Life in a Medieval Castle (16 page)

In every village were found at least a few free tenants. Some simply held their land free of most labor services, owing money rents and “suit,” meaning attendance at certain courts. Others were the skilled craftsmen: the miller, the smith, the carpenter, the weaver, the tanner, the shoemaker. Most prosperous among these, and least popular, was the miller, who paid the lord for the right to operate the mill, a strictly enforced monopoly. The villagers brought their grain there, contributing in payment the
multure,
a sixteenth to a twenty-fourth part of the grain. Since the millers did the measuring, they naturally fell under suspicion of cheating on weight. They were also accused of substituting bad grain for good. A medieval riddle asked, “What is the boldest thing in the world?” and replied, “A miller’s shirt, for it clasps a thief by the throat daily.” A few villagers secretly ground their grain with a
hand-mill at home, but ran the risk of seizure and punishment.

The smith had the privileges of using charcoal from the lord’s wood and having his land plowed by the lord’s plows, in return for which he shod the lord’s horses and ground his scythes and sheep shears, along with those of the villagers. The carpenter, with similar privileges, repaired the plows, carts, and harrows, and built and mended houses and furniture.

The poorest people in the village, the cottars, were sometimes free too, although they might hold nothing more than their cottages and the yards that surrounded them. When they were unfree, they owed lesser services than the more substantial villeins—“hand work” rather than plowing: spreading dung, repairing walls and thatches, digging ditches.

Given the choice between freedom and more land, any villager would have chosen land. Land, in fact, was the real freedom.

Over the majority of villagers, the landholding villeins, the lord in theory had arbitrary power. He could increase a villein’s rents and services at will, or seize his holdings. In practice, however, the lord’s legal position was modified by an accumulation of traditions that had the force of law. Custom was reinforced by the fact that the lord could not survive without the services of his tenants. The lord rarely pressed them so hard that they ran away, or even resisted him. Unless a tenant failed to perform his services, he remained in possession of his holding and could pass it on to his heir. Even the wood and wasteland, theoretically owned by the lord, could only be exploited within limits imposed by custom.

Lord and tenant rarely met face to face, the manor’s affairs being left to the steward or bailiff. Nevertheless, the tenant-lord relationship was as reciprocal as it was real. Furthermore, it was permanent. Villeins were bound to the
land, but at the same time custom ruled that they could not be deprived of their holdings. A villein could leave the manor if he paid a fine and a yearly fee while he stayed away, but leaving meant losing his land.

The village community met at intervals in an assembly called a bylaw, a term that applied to the body as well as to the rules it passed. At these bylaws, all matters were decided that were not automatically regulated by custom—the choice of herdsmen, problems of pasture and harvest, the repair of fences, and the clearing of ditches. It was decided who should be hired to glean and reap, when and how the harvesting should take place, in what order animals should be allowed to graze after the harvest. Every villager had a voice. Decisions were made not by vote but by consensus: Everyone expressed his view, but once a general agreement emerged from the discussion, it became unanimous. No lengthy disagreement was tolerated, and the stubborn or rebellious were threatened with fines.

The bylaws of an Oxfordshire manor in 1293 declared: “No one shall in time of autumn receive anyone as a gleaner who is able to do the work of a reaper.” In other words, able-bodied men, strong enough to swing a scythe in reaping, were not to do gleaning—gathering the grain after the reapers were finished—a job reserved for elders and women. Second, “No one shall give anyone sheaves in the field.” Reapers who received their wages in sheaves were not to carry them off from the fields; to prevent stealing, the sheaves had to be taken to the villagers’ own homes and given out by the man from whose lands they came. Third, “No one shall enter the fields with a cart to carry grain after sunset;…none shall enter the fields except at the village entrances;…all grain…gathered in the fields shall be borne out openly through the midst of the town and not secretly by back ways.” In this way the villagers could watch everyone who came and went during the harvest.

