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Stratford-On-Avon   

 

Chapter II (2)   

 

AGRICULTURAL LIFE

 

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In 1085 the first distinct account of Stratford was put on record by the Domesday surveyors, and it supplies us with many interesting details. The district had then been for several centuries one of the Bishop of Worcester's manors, and all the manorial machinery was at work upon it.

 

The township growing up there was a village community, consisting mainly of very small farmers and a few day-labourers with their families, and in all their relations of life the inhabitants were under the jurisdiction of the bishop's steward, or seneschal, in virtual serfdom.

 

 He presided over the manor court, constituted as the court baron, to which the townsmen came

 

     1 See Domesday Survey (Record Commission). Mr. Seebohm's

        Invaluable book on The Village Community in England (1883) has

        defined the conditions of medieval agriculture.

 

 

 

 

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to supervise the payment of rent and dues, the settlement of new-comers, and the distribu­tion of land. He, too, kept order in the villages, and, with the aid of the community assembled in court leet, punished breaches of the peace.  He saw that the land was properly cultivated, that the ploughs were fully yoked, and that the seed was fairly sown.

The actual extent of Stratford in William L's time was fourteen and a half hides, or nearly 2000 acres. It was of smaller extent than it had been under the Mercian regime, for

 

[End Page 16]  [Drawing “Meadow Walk by the Avon” omitted ]

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the neighbouring villages had now themselves become so many separate manors. The inhabit­ants consisted of a priest, who, doubtless, conducted services in the chapel of the old monastery, with twenty-one villeins and seven boordarii. Each of these residents was the head of a family, and their number, therefore represents a population of about one hundred and fifty. The villeins stood the higher in the social scale.

On all sides of the village lay arable land, divided by balks of earth into narrow strips,­

each about half an acre in size. Each villein held, besides his homestead, strips of this land, sometimes amounting in the aggregate to sixty acres, but the strips in one ownership seldom adjoined each other, being scattered over all the fields adjoining the village. The bordarii, from the Saxon bord, a cottage, were cottagers who owned a cottage with a garden, and some live acres in strips, distributed as in the case of the villeins over the fields at hand. But every householder, whether villein or cottager, evi­dently possessed a plough. The community owned altogether thirty-one ploughs, of which three belonged to the bishop, the lord of the

 

 

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manor, and were probably drawn by a team of eight oxen. Both classes of residents were liable to small money payments to the lord of the manor, and occasionally to payments of agricultural produce, besides being called upon to labour for several days every year on portions of the land cultivated in ,the bishop's own behalf. There was very little meadow land. The Domesday surveyors only found one field of that character five furlongs long and two broad. All the energies of the inhabitants were clearly ,..engaged in growing wheat, barley, and oats. By the river at the same time stood the water-mill belonging to the bishop. There the villagers were obliged to grind all their corn, and they had to pay a fee for the privilege. In r08s the mill produced an income of ten shillings annually, but the bishop was often willing to accept eels in discharge of the mill-fee, and a thousand eels were usually sent to Worcester year by year by the customers of the village mill. I t is noticeable that the total profit derived from Stratford by Wulfstan was £ 25 in the Domesday Survey, an amount fiye times that derived from it in the days of Edward the Confessor. The advance marks

 

 

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The rapid progress of the settlement in the interval.In the century and a quarter (from1085 to 1210) following, the village does not seem tohave made any giant's strides. Alveston, the obscure little village that now lies in the bend of the river nearest to Stratford in its upward course, seemed likely then to rival it in prosperity. Just before the Norman Conquest; "certain great men," says Dugdale, had withheld Alveston from the Bishops of Worcester after it had long been in their pos­session, but William the Conquerer restored it to Bishop Wulfstan, who generously made it over to the great

 

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their end of the bridge, which was known to them and to the Elizabethans as Bridgetown. Its dwellers were all of them bordarii or cottagers, and in the descriptive rental of the

Worcestershire Priory compiled about 1250, the names and annual dues, which varied from five-shillings to sixteen pence, are given at length. One was called Brun, another John de Pont (or, as we should say, John Bridge), another William Cut. The steward, or seneschal, who looked after this, with much surrounding property, was a native of Stratford, Nicholas by name, who held a messuage there with a garden besides arable land in three neighbouring fields. For his house and land he had to pay sixpence

quarterly, to cut hay in the meadow belonging to the lord of the manor for one day, and to help in stacking it, besides spending three days in reaping his lord's grain.

The various services and payments due

as rent from the husbandmen of Stratford and its neighbourhood at the time-services which seemed to increase in intricacy with the centuries-are given at length in the book

 

1 Cf  the Custumary of the Worcestershire Priory, published by the Camden Society.

 

 

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of the possessions of the W Worcestershire Priory, and illustrate the life led by the majority of the villagers in the infancy of the town. Of the changes in the condition of the inhabitants since the Domesday Survey, it need only be noted that many of the large estates outside the town had been let as knight's fees, that is to say, on condition of their holders per­forming certain military services, and that some of the villeins within the village had become free tenants (libere tenentes), that is to say, men free from the imputation of serf-dom who were permitted to cultivate their land as they would, and paid for their farms a fixed money rental, with little or no labour services to supplement it. But the majority of the inhabitants were still villeins or cottagers, and labour services were exacted from both these classes with vexatious regularity. Villeins who owned sixty acres had to supply two men for reaping the lord's fields, and cottagers with thirty acres supplied one. On a special day an additional reaping service was to be performed by villeins and cottagers with all their families except their wives and shepherds. Each of the free tenants had then also to find a reaper, and

 

 

 

 

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to direct the reaping himself. Happily on that occasion the steward saw that all the labourers were fed at the cost of the manor. The villain was to provide two carts for the conveyance of the corn to the barns, and every cottager who owned a horse provided one cart, for the use of which he was to receive a good morning meal of bread and cheese. One day's hoeing was expected of the villain and three days' sloughing, and if an additional day were called for, food was supplied free to the workers. Villeins and cottagers were also expected to assist in cutting the hay, in carting and stacking it. When the hay had all been gathered in, each householder was to be presented with a ram, a four penny cheese, and a small sum of money instead of the fodder to which they were of old allowed to help themselves. No villein nor cottager was permitted to bring up his child for the Church without permission of the lord of the manor.

A fee had to be paid when a daughter of a villein or cottager married. On his death his best wagon was claimed by the steward in his lord's behalf, and a fine of money was exacted

from his successor-if, the record wisely adds, he could pay one. Any townsman who made

 

 

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beer for sale paid for the privilege. But these charges exhausted the manorial demands. Fishing was free, church dues were small, and the mills and the barns for storing grain were at times placed freely at the disposal of the population.