A Kempston Estate in 1341

Summary

Few surveys of medieval estates in Bedfordshire, apart from those in the Hundred Rolls and the Cartulary of Ramsey Abbey, are in print and none of these date from after 1300; the extent of a lay manor in Kempston in 1341 printed below is therefore of some interest. The document presents successively a description of the farm buildings and the acreage and value of their surroundings, followed by a survey of the demesne arable, with some detail about field names and acreages. The whereabouts, size and value of demesne meadow, pasture and wood follow and are succeeded by a valuation of the fishing rights and perquisites of court. Then the tenants, first the free and then the villeins are named, together with a statement of the amount of land held by each and the obligations due. Finally the total annual value of the manor is estimated. No mention however, is made of the number of animals or the quantity of grain in the demesne nor that possessed by the tenants.

The circumstances of the manor and its lord must first be examined. Kempston, a parish on the south bank of the River Ouse with an acreage of over 5,000, one of the largest in Bedfordshire, and of irregular shape, was in the middle ages within the area of Gray’s Midland System; in this much of the arable land of the various occupiers lay in strips intermingled with each other, and after harvest was subject to common pasture rights of those who tilled the land therein; a system not abolished in Kempston until 1804.

Fourteenth-century Kempston contained four or possibly five manors, of which three originated from the division between co-heiresses in 1237 of the manor held by the Earls of Huntingdon. Although the extent does not specify to which of these manors it refers, there can be little doubt that it deals with that known later as Kempston Greys, alias Hastingsbury. The muniments of the Greys, Earls of Kent, whose family held Kempston Greys from 1389 to 1536, contain few documents irrelevant to the estate which produced them; and the small section dealing with their Kempston land is free from extraneous documents.