Download PDF | (Past and Present Publications) Rodney H. Hilton - Peasants, Knights and Heretics_ Studies in Medieval English Social History-Cambridge University Press (1976).
344 Pages
Introduction
R. H. H I L T O N
THE ESSAYS IN THIS VOLUME WERE PUBLISHED IN PAST AND PRESENT
between 1958 and 1973. They therefore illustrate the type of article which has appeared at different times, ranging from the relatively short and deliberately provocative presentation of a thesis for debate (as in the earliest of the contributions to the Robin Hood ballads) to the long and well-researched examination of a major theme, of which there are several in this volume. The latter type of article has become more common in the journal although some critics persist in propagating the view that it is the first type of contribution which characterizes the journal as a whole.1 The essays in the present volume have been selected from a much larger available pool of articles on medieval subjects in order to illustrate a number of important themes in the history of later medieval England (that is, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries).
In some cases two or more are connected as part of a debate but in general they are not deliberately linked thematically. There is, however, a rational element in their choice and grouping. We first present a group of articles in which certain crucial phases in the economic history of the period are considered; next a group in which the changing relationships between the main social classes are examined; and finally some explorations which touch on problems of social consciousness, social mentality and the history of ideas. It is, however, clear to any reader of these articles that this division of themes into the economic, the social and the ideological is, to a certain extent, a matter of convenience. The interconnection of themes is obvious throughout: social problems are so intimately affected by economic developments that one could say that if these writings prove anything it is that the attempt to separate economy and society is not only bound, but deserves, to fail. It is also evident that the ideas and feelings expressed in the ballads, the theological manifestoes and the heretical programmes, which are the subject matter of the last group of papers, only make sense in their contemporary socio-political context. One of the most important themes in our collection emphasizes the crucial character of the decades before and after 1200. The key article here is that of Dr. Paul Harvey on the inflation of 1180-1220 — a key article in spite of the fact that it is the latest to be printed in the pages of Past and Present. However, as Dr. Harvey has made clear, what he has done is thoroughly to document and to attempt to explain a phenomenon to which previous writers had referred as underlying certain other features of this period of history, but without the exploration in detail which Dr. Harvey has given us.
Thus, Dr. Sally Harvey has examined in her pioneer article on the knight and the knight’s fee in twelfth-century England the economic and social process in the course of which the class of knights was polarized and transformed. At the end of the eleventh century the majority of knights were professional fighters of a social status which seemed hardly to lift them beyond the upper ranks of the peasantry, at any rate as far as income was concerned. Their position in society was, of course, sharply different even from the better-off peasants, these knights being specialists who lived off an income composed of peasant surplus, meagre though that income might be. Those of them who were not household knights permanently in the retinues of the greater feudatories had been enfeoffed, not so much by the greater barons as by a middling aristocratic group, with petty holdings on the periphery of the great manorial enterprises, averaging above one hide in extent, only about four times the size of the average holdings of the middle peasantry.
By the middle of the thirteenth century even five times the amount of land, or landed income, of the earlier period was insufficient to maintain a knight, so much had basic military costs escalated, not to speak of the rising costs of the display which was more and more necessary to a group with the social and religious prestige which had accrued to it during the course of the twelfth century. By now the “ knight” , or perhaps in view of the reluctance of even some well endowed individuals to enter the order of knighthood, we should say the “ knightly families” , were fully members of a county nobility. As such they had local administrative powers and responsibilities, political muscle, military expertise and a chivalrous life style which they shared with the magnates with whom they had many direct personal contacts. All this, of course, because the knightly class had largely, though not entirely, shed those lesser members who had not been able to survive the inflation and its side effects (such as new methods of estate management) which Dr. Paul Harvey describes in his article. One must, however beware of attributing too much to this single economic phenomenon. Dr. Paul Harvey believes that the inflation was confined to England, the consequence of an influx of silver resulting from a favourable balance of trade. Whether this is so or not it is worth while mentioning that over the Channel the rise to social prestige of the class of knights from a similarly depressed origin as low-status professionals had occurred considerably earlier, the rise beginning around the year 1000 and reaching its completion, according to G. Duby, by the year 1200,2 though when one considers the literary apotheosis of knighthood in the writings of Crétien de Troyes one must assume that they had arrived socially at least a quarter of a century earlier. Was this explicable by inflation?
