Jurors of the Village Court: Local Leadership Before and After the Plague in Ellington, Huntingdonshire

The Journal of British Studies

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 1991, Pages 237-256

  Olson, Sherri ^a  

^a NONE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 33645427059     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: 15456986     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/385983     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. See, e.g., J. A. Raftis, Warboys: Two Hundred Years in the Life of an English Mediaeval Village (Toronto, 1974); Edwin DeWindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth: Structures of Tenure and Patterns of Social Organization in an East Midlands Village, 1252–1457 (Toronto, 1972); Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish (Cambridge, 1980); Edward Britton, The Community of the Vill: A Study in the History of the Family and Village Life in Fourteenth-Century England (Toronto, 1978).
2. Sherri Olson, Ellington, a Village at Farm, 1280-1600: Local Traditions and Local Leadership in the Medieval and Early Modern Village Community” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1988).
3. Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (Cambridge, 1983), p. 14. Court rolls and other local records allow us to use the products of the literate tradition of medieval civilization to uncover the nonliterate tradition of the great mass of medieval people.
4. See, e.g., chap. 1, “Administration and Government,” in the second volume of J. A. Raftis'S study of the small town of Godmanchester, Early Tudor Godmanchester: Survivals and New Arrivals (Toronto, 1990); Anne DeWindt, “Self Government at Whose Command?” (a paper on the jurors of the small town of Ramsey, given at the 1989 meeting of the American Historical Association, San Francisco).
5. Britton.
6. Barbara Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 168–77, 267.
7. Rodney Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), pp. 54–58.
8. Isolating jurors as a group effectively isolates nearly all village officeholders: in the period from 1280 to 1600 only thirty-three men have been identified who held an office and who did not also serve as juror at some time. The high correlation between serving as juror and holding other office has been discussed elsewhere. See Edwin DeWindt, pp. 220–226. For a very full discussion of jurors responsibilities, see A. B. White, Self-Government at the King's Command: A Study in the Beginnings of English Democracy (Minneapolis, 1933), esp. chap. 1.
9. This periodization also helps to mitigate the problem of record survival between 1350 and 1425, particularly the years between 1407 and 1425 when neither court nor account records survive. Ellington'S court rolls are housed in the Public Record Office (PRO), London, Special Collection (SC) 2/179, and in the British Library (BL), Additional (Add.) Charters and Rolls. The account rolls are held in the PRO, SC 6/875 and 876, as well as BL Add. Charters and Rolls. Other archives consulted for the specific period under study here were the Ellington Parish Records in the County Record Office, Huntingdon, and Ellington Slade documents at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. For a fuller bibliography of primary sources for Ellington, see Olson, pp. 289–296.
10. One hundred and twenty-three men fall exactly within these dates, eighty-nine in the period 1280–1350, while six other individuals' entries extend outside this seventy-year period, for a total of ninety-five men; and thirty-four men in the period 1425–85, with twenty-nine jurors overlapping, hence a total of sixty-three. All citations, however, are counted only in the period in which they fall. This group includes men cited as jurors in the court rolls, as well as an additional eighteen men involved in similar tasks of investigation and presentment as special inquisition jurors for village, regional, and royal affairs, as well as “jurors on oath” concerning a specific case in court, all of these active in the period before 1350.
11. R. H. Britnell found the same phenomenon in postplague Colchester. See Growth and Decline in Colchester, 1300–1525 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 110. And see J. A. Raftis, “Changes in an English Village after the Black Death, Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967): 158–77. (For the 1356 court record see PRO SC 2/179/36.)
12. Figures include all offices held, not just the jurorship. The number of years reflected here is based not on a calculation of the span of continuous activity but rather on the beginning and ending dates for all officeholding activity, hence our figures are really minimum figures. The jurors whose careers overlap two periods are included by counting the years of service within one period. Thus, if a juror is cited in 1340, 1350, and 1356, his length of service is counted only as ten years in the first period (1340–50). As a final note, we omit the eighteen inquisition jurors and jurors on oath who did not also serve as main jurors, as well as two main jurors cited not by surname, but by the formula “X filius X” (e.g., Iohannes filius Willelmi), all of whom fall in the period 1280–1350, since many of the inquisition jurors activities fall in the first decade of our study, hence their official careers may largely antedate 1280. Those cited as “X filius X” may be cited elsewhere with their surname. The figure for the period 1280–1350 including these twenty men would be 9.12 years.
13. White, p. 68, has emphasized the jurors obligation to stay abreast of local developments. White was speaking of juries in general, whether in a court of shire, hundred, or vill, and also jurors whose knowledge was put to use in judicial views of various types.
