• Home
• Project Information
• Fine Rolls
• Style Book
• Commentary
  • Introduction to Reign
  • Introduction to Rolls
  • Originalia Rolls
  • Technical Introduction
  • Heads and Headings
• News
• Help
• Fine of the Month
• Book Publication
• Blog
• Conference
• Podcasts
• Related Papers

1. ‘The greater part of the vill was there’: the struggle of the men of Brampton against their lord. Part I

One of the most important features of the fine rolls is the evidence they provide for the litigiousness of individuals and communities at both ends of the social spectrum and of the favours even peasants believed they could successfully extract from the Crown. In the first part of a two-part article (the second part of which will be the Fine of the Month for January 2009) David Carpenter sets the scene to his analysis of a dispute between the men of Brampton (Hunts.) and their lord, Henry of Hastings, for which the Fine Rolls supply key evidence. He demonstrates the tenacity with which the unfree clung to and exercised their rights as tenants of the ancient demesne, their knowledge and memorialisation of their legal status, their capacity for communal action, and the tensions provoked within communities and between lord and tenant.

⁋1As the work of editing the fine rolls progresses beyond 1234, it becomes possible to answer a series of questions hitherto effectively closed about events in the middle years of Henry III’s reign. One question I have myself wished to pose is whether the rolls throw any light on the struggle in the 1240s of the men of Brampton in Huntingdonshire against their lord, Henry of Hastings. I first came across the struggle when reviewing Curia Regis Rolls, volume XVII, edited by Alexandra Nicoll. ¹ There, an inquiry of 1242 revealed that the men of Brampton had chased back to Huntingdon the bailiffs of the sheriff when they came to help Hastings tallage the manor, rescuing with axes and staves the cattle they had taken. ‘They do not know their names’, the jury added, ‘since the greater part of the vill of Brampton was there’. The dispute was still rumbling on in 1249 as I discovered when I subsequently reviewed Curia Regis Rolls, volume XIX, edited by David Crook. ² Was there anything about the dispute in the fine rolls? A search of the printed Excerpta revealed nothing, not surprisingly since an entry for Brampton was not likely to contain the genealogical information necessary for inclusion. Likewise, there was nothing in the detailed notes I took from the fine rolls when doing my basic research on the reign of Henry III, again not surprisingly since I had concentrated my attention, all too much, on the good and the great. The only course was thus to trawl through the original rolls looking for entries about Brampton, and for this manifold and great labour I failed to make the time.

⁋2With the rolls for the 1240s, thanks to the work of Paul Dryburgh and Beth Hartland, now appearing in English translation, with indexes and search facility, my question can at last be answered with ease. ³ There are indeed two fines made by the men of Brampton in the course of their struggle as well as a letter issued in their favour. ⁴ Simply by themselves these entries have interest since they show that peasants, or at least privileged peasants as the Bramptonians were, had access to the king, knowledge of what he could offer, and the resources to secure it. They also show that the king was prepared to support certain classes of peasant against their lords. He did so in return for money, but he also thereby protected the weak against the strong very much on the lines of his speech to the sheriffs assembled at the exchequer in 1250. ⁵ The episode also has a wider interest. It relates to the movements of peasant protest before 1381 first explored by Rodney Hilton; ⁶ it parallels the struggles of other communities, for example those of the men of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire studied by David Crook (most recently in the Fine of the Month for October 2006); ⁷ and it raises the whole question of the privileges enjoyed by tenants in manors of ‘ancient demesne.’ This was the term increasingly used to describe manors which (so it was believed) had been part of some ancient stock of royal lands, one consequence being that the conditions of the tenants were to remain the same as under the king, no matter to whom he passed the immediate lordship. ⁸ The story also bears on the subject of memory for what the Bramptonians and others remembered, or made up, about their past was central to the dispute. ⁹

