Tenures, tithes and the management of a small ecclesiastical manor: Kingston (Suffolk) in the fourteenth century
Mark Bailey*
Abstract
Studies of the large and classic manors held by aristocratic or ecclesiastical landlords have formed the bedrock of research into the economic, social and cultural history of medieval England, because of the survival of good quantities of manorial documents, which have been readily accessible in major repositories, from such manors. Yet the most common type of manor was small and held by low status lordship, yet these lesser manors have left fewer extant sources which were harder for historians to locate before the updating of the online Manorial Documents Register. Kingston was one of those small manors, albeit held by the prior and convent of Ely, from which a handful of court rolls and a good run of compoti (accounts) are extant: furthermore, and unusually, the accounts contain information about the collection of tithes. This article explores how the information contained in these documents can be utilized to reconstruct the management of the manor over the course of the tumultuous fourteenth-century, including local responses to the Black Death (1349) and subsequent demographic collapse.
Introduction
In 2022 the completion of the project to update the Manorial Documents Register (MDR) as an online resource has confirmed the impressive volume of surviving manorial documents from medieval England. For the period between 1230 and 1500, the MDR contains catalogue references for over sixteen thousand ‘rolls’ of manorial accounts and nearly twenty thousand ‘rolls’ of manorial courts between 1230 and 1500, and a single roll might contain an account for one year or ten, and likewise a roll of courts might contain one court session or one hundred. So, there are perhaps >40,000 manorial accounts and half a million extant court sessions from hundreds of manors scattered across England.
The exceptional quantity of extant medieval manorial documents represents the tip of the iceberg of the material originally generated. By c.1300 manorial extents, surveys, courts and accounts were used routinely throughout the whole of the country and they were drawn up in a highly standardized manner, irrespective of location or the type of lordship.1 However, the surviving manorial records are biased towards southeastern England and the large, classic, manors of the greater ecclesiastical and lay landlords. Academic studies of medieval England are heavily biased towards such manors, partly because they have tended to have a good range of court and account rolls with long runs, but also because of the accessibility of these documents to professional historians: archival collections from the great estates tend to be kept in major repositories, such as The National Archives, or in university libraries, such as the magnificent archive of the bishopric and priory of Durham held at the Archives and Special Collection Department of Durham University.
Yet these large manors (>1,000 acres of total arable land) were atypical of manorial forms in fourteenth-century England, where the average manor was small (<300 acres) and held by relatively low status, gentry landlords.2 Fewer sources have survived from such manors, however, because of discontinuities in ownership over many centuries and a lack of storage capacity in the (modest) seigneurial residence. Furthermore, historians have been hampered by limited knowledge of the whereabouts of such collections and the challenges of accessing them. Studies of these lesser manors are now becoming more common, however, because the online MDR has illuminated their existence and the emergence of digital technology has greatly improved the cost-effectiveness of visits to far-flung repositories.
One purpose of this article is to augment this growing cadre of research into the small, but typical, manors of medieval England, and to illustrate the material which they contain, with a case study of Kingston in the parish of Woodbridge (Suffolk).3 Kingston comprised around 150 acres of arable land (one quarter of which was demesne), which was characteristic of the small size of many manors in this part of medieval east Suffolk.4 However, Kingston was unusual in being held by a great Benedictine monastery, which must help to explain why a good sample of its manorial documents have survived. Another reason for choosing this manor is the inclusion in its accounts of some information about grain tithes, which is most unusual for manorial documents (because tithes pertained to the parish not the manor). Finally, Kingston is well documented for a small manor. Forty-five account rolls survive between 1296 and 1438, although some are in poor condition and one account is mis-catalogued and relates to Ely’s manor of Stoke-by-Ipswich.5 Rolls for sixteen courts held between 1349 and 1370 have also survived.6
The manor of Kingston stretched from the tip of Kyson Point on the river Deben and along the north side of Martlesham Creek to the Finn valley, for the most part located within the southern portion of the large parish of Woodbridge (Map 1). The placename ‘Kingston’ indicates a holding which originated as part of a royal estate, subsequently granted—perhaps in the late tenth century—to the abbey of Ely.7 Domesday Book confirms Ely’s possession of the manor of Kingston, which at that time contained two carucates of land, including meadow, woodland, and 14 dependent tenants.8 By around 1100 Kingston was one of the landed possessions allocated internally within the monastery to the prior and convent of Ely.9 The manor was small in comparison to the priory’s other classic demesne manors in East Anglia, such as Lakenheath with its >500-acre arable demesne and >600 acres of unfree land.10 Indeed, it was too small and too far from Ely (some 60 miles) to justify dedicating a team of officials exclusively to its management, and instead was managed by estate officials based at Melton, four miles to the north (see Map 1), which was Ely’s main manor and administrative centre in east Suffolk.11 The manorial court of Kingston was sometimes held at Melton.12
MAP 1 ABOUT HERE
Map 1. Location and vicinity of the manor of Kingston, Suffolk.