Surely a complex of other factors, such as the devolution down to the level of petty lords of banal jurisdiction with its cash rewards3 and the political wooing of the military groups by the crusading church must have played a considerable rôle. Perhaps England imported not only silver but continental cultural patterns, diffused not only downwards but laterally. Another important social shift of the thirteenth century was linked with the rise in prices and the associated changes in estate management. This affected a much greater section of the rural population than the knights and operated through the development of the direct management of the demesnes on the lords’ estates. As is well-known, this led to the stepping up of rent demands in the form of labour services, whether actually performed or “ sold” on an annual basis.
This seems to have been part of a general attempt to increase the volume of transfers of surplus from the peasant economy to the lords, not only in the form of rent of one kind or another, but in increased profits of jurisdiction. Aristocratic and state expenditure was expanding considerably, almost certainly more than production, and there could only be one ultimate source to sustain it, peasant labour. This, it is suggested below, was the explanation for the definition of villeinage as servile. However, we must once again be cautious in our linking of cause and effect. The rise in prices was contemporaneous with, but not necessarily the only cause of, a range of social and political developments which could not but lead to the increased demands on the peasant economy referred to above.
These include both the development of the judicial and fiscal machinery of the Crown and the strengthening of the economic and political base of the higher nobility, developments which at the level of feudal politics might be contradictory, but from the standpoint of the peasant producer in relation to the rest of society were convergent. There is a problem about these changes in the relations of lords and peasants which is analogous to that which we have noted in discussing the knights. Just as the development of the knightly class was diachronic as between England and the Continent, so we find a similar lag in the evolution of serfdom. It is noted below that the thirteenthcentury descriptions of the larger English estates mention much more frequently than their counterparts a century earlier, such obligations as merchet and heriot which, like labour services were frequently used as tests of servile villeinage in the king’s courts. It was suggested that, although these obligations were not invented during the period when the screws were being turned on the peasantry, it was then that they became generalized. It was also suggested that this generalization could well have been influenced by the widespread imposition of formariage and mainmorte on the peasantry across the Channel.
There is some irony here as well as a lesson perhaps concerning the realities of serfdom. We now know that formariage, mainmorte and many other charges were being imposed, through the generalization of the seigneurie banale, on wide sections of the French rural population, more or less as juridical serfdom, and the use of the term serf was being abandoned. In the eyes of the law the subjected vilein was free while his English counterpart was now servile. But the free vilein, subjected to the seigneurie banale, was not necessarily “ freer” than the English villein who was also subjected, for most things that mattered in rural life, to the private jurisdiction of the manorial court. Whilst it would be wrong to pretend that legal distinctions were irrelevant, we must bear in mind that serfdom as a general phenomenon affecting the medieval peasantry has more to do with the level of non-economic compulsion in the transfer of surplus labour, or the product of labour, than it has to do with the nice distinction of the lawyers. In England as in France there was an evening out as well as a raising of the level of surplus transfer from the mass of the peasantry. In England this was guaranteed in law by the unfreedom of villeinage, in France by the generalization of juridiction banale, which could be imposed without making subjects into serfs. The consequences were not dissimilar.
There is then a considerable emphasis in this collection of articles on the problems of the medieval English peasantry. In spite of an occasionally expressed view that only the history of the “ political” classes is a worthy topic of study there is good reason for this emphasis. One could point to the fact that this class constituted the overwhelming majority of the population, a majority still greater if one also includes that other (and much less well known) plebeian mass, the urban artisans. In any case peasant studies are well established in medieval English historiography, from J. E. Thorold Rogers, through Maitland, Vinogradoff, those historians who published with Vinogradoff in the Oxford Studies in Sodal and Legal History and a host of worthy successors in the inter-war years. Peasant studies have taken many interesting new paths in recent years, in particular under the influence of sociological and socio-anthropological studies. Inter-action within peasant communities is quite rightly emphasized and a new approach to well-tried types of evidence is yielding good results. It would be unfortunate, however, if such studies ignored that aspect of the peasant economy which was devoted to producing income for landowners. Indeed it would be impossible to isolate peasants from the context of the estate and its demands. But this was by no means an unchanging relationship. We have seen that there was a period of great pressure associated with the changing conjuncture of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Mr. Dyer shows us that two centuries later there was a movement of countervailing pressure, almost a reversal of what had happened in the thirteenth century.