⁋3Since the story is long and I hope interesting, I have divided my treatment into two parts. This month I will set the scene by looking at Brampton itself and considering the pre-history of the dispute. Next month (in the Fine of the Month for January 2009), I will examine the conflict in the 1240s, and then consider its aftermath in the period of ‘baronial reform and rebellion’ between 1258 and 1267. We will see that, like other examples of peasant protest, that at Brampton continued over many years. ¹⁰

⁋4Brampton is just outside Huntingdon. ¹¹ In the medieval period it was a large and valuable manor with many peasant tenants. The vill had been a royal manor in Domesday Book, held by Edward the Confessor in 1066 and King William in 1087. It was already a substantial estate, with fifteen geldable hides and an annual value, both in 1066 and 1087, of £20. The king had three ploughs on his demesne while the thirty-six ‘villani’ and two bordars had fourteen ploughs. There was a church, a priest, 100 acres of meadow, woodland pasture half a league long and two furlongs broad, and two mills rendering 100s. ¹² In the next two hundred years the value of the manor greatly increased so that it was leased in 1267 for £80 a year, more than double its Domesday value even allowing for inflation. ¹³ According to the 1279 Hundred Roll survey, the lord, John of Hastings (then a ward of the earl of Conrwall), had two carucates in demesne (as had Henry II a hundred years before), ¹⁴ 200 acres of meadow, 100 acres of separated pasture, a wood of one league in length and two furlongs in breadth and three water mills (one more than in 1086). ¹⁵ What is really striking, if the 1086 and 1279 surveys are any way comparable, is the rise in the population. Against the thirty-six villani and two bordars of of Domesday Book, there were now no less than 160 peasant tenants, all described as ‘bond sokemen’ (bondi socomanni) with another thirty-three sokemen in the attached hamlet of Houghton which had not been mentioned in 1086. The peasant population had thus increased fivefold. ¹⁶

⁋5Some thirty-nine of the tenants in 1279 had ten or more acres of land, and since they often had several acres of meadow as well, they were probably all more than subsistence farmers. Eighteen of the thirty-nine held between ten and fourteen acres, nine between fifteen and twenty acres, another nine between twenty-one and twenty-nine acres, and three over thirty acres. These men answered for rents of between 6s. 8d. and 26s. 4d. (none of the Brampton tenants owed labour services.) At the other end of the scale, in 1279, at least in landed terms, there were around 110 tenants with less than five acres of land, usually without any meadow. Many held an acre or less and answered for rents of no more than a few pennies. If the thirty-nine tenants with ten or more acres of land were in the rough position of the thirty-six villani of 1086, and if the 110 tenants with five acres or less were in the position of the two Domesday bordars, then the rise in the population had been a rise of peasant smallholders, a sure sign of land shortage. ¹⁷ Another calculation points in the same direction. According to an inquiry of 1242, in the time of Henry II (1154–89), Brampton had twenty-eight virgates of land in villeinage, which, assuming a virgate of thirty acres, come to 840 acres. ¹⁸ In 1279 roughly 1150 acres were held by the bond sokemen in Brampton and sokemen in Houghton. This represented a thirty percent increase in the arable, much of it accounted for by the acreage in Houghton, which hardly matched the 500% rise in the population. That the expansion of the population had led to the division of holdings is suggested by the lack of any uniform size for either holdings or rents in 1279, whereas the 1242 inquiry recalled that under Henry II each virgate had answered for a neat 5s. a year. Since, moreover, in 1279, tenants with much less than a virgate of land were answering for rents of over 5s., there had also been substantial rise in rents between the two dates.