The first half of the fourteenth century
The fourteenth century was a period of dramatic contrasts. The first half was characterized by extreme pressure of population on resources, a high proportion of underemployed and landdeficient rural dwellers, persistent taxation, turbulent weather, and episodic food shortages.13 The social and economic pressures of this period were felt keenly in Suffolk, which at this time by one estimate was the fourth most densely populated county in England and where the average size of landholdings—under five acres—was pitifully small.14 Low wages, high grain prices, and full rent rolls worked to the advantage of landlords. In late 1348, however, the conditions of chronic overpopulation were suddenly and brutally eradicated with the arrival of the Black Death, which within one year had killed around one half of the population of England. For the rest of the century, land was relatively abundant and labour relatively scarce, creating opportunities for the survivors among the mass of the populace to improve their circumstances: on the flip side, however, landlords—and especially institutional landlords such as the priory of Ely—faced the prospect of declining revenues from land, rising wage bills, squeezed agricultural profits, and a consequent loss of revenue. We will consider how Kingston fared in each half of the century, interspersed with a brief assessment of the immediate impact of the Black Death.
At the opening of the fourteenth century the demesne resources of Kingston comprised 34 acres of arable land, woodland capable of producing mature timber, a watermill, pastures, and meadows.15 In this period many English landlords exploited their manors directly, consuming some of the produce directly and selling the rest to raise cash, but the demesne resources at Kingston were too meagre, and the manor was too far from Ely, to justify transporting its agricultural produce back to supply the priory. In the first three decades of the century the priory exploited the demesne arable directly, opting to sell most of the grain locally (generating around 25s. each year) whilst transferring small quantities to the manor at Melton.16 By the 1340s the direct management had ceased, and instead the demesne was routinely leased to third parties. In 1340-1 it was leased in two parcels, one of 19 acres to Sir John de Seckford and the other of 15 acres to Christina le Hewe and ‘lord [dominus] Roger her son’: de Seckford was a local, lay, manorial lord and Roger le Hewe was parson of the church of nearby Newbourne.17 By leasing the demesne for cash, the priory had no use itself for either the 45 labour services due from its unfree tenants each year, which were routinely commuted for 3s. 9d., or for the 46 hens at Christmas and 190 eggs at Easter owed as rent, which were collected and immediately sold for around 8s. per annum.18
It is impossible to know the area of land held by the priory’s tenants, but at £5 11s. 0d. the annual assize rents comprised the largest single source of revenue on the manor, and hint that the tenanted land extended to well over 100 acres of land (Table 1). This ‘peasant’ land was fully occupied, because the ‘decays’ of rent of 4s. per annum in the 1330s and 1340s (Table 1) derive from a technical accounting device rather than from unoccupied land. It included rents from both free and unfree land, although we cannot know the split between the two. One of the main functions of manorial courts was to record the transfers of land held on customary tenure, because under the common law the title to customary land belonged to the lord of the manor and could be defended only in the lord’s own court. The priory was alert to ensure that all such transfers were registered in its manorial court rolls, because on one occasion the homage (i.e. those required to attend the court) was amerced 40d.—a relatively large sum—for not reporting a known transfer.19 Transfers of freehold land were not recorded in the court.
