The Story of England, page 31
In the following year of 1485, however, there is one more clue to the family fortunes. That year the Coventry recorder’s office became vacant and was offered to John Brown, who was perhaps Nicholas’s son or brother, in the event that one Thomas Kebell did not accept it. (Kebell was a Londoner who also had land in the Kibworth area and was probably part of the Browns’ old circle of friends.) The letter making the offer survives in the Coventry Leet Book, one of the most magnificent civic documents from any English town in the Middle Ages. The mayor was Robert Only and his letter is dated January 1486:
Ryght worshipful sir I recommende me unto you in my most herty wyse desiring your welfare, praying you that ye wyll gyff credence to the bryngher of this letter … writtyn at Coventre Your true lover Rob Only Mair of the Citie of Coventre
To the right worshipfull John Brown be this deliverd
John’s reply is also preserved in the city’s Leet Book. It begins with the lovely formalities of fifteenth-century letter writing:
Right worshypfull and my verray good maister, I recomende me to you, thankyng you in full hertly wyse for your letter, and that it hath pleased you so to remember me as ye have don; and of me never in eny wyse deservyd …
Regretfully, however, John Brown turns down the request: ‘I think myself full unable thereto,’ writes John, saying that he has been so long in London that he now knew nobody intimately in Coventry save Robert Only himself and Mr Symonds, who had been mayor in 1477, so he could not help:
but I trust it shal-be my fortune hereafter som-thyng to do that shal-be to your pleasure:
writtyn at London the Monday next after the fest of the Circumcision of our Lorde
Yours
J Broun
This is not the first letter written by a Kibworth person in the medieval period, but it contains a fascinating story. By 1485, the year of the battle of Bosworth, John Brown is a Londoner and will indeed rise to become an alderman and knight, having made the same journey as so many ordinary English people over the coming centuries, a journey from the village, to the city and then to the capital. As an English yeoman family’s tale of advancement it could hardly be bettered.
But this is still not quite the end of a story that has taken us from thirteenth-century farming in Leicestershire to the City of London. Adam Brown’s family was last seen in Coventry in 1497; they disappear from the records of the city in the 1490s in the reign of Henry VII. By then Coventry was in grave economic decline, its troubles the subject of street songs and popular ballads. Just the time perhaps for the family to move on and seek new pastures. The timing suggests that the Browns had not lost their knack of knowing how to look after themselves and when to make their move. Just as they had left Kibworth in the stagnation of the early fifteenth century when opportunities in the village were at their thinnest, making an advantageous marriage into a leading Coventry family, in London at the end of the century there was also a grand marriage. Then William Brown, mercer, merchant of the Staple of Calais, a rising star in the cloth trade and son of John Brown, knight and alderman of the City of London, married a wealthy heiress, Katherine, daughter of Edmund Shaa, knight, and his wife Juliana. Was this our John, author of the letter to the mayor, the Coventry draper whose ancestors had come from Leicestershire and whose distant cousins still paid seasonal labourers to work on their strips ‘under Blacklands’ in the East Field of Kibworth Harcourt? We cannot be absolutely certain – the name after all is a common one – but the circumstances and the timing fit perfectly, and there could hardly be a more perfect story of the rise of an ordinary English family in the late Middle Ages.
13. The End of the Old Order
At the turn of the fifteenth century the Kibworth reeve, William Polle, like his neighbours the Browns, the Sibils and the Botons, could look back on five or six generations of family success, back to the days of Henry III and the horrida bella of the thirteenth-century civil war that had changed the village for ever. The villagers had divided feelings about the government and the commons, though they were loyal to the king himself as the personification of England, fount of the law which they knew was there to serve them too. In the collective popular memory of English history, the time of Henry’s son, Edward I, when Merton became their landlords, had been a time when ‘peace returned, and weapons were put aside; when dark clouds blew away, and sunshine came.’ For William Polle (perhaps through the stories told by his grandfather Henry), the family memory easily went back to those years of Edward’s reign before 1300 when ‘the English were joyful’, in the palmy days before the Great Famine, the ‘evil days of Edward II’ and the horrors of the Black Death.
