Sunday 15 December 2024

The Early-Fifteenth-Century Wymeswold Bye-Laws Revisited

LAHS Member, Dave Fogg Postles, explores the significance of these late medieval regulations, covering many aspects of daily village life.

Almost sixty years ago, W. O. Ault composed a famous long essay on the issuance of village bye-laws in medieval England which was subsequently expanded into a book-length examination. The bye-laws seemingly superseded the manor in their promulgation by the ‘community of the vill’ (‘vill’ is synonymous with village). The ‘community’ was self-regulating in the organization and management of the open fields. In particular, where lordship in the parish and vill was divided with several manors, the bye-laws were a collective expression of the entire ‘community’. The bye-laws approached the ‘basic problems of harvest and pasture in an open-field village’ and concentrated on harvest and the ‘stinting’ of animals (‘stinting’ was the customary right to pasture a defined number of animals in the fields). The independence of the villagers in their promulgation was reflected in the fines for infractions being delivered for the use of the parish church (as at Wymeswold). Bye-laws were also occasionally (in fact, infrequently) entered on the court rolls of Merton College’s manors of Barkby and Kibworth Harcourt, but never collected together in the manner of the Wymeswold document.

The bye-laws cited by Ault were preponderantly occasional entries made on the manorial court rolls and frequently in Latin, as most of the Islip (Oxfordshire) issuances (Harvey [1]). By contrast, the Wymeswold bye-laws are completely different. They are a codification or engrossment (collecting together) of the bye-laws at one particular time on a single membrane of parchment. They are, moreover, composed in Middle English. They do enunciate the expected regulation of harvest and stinting of animals. They also do obviously operate in a village and parish which was divided between three lordships (John Nevyll, Hugh de Wyloughby, and Beauchief Abbey). Their production, however, suggests a different interpretation from regarding them as just the perennial organization of the villagers’ husbandry.

Firstly, they were produced in the early fifteenth century and as a composite document in Middle English (apart from the heading and memorandum of consent by the lords at the foot, which are in Latin). The question is why then? The suggestion here is that they were engrossed then because of the particular circumstances of the time: not the normal workings of the community but the ‘community under stress’ (or under more stress than usual).

One of the notable injunctions concerns the movement of labourers to other parishes to work elsewhere at harvest time. The prohibition of this temporary migration was probably associated with a lack of labour as a consequence of the declining demography after the Black Death, well into the fifteenth century (Fox). Harvest time was always a sensitive period for labour supply, of course, but was exacerbated after the contraction of population. Concomitantly, peasant landholding had become concentrated and the new larger peasant landholders needed a larger labour force.

Agistment (grazing) of livestock was a constant problem but was probably heightened in the early fifteenth century as peasant landowners possessed more stock. Again, the issue would have affected the larger peasant landowners more particularly.

Thirdly, there was a discriminatory approach to gleaning. The customary right of gleaning permitted the poorest (often landless) to collect remnants of grain from the floor of the fields after the harvesting of grain. They were now more restricted. They were expected to earn wages before they were allowed to glean. The same rule was enunciated at Islip in 1407: peasants who earn a penny a day will have their rights of gleaning limited. At Wymeswold, the demand was two pence per day. What is suggested here is the development of discrimination between able-bodied and indigent poor detected in the late Middle Ages (Harvey [2]).

Additionally, there is the relationship of these bye-laws to ‘new’ injunctions of the later Middle Ages concerned with social crime (McIntosh). The Wymeswold orders look like a transition from regulation of husbandry to attempts to control (mis)behaviour in the later Middle Ages. This interpretation differs somewhat from the earlier representation of the collapse of ‘community’ in the later Middle Ages hazarded by the ‘Toronto School’ (JBS below). What is happening is the deterioration of the conditions of the poorest of the peasantry and the effort of the larger peasantry to control them. As has been noted, in this endeavour, lords and larger peasants had the same objective.

The following analogy may be anachronistic but will be adventured. The issuance of the Wymeswold bye-laws has a parallel in the ‘Swallowfield [Berkshire] articles’ at the end of the sixteenth century (Hindle). These injunctions were issued by the ‘better sort’ of inhabitants of the chapelry at a time of distress, the run of poor harvests leading to the composition of the articles in 1596. In this vein, the Wymeswold bye-laws should perhaps be considered less as representing the normal operation of the open fields but more as the response to a particular time and the social differentiation within the village and parish.

Dave Fogg Postles © 2024

A Note on the Language

There is a mixture of East Midlands and Northern Middle English as might be expected for the location and the time. The velar stop k for c is prevalent. The voicing of qwyte (wheat) and qwo (who) is distinctly Northern.

References

Nottingham University Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections MiM242 (in this catalogue dated as 1425, perhaps because Tuesday 17 May occurred in the same week as the Feast of St Dunstan the Bishop in that year and the memorandum at the foot has the date of Tuesday before that feast [A Handbook of Dates for Students of British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, revised edn, 2000), pp. 190-191] ; but the date is not so concrete) (Wymeswold bye-laws, early fifteenth century). (I am grateful to the staff of the Dept of MSS and Special Collections for providing a photographic copy to allow me to examine the document again).

Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton (London: HMSO, 1911), pp. 106-109 (‘Statut[um] de Wymundwold’) (p. 106 for the date). (In fact, the endorsement on MiM242 is: Statuta de Wymondeswold’. The head of the face is now illegible, but it might be expected that it reproduced the endorsement).

W. O. Ault, Open-Field Farming in Medieval England: A Study of Village By-laws (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972) (expanding on his ‘Open-field husbandry and the village community: a study of agrarian by-laws in medieval England’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society new series 55 (1965), pp. 1-102). Quotation at p. 19; divided lordship at p. 19; references to Wymeswold, in brief, at pp. 33, 37; to gleaning p. 32.

H. S. A. Fox, ‘Servants, cottagers and tied cottages during the later Middle Ages: towards a regional dimension,’ Rural History 6 (1995), pp. 125-154.

B. F. Harvey [1], ed., ‘Bye-laws of the manor of Islip’ (Oxfordshire Record Society 40, 1959), pp. 104-119 (only one bye-law in Middle English at p. 110; pp. 104-105 gleaning). This pioneering study brought together the entries on the court rolls of Islip so that there is a complete compendium of the bye-laws promulgated for the vill at various times.

Harvey [2], Living and Dying in England: The Monastic Experience 1100-1540 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 31.

Steve Hindle, ‘Hierarchy and community in the Elizabethan parish: the Swallowfield articles of 1596’, The Historical Journal 42 (1999), pp. 835-851.

Journal of British Studies 33 (1994) (special issue on the late-medieval ‘community’ including discussion of the ‘Toronto School’ which is an epithet attached by others to scholars associated with the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto which produced a series of books and articles on the estates of Ramsey Abbey).

Marjorie McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 38-39.

McIntosh, Poor Relief in England 1350-1600 (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), pp. 41-44.