A bylaw of 1329 read: “No one shall take in outsiders or
natives who behave themselves badly in the gleaning or elsewhere…Also, no one may tether horses in the fields amid growing grain or grain that has been reaped where damage can arise. Also, no one may make paths, by walking or driving or carrying grain, over the grain of another to the damage of the neighbors or at any other time.” With holdings scattered and intermixed, roadways and paths required strict regulation.

Another early fourteenth-century bylaw read: “Item, that sheep shall not precede the larger animals”—that is, plow oxen were to be pastured on the stubble of harvested fields before the close-cropping sheep.

In the bylaws, the villagers met not as tenants of a lord but as a democratic community. The regulations they agreed on involved not their relationship to the lord but to each other. The lord was affected by the bylaws only as another landholder in the village, with a common interest in the harvest and pasture. In the written records of the bylaws found in the rolls of manorial courts, the lord was seldom mentioned; instead the regulations were enacted by the “community” or the “homage” or the “tenants” or the “neighbors.”

A characteristic institution of the manor was its court, known in England as the
hallmote
or
halimote,
a place where the lord dealt justice to his tenants, pocketing the fines. The lowest court in the feudal hierarchy, it was also the chief private court. Except in cases of murder or felony (tried by royal courts), the manorial court had general jurisdiction over all matters concerning the villagers. It took its name from the lord’s hall; it was a
moot
(Anglo-Saxon, “court”) that met in the hall, although actually it sometimes met in the open air, under a traditional tree, or in the parish church.

Presiding over the court was the lord’s steward, but he did not act as judge. His presence gave weight to the court’s decisions, but the verdicts, decided by the custom of the
manor, were rendered either by a jury of the court or by the whole body of its suitors. These were the men who owed attendance, or “suit,” to the court, that is, the villeins of the manor and freeholders whose ancestors had owed suit, or who held land by a charter stipulating that they owed suit. Failure to attend meant a fine, unless the suitor sent someone with an excuse; the manorial court roll usually began with a list of the jurors, followed by a list of the excuses (
essoins
). The jurors, usually twelve in number, were chosen from the suitors. If a freeman was to be tried, a special jury of freemen seems to have been formed. In some villages the same men, a kind of aristocracy of jurymen, were chosen again and again.

The hallmote was more than a court of law; it handled many of the functions of the manorial government: the election and swearing in of manorial officials; payments for permission to marry, to enter the Church, to inherit a holding. When an heir succeeded to his father’s land, a ceremony was enacted in the manorial court similar to that in which a king or baron invested the heir of a vassal with his lands. He received
seisin
(possession) of his holding “by the verge,” which, as in the case of king or baron, dramatized the legal fiction that was the basis of relationship between lord and tenant: that the lord repossessed the holding and then regranted it to the heir, although inheritance was in fact fixed by custom. The steward held out a “verge” (stick) to the heir. When the heir took hold of the end of it, he was understood to have possession, as if the right flowed from steward to tenant along the stick.

Besides these official matters, the courts handled infractions of manorial customs concerning harvest, pasture, the maintaining of fences, and disputes among villagers over slanders, trespasses, boundaries, debts, and contracts. The usual punishment for a misdemeanor was a fine, sometimes in money, sometimes in workdays, which went to the lord.

Lawyers were not allowed in the manorial courts. Cases
were presented by the manorial officers concerned, or by the plaintiffs. In criminal cases, the steward might order the accused to find a certain number of men who would swear with him as a body that he was innocent of the misdeed with which he was charged. In a community where everyone knew his neighbor’s business, if a man could find the necessary oath takers, he went free.

In civil cases, the procedure was by complaint. The plaintiff appeared before the court and complained that the defendant had injured him in such-and-such a way. The defendant could delay the case through a certain number of summonses, distraints, and excuses. Sometimes the plaintiff dropped the case. If he did so, however, he had to pay a fine, so that the lord did not have his court’s time wasted. If the case did come to trial, the plaintiff opened with a statement of his plea, following traditional formulas, and the defendant replied, answering each item of the plea word for word, great stress being placed on the accuracy of wording. After both parties had been heard, judgment might be given by the jury, or by the whole court. The case was decided according to the facts and the custom: which of the two parties was believed to be telling the truth, and what was the custom of the manor. Sometimes the court decided that the suit was merely an expression of bad feeling, and the steward ordered the parties to hold a “love-day” before another hallmote at which they settled their differences and were reconciled.

