1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook by Danny Danziger Read Free Book Online Page A

human cattle – had been. Serfs were not slaves. But they felt unfree, and with reason. A long struggle lay ahead, in which the great rebellion of 1381, the Peasants’ Revolt, was the principal landmark, before serfdom was at last ended, although it has never been formally abolished.
    Meanwhile, the England of 1215 was undergoing a managerial revolution. For many generations past the magnates, those who owned many manors, had lived off the rents and services owed them by their tenants. Their richer tenants, men of gentry status, would take over a whole manor or even several manors. Leases at rents fixed for a term of several lifetimes were common, and tended to turn into hereditary tenures. From the magnate’s point of view this had its advantages. It gave him a predictable income and kept administration costs to a minimum. There was no need for anyone to keep detailed records. This absence of records is why it is virtually impossible to write an economic history of the early English countryside.
    What would happen to wealthy landlords who spent far more than they could afford and got into debt? The story of Samson, abbot of Bury St Edmunds from 1182 to 1211, as told by one of his monks, Jocelin of Brakelond, is revealing. Samson’s predecessor, Abbot Hugh,
    was a good and devout monk but he lacked ability in business matters. For all his financial problems he only had one remedy: to borrow money, so that he could at least maintain the dignity of his household. Every year during the last eight years of his life further loans were taken out to pay the growing interest. Silk copes, gold vessels and other church vessels were pawned to both Christian and Jewish money lenders.
    This was the situation that faced the new abbot immediately after his election. How could the monks climb out of the vicious cycle of escalating debt? Was it possible to run their estates more profitably? Could they re-negotiate the leases? Was demand for foodstuffs increasing as the population rose? Jocelin describes a first step in the process, one in which he himself was involved.
    There is an English tradition by which every year on the day of Our Lord’s Circumcision (1 January), the abbot, as lord, is presented with gifts by a great many people. So I, Jocelin, thought carefully about what I would give him. Then I began to write down the names of all the churches which belong to the abbot, and I added estimates of the rents at which they could be leased, assuming an average price for grain.
    If prices were increasing, then would they not do better if they took their manors into their own hands, instead of leasing them out, appointed bailiffs and reeves to run them, then sold the surplus on the open market? This, at any rate, was what Abbot Samson did during the 1180s and 1190s, and so did a few other of the more enterprising and efficient lords.
    Then, early in King John’s reign, prices rose sharply, doubling or even trebling in the first five years of the new century. An ox, which could be bought for forty pence in the early 1190s, now cost eighty pence. The sudden and, to all appearances, unprecedented rise in the cost of living at the beginning of the century meant that great landowners would have found it impossible to maintain the style to which they were accustomed unless they followed Samson’s example and revolutionised the methods by which they managed their estates. And this was what they did. Many lords encountered fierce opposition from their tenants when they re-negotiated leases which fell in, and even fiercer when they tried to cancel them. Jocelin recounts one such case:
    On the death of Robert of Cockfield, his son Adam came to the abbot, and asked that he should have the half hundred of Cosford for an annual payment of £5, saying that his father and grandfather had held it for more than 80 years. Adam came accompanied by his kindred, by Earl Roger Bigod, and by many other important people.
    But Abbot Samson resisted this