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Medieval merchets as demographic data: some evidence from the Spalding Priory estates, Lincolnshire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

E. D. Jones
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Type
Research Note
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Continuity and Change , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , December 1996 , pp. 459 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 Scamell, J., ‘Freedom and marriage in medieval England’, Economic History Review, second series XXVII (1974), pp. 523–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; E. Searle, ‘Freedom and marriage in medieval England: an alternative hypothesis’, ibid. XXIX (1976), 482–6; ‘Seigneurial control of women's marriage: the antecedents and function of merchet in England’, Past and Present 82 (1979), 3–43Google Scholar; see also ibid., 99 (1983), 123–60, for untitled contributions by R. Faith, P. Brand, and P. Hyams, with a reply from Searle; Bennett, J. M., ‘Medieval peasant marriage: an examination of marriage license fees in the Liber Gersumarum’, in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. Raftis, J. A. (Toronto, 1982), 193–246 (the only detailed analysis so far of an extensive list of merchets)Google Scholar; Razi, Z., Life, marriage and death in a medieval parish: economy and society in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), 45–50, 131–5, 152–3Google Scholar; Poos, L. R. and Smith, R. M., ‘Legal windows onto historical populations? Recent research on demography and the manor court in medieval England’, Law and History Review 2 (1984), 144–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, R. M., ‘Marriage processes in the English past: some continuities’, in The world we have gained, ed. Bonfield, L., Smith, R. M., and Wrightson, K. (Oxford, 1986), 52–6Google Scholar; Hanawalt, B. A., The ties that bound: peasant families in medieval England (Oxford, 1986), 197–203Google Scholar; North, T., ‘Legerwite in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’, Past and Present 111 (1986), 7, n. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldberg, P. J. P., Women, work and life-cycle in a medieval economy: women in York and Yorkshire c 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992), 204–13, 324–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, E. D., ‘The medieval merchet: a late contribution to the debate’, Medieval History 2 (3) (1992), 26–35.Google Scholar; I am analysing the Spalding Priory merchets in other contexts, particularly the place of land as a component in the calculation of its amount, the Priory's policy to it before and after the Black Death, and the respective parts played in its payment by single women, fathers, husbands, and widows, in a forthcoming article, ‘The Spalding Priory merchet evidence from the 1250s to the 1470s’.

2 Poos, and Smith, , ‘Legal windows’, 144–8.Google Scholar

3 Spalding Priory seems to have concentrated its efforts on extracting merchet from its richer villeins after 1348, but had a more comprehensive policy towards collection before the Black Death; see my forthcoming article mentioned in note 1.

4 Spalding Gentlemen's Society, Myntling Register (hereafter MR), ff. 212–69v.

5 Jones, E. D., ‘Villein mobility in the later middle ages: the case of Spalding Priory’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 36 (1992), 151–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 I have given these attention elsewhere: see Jones, E. D., ‘Going round in circles: some new evidence for population in the later middle ages’, Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989), 329–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 I have likewise examined these elsewhere: see Jones, E. D., ‘The medieval leyrwite: a historical note on female fornication’, English Historical Review CVII (1992), 945–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Leyrwite was the payment from a serf to a lord as a punishment for sexual misdemeanours.

8 Chevage was the payment from a villein to a lord for permission to live outside the lord's jurisdiction.

9 By way of explanation, the ‘Fathers’, ‘Single females’ and ‘Husbands’ columns indicate numbers of merchets paid on behalf of the women by the different designated groups; the ‘Others’ column indicates merchets paid by other relatives such as brothers or mothers; the ‘For widows’ column indicates merchets paid for widows, invariably by their husbands; the ‘Widows to’ column indicates merchets paid by widows themselves in order to remarry; and the final column indicates merchets paid by serfs to marry freemen or outside the Priory's jurisdiction. I have amalgamated such marriages in the final column, because they amounted to the virtual loss of the female serfs. See Hyams, P. R., ‘The proof of villein status in the Common Law’, English Historical Review LXXXIX (1974), 738–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Poos, and Smith, , ‘Legal windows’, 147, n. 60.Google Scholar

