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A partir d'une etude de cas, retracant un litige opposant deux paysans devant un tribunal seigneurial du manoir de Bury St Edmunds a Hinderclay (Suffolk) dans l'Angleterre du 13 eme siecle, l'A. examine la litterature sur la resolution des conflits dans les societes du passe et la litterature recente concernant les tribunaux seigneuriaux, notamment le debat sur la nature du droit coutumier. Deux points de vue s'opposent : la resolution des litiges resultant d'un processus mettant en jeu des normes culturelles relevant de la vie quotidienne et permettant aux plaignants de mettre en oeuvre des strategies individuelles (par exemple en instrumentalisant les rumeurs et commerages), engendrant un droit local cherchant la negociation d'une solution relevant de l'equite, la resolution des litiges resultant de l'application d'un droit substantif codifie dans des regles de droit par le pouvoir central et s'exprimant dans un systeme judiciaire institutionnalise. L'A. tente aussi de montrer comment les sources historiques legales de l'epoque peuvent permettre de comprendre le contexte economique et culturel de la resolution des conflits et dans quelle mesure elles peuvent contribuer a la comprehension des mentalites de la paysannerie medievale.

As in previous chapters, a study of the religious experience of English peasantry in the late Middle Ages illustrates the potential interconnectedness of the peasantry with worlds which extended not only beyond localities and regions but also beyond nations. There were clearly differences of access to religion between those living in towns and those living in the countryside but, in essentials, there were no fundamental distinctions of faith or understanding between the majority of rural dwellers and urban townspeople. Where differences did exist, as for instance in attendance at the sermons of the greater preachers of the day, they were consequences of the relative immediacy of urban life, and, importantly, rural dwellers could still enjoy occasional access, as sermons directed at the peasantry clearly reveal.1 The argument of this chapter is that both through personal enquiry and through the institutions of church, the peasantry was integrated into far-reaching religious and intellectual communities. There were, of course, local peculiarities to that experience and, generally speaking, religious expression in the countryside lacked the sophistication of that in towns but these differences of scale were likely to be less significant than the shared beliefs and assumptions which such universal membership helped generate.

The recent historical emphasis upon commercialisation, elements of which have been outlined in the previous chapter, threatens to alter fundamentally our view of the late medieval peasantry and tensions within the medieval village. Discussion of the burdens imposed upon late medieval villagers has, traditionally, been couched in terms of lord and tenant relations and has an illustrious historiography, with Marxist historians, notably R. H. Hilton, at the forefront.1 Central to this discussion of peasant resistance to the lord is a class-based view of the peasantry; implicit in the work of Hilton and those who have followed him is the contention that, at its essence, peasant society operated as one against lordship.2 Although Hilton has, throughout his career, been alive to the tensions existing within peasant society and the fact that the late medieval village was clearly not egalitarian, there is an assumption that the enemy and the driving force for resistance and mutual co-operation was the lord of the manor.3

The relationship between peasant families and their land sits at the core of the majority of investigations of the peasantry. Family, as a preoccupation of peasant culture and life, is seen as of central importance and, for some historians, without evidence of this preoccupation the identification of a society as ‘peasant’ becomes problematic.1 A simple model of peasant agriculture and everyday existence posits a collectivist enterprise in which each member of the peasant family neglects individual endeavour in favour of mutual responsibilities to the wider domestic group. In these ‘true’ peasantries, it is the family and not the individual that is significant. This close categorisation of the peasantry as family-centred has had implications for historians’ preparedness to conceive of a peasantry operating within wider spheres. If the peasant thinks first and foremost of his or her responsibility to his or her relations, then his or her motives for interacting with the outside world are likely to be limited. Furthermore, since a linked assumption about such peasant activity is that the collective activity of the peasant family is primarily concerned with self-sustaining agriculture, it may also be presumed that the peasantry’s focus of attention is almost wholly inward.

Having set out the ways in which land was held, its extent, its obligations and its legal tenures, it is evident that no simple uniformity of peasant landholding existed in medieval England. In order to comprehend this diversity, it will be useful to consider the combination of factors that might have contributed to it. The range of these is, of course, very considerable: they include the landscape, patterns of settlement, regional customs and inheritance practices, and the initiatives of the peasantry themselves. Developments in these, increases or diminutions in the importance of each, were of signal importance in the lives of the peasantry and, above all here, the ways in which they held and worked their land.

This chapter will be concerned with the land of the peasantry: the size of holdings, the different ways in which land could be held, and the rents and other obligations which individuals owed their lords for holding land. Discussion of the range of influences which played upon peasant landholding and the transfer of that land within the peasant community will be reserved for the following chapters. For the moment, discussion of landholding and its obligations offers us a point of access into the expectations which society made of peasants in the high and late Middle Ages and an insight into the disparities which existed in the medieval countryside. It will also permit us to establish some of the more significant developments in the economic and societal life of the peasantry during the three centuries between 1200 and 1500. It is an obvious but important point that even something as immobile as land was not immune from historical developments; nor were those who lived upon the land isolated from wider economic and social trends.

This book is an attempt to explore the limits of peasant society in medieval England. In the last thirty or more years, the study of the medieval English peasantry has moved in new and significant directions. The inter-disciplinarity of the post-war period, the growth of new social history, the encouragement to engage with history from below, and the development of women’s studies and gender studies, have all informed research into the medieval peasantry. Two strands in recent decades are particularly prominent and both have, to an extent, borrowed their approaches from other disciplines, namely the social sciences and demography. The social science approach has been most obviously employed by those who have studied with and under J. A. Raftis at the Pontifical Institute, Toronto. Close investigation of the medieval village has been attempted by Raftis and his pupils who have employed manorial court rolls to examine such issues as the peasant family, landholding and inter-peasant dealing.1 In undertaking this work, these historians have tried both to distinguish between social and economic groups within the village, stratifying that community according to certain criteria (office-holding, for example), and have also attempted to chart changing social relations within the community over time.