13 - Wastes, the Margins and the Abandonment of Land: The Bishop of Durham’s Estate, 1350–1480

Summary

The period from the Black Death to the later fifteenth century has presented many problems for social and economic historians. For M.M. Postan it was ‘an age of recession, arrested economic development and declining national income’. But for others such as A.R. Bridbury the period was not at all this world of economic gloom. Certain groups did suffer, but for Bridbury this was a period of ‘fundamental buoyancy and resilience’. Such extreme and contradictory views are no longer accepted. A whole plethora of work, recently summarised by John Hatcher, has suggested that the period should in fact be seen as a progression of sub-periods where quite differing economic conditions prevailed, and different groups within the economy and different sectors of the economy could and did have widely differing experiences.

There is nevertheless no doubt that this was a period of momentous change, particularly on the land, following the first visitation of the plague in 1349 and perhaps earlier. It has long been recognised that there was a fundamental change in the relationship of lords to their tenantry, and in the way that the land was managed, which reflected the impact of depopulation. The period was marked by a general withdrawal of lords from the direct exploitation of their estates. With a smaller population and the concomitant strengthening of the position of tenants, demesne farming became economically unviable. This was by no means a sudden change – the retreat was managed over a period of many decades – but by the mid-fifteenth century most lords had permanently let their demesnes, and only a few vestigial elements such as parks and home farms remained on the majority of estates. For example, on the Percy estates, which lay throughout the northern counties, Yorkshire and Sussex, there was a retreat from demesne farming so that by 1416 even on the estates in Yorkshire and Sussex, well away from the periodic instability of the Scottish border, demesnes were let at farm. Only at Alnwick, the chief seat of the family, was any land still directly managed at this time.