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

pressure from the local bigwigs, and explained why in a lengthy speech. He was, after all, a famous preacher able to give sermons in Latin, French and English, including Norfolk dialect. The local establishment then offered him a large sum of money to renew the lease of Cosford, but Samson still refused. It required determination (and often forensic skill in the law courts) to resist the pressure and prudent thought for the future to say no to the presents they tried to give him. But gradually, both at Bury St Edmunds and on other estates, the new measures were pushed through.
    The rich could now get richer, but the new system was far from being problem free. From now on the lord’s expenses and profits were bound to vary from year to year. This made it easy for his officials to cheat him unless a close check was kept on their activities, so on each manor a detailed record of the year was kept, then checked together with similar returns from the other manors by auditors who represented the central administration of a great estate. The earliest such records to survive were drawn up from 1208 on the instructions of the bishop of Winchester, King John’s good friend Peter des Roches. As one satirist of the time put it, the bishop was ‘slack at scripture, sharp at accounting’. Other estates followed the practice of the businesslike bishop. The survival of masses of these accounts dating from around 1250 to 1400 means that historians know a great deal about the economy of the great estates during that century and a half.
    Thirteenth-century auditors had a policy-making as well as a fraud-detecting role. They often noted that those who owed labour services worked without enthusiasm and suggested it might be better to hire wage labourers. In the summer everyone was expected to help with the lord’s harvest, but he had to lay on a generous feast to mark the occasion. Was it worth it? the auditors asked. They fixed targets for each manor, and took investment decisions, whether to replace equipment, for instance, or build new barns. The barley barn built at Temple Cressing in Essex around 1230 is still in use today. The landlords’ solution to the crisis of inflation meant that to run their estates they now required a whole army of professional treasurers, auditors, bailiffs, receivers and their clerks. Such people needed to learn their trade, and by the early thirteenth century there was a school of business administration at Oxford.
    Yet the managerial revolution did little, perhaps nothing, to raise crop yields. By modern standards they remained very low indeed. The earliest surviving manorial accounts show that most lords were content to let a half or a third of their arable land lie fallow, leaving their sheep to manure it, plough the rest with ox teams only once or twice before sowing, and then sow only two to four bushels of seed an acre. By these methods they achieved returns of just three or four times the amount sown – in contrast to modern yields of more than twenty times the amount sown. Since these records relate to the home farms – the demesnes, as they were then called – of the greatest estates in England, it was always assumed that the yields obtained by their tenants or other lesser landholders were even lower, in the belief that the wealthiest would have employed the most advanced agricultural techniques.
    But recent research has questioned this assumption. It has discovered that in relatively densely populated regions such as parts of Norfolk more intensive methods were employed, and higher yields achieved. Instead of letting some of the arable land lie fallow, it was all, or virtually all, cultivated. Crops such as peas were grown in great quantity and used not only to add nitrogen to the soil but also as fodder for animals kept in stalls, whose manure was collected and then spread on the soil just before ploughing – much more efficient than relying on grazing animals, whose droppings were often