Table Of ContentSURVIVAL AND DISCORD
IN MEDIEVAL SOCIETY
THE MEDIEVAL COUNTRYSIDE
Editorial Board under the auspices of Yale University
Paul Freedman, Chair, Yale University
Isabel Alfonso, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid
Monique Bourin, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Sandro Carocci, Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’
Piotr Górecki, University of California, Riverside
P. C. M. Hoppenbrouwers, Universiteit Leiden
Jeppe Netterstrøm, Aarhus Universitet
Sigrid Schmitt, Universität Trier
Phillipp Schofield, Aberystwyth University
Lluís To Figueras, Universitat de Girona
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book
VOLUME 4
SURVIVAL AND DISCORD
IN MEDIEVAL SOCIETY
Essays in Honour of Christopher Dyer
Edited by
Richard Goddard, John Langdon, and Miriam Müller
H
F
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Survival and discord in medieval society : essays in honour of Christopher Dyer. -- (The
medieval countryside ; v. 4)
1. England – Civilization – 1066-1485. 2. England – Social conditions – 1066-1485.
I. Series II. Dyer, Christopher, 1944- III. Goddard, Richard, 1967- IV. Langdon, John.
V. Muller, Miriam.
942'.03-dc22
ISBN-13: 9782503528151
© 2010, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2010/0095/47
ISBN: 978-2-503-52815-1
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
RICHARD GODDARD, JOHN LANGDON, AND MIRIAM MÜLLER
The Long and the Short: Rural Settlement in Medieval England 11
GRENVILLE ASTILL (University of Reading)
Lords and Wastes 29
HAROLD FOX (University of Leicester)
Postan’s Fifteenth Century 49
RICHARD BRITNELL (University of Durham)
Surviving Recession: English Borough Courts 69
and Commercial Contraction, 1350–1500
RICHARD GODDARD (University of Nottingham)
Economic Survival in Late Medieval Derbyshire: The Spirituality Income 89
of the Dean and Chapter of Lichfield, c. 1400–c. 1535
ROBERT SWANSON (University of Birmingham)
Waged Building Employment in Medieval England: 109
Subsistence Safety Net or Demographic Trampoline?
JOHN LANGDON (University of Alberta)
Town, Country, and Law: Royal Courts and 127
Regional Mobility in Medieval England, c. 1200–c. 1400
JAMES MASSCHAELE (Rutgers University)
Trespass Litigation in the Manor Court 145
in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries
PHILLIPP R. SCHOFIELD (Aberystwyth University)
Individualism, Community, and Lordship: 161
The Peasant Demesne Lessees of Great Horwood, 1320–1610
MATTHEW TOMPKINS (University of Leicester)
Monitoring Demesne Managers through the Manor Court 179
before and after the Black Death
CHRIS BRIGGS (University of Southampton)
Confrontation and Negotiation in a Medieval Village: 197
Alrewas before the Black Death
JEAN BIRRELL (University of Birmingham)
The Control of Discord in Fifteenth-Century Chester 213
JANE LAUGHTON (University of Leicester)
Food, Hierarchy, and Class Conflict 231
MIRIAM MÜLLER (University of Birmingham)
Rural Revolts and Structural Change in the Low Countries, 249
Thirteenth – Early Fourteenth Centuries
BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL (Universiteit Utrecht)
Revolts of the Late Middle Ages and the Peculiarities of the English 269
SAMUEL K. COHN, JR (University of Glasgow)
Bibliography of Christopher Dyer’s Writings, 1968–2009: 287
The Story So Far . . .
COMPILED BY RICHARD GODDARD
Index 295
Tabula Gratulatoria 307
ILLUSTRATIONS
Harold Fox, ‘Lords and Wastes’
Table 1, p. 45. Okehampton manor, 1534–35: sources of income.
Richard Britnell, ‘Postan’s Fifteenth Century’
Table 2, p. 61. Average annual values of combined wool and cloth exports at
constant prices, 1401–10 to 1491–1500 (decadal averages).
Richard Goddard, ‘Surviving Recession’
Table 3, p. 80. Nottingham borough court burgess debt pleas, 1350–1499.
Table 4, p. 81. Winchester city court debt pleas, 1350–1473.
John Langdon, ‘Waged Building Employment in Medieval England’
Table 5, p. 113. John Munro’s nominal labourers’ wages, 1266–1350.
Table 6, p. 114. Daily wages for adult male labourers on various royal sites.
Table 7, p. 118. Career of Alexander Lucas, operator, at Windsor Castle,
1294–1315.
