Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 279

The Winchester pipe rolls – the series of enrolled accounts of the manors of the Winchester bishopric estate, the earliest of which dates from 1208/9 – offer many riches to the agricultural historian. One is the information they contain on the entry fine, or the money paid by peasant tenant to landlord in the manor court whenever a villein or customary landholding was taken up by a new owner, and on similar fines paid on the marriage of a customary tenant, an occasion which often involved land transfer. These entry and marriage fines and their accompanying details represent a formidable body of evidence for the peasant land market. This book analyses thousands of fines, taking as its start date 1262/3, the year from which a new arrangement of the relevant entries in the sources permits systematic analysis. Collectively, the fines provide a rich picture of the inheritance, sale, and leasing of peasant tenements on well over 50 manors scattered across seven southern English counties.

The volume is the culmination of two major research projects that ran between 1996 and 2003. Mullan has published some project results in previous chapters and articles, and Mark Page, who undertook the original data collection on the period to 1349, has published others. It is only with the appearance of the present book, however, that one can begin to appreciate the sheer quantity of data generated by the projects, as well as the wide range of issues in the study of the peasant land market upon which this information sheds light. The book’s detailed findings are set in context through an introductory chapter by Paul Harvey, which surveys previous work in the field.

The eight substantive chapters begin with a discussion (ch. 2) of the conditions on the bishop’s estate, which provides the context in which the market in peasant property evolved. The next two chapters describe the units of property transferred, and the tenure by which they were held. While unfragmented standard units (virgates, half virgates etc.) were very important, the traffic in a range of miscellaneous plots of unvirgated land and of cottages, messuages, and houses is a central theme. Then, in Chapters 5 to 9, the fines are used to trace the major changes in land transfer patterns over the period. There is a special focus on the extent to which transfers took property outside the family and to the degree to which inter-vivos rather than post-mortem transfer predominated. The book’s broader findings are in many respects in line with the existing picture, describing the population losses of the fourteenth century that lead to a breakdown of links between family and property and to the emergence of a genuine market in land, which in turn permitted substantial individual accumulations.

The book does not restrict itself, however, to a broad-brush overview of the whole estate. One of the criticisms often made of the Winchester pipe rolls is that, while they yield unparalleled data, they were created by an exceptional landlord who practised a centralized and conservative estate policy. Mullan and Britnell tackle this issue head on, demonstrating how their evidence reveals variations in the land market – at the manorial and regional level – that have nothing to do with seigneurial directives, but everything to do with local conditions. In this way, they are able, using a number of examples, to show how general trends played out in specific manorial contexts.

The study is also admirably alert to the significant role of subletting. The holdings transferred between peasants represent units of ownership, and not necessarily of cultivation. Holdings could be sublet, but the extent and functioning of this practice is as yet inadequately explored. Mullan and Britnell explore it for the Winchester estate as far as they can. They find, though, that many of the recorded subleases were for lives, and conclude that shorter subletting contracts went unrecorded. Parts of the large, late medieval accumulations of holdings – such as the 100 acres or more scattered across East Meon manor, passed on by Thomas Knoller to his widow Nicola in 1399/1400 – were presumably sublet, as the authors note. However, it is difficult to observe this happening in practice.

All in all, this is an impressive study. Its generalizations about broad patterns are compelling, because they are based on such large quantities of data, while its local case studies enhance our understanding of how specific features, such as inheritance customs or soil quality, could either encourage or hold back traffic in land. It should offer a welcome stimulus to research on the medieval peasant land market.