Customary landholdings on many of Ely’s demesne manors in East Anglia were retained as large, standardized, holdings, such as the 15-acre half virgates at Lakenheath and the 40-acre full-lands at Brandon.20 At Kingston, however, customary landholdings were irregular and small: the largest documented transfer involved a holding of one messuage and 11 acres of arable land, but most transfers were of holdings no larger than an acre or two. Perhaps customary landholdings here had always been small and irregularly sized, although some had undoubtedly become fragmented through sales as pressure on landed resources mounted across the thirteenth century and a market in customary land developed: this would offer the best explanation for the existence of one parcel comprising ‘the third part of half an acre’ of arable land.21 Few of these holdings lay in contiguous blocks, but instead were mostly scattered as small parcels of either tiny enclosures or strips within the irregular open fields. For example, one unfree holding of 1½ acres was split between eight separate parcels of land.22 Some parcels belonging to the manor of Kingston lay in the neighbouring vill of Little Bealings—one is described as adjacent to Little Bealings church—and conversely residents of other settlements held land in Kingston.23
Almost all villein land at Kingston was held on service tenure, a customary package of rent based on a mixture of payments in cash (a fixed annual sum), in kind (hens and eggs) and labour services: tenants were also liable to render a fine for entering the holding, and tallage fixed at a farthing per holding each year.24 There is no record of fines for breaching mill suit. Similarly, heriot was rarely collected on the death of a tenant, which reflected the regional custom of waiving heriot on post-mortem transfers if an entry fine was paid by the heir.25 The formula used to describe these service tenancies in the court rolls was highly standardized: the tenant, usually an adult male, held the land ‘for him and his brood (sequela) for services and customs at the will of the lord, saving the right, etc.’.26 Thus, the language of the grant emphasized the base nature of the tenure (‘brood’, held at the lord’s will), but also confirmed the tenant’s possession of some heritable rights (‘to him and his’) and some security of tenure (‘saving the right’ implied claims to tenure were respected). The incidents of personal servility—i.e. those imposed on individuals as hereditary serfs, as opposed to tenants of unfree land—hardly feature at Kingston. Merchet was unusual, leyrwite is not recorded, chevage—a licence to live away from the manor—was seldom recorded, and there were no restrictions on educating serfs or allowing them to join holy orders, a prohibition characteristic of many great ecclesiastical estates.27 Thus, serfdom weighed lightly on this manor: labour services were light and commuted for cash each year, tallage was fixed at a very low level, mill suit was not enforced, and few of the incidents of personal servility were enforced. This was unusual for a manor on the estate of a great ecclesiastical lord in the pre-plague era, but highly typical of the small manors which dominated medieval England.
The revenue from the annual cash rents of customary and free holdings, and from the sales of the rents in kind and labour, constituted the priory’s main source of revenue from Kingston in the first half of the fourteenth century (see Table 1). None of the customary land had been converted to leasehold, so income from leases was insignificant until bolstered by the leasing of the demesne in the 1340s. The income from the manor court was variable, depending on both the volume of business and the level of fines, but it was consistently the next main source of revenue. Very few details have survived about the mill, which was probably a water mill situated somewhere along the north side of Martlesham Creek or along the Finn valley. It was leased each year to an unnamed third party for around 30s. Thus, by the 1340s the management of Kingston was geared towards generating rental income, including the demesne mill and arable land, and from the land rents of its dependent peasantry. The manor generated a cash surplus of just over £10 each year, which was sent to the monastery at Ely. Hence, whether assessed by its acreage or value, Kingston was a small manor.
Table 1. Principal sources of revenue at Kingston, and cash payments sent to the priory at Ely, 1332 to 1393
The Black Death The Black Death swept through East Anglia between February and July 1349, killing around half the population.28 There is insufficient information from extant sources to identify the exact date of the pandemic’s arrival at Kingston or the death rate, although other manors in its vicinity were recording deaths from February 1349.29 No account roll has survived from Kingston for the plague year, and the earliest court session dates from October 1349 when the pandemic had already passed through the manor: the session does, however, reveal signs of its passage in the form of abandoned unfree landholdings following the recent deaths of their tenants and the difficulties in locating heirs.30 Courts held in December 1349, and March and July 1350, document the gradual reoccupation of that land, with a spate of five marriages now that some younger survivors had acquired sufficient land and perhaps some other assets to establish a separate household.31
In October 1349 there were at least five villein holdings still lying abandoned in the hands of the lord following the deaths of their tenants earlier in the year, which in December was reduced to three holdings when two heirs came forward to claim their inheritance.32 Parcels of land were still lying untenanted over a year later, because in 1350-1 decays of rent were double the level of 1348, albeit both were small sums (Table 1). Furthermore, no tithes were paid in that year (Table 3): their absence must reflect a combination of greatly reduced grain production—due to the demographic collapse and poor weather—and a charitable decision not to collect any tithes, because it is inconceivable that no grain had been harvested. Tithes were paid in 1352-3, although the level was barely one third of the level of the 1340s and remained low for the next four years (Table 3). Likewise, the mill could not be leased in 1350 or early 1351, until eventually a new lessee came forward willing to pay six shillings for the rest of 1351, which was barely one quarter of the level attained in the 1340s (Table 3).33 Based on the recovery of mill income and tithe sales (see below), it was not until the late 1350s that peasant grain production recovered to something like the levels of the 1340s,.