14. As a note to the argument that powerful individuals of dominant families gained and kept village office based on their economic status, it is significant that the temporary poverty of a juror seems to have posed no bar to his service: two of the six citations of paupers in Ellington in the period 1280–1350 concerned jurors. Between 1432 and 1451 twelve jurors were cited either for poverty or ruinous tenements or both, and yet their official activities continued unabated throughout the period of their economic difficulties. For examples of men cited on both counts, see Robert Mokke, in the courts of 1444 and 1446; Thomas Penyell, 1432, 1444; and John Taillor, 1444 and 1446 (1444: PRO SC 6/ 876/1; 1432: SC 2/179/61; 1446: BL Add. Roll 39, 867). Judith Bennett has been able to chart variations in the public profile of individual villagers, male and female, that were dependent on a wide range of variables other than economic status, such as sex, age, birth order, marital status, and the like. See her Women in the English Medieval Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (New York, 1987), pp. 65–66 and chap. 4.
15. See the studies cited in n. 1 above for discussions of population loss. Ellington'S data are inadequate for estimating even gross population loss, although the following can be shown: on the average, about ninety-one different surnames were present in each of the seven decades between 1280 and 1350; that number fell to sixty-three in the seven decades between 1420 and 1490, a drop of more than 30 percent.
16. For a discussion of family longevity and official activity, see Edwin DeWindt (n. 1 above), pp. 213–214 and 225–27. According to DeWindt, long-term residence was not a necessary condition of jury service, but rather one factor among others which constituted the specific principles of selection and eligibility
17. Given uneven record survival, our minimal requirement for the definition of a “juror family” seems defensible.
18. This trend is even more striking in view of the fact that the records after 1425 are generally better for making direct family linkages than those of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
19. Judith Bennett, “Gender, Family and Community: A Comparative Study of the English Peasantry, 1287-1349” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1981), p. 75. 20 Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, p. 51.
20. Britton found hereditary characteristics in the jurorship in the process of “mergence,” in which fathers involved their sons in adult responsibilities before their own deaths. See Britton (n. I above), pp. 44–49.
21. Names of officials appear in a new and more systematic way in the series of election notices that first occur in the court rolls of 1360/66 (roll dated to either 1360 or 1366), 1400, and 1407 and continue in a more serial manner from the later 1420s up to 1536. These notices name the men elected to the offices of constable; beadle; bailiff; ale taster; affeeror; and less frequently hayward; collector of rents, of fines, and of the chevage; one case of a “custos camporum” (1447); and occasionally capital pledge (1460, 1465) (1360/66: BL Add. Roll 39, 738; 1400: PRO SC 2/179/45; 1407: SC 2/179/51; 1447: SC 2/179/65; 1460: SC 2/179/68; 1465: SC 2/179/70).
22. The significance of the pledge system as a method of social control is well known. For a general discussion, see J. A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Mediaeval English Village (Toronto, 1964), pp. 101-4; E. DeWindt, pp. 242-50; and Helen M. Jewell, English Local Administration in the Middle Ages (New York, 1972), pp. 158–164.
23. A breakdown of all known pledge cases between 1280 and 1438/39 shows that fully 43 percent of all cases for which a pledge was required concerned actions that were potentially or actually disruptive, e.g., false claims, violence, defamation, hamsoken, theft, receiving, raising the hue and cry unjustly, having it raised against that individual, common trespass, and the like.
24. Pledging continued after 1350, but the bulk of the known cases (524 of a total of 571, or nearly 92 percent) occur in the preplague court records.
25. Relationship is determined only by similarity of surname, thus the figures given here are minimum ones. For a discussion of the difficulties of making family linkages, see Judith Bennett, “Spouses, Siblings and Surnames: Reconstructing Families from Medieval Village Court Rolls,” Journal of British Studies 23, no. 1 (Fall 1983): 26–46.
26. According to M. Patricia Hogan, “Medieval Villainy: A Study in the Meaning and Control of Crime in an English Village,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 2 (O.S. vol. 12) (University of British Columbia, 1979), p. 208, as the risks involved in pledging increased, the effectiveness of the system was enhanced by “enlisting more authoritative pledging devices. the more reprobate the principal, the more stringent the surety.”
27. This movement beyond the village was a traditional phenomenon of rural life. For a full discussion of peasant mobility and its causes from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, see Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, pp. 129–182.
28. There were sixty-seven cases of trespass between 1280 and 1350 and 167 between 1425 and 1485. Common trespass occurred much more frequently than trespass against individuals, accounting for 85 percent and 95 percent of all cases in our periods, respectively. Similar increases in the level of trespass have been found elsewhere for the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. See E. DeWindt (n. 1 above), pp. 264–68, 271–74, and Raftis, “Changes in an English Village after the Black Death” (n. 11 above), pp. 164–165. Such a trend suggests that real change had occurred in village life and that increases in the frequency of trespass were not due to changes in record keeping or court procedure. Indeed, several types of entries disappear from the fifteenth-century court rolls, making it more difficult to track “disruptive” behavior in the later period. See n. 30 below.