⁋6The peasant smallholders of 1279 cannot have supported their families from their land, and must have had other sources of income. Since there were no labour services, the lord would have paid for work on his demesne, as perhaps did some of the more prosperous peasants. There may also have been resources derived from Brampton’s situation, just outside the borough of Huntingdon, bounded by the river Ouse and bisected by the Great North Road. Indeed, two roads, one in the north of the parish, one in the south, led off to Huntingdon, the northern intersection being later the site of a well known coaching inn. ¹⁹ And then there was also Brampton wood. In 1279 this was doubly restricted since it belonged to the lord, John of Hastings, and was also within the royal forest. This contrasted with the earlier situation since, at least so a jury of 1218 alleged, Brampton, although a demesne wood of the king, had only been brought under forest law by Henry II. Before that it was ‘common’. ²⁰ Even with these restrictions, however, it is hard to believe that the Bramptonians were unable to profit from the wood, legally or illegally. On the legal side, the Charter of the Forest of 1217 had guaranteed ‘common of pasturage’, within demesne woods brought within the forest, to those who had been accustomed to enjoy it, which was precisely the situation at Brampton. The lords who subsequently held the manor would have been obliged, under the terms of the Charter, to continue this concession. ²¹ Just how far these sources of income alleviated the lot of the Brampton smallholders is impossible to say. Some may have been prosperous, others able at least to get by, while others again, perhaps many others, were probably grindingly poor and subject to starvation in years of bad harvest. ²²

⁋7The social composition of Brampton is vital to understanding the conflict between the peasants and their lord, although the precise dynamics are hard to unravel. Clearly, there was an elite of better off men who, as elsewhere, could provide leadership, and raise far larger sums of money than the smallholders beneath them. That indeed was recognised by the government when imposing the aid for the marriage of Henry II’s daughter in 1167–68. At Brampton and elsewhere a distinction was made between ‘the men’ of the vill who were individually named and shouldered individual sums (there were five of these at Brampton) and the unnamed members of the ‘communis ville’ which answered for a much smaller amount. ²³ When the ‘men’ of Brampton reached agreements with their lords, it was presumably the wealthier peasants who were the essential makers and payers, but some of the money must have come from smallholders and how and how fairly it was distributed amongst them we do not know. Brampton was not necessarily a harmonious village community, with everyone, according to their degree, involved in ‘communal action’. The rise in the population, the creation of new holdings, the division of old ones, the assessment of new rents, and the existence of a prosperous elite alongside numerous smallholders may have created a tense and toxic atmosphere in the village, with the richer peasants preying on the poorer. Indeed, remembering the division between the prosperous men and the ‘communis ville’ in 1167–68, one can imagine a ‘community of the village’ forming against the richer peasants just as much as against the lord. On the other hand, the aspirations of the rich and the desperation of the poor may sometimes have brought the village together in unified resistance to seigneurial oppression, as seems indeed to have happened in 1242. ²⁴

⁋8Joint action by the ‘men’ of Brampton, whoever they were, had a long history before the 1240s, another important backdrop to the dispute. This is most obvious in the area of financial relations with the crown where the men reached an agreement with Richard I, and apparently also with Henry II, which allowed them to run the manor themselves. According to the inquiry of 1242 Richard had leased his two carucates of demesne in Brampton, the twenty-eight virgates held in villeinage, and the attendant meadows in return for a rent of £20 a year, retaining only the wood, mills and pleas. ²⁵ Henry II had entered into a similar lease and though the inquiry does not say who the lessees were the implication was that they too were the men. Since there is no sign of these arrangements in the pipe rolls, the men must have given the £20 to the sheriff (rather than paying it direct to the exchequer), who then answered for it within the farm of the county. This is confirmed by a government inquiry of 1199 which asked specifically how much the men gave as farm to the sheriffs before the manor came into the hands of Lambert of Cologne, which was in 1193–94. ²⁶ That this sum was indeed £20 is confirmed that being the sum deducted from the farm as terrae datae when the manor was given to Lambert. ²⁷

⁋9Since £20 was the value given to Brampton in Domesday Book, a lease at £20 a year seems a very good bargain for the men, They were soon, however, or so it was later alleged, to face higher demands both from the king and from the lords to whom the king granted the manor. The appearance of non royal lords was a watershed in Brampton’s history. Monarchs and their local officials might change, but between 1066 and 1194 the immediate lord of Brampton had always been the king. Then, in 1193–94 Richard I gave the manor to Lambert of Cologne. Thereafter, apart from some brief intervals, the king was never again its immediate lord. Although the itineraries of the twelfth century kings are too imperfectly known for us to be sure, Henry I, Stephen and Henry II (at least early in his reign) seemed to have made considerable use of Brampton and its adjoining forests. Once the manor was alienated, as the VCH puts it succinctly, ‘the royal visits ceased’. John was at Brampton only twice. Henry III but once. ²⁸ The change affected the area as a whole for Huntingdonshire and its forest seems generally to have dropped from the king’s itinerary.