The villein land market proved relatively resilient in the face of the pandemic, because most of the holdings abandoned by dead tenants had been re-occupied by the end of the 1350s. Although decays of rent on account of non-payment had doubled between the late 1340s and early-1350s (Table 1), even at their highest point in 1355 they comprised no more than one tenth of total rents of assize, before falling and stabilizing in the late 1350s. The explanation for the rapid and relatively full take up of land after such a devastating pandemic is twofold. First, acute land hunger in the 1340s meant that many survivors were landless and land deficient and therefore eagerly seized the opportunity to acquire land. Second, for newcomers to the land market the small land parcels characteristic of this manor were cheaper and less risky to acquire, and less challenging to manage, than large standardised landholdings.34 The lord’s income from the manorial court income was variable each year and displayed some resilience, generating around 86s. per annum in the 1340s and 80s. in the 1350s (Table 2): in other words, the survivors of the Black Death must have been paying twice as much per head to the court, given the likely halving of the population. The heightened turnover of land in the wake of successive epidemics would have generated more curial income through entry fines, but the priory might also have been defending its jurisdictional interests more vigorously through enforcement waves on, for example, dilapidating buildings (see below).
The relative buoyancy of land rents and court income in the 1350s (Table 1) is, in fact, a statement of revenue owed rather than revenue collected by the lord’s officials. Reading manorial accounts can sometimes be an exercise in distinguishing accounting practice from reality, because the final sums were settled at the audit of the account at the year’s end and recorded through adjustments at the foot of the account. To exemplify this point, table 2 records the difference between the court income officially due for the accounting year (i.e. Michaelmas to Michaelmas), as recorded in the body of the account, and the amounts which the auditors formally acknowledged were, in fact, uncollectable when reckoning with local officials at the foot of the account. The information in Table 2 reveals how the due court income was always collected in full in the 1330s and 1340s, but in the 1350s the auditors formally recognized that in most years up to 10% of court revenue was unpaid and uncollectable. These sums represent those formally written off by the auditors, but there were also further unpaid court fines, and indeed rents, which had not yet been formally written off and instead were carried forward as arrears to the next year. The fluctuating level of arrears—the monies owed by manorial officers because they had not been paid in a previous account—recorded in Table 1 were minor or nonexistent in the 1330s and 1340s, but amounted to nearly ten per cent of revenues for much of the 1350s. The implication that the persistently high level of arrears in that decade was a function of difficulties in actually collecting all of the due rents and court income is further suggested by the fall in the cash sums generated by the manor and sent back to Ely, which slumped by over one third from an average of £13 each year in the 1340s to £9 between 1350 and 1357 (Table 1).
No accounts or court rolls have survived to document the passage of the second plague pandemic in 1361-2, although a court held in October 1363 notes that John dil Fen had died holding land ‘at the time of the pestilence’, but his son Peter was an outlaw and therefore could not be admitted as the heir, and so the land was granted to a new tenant instead. The 1362-3 account notes the recent death of Sir John de Seckford and the abandonment of the 19 acres of demesne arable he was leasing.35 Disruption is hinted by the low cash sum of £4 sent to Ely in 1362-3, but otherwise there is little to suggest that the second pandemic—or indeed the third of 1369—had a significant impact on the manor.
The later fourteenth century
Despite the appalling cull of the human population in successive pandemics, from the late 1350s to the mid-1370s many aspects of the management of Kingston retained a semblance of normality and continuity. The sums of money sent back to Ely returned almost to pre-plague levels, the level of arrears dropped (Table 1) and the due court income was largely paid in full once again (Table 2). The arable demesne continued to be leased on competitive rates: for example, the 19-acre parcel of demesne, which in the 1340s had been rented to Sir John de Seckford for 4s. 9d. each year, was in 1363 leased to John Bredheg for 6s. 8d.36 The manor also bolstered its generation of cash with occasional sales of fuel or mature timber from the demesne woodland. For example, 20s. 10d. was raised in 1362-3 from the sale of underwood (for fuel).37
Demand for land remained reasonably buoyant at Kingston throughout the 1360s and 1370s. On many East Anglian manors, the sudden shift from a chronic shortage of land in the 1340s to a sustained surfeit from the 1350s had two main consequences: a rise in the area of arable land left abandoned and reverting to scrub pasture, and rapid tenurial change on villein land as lords perforce made concessions to retain existing and attract new tenants in the drastically changed market conditions.38 The most common tenurial change was to convert the old villein service tenancies to leaseholds, which were fixed-, and usually short-, term grants for a straight cash rent, replacing the former mixed package of labour services, renders in kind, and servile incidents such as heriot and entry fines.39 At Kingston, however, villein land continued to held on the old service tenure, albeit with all the labour services commuted for cash each year, and the poultry and egg renders immediately sold. Furthermore, the buoyancy of rental income in the 1360s and 1370s, coupled with the low level of arrears and decays, indicate that most of the arable land was once again fully occupied after the initial shock of the first pandemic.