29. The incidence of citations in this category decreased over time, from 510 in the period 1280–1350, to only fifty-six in the period 1425–85. Much of this decline was based on the disappearance of the pledging system: fully one-half of all citations concerning disruptive behavior for jurors and nonjurors between 1280 and 1425 were for having a pledge. The disappearance of other classes of references, such as the hue and cry and receiving strangers or persons outside tithing, also affect these figures.
30. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that men with the same surname rarely served as jurors simultaneously, even after 1350. Only three cases have been found in Ellington'S surviving court rolls, in 1299 (PRO, SC 2/179/10), 1447 (SC 2/179/65), and 1469 (SC 2/179/71).
31. For the court records of 1400, 1402, and 1405, see, respectively, PRO SC 2/179/ 45, 179/47, and 179/50. The reference to Gymber'S having been reeve “recently” appears in the account record of 1407, SC 6/875/24. Our findings for medieval Ellington bear a powerful resemblance to the situation in fifteenth-century Colchester, studied by R. H. Britnell. He noted that the economic difficulties of that period brought about an intensification of the principle that stressed the obligations of prominent families to the community. High status went “hand in hand with the assumption of financial responsibilities” in an “alliance of wealth and public responsibility.” See Britnell (n. 11 above), 227–235.
32. See J. A. Raftis and M. Patricia Hogan, eds., Early Huntingdonshire Lay Subsidy Rolls (Toronto, 1976), e.g., pp. 23–26.
33. Richard, 1316; Geoffrey, 1393; Robert, 1405-7; Roger, 1405-7; John Senior, 1425-34; John, 1426-50; and Thomas, 1459–60. Other families which illustrate this phenomenon include the Buk, Burgeys, Coten, Couper, Hicson, Hunte, and Mokke families, all prominent families in Ellington in one or both of our periods.
34. For the court records of 1432, 1452, and 1455, see, respectively, PRO SC 2/179/ 61, 179/66, and 179/67.
35. Raftis, Warboys (n. 1 above), pp. 242–43.
36. Hogan, “Medieval Villainy” (n. 28 above), p. 209. Hogan describes the tithing, e.g., as an instrument of social control and a “socializing technique,” “schooling the individual” for useful participation in village society. Ibid., pp. 197–98.
37. Ibid., pp. 188–189.
38. It is interesting to note that the election notices described earlier (n. 23 above) were, in the sixteenth century, occasionally replaced by the statement, “Et quod omnia officii sunt ut in anno precedente” (1520). Elsewhere, specific offices were so settled (taster in 1508 and 1527, and constable in 1527 and 1534/35). This obviously suggests a much more routine spirit in the election of officials in the early modern village (1508: PRO SC 2/179/80; 1520: SC 2/179/85; 1527: SC 2/179/86; 1534/35: SC 2/179/88).
39. Since Ellington'S court rolls are not continuous, our history of these men represents only a portion of their participation in village officeholding.
40. It should be noted that what might appear to be bad administration (such as the failure to collect debts and fines) may have been the effects of poverty among villagers. See Raftis, “Changes in an English Village” (n. 11 above), p. 175. Cicely Howell in Land, Family and Inheritance in Transition: Kihworth Harcourt, 1250–1700 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 48, notes that in the postplague era, the “rapid turnover of tenants and the difficulties encountered in recording transfers made rent collection an unenviable task.”
41. The number of brewers cited declined from an average per court of 13.26 in 1280–1350 to only 5.04 in 1425–85.
42. This trend has been noted in other Ramsey Abbey villages. See, e.g., Raftis, Warboys, pp. 219–221, and “Changes in an English Village,” p. 164, where it is noted that “there is more evidence for quarrels, violence and bloodshed among villagers from the court rolls for a few years of the 1360s than for a whole generation before the Black Death.”
43. See Robert Redfield'S discussion of the “organization and disorganization of culture” in his study of the culture and society of the modern peasant communities of Yucatan in The Folk Culture of Yucatan (Chicago, 1941), esp. pp. 132–134.
44. Hogan, p. 209.
45. Elaine Clark, “Debt Litigation in a Late Medieval English Vill,” in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis (Toronto, 1981), pp. 247–79, esp. pp. 259–71, explores one dimension of interpersonal relationships in terms of long-lasting credit and debt associations between villagers.
46. We must consider, even if we cannot accurately gauge, the effects of such developments on the socialization of the younger generations in the village. Barbara Hanawalt, in The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York, 1986), p. 266, points out that new families entering a village in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would not have had the same integration into the community that former tenants had had: “the mutual cooperation and community cohesion that had been built on generations of interactions and trust.”
47. That local leadership was conferred on the basis of a trust that had to be earned is made clear in the study of a modern rural parish. See Horace Miner, St Denis: A Freneh-Canadian Parish (Chicago, 1939), esp. chap. 3. One can at least speculate on the effects such extensive official activities would have had on a juror'S social and psychological development, in terms of his attitudes toward officeholding.
48. One of the larger questions that our study glances at is assessing the impact of the plague as a catalyst of change in later medieval society. In the village we can witness its effects on a truly intimate scale.
49. Miner, p. 88.