THE CHOIR OF RIEVAULX ABBEY (Cistercian)
It was this very desire after agricultural completeness, and the thorough farming of all entrusted to their care, that brought about in England that curious admixture of the two sexes that prevailed in most of the houses of the Gilbertine order. Houses for Sisters was the first idea of St. Gilbert, and always remained paramount in his mind; but in order to secure effective administration of their lands, certain religious Canons were attached to them, in absolutely separate buildings, to serve as chaplains, and to superintend or personally carry out all the agricultural details, on the due sustaining of which the whole convent depended. This, too, was doubtless the main reason why we also find two or three canons attached to those great houses of Hampshire Benedictine nuns of pre-Norman foundation, Nunnaminster, Wherwell, and Romsey. A like cause was probably the reason why priors, masters, or wardens, were in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries associated to some extent with the prioresses of such nunneries as Nuneaton, Warwickshire; Kingsmead, Derbyshire; or Catesby, Wyrthorp, and Stamford, Northamptonshire—a fact not hitherto, so far as we are aware, noted or commented upon by any writers on English monasticism.
CHAPTER II
THE MONASTIC TENANTS
WHEN the religious houses were possessed of manors—and all save the smallest houses held at least one or two and frequently many—it was incumbent upon them to discharge the obligations that rested on manorial lords; nor was there any difficulty about this, for the technical obligations of presiding at courts and fulfilling other like duties were almost invariably discharged, even on secular manors, by the lord’s steward. Still the lord was responsible, and held responsible, in the same fashion as a modern landowner and his agent, and the difference between a good and a bad or careless landlord had even more striking results in the feudal and sub-feudal days than in our own. The tenants of the monastic estates were of every kind, from those who held under the obligation of military service to the Crown and so many knight’s fees, to the humblest customary tenants or villeins, who were tied to the soil. The abbot or prior had to carry out the obligations resting on landholders of the days in which he lived; he could not, if he would, have upset the land system, but by just and conscientious administration each manor might become a centre of comparative content.
If the student of manorial records and customaries compares any considerable number of manors that were in monastic, or Church, hands, with those that were in lay control, it will be found, broadly speaking, that the lot of the tenants generally, and more especially that of the villeins, was decidedly superior when under monastic administration. True, tenants of ecclesiastical manors had their difficulties with the lord from time to time, and were, perhaps, all the more ready now and again to show dissatisfaction in a more marked way than they would have dared to do against the more severe secular lords; but the easy terms on which the assarts or clearings made by the monks and their lay-brothers were conferred on their tenants, the commuting of labour customs for quite small sums of money, the generally light character of the labour for the lord, the better harvest fare provided, and, more particularly, the far greater opportunity for manumission or freedom that pertained to the clerical estates, all these were noticeable in so many instances, that there can be no doubt it was as a rule far better for each class of tenants to be on a monastic rather than on a secular estate.
In the valuable chartulary of the abbey of Burton-on-Trent, preserved at Beaudesert, there are full accounts of the tenantry on their Staffordshire and Derbyshire manors drawn up about the year 1100, as well as some like entries of the year 1114. It would be very difficult to find such easy tenures on any secular manors of approximate date. In a variety of cases a house was held for which a single day’s harvest work per week for the lord was the only charge. The proportion of ad opus tenants on these estates was unusually small; thus at Mickleover, out of a total of seventy-eight only twenty-two had to make any return in labour, and in each of these cases the villein held two bovates or oxgangs of land in return for two days’ labour a week at harvest-time, the occasional carrying of a load to the lord’s garden, and ploughing once in the winter and twice in the spring. Their position, too, is also shown by the fact that they were cowkeepers; for time was allowed them, when working for the lord, to drive home and milk their cows, and generally to attend to their stock. In two other Mickleover cases ad opus tenures of two bovates of land had recently (1100) been commuted by the abbot for 2s. a year, a sum which gives a good idea of the comparatively small amount of exacted labour.
In the adjoining township of Littleover there were twenty-two villeins, including Goderic the reeve, the majority of whom held two bovates of land; but in only four cases did they make recompense to the lord by labour. On the same manor there were, in 1114, five men in charge of the plough oxen (bovarii); each of them held one bovate of land and two acres of marsh in return for making or providing the irons of three ploughs, the amount of demesne land being sufficient for three ploughs. On another of the abbot’s Derbyshire manors, Willington, there was no “inland” or demesne land, but there were thirty-two bovates, seven of which, sufficient for two ploughs, were held by the lord. The remaining twenty-five bovates were thus held:—One, with part of the church meadow, by Goderic the priest; Unifred, six bovates for 6s.; Soen, four bovates for 6s.; Serlo, two bovates for 2s.; Lewin, the reeve, one bovate for 1s.; Hotin, one bovate for 2s.; Godwin, half bovate for 11d.; Lewric and Lewin, each two bovates for 32d. and two days’ work a week from July to Martinmas; Edwin and three others, each one bovate for 16d. and two days’ work for the like period; Godric, half bovate for 8d. and half day’s work for the like period; and Lewin, the smith, one bovate by the service of two ploughs, or for 16d. and work as above.
It was easy, too, on most monastic manors, for the native tenant or villein to obtain leave to live elsewhere on payment of a small acknowledgment, which was a privilege very rarely granted by a secular lord. Thus, on the manor of Inkpen, Berkshire, in the time of Richard I., the Abbot of Titchfield, as lord, licensed three of his native tenants to dwell outside the manor in return for 6d. a year apiece at Michaelmas; in another case the annual acknowledgment for a like permission took the shape of a ploughshoe (or iron tip for a wooden share), then worth about 2d.; and in a third case, the more costly service of a pair of cart-wheels, probably worth about 1s.
The same abbot, according to the customary of the Hampshire manor where the abbey stood, had an extraordinarily generous scale of dietary for those tenants who worked at the lord’s autumn harvesting. Those who worked one day a week for the whole day received at three o’clock a supply of food (unum pastum) consisting of bread, with beer or cider, broth (potagium), and two sorts of flesh or fish, as well as drink once after dinner. For supper the fortunate labourer also received a wheat loaf weighing forty ounces, and two herrings, or four pilchards, or one mackerel. As such a pastum by itself seems to have been considered as worth 4d., this food allowance was certainly remarkably generous. If three days’ labour was the service to be rendered, the last of the three was recompensed in a like generous fashion, whilst on the two first days the pastum was a loaf of barley bread, water to drink, and two kinds of fish, whilst the change in the supper consisted merely of the substitution of a forty-ounce barley loaf for one of wheat. When the customary tenants had to wash sheep or do a day’s work on the meadows at the lord’s will, they received nothing, save that they had wheat bread and beer when they had finished; but the shearers of sheep had cheese in addition to the bread and beer. Those who dressed the meadows had no food allowance, but when haymaking they received bread and beer, with flesh or fish. In short, it is admitted that on several monastic estates the harvest payment in food for villein labour cost more than the labour was worth.