The recovery in the customary land market at Kingston was partly due to the predominantly small size of its land parcels, and their relatively light and cash-based rent package, when plague struck. Most survivors of plague sought to augment their holdings cautiously, with an acre here and there, rather than to plunge into an uncertain world by risking the acquisition of a very large landholding. Furthermore, now that their labour was scarce and accordingly valuable, they sought rent packages such as those already in existence at Kingston which were not burdened by a requirement to perform heavy labour services. Demand for land locally was also stimulated by the relative prosperity of nearby Woodbridge, which was emerging as a port handling dairy and meat products—both in demand in the post-plague era—produced on the clays of High Suffolk and bound for distant urban markets.40
Despite the many signs of continuity in the running and profitability of the manor in the 1360s and 1370s, careful inspection of the extant documents reveals signs of some post-plague changes. The mass mortalities in 1349 and 1361 meant that much of the pre-plague housing stock was now surplus to requirements, providing the priory with an opportunity to raise some ready cash from either selling the timber from redundant housing or fining villein tenants for licences to demolish the houses and agricultural buildings. For example, in 1355-6 13s. was raised from the sale of old timbers from a disused house and barn.41 A feature of the handful of surviving courts from the 1360s is a sudden spike in presentments for allowing ‘wastage’ on villein buildings. These dilapidating houses would have been low quality constructions, but the lord could fine tenants for any loss of the capital value of a villein tenement. Initially, some fines were sizeable: William Grymundson paid 40d. to be exonerated from having to rebuild one old house on his holding in October 1363 and an additional 2s. for wasting another building the following year.42 This seigniorial tactic of asserting an ancient customary right under villeinage presented a means of extracting cash to protect the levels of curial income in the post plague era.
Before the plague chevage payments for serfs to live off the manor were only recorded very occasionally at Kingston, such as the hen rendered by each of the three male serfs who were away in 1334-5.43 After the Black Death, however, the priory became more sensitive to the emigration of serfs from the manor, given the general shortages of labour. Consequently, the recording of such absences became more frequent and more forthcoming about their whereabouts. The lord now required payment for absence in cash rather than in poultry. The 1356-7 account includes receipt of 7d. for ‘chevage’ and again in 1358-9, although in the latter it was labelled ‘capitage’ due ‘from diverse neifs of the lord, because they do not hold land from the lord this year’.44 The same sum was rendered every year through the 1360s, increasing to 8d. in the 1370s, although it is not stated how many individuals were contributing.45 In the 1380s, however, Thomas dil Fen and Alex Luss were paying a combined total of 18d. ‘for licence to live wherever they wished’, and in the 1390s the accounts are explicit that Thomas was choosing to live in Great Yarmouth (Norfolk) and Alex in Harwich (Essex).46 Indeed, as early as 1369 the Kingston court had noted Thomas’s departure to Yarmouth and also that his brother, Richard, had left around the same time and settled at Guston, a small port near the estuary of the river Deben.47 Overall, this does not amount to much information about the scale and direction of emigration from Kingston, although it does point to the close links between its residents—who lived next to the tidal river Deben—and other ports.
There is very little other information about serfdom on the manor after the Black Death, which indicates that what few incidents were enforced in the pre-plague era quickly disappeared thereafter. There are no disputes over personal status, which feature on some other manors in the 1350s as lords tried to keep track of hereditary serfs, and no presentments of local wage earners under the provisions of the Statute of Labourers.