⁋10This change was surely detrimental to the men for, as David Crook has put it, ‘the relative frequency or infrequency of royal visits to the area seems from the first to have been a significant factor in the relationship of the rulers with their local tenants.’ In 1200 the men of Mansfield thus took advantage of John’s visit to secure a concession over common pasture in Clipstone park. ²⁹ The men of Brampton could have done the same in the past. Now, if they had plaints and petitions, they had to seek the king out like everyone else. The break in 1193–94 was also significant in another way for it introduced a period of instability where the lordship of the manor chopped and changed according to the needs of royal patronage, the vagaries of family history and the consequences of political revolt, as the following table shows. ³⁰

⁋11It was with the passage of the manor to non-royal hands in 1193–94, that the struggle of the men of Brampton over their terms and conditions began. Here we are largely dependent on an inquiry into the history of the manor carried out by eleven men in 1242. The men were local worthies rather than Bramptonians, and were not necessarily Bramptonian partisans, but they doubtless obtained much of their information from the men of the manor. ³¹ According to their story, for the first three and a half years of his tenure, that is from Michalemas 1193 to Easter 1197, Lambert of Cologne continued to lease the manor to its men at £20 a year, retaining only the wood, the mills and the pleas, in other words he continued to hold the manor in the same way as King Richard. Then, however, he demanded from the men ‘several other customs and since they did not wish to do these’, he handed back the manor to the King Richard, and received £20 a year from his chamber instead. What exactly Lambert was demanding we do not know . At the neighbouring royal manor of Alconbury, John Wolf, the emperor’s chamberlain, to whom Richard had given the manor, attempted to end the lease to the men and take the manor in hand, thus falling in with the more general switch from leases to direct management. ³² If this was what the men of Brampton also resisted, they did so at a price (at least according to the 1242 inquiry) since Richard, now back in possession increased the farm paid by the men to £30, while John, on his accession in 1199, raised it to £50, before ultimately giving the manor, along with Alconbury, to Earl David of Huntingdon. (The pipe rolls show that David’s tenure ran from Michaelmas 1202.)

⁋12Support for at least part of this story is provided by a remarkable letter issued in the name of the justiciar, Geoffrey fitz Peter, at Westminster on 8 July 1199. It was addressed to the sheriff of Huntingdonshire and informed him that the men of Brampton had fined in £40 with king to hold their vill for a farm of £50 a year. ³³ Plainly, then, at the start of John’s reign the men of Brampton had the confidence, knowledge and resources to bid high for control of their manor. In this they were marching together with the men of neighbouring Alconbury, who had likewise offered £30 to hold their vill at a farm of £21 a year, thus hoping to get rid of John Wolf. Indeed, since this fine appears in the pipe rolls under the heading ‘new offerings made in the king’s presence in parts across the sea and sent to Geoffrey fitzPeter’, Alconbury must have sent a delegation as far afield as Normandy or Anjou, whereas the Bramptonians only had to go to Westminster. ³⁴ Just how far these fines actually secured the desired results is, however, another matter. That of the men of Brampton never appeared on the pipe rolls where Lambert of Cologne, far from resigning the manor to King Richard, remained in undisturbed possession until he finally exited at the end of 1200. ³⁵ Conceivably, despite fitz Peter’s writ to the sheriff, the fine was never implemented, doubts perhaps having arisen about the value of the manor. This would explain why, in the Trinity term of 1199, men from Brampton appeared at Westminster, having been summoned to testify to the extent of the royal demesne in the village and how much they had answered for when they had held it at farm. ³⁶ Once the manor was back in the king’s hands from the start of 1201, it is possible that the men did now answer for a £50 farm to the sheriff until Earl David took possession at Michaelmas 1202, although in that case none of the proceeds reached the king since Brampton was simply accounted for within the overall farm of the county, which was not in anyway increased. ³⁷ According to the inquiry of 1242, Earl David, when he gained possession, held the manor in the same way as King John, which would seem to indicate that the men now answered to him for a farm of £50 a year, although we have no other evidence as to whether that was the case. ³⁸ Whatever the truth here, the way the men of Brampton had resisted Lambert of Cologne, and had held their vill at farm clearly left a deep mark on their collective memory since they were able to recall it for the inquiry forty years later. One would like, of course, to know far more about how they ran the manor, cultivating the two carucate demesne, selling the produce, collecting the rents, and raising each year the colossal farm of £50, if such it was, a very major business undertaking. During the whole period the population was probably increasing fast, and one wonders what the balance of responsibility was between the men and the lord (who still ran the manorial court) when it came to creating new holdings and assessing the higher rents which must have been needed to pay the increased farm.

