Rowley - The Middle Ages, Death and Development

By Chaucer’s time, around 1340, England had moved on from a land of French speaking nobles and Anglo-Saxon peasants. Henry I, the ‘lawyer King’ had given us his judges and juries and our boundaries; Stephen had left us the monasteries and abbeys of Yorkshire; Becket had been martyred when Henry II had fallen out with the Pope as to who was top dog in Britain, and, losing, tackled Ireland as penance; King John had been forced to sign Magna Carta; Edward I had rushed back from his Crusades on John’s death. To resolve the barons’ increasing tax complaints he had set up a Parliament of all ranks above lord of manors; ‘Summoning the magnates, lay and ecclesiastical–the earls and barons, archbishops, bishops and abbots who were his tenants-in-chief–and through his sheriffs, four elected and representative knights, discreet in law, from the shire court of every county, and four burgesses or merchants from the burgemote or borough court of every important town…’. This quote tells us much of the society of those days, but most valuable of all it tells of the very base of a government that has persisted since 1275 until now as our unwritten constitution.

But what then of Little Weighton, Bentley, Risby, Hunsley and Riplingham? What was being talked of at the corn-mill? Perhaps the price of barley or sheep at Beverley market, what to do about ‘X’ who had turned his sheep early onto the turnips, who was next for the plough, the parson’s last sermon, who had been caught poaching the lord’s game?–but certainly not the new Parliament or elections.

News did not travel fast and life would have seemed more or less as it had been for centuries, barely sustainable, illiterate, hard, short and brutal–but it had in fact changed greatly by 1340, and was about to change more. ‘Freemen’ becoming richer, manorial courts’ ‘bond to the land’ weakening fast, and land ownership coalescing into small farms with hired labour, and any fighting for the King and lord now in the hands of the Knights. A new gentrified class between lord and serf was emerging based on land ownership and wealth. Security of the person barely existed but courts above those of the manor could be invoked, although punishments were severe. At the Rowley parish population level with one or two minor hiccoughs, such as civil wars and ‘Reformations’, this progress continued gently until about 1750 with land increasingly in the new landowners hands. Housing was still wood, mud, chalk and straw and hygiene non-existent although each householder had a croft on which to use his waste.

But in the 1340’s dire change was fearsomely imminent. In East Yorkshire in 1349 the Black Death came, and came back again and again over the next 200 years. In the first bout it took 40% of the clergy in the York diocese, 60% of the population in the Wolds deanery of Dickering just to the north, and several recurrences took more, especially non-immune children. Land lay untilled, stock died a flock of 3000 became 1000, 129 villages on the Wolds disappeared with vacant land being annexed by sheep farmers, in Little Weighton tax value dropped by 60% to £2 and any ‘free’ labourers demanded higher pay.

Other changes breaking down the feudal society came from new agricultural ideas such as game farming, hunting enclosures as at Risby, land draining as in Bentley, woodland development, more intensive soil use, and better seed. Behind these moves were the monasteries where very large landholdings resulted in a wider appreciation of the value of land and how best to farm it. The final factor had to be the spread of money, with which release from serfdom could be bought; with which more land could be bought and traded; with which one could pay the lord in cash rather than have to, with bad grace, work his land–advantageous to both parties; and with which to move to towns.

The detail of outside events and effects at our parish level requires a major study, well beyond me, but with one or two diversions I would like to move to the radical effect of the ‘enclosure of land’ in our rural parish–an effect that brought our parish and landscape to what we have now.

Big Thank You to Barrie Heaton for his historical articles.

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