From the mid-1370s the size of the cash lump sum sent to Ely each year dropped, and it also became more variable from year to year: overall, in the last quarter of the fourteenth century the sum was closer to £8 per annum, compared with the £11 of the first half of the century (Table 1). The collapse of tithes in the mid-1380s (Table 3) is reflective of a major downturn in the general fortunes of arable farming across England.48 The cold economic chill is evident locally in the decisions in 1386 of two tenants, John Bronde and Roger Langsweyn, to relinquish their leases of arable land, which remained uncultivated and therefore had to be leased as pasture to the canons of Woodbridge priory: at the same time, there is a first reference to the lease of a sheepwalk for 60s. each year, another indication that arable was reverting to pasture.49 By the 1380s agriculture here was swinging decisively to pastoral pursuits.50 By the 1420s a small rabbit warren had been established on heathland.51
Tithes
The Kingston accounts include information about tithes collected from parishioners. It is unusual for manorial accounts to contain such information, because tithes were payable to the rector of the parish church and not to the lord of the manor. Tithe information may find its way into manorial accounts, however, when the rector was an ecclesiastical landlord who was also the lord of the main manor in the same parish. In such circumstances, the lord’s officials might choose to enter the collection of tithes in the manorial account for administrative convenience, rather than recording them separately. Ely abbey was not the rector of any of the three surrounding parishes (Bealings, Martlesham or Woodbridge), however, and the quantities recorded in the Kingston accounts are small and confined mainly to renders of grain. Evidently, the priory had the right to collect a portion of the tithes in the parish, presumably those relating to all or part of its manor. The inclusion of this information does, however, provide some exceptional insights into peasant grain production.52
Tithes were collected at the rate of ten per cent of the gross produce of grain, eggs, lambs, wool, flax, hemp, pigeons, and hay produced within the parish. The information relating to Kingston is presented in Table 3, which shows that the manor collected just grain tithes, and a little hay, but no other form of tithes. In the 1330s the accounts recorded quantities of grain only. From 1340 they ceased recording quantities of grain and instead entered an annual cash sum from the sales of tithes. It is unclear whether the priory now required its parishioners to render the cash equivalent of 10% of their grain harvest or whether its officials were still collecting the grain, but then selling it locally to raise ready cash. It is also possible that the cash sums from 1340 represent the lease of the tithes to a local person, which was a common enough practice elsewhere. Yet one would expect such a lease to be granted for a number of years, for the annual sum to be fixed and rounded, and for the arrangement to be entitled ‘farm of tithes’: the Kingston account records these as ‘sales’, which, together with the highly variable and nonrounded, sums each year, support that interpretation. The arrangements changed again in the 1380s, when the quantities of grain collected are once again recorded, although this time with their sale value also stated.
Table 3. Tithe receipts recorded in manorial accounts of Kingston, 1333 to 1392
Between 1333 and 1339, and after 1386, the accounts specify the type and quantity of tithe grain collected. Although the quantities are small, we can express the volume of each category of grain collected as tithe as a proportion of all grain collected as tithe, thereby presenting rare insights into the production strategies on peasant holdings. These are broken down into time series in Table 4.
In the 1330s peasant grain output was dominated by rye—as the main winter sown grain—and oats in the spring. Table 4 also includes the proportion of demesne-sown grain sown in 1296-7, when it was being exploited directly: these are not tithes, of course, but the information is included to compare the sowing strategies of the lord with those of the local peasantry, as revealed through tithes. The balance of crops was broadly similar. This was a period of extreme pressure exerted on the resource base by over-population and consequently low standards of living for the majority of the people, which placed a premium on the production of cheaper and higher yielding grains, such as oats and rye. These grains were also easier to grow on the light and sandy soils of east Suffolk.53
After the Black Death sales of tithes settled at a mean of 23d. per annum, which was nearly 40 per cent lower than the 1340s mean of 36d. Put crudely, grain production per capita was perhaps 50 per cent higher after the Black Death, which would be consistent with higher levels of consumption among survivors. The data from 1386 to 1393 reveal that the reduction in the quantities of grain produced was also characterized by a significant shift in the composition of grain grown on peasant holdings, with a notable swing away from rye and oats towards barley and a small amount of peas. Barley produced higher quality bread than oats, and also higher- grade malt, both of which were in demand after the Black Death when the living standards of ordinary people had risen and they were increasingly picky about their food. Peas could be used as fodder for livestock which, together with the first references to hay tithes (table 4), reflects the post-plague swing from arable to pastoral pursuits. Peas were even more important between 1410 to 1432, perhaps reflecting an accelerating demand for fodder, although their importance might be connected to the sudden increase in wheat production. As a leguminous crop, peas fix nitrogen in the soil and therefore might have been used to prepare the ground better for a wheat crop on the same parcel of land the following year. Overall, the swing to barley and wheat reflects the post-plague change in consumption patterns among the peasantry, and the swing to peas and the continued importance of oats reflect the heightened demand for quality fodder crops.
