Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 2 (2014), p. 361

Mark Bailey’s new study consciously echoes the title of Rodney Hilton’s classic short student guide, offering (amazingly) the first ever monograph on this important topic. Where others have given up in the face of a plethora of fragmented evidence buried in manorial records, Bailey has applied a clear-headed and systematic approach. Part one offers an overview, surveying the existing literature to consider the importance of serfdom in late medieval England, the chronology of its decline, and the causes of that decline. Part two examines the evidence of court rolls and accounts from 38 manors in two localities: 29 from East Anglia (mostly Suffolk) and nine from the South Midlands (mostly Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire). While the geographical coverage is far from comprehensive or even, the manors are chosen to represent different size categories and a variety of types of lords. The three main aspects of the decline of serfdom are tracked using this documentation: first, the disappearance of servile incidents such as chevage, childwyte, merchet, millsuit and tallage, along with labour services – with a particular stress on heavy week works rather than harvest works; second, the conversion of villein tenures to non-servile fixed-term tenures for money rent; and third, the disappearance of the language of servility in describing customary terms of tenure. In part 3, two concluding chapters return to the issue of timing (when did serfdom disappear on most manors?) and causation (what was the most likely cause of serfdom’s disappearance?).

The conclusions drawn from this approach are startling. Rather than finding evidence of an ‘Indian summer’ in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, when serfdom was retained or even strengthened, and life went on more or less as normal, as much of the existing literature assumes, Bailey finds that serfdom decayed immediately after the Black Death, before 1381. This was true whether disappearance is judged by the majority of customary land being converted to non-servile tenures, or by the majority of servile incidents falling into disuse. Evidence of land values from leasehold rents showed a steep decline between the 1340s and 1360s, with customary tenures not fully reoccupied until early 1360s. The growing rental income of some manors between the 1350s and 1370s was due to the replacement of labour services with money rents, in other words it was due to the weakening of serfdom not its intensification. Only one aspect of serfdom was tightened after the Black Death and particularly after 1381: a growing distinction emerged between villein tenure and personal serfdom. While villein tenure was largely no longer regarded as servile, those identified as personally unfree were labelled ‘bondmen of blood’ and charged some servile incidents, particularly chevage, more frequently than before. Thus the institution of serfdom continued to change in character even as it disappeared. The findings also include some important observations about the emergence of different forms of copyhold tenure from the collapse of serfdom. The creation of fixed-term tenures for lives or years was most common on manors which had difficulty finding tenants; these tended to be manors with standard-sized holdings, heavy labour services, and little or no land market in the pre-Black Death period. Such manors were more common in the South Midlands than in East Anglia. The fixed-term tenures of the 1350–1450 period, which were often leaseholds, later developed into copyholds for lives. The less radically reformed villein tenures on manors where demand for land remained strong, which were common in East Anglia, developed into copyhold of inheritance.

Where the study is weakest however, is in its consideration of the causes of these changes. Four main candidates for ending serfdom are suggested: manumission, resistance, migration, and economic forces underpinned by demographic change. And despite acknowledging the multi-faceted nature of historical change, the conclusion argues that the sharp decline in land values immediately after the Black Death offers the only convincing explanation of the speed and comprehensiveness of serfdom’s decline in England. Differences between manors in the timing and nature of changes are explained in terms of lordly policy, landholding structures, and levels of over-population before the Black Death. Certainly, manumission was never a serious contender for the end of serfdom in England, but resistance and migration deserve more careful consideration. Here Bailey’s rigidly systematic approach is less helpful. Evidence of popular resistance against aspects of serfdom, of which this study notes many instances, is rarely clear cut. Bailey chooses to conclude that resistance was limited, accusing other historians of cherry-picking examples of active resistance to serfdom in order to overplay its significance. But given that he is only willing to consider overt acts of resistance to servile incidents clearly recorded in the manorial documents, and that such acts are recorded in the many of the manors in his well-documented category, another historian might interpret this as widespread resistance. He is even more conservative in his interpretation of migration, only counting those people formally presented for leaving a manor as migrating to escape serfdom. Yet it remains likely that the most widespread form of resistance to serfdom was for tenants or heirs to leave the manor to which they belonged to take up land elsewhere, and that most of these cases were not presented. The unusually high turnover in tenant surnames between 1348 and 1440 surely needs to be explored in this context, but Bailey’s method does not admit evidence of tenant turnover, even when it is available in print for one the manors studied, as at Kibworth Harcourt. This is also symptomatic of the book’s sparing engagement with existing scholarship on the topic, even those studies mentioned in the bibliography. Despite these quibbles, however, this is an impressive and valuable study, which will hopefully provoke further lively debate on this important but neglected chapter in England’s economic development.