For not only was there a general reduction in the amount of surplus transferred from the peasant economy to the landowners, there was apparently a conscious selection by the peasants on the bishop of Worcester’s estate of those elements of rent and other payments which could be thought to represent a tribute to seigneurial domination rather than a fair rent for the landed holding. If the historian regarded all forms of peasant payment as one form or other of transferred surplus for the support of the ruling class and its state, the distinction in the conditions of the medieval economy between a real and a personal payment might seem illusory. But the fact that this distinction was now insisted upon by the peasants themselves is quite significant because it suggests that experience of the production of commodities for the market may have persuaded them that land was not so much the natural condition of their existence as a factor of production which had its price. When had the balance of forces begun to swing against the landowner and in favour of the peasant?
The usual answer is that the shortage of tenants and of labourers resulting from the mortality of the second half of the fourteenth century created a situation in which rents had to fall and wages to rise ; in other words, to use Mr. Dyer’s phrase, there was a redistribution of incomes in favour of the ruled and at the expense of the rulers. But Mr. Dyer’s redistribution postdated the population collapse by many years : other factors, of which the subjective attitudes of the exploited must be to the forefront, must have played their part. Another debate is closely connected, namely the chronology of the break of the equilibrium of the medieval economy. The older view was that if there was a breaking point it was with the Black Death of 1348-9. Other historians have lately tended to push the crises of the agrarian economy, and therefore of the whole of the medieval economic system, back, some to the second half of the thirteenth century when, it is argued, overpopulation caused soil exhaustion, others to the famine of the years, 1315-17.
A French historian indeed has gone so far as to suggest that the late medieval fall in grain prices, often attributed to the post-1348-9 population collapse dates back to the arise frumentaire of those famine years.4 Dr. Kershaw’s article, the most detailed study we have of the 1315-17 crop failure, famine, and human and animal disease, puts it into a comprehensible perspective. He shows that the crisis was much more prolonged than has been supposed, since crop failure as well as sheep and cattle murrain persisted into the 1320s. Land went out of cultivation for shortage of tenants, land values fell, demesnes were leased, rich peasants took advantage of the amount of land coming on the market to enlarge their holdings, all the familiar symptoms of social dislocation, in fact, which are usually associated with the decades after the Black Death. What is striking, however, is that although already backward areas were very badly hit, the more densely populated and more prosperous cereal-producing areas recovered remarkably quickly, demonstrating that enormous recuperative power of arable farming communities which has been noticed in those areas on the Continent which were devastated during the fourteenth-century wars and pillagings.5
It is interesting that what Dr. Kershaw considers to be the most serious agrarian crisis since the eleventh century seems not to have triggered off on a significant scale the sort of agrarian discontent which is often associated with famine conditions. However, as he points out, this period seems to have been one which produced a crop of verse outpourings complaining not of natural calamity but of human injustice. The dating of such verses is, of course, a problem, but even if in the end insoluble, it is considerably less complex than the dating of a tradition which also bears the character of a myth. Such is the puzzle presented in the group of contributions which centre on the question of the historicity and social rôle of the ballads of Robin Hood. This debate suffers perhaps by being somewhat too narrowly situated in the familiar terms of discourse of the professional historian.