Conclusion
Small manors (<300 acres) proliferated in medieval England, but to date they have not featured proportionately in academic studies due to lower survival-rates of documents and the difficulties of accessing them. The updated and online cataloguing of manorial documents in the MDR, curated in the Discovery platform of TNA, has helped historians to identify the existence and whereabouts of the precious extant sources relating to such manors, as a consequence of which they are beginning to feature more in scholarly studies. Kingston is one such manor. It comprised over 150 acres of arable land, of which less than one quarter was the lord’s own demesne land. Overall, the demesne resources were limited and narrow: a small acreage of arable was supplemented by a small area of mature woodland, a mill and some pasture and meadow. The burdens of villein tenure, and the incidents imposed on hereditary serfs, were light, and largely commuted for cash each year.
Although Kingston is typical of most English manors in terms of size and structure, it is atypical in its ownership: most small manors were held by low-status lords who lived onsite or close by, not by one of the greatest Benedictine monasteries in the country. Such manors would usually have been managed directly by their gentry lords, generating a combination of produce and cash. In contrast, after a short period of direct exploitation in the early fourteenth century, the prior and convent of Ely leased out the demesne resources of Kingson to a variety of local tenants. The manor was too small, and too far from Ely, to produce worthwhile quantities of produce for consumption by the monastic community. Instead, it managed the manor to generate cash each year, a strategy in which it was reasonably successful: Kingston generated around £10 per annum for most of the century, despite the ravages of the Black Death in 1349 and the subsequent halving of the population. The manor coped with this catastrophe relatively well, recovering land occupation and rental income in the 1360s and showing signs of decline only towards the end of the century.
This study has illustrated the type of information which can be extracted from the manorial court rolls and accounts of a small manor, and how it can be utilized to illuminate aspects of local life. The material gleaned from the accounts and court rolls is considerably enhanced in the case of Kingston, because, unusually, the lord possessed the right to collect some grain tithes within the parish—probably from its manorial tenants—and included this information within the accounts. This provides rare but important insights into peasant production preferences, especially as the data enable us to reconstruct their responses to the dramatically changed market conditions after 1349. The tithe data reveal that the quantities of grain produced inevitably fell after the Black Death, but the balance of crops swung sharply towards the higher quality malting and bread grains, and to fodder crops to support commercial livestock rearing. This reinforces the view that agriculture in this area of England was commercialized and highly responsive to market opportunities, and this responsiveness increased after the Black Death. Overall, this study has demonstrated a major point made in the Introduction to this issue of Archives: manorial documents provide exceptional insights into local life at a formative period in the march of England to modernity.
* The author is the Professor of Later Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.
1		The seminal works are: Manorial Records of Cuxham, Oxfordshire, circa 1200-1359, ed. Paul D.A. Harvey (Oxfordshire Record Society, 50, 1976); P.D.A. Harvey, Manorial Records (London : British Records Association, 1984); P.D.A. Harvey, ‘English Estate records’, in Britnell, R.H., ed., Pragmatic Literacy, East and West 1200-1330 (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 107-18. See also The English Manor c.1200 to c.1500, ed. Mark Bailey (Manchester, 2002)
2		Evgeny A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1956), pp. 95-103; B.M.S. Campbell and K. Bartley, England on the Eve of the Black Death. An Atlas of Lay Lordship, Land and Wealth, 1300-49 (Manchester, 2006), pp. 80–6.
3		For a discussion and examples of material from such lesser manors, Manorial account rolls and rentals of Walsham le Willows, 1327 to 1559, eds. Audrey McLaughlin and Mark Bailey (Suffolk Records Society, 68, 2025), pp. xiii-xxv.
4		Mark Bailey, Medieval Suffolk. An Economic and Social History 1200 to 1500 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 27-34.
5		Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL) EDC 7/14/C/1 to 36, the Stoke account is /19.
6		CUL EDC 7/14/B/1 to 5.
7		Keith Briggs and Kelly Kilpatrick, A Dictionary of Suffolk Place Names (Nottingham, 2016), p. 83.
8		Alex Rumble, ed., Domesday Book, Suffolk: Part Two (Chichester, 1986), 21,53.
9		Walter A. Copinger, The Manors of Suffolk, volume 4 (Manchester, 1909), p. 329, although in 1309-10 money from Kingston was transferred to the sacrist of Ely, not the prior and convent, CUL EDC 7/14/C/3.
