap in the record only if a court roll is lost from the sequence, and — as is not the case in a series of charters — we can nearly always tell if this has occurred, when one or more court rolls are missing. Unlike charters, all court rolls are dated. Then again, the court rolls record every change of tenure: not only what we assume to be sales and purchases, but changes when a tenant died or became too infirm to manage the holding, so that it passed to a widow, a son or another relative whose relationship to the former tenant is often revealed in the record. However, we are more likely to find a piece of property fully described and defined in a charter than on a court roll, and court rolls are far scarcer than charters; they survive in twos and threes from many places, but the full series that tell us most have seldom survived. Moreover, while we have charters relating to small pieces of land from the mid-twelfth century onwards, the earliest known original court roll dates from 1246 and very few survive from before the 1270s...
By the end of 1996, however, the research published in the present volume – an investigation of peasant families and the land market on the estates of the medieval bishops of Winchester – was already under way. It is on a far larger scale than any earlier work on this topic and, paradoxically, it owes nothing to court rolls – indeed, few medieval court rolls survive from the bishopric manors. Instead it is based on the bishops’ estate accounts, the Winchester pipe rolls. For every one of the fifty-odd manors of the estate an account was drawn up every Michaelmas showing what money the bishop’s local official, the reeve, had received and how it had been spent, drawing a balance owing either to the reeve or to the bishop; along with this cash account were accounts of the manor’s corn and livestock. After the accounts for all the manors had been audited they were copied, one after the other, on a single file of parchment that was the year’s pipe roll. This was kept at Winchester, while the original accounts were probably returned to the manors to be referred to over the next few years but then subsequently discarded.
Other owners of large estates dealt with their accounts in the same way in the first few decades after demesne farming – running manors through the owner’s own officials – replaced a general policy of leasing manors out in the late twelfth century. We have accounts copied out for entire estates – enrolled accounts like the Winchester pipe rolls – for Winchester Cathedral Priory, the archbishopric of Canterbury, Peterborough Abbey and a few others. But in several crucial ways the Winchester pipe rolls are unique. For one thing, they survive from a very early date, 1208–9, and are, indeed, all but the earliest manorial accounts that we have. For another, the bishops of Winchester continued this system, laboriously copying out all these accounts every year, long after other estates had changed to more efficient methods. Even Crowland Abbey, which continued enrolled accounts much longer than most, abandoned them between 1315 and 1319, whereas at Winchester the system persisted down to 1711, although in books, not rolls, from 1456. Moreover, the series is amazingly complete, with very few gaps. As a source of information on the administration and economy of a large medieval estate it is unparalleled in England, or, indeed, anywhere in Europe.
However, it is another peculiarity of the Winchester pipe rolls that makes them a
source of information on the peasant land market. Manorial accounts in general tell us
little or nothing of what happened in the manorial court. This was set out in detail on
the court roll, which served as the permanent record of proceedings for future
reference. Many of the transactions in the court produced money for the manorial
lord: penal payments for greater or lesser offences, payments to have the judgment of
the court, payment on taking over a villein holding – the so-called entry fine – and so
on. For these sums the reeve would be answerable to the lord, and their total amount
would be entered among his liabilities on the annual account as profits of the court, or
‘Pleas and perquisites’. Exceptionally, on the Winchester pipe rolls, as also on manorial
accounts from two other Winchester estates, the Cathedral Priory and St Mary’s
Abbey, the profits of the courts were entered not as single totals but as lists of the
individual payments, explaining how each had come about. At first this may have
been done because no court rolls were kept, so that the pipe roll was the only written
record of proceedings, but we can ascribe its continuance only to the same
extraordinary conservatism that continued to produce the pipe rolls themselves.
Certainly it is good fortune for the historian. Not only do the Winchester pipe rolls give
us an incredibly full record of the agriculture, the buildings, the general economy,
everything we would expect of manorial accounts, but for work on the land market and for many other purposes they are all but equivalent to manorial court rolls, in a
nearly complete series for the whole of the later Middle Ages, from the whole of a
large estate scattered throughout southern England.