⁋13Unfortunately, after the manor passes to Earl David we know nothing more about its history until the 1240s, although one may suspect that the men provided evidence for the perambulations of the Huntingdonshire forest carried out during Henry III’s minority, doubtless feeding in the notion that before 1154 the wood of Brampton had been ‘common’. ³⁹ It was with the arrival of Henry of Hastings as lord around 1241 that a new phase in Brampton’s history begins, the one with which we are chiefly concerned and on which the fine rolls throw light.

⁋14Henry of Hastings gained the manor in right of his wife, Ada, third and youngest daughter of Earl David, and thus sister and one of the co-heirs of David’s childless son, John le Scot, earl of Chester and Huntingdon. Matthew Paris described Hastings as a ‘noble man’ and a ‘famous knight and a wealthy baron’, though whether the men of Brampton would have agreed about his nobility one may doubt. ⁴⁰ In fact Henry did not come from a long established baronial family. The ancestral home at Asthill in Norfolk was held by serjeanty ‘namely of acting as the steward (dispensarius) in the pantry of the king’. ⁴¹ The service was honourable enough, and the Hastings referred to it in the sleeve which featured in their coat of arms, but it did not make them baronial. ⁴² That status was essentially the result of Henry’s marriage which brought him a third share of two earldoms. Perhaps the aggression he showed as a lord was to generate the resources to parade as the ‘wealthy baron’ of Matthew Paris’s picture. That aggression was felt not merely at Brampton. At Mansfield, another royal demesne manor he gained from his marriage, he exacted a novel annual tallage of ten marks. ⁴³ At Brampton itself, ‘through oppressions and distraints’, he made the men of the manor give him the one mark for view of frankpledge which they had previously given direct to the sheriff, a move remembered as late as Edward I’s quo warranto proceedings. ⁴⁴ Much more seriously for the men, he also ‘demanded other customs and other services than they were accustomed to do in [previous] times’, this according to a petition of the men made a quarter of a century later in 1265. ⁴⁵ Just what these new customs and services were does not appear. The issue, as we will see, may have been Hastings’ attempt to levy annual tallages as at Mansfield, or perhaps, more radically, he was trying to take the manor in hand, dispensing with the arrangement by which it had been leased to the men.

⁋15This, then, was crisis time for the men of Brampton and they must have earnestly discussed what to do. Did the law protect them, as tenants of a manor belonging to the ‘ancient demesne’ of the king from such increased services? ⁴⁶ And if so, assuming they had the resources, how did they exploit it? How anyway did they know about the law? Here the procedures of their own manorial and hundred courts must have been important, although of these we have no evidence. Also important must have been the visitations of the general eyre, and here the loss of the Huntingdonshire rolls for the eyres of 1219, 1232, 1235 and 1240 constitutes a big gap in our knowledge. ⁴⁷ One case from the 1228 eyre (the only one for which a roll survives) is, however, suggestive of the eyre’s educative effect since it concerned Brampton’s special status as a royal demesne manor. ⁴⁸