11 Hallam, H. E., ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, Economic History Review, second series 10 (1957–1958), 341.Google Scholar

12 Jones, E. D., ‘Death by document: a re-appraisal of Spalding Priory's census evidence for the 1260s’, Nottingham Medieval Studies XXXIX (1995), 65.Google Scholar

13 Smith, R. M., ‘Hypothèses sur la nuptialité en Angleterre aux XIII–XIV siècles’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 38 (1983), 120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Poos, and Smith, , ‘Legal windows’, 145–7.Google Scholar

15 These censuses were the subject of vigorous debate between H. E. Hallam and J. C. Russell over thirty years ago, with more recent analysis of them by Smith. On all of this, see Jones, , ‘Death by document’, 57.Google Scholar

16 One of these is with names. For example, in my Weston calculations, I have included Lecia, daughter of Ringolf, as she appears in the Myntling Register, equating her with Lecia, daughter of Geoffrey Ringolf in the 1268/1269 census, on the strong likelihood that the same person is indicated, especially since Lecia paid the same sum of 4/ – as did her eldest sister, Matilda, and, also like Matilda, she paid for herself. Similarly, again for Weston, I have included an Agnes, daughter of Simon, as she appears in the Myntling Register, paying her own merchet of 6d., equating her with an Agnes, daughter of Simon Osbern, in the census, after eliminating other Simons and Agneses as possibilities. For both these cases, see British Library (hereafter BL) Add. Ms. 35296, ff. 222, 223; MR, ff. 212v, 214.

17 It must be stressed that these marriages of female serfs in Weston and Moulton are not classified as marriages of adults, though they would have had to be adult to marry, but as marriages of female children. Therefore it is probable that they might, on occasion, have been middle-aged, but not old. If one were to suppose a young marriage age of, say, 20, then female children would have had to be over 35 in 1268/1269 to have had merchet paid before 1253, and I cannot envisage many of these after an examination of the Weston and Moulton censuses. I can envisage even fewer if one were to suppose a higher marriage age of, say, 25, in which case female children would have had to be over 40 in 1268/1269 to have paid merchet before 1253. The ages of children in the two censuses range from babies onwards, but if there had been large numbers of these over 35, it would presumably have been their children, i.e. the children's children, some of whom would have been adults or approaching adulthood themselves, who would have been being investigated. Nor must it be forgotten that avoidance of the charge would have occurred before 1253 as well. See Jones, , ‘Death by document’, pp. 63–5Google Scholar, for further explanation of this point.

18 That of Matilda, daughter of Geoffrey Ringolf, previously mentioned.

19 Smith, R. M., ‘Demographic development in rural England, 1300–1348: a survey’, in Before the Black Death: studies in the crisis of the early fourteenth century, ed. Campbell, B. M. S. (Manchester, 1991), 64, n. 111.Google Scholar

20 The difference in numbers of merchets estimated by myself and Hallam may be due to the condition of the manuscript or to the nature of the information. The section of the register devoted to the merchets is in places blurred or faded, or has otherwise deteriorated. The evidence is sometimes difficult to interpret or analyse. For example, very occasionally there are two merchets paid for the same marriage, e.g. by both the father and the husband, and I have interpreted these as one for the purposes of my statistics. The sheer volume of the merchet numbers is bound to lead to discrepancies here. I have had to check the list several times, and I always come up with somewhere around 1,560 merchets.

21 The Statute of Mortmain forbade the acquisition of land by the Church without royal licence, and because this licence had to be purchased, religious houses might have cut back on land investment after 1279 because it was more costly.

22 Jones, E. D., ‘Some economic dealings of Prior John the Almoner of Spalding, 1253–74’, Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 12 (1977), 41–2Google Scholar; Jones, E. D., ‘The Crown, three Benedictine houses, and the Statute of Mortmain, 1279–1348’, Journal of British Studies 14 (1975), 8–9, 17, 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Jones, , ‘The Crown, three Benedictine houses, and the Statute of Mortmain’, 10–11, 27–8.Google Scholar

24 See below.

25 Jones, , ‘The Crown, three Benedictine houses, and the Statute of Mortmain’, 17–18.Google Scholar

26 Hallam, H. E., ‘The agrarian economy of medieval Lincolnshire before the Black Death’, Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand 11 (1964), 163–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The only drawback here is that Hallam's conclusions do not really cover all the Priory's estates.