This is exemplified by the title of one of the contributions, “ Robin Hood Peasant or Gentleman?” It is almost certain that any attempt to identify and thus to locate the “ actual” hero of a popular ballad, either as an individual or even as a member of a social group, though not without importance, risks diverting the investigator from what should be true object of his search. Ballads, in common with many other products of oral tradition, may be derived from an insignificant happening or from a literary work. They may, like fairy tales, be composed of a combination of traditional motifs, or they may narrate an actual or imagined sequence of events. What is of interest to the historian of social mentality is not the origin or even the formal content, but the function of the ballad for the singer and for his audience. If, therefore, we are to interpret the significance of the Robin Hood ballads in social terms, we have to think primarily of the audience and to try to see what the singer will present to it, knowing the audience’s prejudices and its aspirations.
Whilst paying careful attention to the details of the story our attention should be focused principally on the problem: What social message is given? And this problem does, of course, pose the further problem of dating, for the social message of one time would not be the same as that of another. Within the ballads it is tempting to identify historical features of a specific period, such as the pre-eminence of the sheriff as the law enforcer, the indebtedness of the poor knight to the great landowner or the theme of the forest. These may well be features of thirteenthcentury origin whereas the marked anti-clerical atmosphere could be of a later date. But the social message is most likely to be that conveyed by the latest bearers of the oral tradition before it was put down in writing (and henceforth became something else).6
Every indication suggests that this would be at the latest the latter part of the fourteenth century. This is the period in which all the earliest references to Robin Hood cluster, including the remark about the predilections of Sloth in Piers Plowman; the guess by the late fourteenth-century chronicler, Fordun, that the ballad referred to the period of the Barons’ Wars; Daw Topias’ remark about Robin’s bow; the use of the names of the ballad outlaws as nicknames by actual outlaws and rebels. It is, of course, in the fifteenth century that Professor Holt suggests a bifurcation of the audience of these ballads, one continuing to be aristocratic, the other now plebeian. The argument for knightly patronage of the ballads in the earlier period, apart from details which may or may not be irrelevant (for instance the absence of specific reference to villeinage cases) seems to rest broadly on the view that the actual life of outlaws portrayed in the earlier ballads corresponded to the actions of the unruly county gentry such as can be deduced from the legal records, that is poaching, robbing, kidnapping, murdering.
Apart from the fact that the principal authority on this topic, Professor John Bellamy, whilst seeing some of these correspondences, rejects the identification of the ballad heroes within the gentry,7 the theory of Robin Hood as simply an archetypal aristocratic brigand seems to ignore many of the moral resonances of the legends, as told through the ballad medium. This ballad hero, like the “ social bandit” throughout European folk legend, may not rob the rich to give to the poor but he rights wrongs while standing against the law and its official enforcers.8 Unlike Gamelyn (and unlike many of the unruly county gentry) he does not alternate between fighting sheriffs and becoming a sheriff himself. The message, in spite of its royalism, is basically subversive.
Whatever the stories implied in the thirteenth century (if they were then current), by the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when we know that they were current, that subversive message must have met a highly receptive audience. The loss of plebeian respect for the traditional élites has, in the past, been obscured by the factional politics of the nobility between the 1370s and the 1460s, but its reality is now recognized more and more, not only in the events of 1450, but in such episodes, by no means isolated, as those described below by Mr. Dyer.9 The papers reprinted in this volume finish on another note of subversion. Dr. Aston’s important paper emphasizes the fears of the secular and clerical rulers who, quite naturally, associated heretical questionings of established religious doctrine with designs on the stability of the established social order.
There would seem to have been exaggeration on all sides. If disendowment proposals and plots by artisans to become dukes and earls seem to reveal extremes of fantasy on the part of some of the Lollards, one cannot help suspecting that unlikely aims, such as the community of goods, were attributed to them by their accusers. Whatever Froissart may have learned from his aristocratic informants some years after 1381, the community of goods, supposedly advocated by John Ball, and later a frequent charge against the Lollards, seems an unlikely peasant or artisan aspiration. In other words, between one set of fantasies and another it is not easy to estimate the extent or the radical character of genuine lower class social and political discontent in the fifteenth century. One suspects that there is here a relatively unexplored field for research with a fresh eye into the records of rural estates and urban communities, as well as into the still relatively unexplored mass of records of royal and ecclesiastical courts.
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