Twice a year in some of the English counties, courts of the View of Frankpledge were held. In these districts all men twelve years and over were divided into groups of ten or twelve persons called frankpledges or tithings. The head of each tithing, the chief pledge, or tithingman, was usually elected for a year but often served for many years. Frankpledge was a police measure, a system by which a group of men was made responsible for the misdeeds of any of its members. Any malefactors in the group had to be
brought to court, and the tithing could be fined for failure to do so. The twice-yearly inspection of the system known as the View of Frankpledge was originally held by the sheriff as a royal officer, but later, in many cases, it was usurped by the lords of manors as a source of income. It was also the occasion for the meeting of the most important manorial courts of the year, the Great Courts, which freeholders exempted from the ordinary hallmotes were compelled to attend, and where matters of local police and lesser cases of the Crown were presented.

The everyday relations of the villagers with the castle were governed by ancient custom and regulated by a group of officials at whose head was the lord’s bailiff. The bailiff’s duties on the lord’s demesne land, as summed up in
Seneschaucie
, were manifold. He must survey the manor every morning—its woods, crops, meadows, and pastures; see that the plows were yoked; order the land marled and manured. He must watch over the threshers, the plowmen, the harrowers, and sowers; over the reaping and shocking, the sheep shearing, and the sale of wool and skins. He must inspect the lord’s oxen, cows, heifers, and sheep, and weed out the old and weak, selling those that could not be maintained over the winter.

To the villagers the bailiff was the collector and enforcer—collector of rents and enforcer of labor services. Understandably, he was little loved. A fourteenth-century sermon told of a bailiff who, while riding to a village to collect rents, met the Devil in human form. The Devil asked, “Where are you going?” The bailiff replied, “To the next village, on my master’s business.” The Devil asked if he would take whatever was freely offered to him. The bailiff said Yes, and asked the questioner who he was and what was his business. The Devil replied that he was the Devil, busy like the bailiff in quest of gain, but willing “not to take
whatever
men would give me; but whatsoever they would gladly bestow with their whole heart and soul, that will I accept.” “You do
most justly,” said the bailiff. As they approached the village, they saw a plowman angrily commending to the Devil his oxen that repeatedly strayed from the course. The bailiff said, “Behold, they are yours!” “No,” said the Devil, “they are in no wise given from the heart.” As they entered the village they heard a child weeping, and its mother wishing it to the Devil. Said the bailiff, “This is yours indeed!” “Not at all,” said the Devil, “for she has no desire to lose her son.” At length they reached the end of the village. A poverty-stricken widow whose only cow the bailiff had seized the day before saw him coming, and on her knees with hands outstretched shrieked at him, “To all the devils of hell I commend thee!” Whereupon the Devil exclaimed, “To be sure, this
is
mine. Because thus cordially you have been bestowed on me, I am willing to have you.” And snatching up the bailiff, he bore him away to hell.

Under the bailiff a number of villagers held office both as servants of the lord and as village functionaries. The hayward—in charge of the
haie,
the hedge or fence—made sure that after fields were sowed the gaps in their hedges (usually “dead hedges” made of stakes and brushwood) were closed to keep out animals, and the fields were thus put “in defense.” He also sometimes served as an officer of the hallmote, was part of the management of the lord’s demesne farm, and impounded stray cattle. His badge of office was his horn, used to sound a warning that the cattle were in the corn (Little Boy Blue was a hayward). The woodward, who had charge of the lord’s woods, was also a villager, elected by his fellows. In some villages there were also shepherds, swineherds, and oxherds, though often families had their own herdsmen. Although illiterate, the shepherds and haywards had no difficulty keeping accurate records of labor services, stock, expenditures of grain, and expenses. Their instrument was a stick, on which they cut notches that the reeve or bailiff translated into parchment records.