⁋16This status was surely the starting point for the Bramptonians. At least one thing was clear to all. They were tenants of a manor which had for a long time been the king’s. This was not always a subject on which memory could provide accurate chapter and verse. In 1238 the men of Crondall, Hurstbourne Priors and Whitchurch in Hampshire were quite unable to name the ancestors of the king who, they said had once held their vills. ⁴⁹ In 1259 the claim of the men of Witley in Surrey to be tenants of ‘the ancient demesne of the king’ was shown to be false by reference to Domesday Book, an early example of Domesday being to test such claims. ⁵⁰ In the case of Brampton, its status as an ‘ancient demesne’ manor was never challenged. The inquiry of 1242, as we have seen, reached back to the time of Henry II, while that of 1199 remembered how Henry I and Queen Matilda had thrice worn their crowns in ‘a certain wooden chapel which at that time was there’, a chapel which they subsequently converted into a stone church. ⁵¹

⁋17Being tenants of an ‘ancient demesne’ manor was vital to the Bramptonians’ case, but it only got them so far. Equally vital was what type of tenants they were. The great book on the laws and customs of England, written in the 1220s, which goes by the name of Bracton described tenants on the demesne of the king who held by ‘villein and uncertain services’, and did whatever they were told to do. ⁵² This was no good to the men of Brampton. If they held from the king by uncertain services, ones in effect variable at the king’s will, then the same would apply under any regime of the king’s successors. Henry of Hastings could impose whatever burdens he liked. There was here an awful warning from next door Alconbury, where the men had been forced in 1237 to acknowledge that they were ‘villeins and called bondmen of the king’ with services entirely determined by the king’s will. As a result, Stephen of Seagrave (who had gained the manor from John le Scot) was allowed to treat the men in just the same arbitrary way. ⁵³ Bracton, however, also described another group of tenants, namely villein sokemen or glebae ascripticii. Although these performed works and servile services, those services were ‘certain and specified’. Such men were also personally free. Since, by the time of the 1279 survey, and probably for long before that, the men of Brampton had answered for rents rather than servile services, they did not fit exactly into this villein sokeman category. The description in 1279 of them as ‘bond sokemen’ may rather indicate that they were personally unfree but answered for free services. ⁵⁴ That some of the villagers accepted their status as bondmen is shown by personal names in the manor both in 1199 and 1279, but that acknowledgement may have been far form universal. ⁵⁵ In 1265 the king, responding to a petition from the men, and perhaps repeating how they described themselves, called them simply ‘sokemen’. ⁵⁶ Whatever the personal status claimed by the men, of one thing, we can be sure. Although they did not fit exactly into Bracton’s villein sokeman class, they must have claimed that they too had held under the king by ‘certain and specified’ services. If they could not do that, any kind of resistance was pointless.

⁋18For such a claim to work, there needed to be, and the Bramptonians needed to know, one final piece of law. This was that when a royal manor passed to another lord, its conditions remained the same as they were under the king. That had indeed been the point of the Brampton case on the 1228 Huntingdonshire eyre but it related to the way the common law assizes were inapplicable in such a manor, rather than to the terms on which the tenants held their lands. Bracton was silent on the latter issue save for observing that glebae ascripticii could not be removed from the soil as long as they performed their services ‘no matter into whose hands the king’s demesne may come’ . ⁵⁷ That, however, the principal of fixed services was accepted in law and known to peasants is shown by several cases coming (from John’s reign onwards) before the central courts, including that involving the men of Alconbury in 1237. All turned on establishing what the customs and services of the peasants had been under the king, the clear implication being that they could not be changed thereafter. ⁵⁸

⁋19When, therefore, the men of Brampton began to suffer under Henry of Hastings’ yoke they were probably aware, or could quickly discover, that the law might be their defence. If they had held by ‘certain and specified services’ under the king, then those same customs would have to be observed by Henry. They were protected from him. The question was how best to set about securing that protection. It is to how the Bramptonians addressed that question, under their intrepid leader, John Kechel, that we will turn in the next Fine of the Month.