THE TRANSFER OF CUSTOMARY LAND ON THE ESTATE OF

THE BISHOPRIC OF WINCHESTER, 1350-1415

A PROJECT FUNDED BY THE LEVERHULME TRUST

This project, started in October, 2000, was researched by Dr John Mullan under the supervision of Professor P.D.A. Harvey and Professor R.H. Britnell. It used the earlier research of Dr Mark Page on the land market on the estates of the Bishopric of Winchester before 1350 as a foundation on which to study the changes that occurred in the generations following the Black Death.

The land market is a topic of central significance for an understanding of medieval society and its transformations. It relates directly to three major historical questions that are matters of ongoing debate. (1) How commercialised was the medieval economy? (2) to what extent were individuals constrained either by custom of by seigniorial authority? (3) what were the principal directions and variations in economic development through space and time? Research on the later medieval land market has concentrated on single localities, both in monographs about individual manors and in articles. Few studies have tackled whole estates, though there are notable exceptions for the lands of Westminster Abbey and those of the bishopric of Worcester. Neither of these estates permits the sort of quantitative analysis to be obtained from the Winchester estates. Previous research into the land market across the these estates had concentrated on the period before 1350, notably in J.Z. Titow’s doctoral thesis and in a three-year project, terminated on 29 September 1999, funded by the ESRC on ‘The Peasant Land Market in Southern England, 1250-1350’. At the time when the project was undertaken little had been published about the period after the Black Death, though its immediate aftermath is the subject of a paper by Dr Titow.

The period 1349-1415 is well known as the one when, following the Black Death, customary tenure was transformed through modification of its more servile aspects, partly as a result of confrontation between landlords and tenants, but partly as the outcome of slow changes in negotiated terms of tenure. Many of these changes were already apparent by 1415. The period 1350-1415 is generally considered to be split between years (c. 1350-75) when landlords recovered much of the ground they had lost at the time of the Black Death, and years (c.1375-1415) when they suffered greater losses of income and had to make more considerable concessions to tenants. These trends and their periodisation have now been tested over the wide area that the Winchester pipe rolls document.

Objectives

The project used the 60 surviving Winchester pipe rolls from the years 1350-1415 (Hampshire Record Office, B1/102 - B1/161) to identify the extent and timing of changes in the land market. These documents, which record financial details for the numerous manors on the scattered estates of the bishopric of Winchester, are exceptional for their continuity and comprehensiveness, and so offered a rare opportunity for the close study of economic change in southern England. The quality of the evidence is demonstrable from the roll for 1301-2, edited in translation by Dr Page, in which the annual accounts for the 68 manors and boroughs on the estate occupy 363 printed pages. The amount of detail relating to land transfers increased steadily during the early fourteenth century, so that the records for the years 1350-1415 are even fuller than the roll for 1301-2. This is demonstrable from Dr Page’s edition of the pipe roll for 1409-10, which is even longer than the one for 1301-2.

Summary report

Full report

Hampshire Record Office

Hampshire Record Office