0305B

Surviving examples of medieval smoke-blackened thatch have preserved samples of crops harvested six or seven centuries ago. All the grains were significantly taller than the dwarf varieties grown today. In contrast, preserved animal bones show that livestock were of debased stature relative both to Romano-British livestock and those of the 18th century. Probably breeds had become genetically debased. Pastures, too, had become degraded through repeated heavy stocking. Consequently, carcass weights, milk yields and fleece weights were relatively modest and ripe for systematic improvement in later centuries. Keeping flocks and herds up to strength required constant care and attention. Disease and the asset-stripping activities of executors and crown officials could undo years of effort at a stroke. Wales, the north of England, and Scotland served as reservoirs of replacement animals for pastoral producers in the English lowlands, most of whom had long since abandoned any attempt at complete self-sufficiency.
Wood for fuel and timber for construction and a host of other purposes were among the most essential of renewable resources. The more closely settled and intensively exploited parts of the countryside were almost devoid of woodland and such as existed was jealously guarded and closely managed. Communal ovens were one way of conserving fuel; in large conventual (of or belonging to a convent) and aristocratic households, communal kitchens and hearths were another. Strictly, monasteries should have had only one heated room, apart from the kitchen; but this rule, made in southerly climes, proved hard to enforce in cool and rainy Britain. Scarcity of fuel was a greater constraint upon London's growth than scarcity of food. Smiths and other industrial workers in the capital were already turning to coal shipped from the north-east, which was also finding a market in port towns on both sides of the North Sea. Irrespective of social status, most houses at this time must have been smoky, draughty and cold; all social classes placed a premium upon heavy fur-lined clothing. Communities mostly in the north and west with free access to an abundance of peat therefore enjoyed a significant advantage.
Britain in 1300 was almost certainly more crowded than ever before. There has been much debate among historians over the size of the population. For England a figure of 4.25 million to 4.5 million is consistent with the agricultural resources of the country, and Wales and Scotland between them are unlikely to have contained more than a further million. However, some have argued for a population of 6 million for England alone. If this is correct, it would not have been exceeded until well into the 18th century. Whatever the population size, it was relatively unevenly distributed in England at least. In the most congested districts there may have been in excess of 400 people per square mile, but much lower population densities were generally the rule. Norfolk was the most populous county, closely followed by Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, and Lincolnshire. Significantly lower densities prevailed north and west of a line from the Humber to the Severn and the Exe, and in the highlands of Wales and Scotland densities must have been lower still. Nor, at this point, were the Home Counties around London as relatively populous as they were to become. England's demographic centre of gravity lay very much around the Wash. This reflected institutional and historical factors which often ante-dated the Norman Conquest. Later centuries would see the population map of England redrawn, with many settlements that had been thriving in 1300 shrinking or abandoned entirely.
In England the population varied as much in status as it did in distribution. This was a male-dominated age and there were many grades and conditions of men: laymen and churchmen, townsmen and countrymen, lords and peasants, great magnates and minor country gentlemen, merchants and hucksters, franklins (a landowner of free but not noble birth in the 14th and 15th c.) and petty freeholders, substantial customary tenants and poor cottars, and a growing class of landless who laboured, begged and stole. Serfdom, in which three-quarters of the rural population had been entrapped at the time of Domesday, had long been on the wane. By 1300 serfs were outnumbered by freemen, and about 60% of all tenanted land was held by some form of free tenure. Freemen had reproduced themselves more rapidly than customary tenants and the extensive land reclamation and colonisation of the 12th and 13th centuries had tended to create free, rather than unfree, tenancies. Moreover, customary rents and obligations, once fixed, were hard to raise. Custom now protected serfs from some of the more arbitrary actions of lords - including, in most cases, the raising of rental obligations. Customary tenants holding 15-30 acres for a fixed rent were often comparatively well off at this time of scarce land, high rents, and low real wages.
On most manors substantial customary tenants filled the most important offices and helped operate the manorial courts. Notwithstanding some celebrated struggles of serfs against their lords, the more enlightened landlords, such as Ramsey Abbey, employed co-operation rather than coercion in dealing with their tenants. Social control was difficult to maintain without good landlord-tenant relations. Only a minority of customary tenants were expected to perform regular work on the lord's demesne; hired labour was better motivated and cheaper to supervise. Within the economy at large, wage labour may have accounted for about a fifth to a quarter of the total labour expended in producing goods and services, with family labour accounting for the lion's share of the remainder. Lords also increasingly preferred money rents to labour rents, lay lords receiving seven-eighths of their income in that form by the early 14th century. This was possible because the economy was more based on money than ever before, with three times more coinage per capita in real terms than in 1086.
The population had grown in response to the absence of serious mortality crises coupled with expanding employment opportunities, as the European economy became more commercialised and integrated. The great cities of Italy and Flanders were the nerve centres of that economy. Their growth owed much to the absence until the end of the 13th century of major European wars. In England it was war that in 1275 first led kings to tax and manipulate trade. Until then, except for the tolls charged by towns through which goods passed, conditions of free trade had effectively prevailed. Latin provided merchants with a common language for international trade and silver and gold a common currency. As a result trading volumes had risen everywhere, with the value of English overseas trade trebling over the course of the 13th century. An increasing share of that trade was channelled through London, where native merchants vied for its control with foreign merchants. London alone among British cities regularly attracted merchants from all of the countries with which Britain conducted trade. Lombard Street in the City of London takes its name from the great Italian companies who based themselves in the heart of the metropolis.
Since 1100, lowland Britain had become covered by a close network of towns. In Wales and Scotland the bulk of these were deliberate foundations and their streets and property boundaries still display evidence of formal planning. Many English towns were of similar origin, including several that had risen to commercial prominence - Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Kingston-upon-Hull, Boston, King's Lynn, Liverpool and Salisbury. Together, developing administration and trade had reshaped the league-table of towns. London - second only to Paris among northern European cities - headed that table, the undisputed national focus of commercial, cultural, legal, administrative and political life. The capital's population of perhaps 75,000 was supported by a sophisticated system of' provisioning which guaranteed the city's food supply in even the worst harvest years.

Monks, nuns, friars, clerics and clerks accounted collectively for about one in ninety of the total population. This was institutionalised celibacy on an impressive scale. Fast advancing fashions and techniques of art, architecture and musical composition helped make religion the great consumer product of the age, offering something to suit almost every purse. Cathedrals, convents, churches, chapels, chantries, altars, retables (a frame enclosing decorated panels above the back of an altar), statues, monuments, windows, books, vestments and choral masses were all available to be endowed, adorned or purchased by those with the wherewithal to do so. Pilgrimages and crusades provided both the pretext and the means for those inclined to travel. Monarchs and magnates with their retinues and households, merchants, mongers and hawkers with their wares, armies with their cavalries, infantries and baggage trains, prelates, priests and pilgrims, carters and drovers on land and boatmen and sailors on river and sea were all on the move. Even bonded villeins regularly took to the road to transport demesne produce to market or estate headquarters. More in Part C....