The Leasing of the Abbot of Westminster's Demesnes in the Later Middle Ages

T | HOROLD ROGERS placed the leasing of the seignorial demesnes near the centre of his account of English agrarian economy in the later Middle Ages.' His main reason for doing so was his belief that the terms on which this land was ultimately leased guaranteed security and prosperity to tenant-farmers for the rest of the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. The leasing of the demesnes itself he attributed directly to the conditions created by the Black Death, and he assumed that the new lessees were peasants. Since he believed that it was in this time of relatively straitened circumstances that the aristocracy first adopted the unvarying rule of primogeniture, the leasing of the demesnes, though to be considered beneficial in its effects within the medieval period itself, was also associated in his mind with the prehistory of the institution which it was one of the main concerns of his political life to destroy. This was the strict settlement. Later work has convincingly revised Rogers's chronology, by making it plain that leasing was a long process which had begun before the end of the thirteenth century; on some estates it may even have been temporarily retarded rather than speeded by the Black Death. But if we now have a much better understanding of the chronology of leasing, it cannot be said that we are yet as well informed as we need to be about the conditions on which the leases were granted or about the lessees who took them. Historians have usually found the demesnes in hand more interesting than the demesnes on lease, and for the obvious reason that the sources facilitate the one study but frustrate the other. There are not many detailed studies of the lessees who took the demesnes to set beside Prof. Du Boulay's account of the archbishop of Canterbury's farmers.2 As a result, some of the assumptions which Rogers made in this context have passed into the medieval canon, although other parts of the conceptual framework in which he placed the leasing of the demesnes have been outmoded. In particular, his belief that the demesnes passed into the hands of men whom it is appropriate to call has won acceptance with little attempt on the part of historians to weigh the importance of the exceptions to this rule, if rule it was, or to define what is meant by the term peasant, and the classification of rural society in simple terms of landlords and peasants lingers in this corner of historical studies, although there is hardly any other in which it would not now seem naive. How important it is that we should examine the evidence more closely has been made plain recently by Dr Bridbury's reconsideration of the English eco

Ancient history · Art · Middle Ages · Political science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Medieval Literature and History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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