The Abbey of St. Albans from 1300 to the dissolution of the monasteries

by V. H. Galbraith

Abbey and Town.

There were thus substantial reasons why the townsmen should free themselves at the first opportunity from the hated tutelage of the Abbey, though it must be confessed that their civic disabilities weighed less with them than the strict preservation of the Lord Abbot’s warrens and fish ponds, the close fencing in of his estates, and a host of galling and antiquated signs of subjection, the chief of which was the obligation to full their cloth and grind their corn at the Abbot’s mill.

It was typical of the monastery’s conservatism that each succeeding abbot refused all concession. Discontent culminated in revolt. In 1274, taking as their pretext the matter of the Abbot’s mill, the townsmen inaugurated a mild rebellion by setting up handmills in their own houses. Abbot Roger easily suppressed the rising, and an outbreak in 1314, provoked by the tactless, overbearing Hugh of Eversdon, collapsed even more ignominiously. A more serious disturbance, which broke out in 1327, was not finally crushed for seven years. Taking advantage of the death of Abbot Hugh, and the temporary anarchy which followed the death of Edward II, the townsmen rose again and blockaded the Abbey. The affair was rendered the more serious by the existence among the monks of a party in league with the malcontents. The internal danger was averted by sending away the disaffected monks to distant cells, but Abbot William was compelled to give verbal consent to the demands of the townsmen for a charter embodying the right of choosing their own members of Parliament, liberty to use handmills, to fish in the Abbey waters, and to hunt its preserves, the privilege of executing writs without the interference of the bailiff of the liberty, and finally, the title of free burgesses.[48] By royal help the Abbot at length crushed the rising; the old subjection was once more firmly rivetted upon the townsmen, and the Abbey parlour was paved with their handmills as a token of their defeat and a warning for the future.[49] It is significant of the cruelty and selfishness of the Abbey that no sort of concession was made to the defeated townsmen. At this time, as subsequently, the Abbot showed himself incapable of appreciating the real trend of events. For a moment the Abbey had triumphed and all was well. Under the firm rule of Thomas de la Mare there was no hope of success for an isolated rising, but the outbreak of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 gave the tenants their opportunity, and the Abbey reaped the fruit of its foolish and short-sighted policy.

The Country Tenants.

So much for the townsmen. The bulk of the Abbot’s subjects, however, were country tenants, living on his various manors. Under the manorial system rural tenants lived in a state of political and economic subjection to their lord. Of such tenants a certain number were free labourers, but the large majority were bound to the lord by varying degrees of servile tenure. The serfs or villeins divided their time between cultivating their own patches of land and rendering labour services on that part of the manor which was cultivated by the lord or his bailiff for the supply of his own granaries. On many of the St. Albans manors a small money rent was also paid by the serf for his land.[50] By long tradition, though scarcely by law, the villein could not be evicted; on the other hand, he was bound to the soil, owed many feudal dues to his lord, and so many days’ work per year on the lord’s domain. A series of regulations of the close of the thirteenth century[51] discloses the harsh policy of St. Albans with regard to its villeins. Freemen were forbidden to buy villein lands; villeins were forbidden to sell to anyone either lands or produce;[52] money payments and labour services were rigorously exacted, and the huge warrens in possession of the Abbey were strictly preserved. The effect of these regulations was to prevent the serf increasing his holding, and to maintain the distinction between free and unfree tenants. By this means alone could the Abbot combat the general tendency towards fusion of the two classes.[53]

While the Abbey was thus fighting to continue the old tyranny manumissions were becoming frequent on lay lands, and all over the country labour services were being given up in favour of money payments. Further, the practice of letting out lands in farms to rent-paying tenants was growing more general. By diminishing the population the Black Death (1349) hastened this process,[54] for landlords were compelled to offer high wages to secure the cultivation of their demesnes, and they had perforce to bring in rent-paying tenants to till the lands of such of their villeins as had succumbed. Nor was the break-up of the old system retarded by the Statute of Labourers (1352). The Act, which provided that food prices as well as wages should remain fixed, was not so much a blow aimed at the poorer classes as an attempt to restore the state of affairs existing before 1349. The process of manumission continued; the numbers of freemen steadily increased, and, in spite of the Statute, wages and prices rose higher than ever before. This increase in the numbers of free labourers inspired those who were still in villeinage with the ambition to become themselves free and to cease rendering labour services which, as the token of their servile tenure, were regarded as degrading.

Such were the grievances of the peasants who in 1381 formed the backbone of the Revolt. The unwillingness to allow manumission which has been seen to exist towards the end of the thirteenth century at St. Albans, and the harsh provisions made to retain labour services, continued in full force.[55] In the case of one manor,[56] it is true, the two systems appear to have existed side by side about 1340, but the rest of the evidence points to the retention in full of the old system both on the St. Albans estates and on the estates of its cells. Thus in 1381 the rural tenants of St. Albans were ready to join in the general revolt. Simultaneously the townsmen made a final attempt to win from the Abbot privileges identical with those demanded in 1327.

The Revolt of 1381.

There is little reason to linger over the details of the Revolt. The townsmen rose in a body and set themselves to destroy all visible tokens of their subjection. The fences of the Abbot’s woods were pulled down, his game was killed freely, and a show was made of dividing his domain into small individual holdings. Many houses were burnt, and the Abbey itself was mildly raided; but from first to last there was no wish to take life. The leader of the insurgents was William Grindcob, who appears to have been something of an enthusiast, and the most disinterested of all the leaders in this revolt. In compliance with his demands the Abbot was compelled to deliver up all the Abbey charters, and then to draw up a new charter granting to the townsmen (1) rights of pasturage on his common, (2) permission to use private handmills, (3) entire freedom to hunt and fish over the monastic estates, and (4) self-government by freely-elected officials. These were a repetition of the demands of 1327, except that in the interval the notion of self-government had become more clearly defined.

In spite of the townsmen’s boast that they were in alliance with the country tenants, the two bodies seem to have acted independently. Each had its own grievances to redress. Indeed, the country tenants were still further divided, but the Abbey was powerless to resist even such small bodies as the villeins of individual manors. The villeins on most of the Hertford manors—Tittenhanger, Northaw, Watford, Berkhamstead—marched to the Abbey and in a curiously restrained spirit secured charters satisfying their various local grievances. The tenants of the manor of Redburn, for example, extracted charters containing the abolition of serfdom, of villein services (in favour of money rents), and also, in common with the townsmen, the rights of the chase and of fishing. Those of Rickmansworth obtained all these privileges and the right besides of disposing freely of lands and movables; and so it was done by most other manors in the county.