Chapter Eight - After the Peasants’ Revolt

Summary

This volume tells the story of a rural Bedfordshire manor following the changes in English society brought about by the drastic reduction in population in the mid fourteenth-century and the uprisings and disturbances of 1381, the Peasants’ Revolt. Although the structure and language of the manorial records suggests continuity and a hierarchical system of control, the history of Willington 1382–1522 reveals how tenants took opportunities to better themselves and their families. The lords of the manor sought to retain the value of their property and income – not necessarily successfully – while the tenants lived a relatively peaceful life within the structure of the Mowbray administration.

Willington emerges as a stable community where the custom of the manor prevailed, and the local bailiff, almost always a resident, was a pivotal figure. It was a single manor parish with an absentee landlord, so the bailiff and the tenants jointly controlled the use of the open fields from before 1066 until the purchase of Willington by a local man in 1529. There is no evidence in the medieval documents that the absentee landlords exploited their tenants or that religion dominated the lives of the population – quite the reverse. In contrast, the story of Willington's near neighbour Blunham was more vibrant, and sometimes more violent. It had a commercial legacy from a market held there during the fourteenth-century, and life may have been influenced by the presence of the small Fraternity of Blunham.

The land

Willington manor was on the western edge of what has been described as some of the best agricultural land in England, and although it had no mineral resources except clay, gravel and sand, it had a: ‘mixed and variable nature of soil types over a short distance which supported successful, mixed farming of the former demesne, the three-field system of open fields, the commons, and the woodlands.’ The tenants’ prosperity was primarily dependent on agriculture and was determined by the type and fertility of the soil and sub-soil, on the weather, and on the opportunities for the sale of produce and materials. Their arrangements for working the open fields and commons, the pasture and meadows followed unwritten customary practices. Once established, these practices were slow to change.