Miriam Müller, ‘Food, Hierarchy, and Class Conflict’
Figure 1, p. 238. Food given to boonworkers at the manors of the Bishopric of
Winchester.
Bas J. P. van Bavel, ‘Rural Revolts and Structural Change in the Low
Countries’
Map 1, p. 268. Regions and towns mentioned in the text.
INTRODUCTION
Richard Goddard, John Langdon, and Miriam Müller
In 2008, Christopher Dyer received a CBE for services to scholarship in the
Queen’s birthday honours list. It is a well-earned tribute for an academic career
with a tremendous influence on medieval social and economic history. It is
difficult to categorize his career around a single theme or even set of themes. His
current position as head of the Department of Local History at the University of
Leicester underscores this difficulty, in that it is a post that celebrates the particular
and the difficult to define in more general terms. In this regard, the two motifs
highlighted in the title of this volume, ‘survival’ and ‘discord’, should be seen as
poles of a continuum of interests by an illustrious scholar rather than necessarily
defining the dominant ideas of his career.
The two themes, however, do comprise a considerable part of his extensive and
wide-ranging publications, which we have endeavoured to list (undoubtedly with
some omissions) at the end of this volume. Survival in medieval British society is
an issue which he comprehensively considered in two of his major publications,
Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages and Making a Living in the Middle
Ages.1 Central to both of these works was exactly how well medieval people lived
in physical terms and how resources were shared amongst them, the main geo-
graphical focus being the British Isles and especially England. Dyer’s intimate
knowledge of both documentary and archaeological evidence gave a particular
richness to these considerations and a comprehensive treatment of all sections of
society, from rich to poor, so that lords commanded as much of his attention as did
1 Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England
c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; rev. edn, 1998); Dyer, Making a
Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2002).
2 Richard Goddard, John Langdon, and Miriam Müller
peasants. In examining the mechanisms by which individuals and families of all
ranks sought to feed, clothe, and otherwise maintain themselves, Dyer has investi-
gated a number of major avenues, ranging from how people structured their land-
scapes, the techniques they used to fashion a sufficiency from the land, how rich a
life in diet and material life they could expect, and how they managed their
existences generally. Equally central was his balanced treatment of urban and rural
societies, indicated not only in his two major works on survival issues, but in a
number of smaller publications. He has likewise been unafraid to explore the
unusual or esoteric in the matter of fashioning a living in medieval society, whether
it be gardens or goats.2 In short, Dyer’s research has broadened our understanding
of the way that medieval people approached the problems of surviving on a day-to-
day basis, their approach to making that living (that is, whether they can be
considered capitalists, for example), how they valued leisure, and how they
conceived their lives.3
In the other pole that we have used, discord, that is, going beyond the tensions
of simply making a living, Dyer has been equally influential. Being trained at the
University of Birmingham under the tutelage of the great historian of medieval
class conflict, Rodney Hilton, it is not surprising that Dyer’s work would display
some of those interests. In a way, it was reflected in his first full-length work on the
medieval bishopric of Worcester, where the relationship of lord and tenants on a
large estate was examined over nearly a millennium.4 But Dyer has increasingly
tended to dissect these tensions in a more localized fashion, no more evident than
2 Christopher Dyer, ‘Gardens and Garden Produce in the Later Middle Ages’, in Food in Medi-
eval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. by Christopher M. Woolgar, Dale Serjeantson, and Tony
Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 27–40; Dyer, ‘Jardins et vergers en Angle-
terre au moyen âge’, in Jardins et vergers en Europe occidentale (VIIIe–XVIIIe siècles): 9e Journées inter-
nationales d’histoire, Flaran, 18–20 septembre 1987, Flaran, 9 (Valence-sur-Baise: Centre culturel
départemental de l’abbaye de Flaran, 1989), pp. 145–64; Dyer, ‘Alternative Agriculture: Goats in
Medieval England’, in People, Landscape and Alternative Agriculture: Essays for Joan Thirsk, ed. by
Richard W. Hoyle, Agricultural History Review Supplement, 3rd series (Exeter: British Agricul-
tural History Society, 2004), pp. 20–38; Dyer, ‘Work Ethics in the Fourteenth Century’, in The
Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. by James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and
W. Mark Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 21–41; Dyer, ‘Memories of Freedom:
Attitudes Towards Serfdom in England, 1200–1350’, in Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal
Bondage, ed. by Michael L. Bush (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 277–95.
3 The latter two issues are particularly evident in his An Age of Transition? Economy and Society
in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
4 Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of
Worcester, 680–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