27 The evidence for the period 1300–1348, though often pointing to decline before 1348, is mixed. See Smith, , ‘Demographic developments’, 25–77Google Scholar; Mate, M., ‘The agrarian economy of south-east England before the Black Death: depressed or buoyant?’, 79–109, both in Campbell, ed., Before the Black DeathGoogle Scholar, and in fact all the contributions to this book.; Hatcher, J. (Plague, population, and the English economy 1348–1530 (London, 1977), 63–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Mortality in the fifteenth century: some new evidence’, Economic History Review, second series 39 (1986), 19–38Google Scholar) stresses continued demographic decline into the fifteenth century and perhaps beyond.; Howell, C. (Land, family and inheritance in transition: Kibworth Harcourt 1280–1700 (Cambridge, 1983), 57Google Scholar and note) emphasizes that the full effect of the late-fourteenth-century plagues was not felt until the 1420s at Kibworth Harcourt.; Poos, L. R. (‘The rural population of Essex in the later middle ages’, Economic History Review, second series 38 (1985), 525CrossRefGoogle Scholar) writes of ‘sustained, gentle decline into the early fifteenth century, and prolonged stagnation for the remainder of the 1400s’.

28 The possibility of a recovery in population in the fifteenth century has drawn attention from later-medieval demographic historians. See for example Hatcher, , Plague, population and the English economy, 63–5Google Scholar; Gottfried, R. S., ‘Population, plague, and the sweating sickness: demographic movements in late fifteenth-century England’, Journal of British Studies XVII (1977), 12–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 The censuses reveal that 11 out of 24 females in Moulton married outside the fief, and 10 out of 53 in Weston, but in the latter case a further 23 married onto other of the Priory's holdings. See also Smith, ‘Hypothèses sur la nuptialité’, 128, and Hallam, ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, 356.

30 See also Hallam, , ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, 356, 357.Google Scholar

31 Teitelbaum, M. S., ‘Factors associated with the sex ratio in human populations’, in The Structure of Human Populations, ed. Harrison, G. A. and Boyce, A. J. (Oxford, 1972), 91.Google Scholar

32 BL, Harleian Ms. 742, f. 220.

33 Jones, , ‘Villein mobility in the later middle ages’, 158.Google Scholar

34 Kershaw, I., ‘The Great Famine and the agrarian crisis in England, 1315–22’, Past and Present 59 (1973), 3–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; For a recent discussion on the first half of the fourteenth century in general, and the Great Famine in particular, see Smith, , ‘Demographic developments’, 25–77.Google Scholar

35 This would have been most obvious in sudden jumps in numbers after heavy mortality, but Razi has pointed out that a fall would have been more likely if marriages had been postponed during this prolonged crisis. See Razi, , Life, marriage and death, 47.Google Scholar

36 See above.

37 They therefore bear out warnings by H. E. Hallam and B. M. S. Campbell against too readily seeing the Great Famine as a turning point in demographic terms. See Hallam, H. E., ‘The climate of eastern England’, Agricultural History Review 32 (1984), 127Google Scholar; Campbell, B. M. S., ‘Population pressure, inheritance, and the land market in a fourteenth-century peasant community’, in Land, kinship, and life-cycle, ed. Smith, R. M. (Cambridge, 1984), 215, 217.Google Scholar

38 Ziegler, P., The Black Death (Penguin, 1988), 254.Google Scholar

39 Whilst there is an obvious explanation for the huge rise in merchet numbers to 16 at Moulton in 1350, there is none for the rise to 14 in 1345. Between 1253 and 1477, the next highest total for Moulton is 7, so 14 for 1345 can be regarded in the fullest sense as extraordinary. Perhaps some merchet evaders were discovered, but there is no mention of unlicensed marriage.

40 Ziegler, Black Death, 180, notes the Black Death's ‘haphazard venom’; Lomas, R. (‘The Black Death in County Durham’, Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989), 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar) shows the huge discrepancies in mortality between two adjacent townships.