10		Edward Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 87-9; M. Bailey, ‘The prior and convent of Ely and its management of the manor of Lakenheath in the fourteenth century’, in eds Michael J. Franklin and Christopher Harper-Bill, Ecclesiastical Studies in Honour of Dorothy M. Owen (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 2-4.
11		Miller, Abbey and Bishopric, map 1.
12		CUL EDC 7/14/B/1, courts held October 1349 and 1352.
13		Summarised in Bruce M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition (Cambridge, 2016); and Phillipp R. Schofield, ‘Peasants and food security in England and Wales c.1300’, in Journal of Medieval History, 49:5 (2023), pp. 588606.
14		Bruce M.S. Campbell, ‘Benchmarking medieval economic development: England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, c.1290’, in Economic History Review, 60:4 (2008), table 14.
15		CUL EDC 7/14/C/16 for the 35-acre demesne; /18 for 15s. of underwood sold from Edwardshaugh, and /29 for £6 15s. 10d. of timber from Redwalle; /34 for the lease of a sheepwalk to the rector of Waldringfield; and /41 for the warren.
16		CUL EDC 7/14/C/1 to 10.
17		CUL EDC 7/14/C/16. De Seckford held the manor of Seckford in Great Bealings, Walter A. Copinger, The Manors of Suffolk, volume 3 (Manchester, 1909), p. 6. I am grateful to Christopher Whittick for identifying le Hewe as parson of nearby Newbourne church,
https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/results/r?_dss=range&_sd=1340&_ed=1370&_q=Roger+le+Hewe accessed 7/12/2025.
18		CUL EDC 7/14/C/11, 14, 16.
19		CUL EDC 7/14/B/4.
20		Bailey, ‘Lakenheath’, p. 3.
21		CUL EDC 7/14/B/1 to 5.
22		CUL EDC 7/14/B/1 and 3.
23		CUL EDC 7/14/C/11 for the Bealings parcel: see also Copinger, Manors of Suffolk, volume 3, p. 10 for Ely’s smallholding in Little Bealings. CUL EDC 7/14/B/2, court held in early October 1352 when John le Smith of Seckland surrendered land in Kingston.
24		For tallage, see CUL EDC 7/14/C/18.
25		For two heriots, see CUL 7/14/C/4. For the regional custom, Mark Bailey, ‘Villeinage in England: a Regional Case Study c.1250–1349’, in Economic History Review, 62 (2009), pp. 445-6.
26		Plenty of examples in the earliest extant court rolls from the 1350s, CUL EDC 7/14/B/1.
27		See, for example, Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680-1540 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 273 and Mark Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2014), p. 46.
28		Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, pp. 176-80.
29		Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, p. 177.
30		CUL EDC 7/14/B/1.
31		CUL EDC 7/14/B/1, three merchets (average 18d.) and two marriages without licence.
32		CUL EDC 7/14/B/1.
33		CUL EDC 7/14/C/18.
34		Mark Bailey, After the Black Death. Economy, Society and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2021), pp. 86-102, 142-53.
35		CUL EDC 7/14/C/25.
36		CUL EDC 7/14/B/4, court held October 1363; CUL EDC 7/14/C/16.
37		CUL EDC 7/14/C/25.
38		Phillipp R. Schofield, ‘Tenurial Developments and the Availability of Customary Land in a Later Medieval Community’ in Economic History Review, 49:2 (1996), pp. 250-67; Bailey, Decline of Serfdom, pp. 287-93, 311-22.
39		Bailey, After the Black Death, pp. 86-102.
40		Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, p. 283.
41		CUL EDC 7/14/C/21.
42		CUL EDC 7/14/B/4.
43		Their location is not stated, CUL EDC 7/14/C/14.
44		CUL EDC 7/14/C/22 and 23.
45		CUL EDC 7/14/C/24 to 32.
46		CUL EDC 7/14/C/33 to 36.
47		CUL EDC 7/14/B/5. For Guston, see M. Bailey, P. Wain and D. Sear, ‘The transformation of the Suffolk coast
1200 to 1600: from Orford Ness to Goseford’, in Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, 45:1 (2021), fig. 30 and pp. 102-3.
48		Bailey, After the Black Death, pp. 241-9.
49		CUL EDC 7/14/C/36.
50		Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, pp. 204-30.
51		CUL EDC 7/14/C/41.
52		The best treatment of this material is Ben Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East. The Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536 (Woodbridge, 2005).
53		Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, pp. 75-8.