Chapter Two - The Decline of Serfdom and the Peasants’ Revolt

Summary

Some historians divided the past into periods or eras, and some identified major historical turning points. In contrast to these artificial attempts to divide history into units, researchers now examine continuity and change; features which were formerly used to identify periods, eras or turning points are recognised as the results of earlier developments and are seen to contribute to later ones. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 has often been identified as an historical turning point leading to the end of serfdom. But, while significant, it should also be seen as part of a longer transitional process.

The decline of serfdom after 1348

Social conditions, which were at least partly the results of the Black Death of about 1348, and further outbreaks of the plague later in the fourteenth century, brought about changes in the relationships between landlords and tenants and led to conflicts between them, not only in England, but also on the continent of Europe.

As a result of the depopulation caused by the plague landlords found it difficult to keep tenants under the old terms. Gradually conditions of tenure changed, and serfdom began to disappear even before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which started in the towns of Essex in response to the government's imposition of a national poll tax. While it is possible that the Peasants’ Revolt had some influence on life in Willington, Joyce Godber wrote:

The Bedfordshire villages were surprisingly quiet, as were those in Buckinghamshire… Perhaps it was the lord, rather than the customary tenant, who was getting the worst of things on the small Bedfordshire manors, and the poll-tax alone was not sufficient to incite the freemen to rise.

Even though the disturbances in Bedfordshire seem to have been few, at Willington the Mowbray family seemed to accept that change was inevitable. Their power base was too far away, at Epworth on the Isle of Axholme, to effectively control difficult villein tenants, so by 1382 the holdings had been rearranged, a new extent agreed or imposed and a new way of life begun.