INTRODUCTION

Summary

The medieval tenants of the English royal manor of Havering, Essex, enjoyed exceptional autonomy. Both as individuals and as a community Havering people reaped the benefits of freedom to a degree seldom found between 1200 and 1500. This unusually large manor, containing 16,000 acres, sheltered nearly 2000 inhabitants in 1251. As residents of a manor held by the crown, the tenants profited from royal administrative neglect. As residents of a privileged manor of the ancient royal demesne, they profited from a series of special rights: free personal status, a form of tenure functionally equivalent to freehold, protective legal procedures, enhanced authority for their local court, freezing of their rents, services, and entry fines as of 1251, and exemption from market tolls. In legal and administrative terms, Havering was encumbered by little outside supervision apart from the workings of the criminal law; the latter intrusion was remedied in 1465 when the tenants obtained a charter which established Havering as a Liberty, complete with its own justices of the peace. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries taxes were levied within Havering at a lighter level than that mandated by law. The residents were thus accustomed to scant seigneurial domination and to minimal interference by other external authorities. When in a few instances individual monarchs tried to exert more effective control over Havering, the tenants resisted. Havering's participation in the Peasants' Revolt was likewise fuelled by the imposition of new demands from outside.