Much had changed since his grandfather had been buried in the churchyard of St Wilfrid on the eve of the Famine. Still with his wife Emma, William by now had been reeve for fourteen years, just as his father Roger had been reeve for twenty years till his death in 1348, also having served at times as constable and ale-taster. The family took pride in having been long-standing officers in the village, just as in his turn William’s son Robert would be. But the years of famine and plague had taken their toll across his wider kin. Plague had become an almost permanent presence in the village in the last half-century. Two thirds of the village had died in 1349, but more deaths had followed in a steady wearing away of the manpower and morale of the community over the next five decades, to culminate in a final savage spasm in 1412. A man who carried in his mind (as reeves must) a detailed picture of the village population and the interweaving of its kin groups over recent history, William was all too well aware that in his time, over the four branches of his own family, the names of seven male members had been struck through in the tenants’ lists, in addition to many kinswomen and children, all victims of the pestilence.
At the turn of the century in 1400 there were complaints across the nation about the failures of Henry IV’s government, and its exactions. Henry, it was murmured, was an inauspicious usurper who had overthrown Richard II unjustly: ‘aboute this tyme the peple of this land began to grucche [grouch] agens kyng Harri, and beer him hevy, because he took thair good and paide not therefore; and desired to haue ageen king Richarde.’ Stories even circulated among travelling brokers on the road that Richard was not dead, ‘wherof moche peple was glad …’ The local abuse of power renewed talk of Magna Carta, ‘that no one should be arrested or imprisoned without response, or due process of the law … which the charter has confirmed in each parliament’.
The national mood then was grim: above all because of a general economic decline, which is vividly revealed in the manorial rolls for Kibworth. The great changes in employment patterns now becoming evident across the country had been under way before the Black Death, the heavy rent arrears in Kibworth for example already mounting up in the 1320s after the Great Famine. But everything was accelerated by the plague, and among the survivors it was the same whether one migrated or stayed put in the village. As William Polle and his kin saw it, the plague had hit the family hard, with the loss of so many of its menfolk. The oldest branch was headed by his cousin Nicholas and his wife Felicia; now the fifth generation after Robert (a freeman who is named in the Hundred Rolls in 1279), they had no children who survived to adulthood. Cousin William died of plague with no male heirs; as did another cousin Nicholas. The plague also killed three brothers in the third branch – Roger, Will and Robert – leaving only their sister Alice. So only our William came through, living a long life through the Black Death to 1406. William and his son Robert held the key village office of reeve for an astonishing fifty-six years between them. Clearly the Polles were generally respected and trusted, despite the inevitable village feuds with the likes of the cantankerous butcher John Pychard junior, who seems to have been able to pick quarrels with his neighbours almost at random.
As he entered the first quarterly court rentals arrears of the new century, William was well aware of the physical decline of the village. Adam Brown (now happily in business in Coventry for part of each year) may have raised his neighbours’ eyebrows with his fine new house by the Slang in Main Street in 1385, and other free tenants of old families kept good homes, but many of the customary villagers, let alone the serfs, of whom there was still a handful in the village, lived in increasingly depressed conditions. The loss of so many villagers in 1349 and during later outbreaks of the plague had left a surplus of rentable housing, barns, sheds and farmhouses. Of these many are now described in the court rolls as ‘empty’, ‘in need of repair’, ‘derelict’ and even ‘ruinous’. Over the next two generations many better-off survivors accumulated more property and land at low rents, then rented them out to other villagers, or farmed them with seasonal labour or with their own servants. But needless to say they no longer wished to be held to every term of the customary manorial conditions of rent, especially the landlord’s onerous repair clauses.
The last years of the fourteenth century, then, had been a time of economic hardship, rising prices and social unrest, when the real long-term effects of the Black Death made themselves felt. And in 1401 a dangerous level of confrontation was reached in Kibworth Harcourt. Rent arrears when William took over as reeve had been nearly £15, the highest since the plague year of 1361. As this situation persisted, the college now threatened twelve tenants with steep fines if they did not repair their houses. Most of these tenants had two or more houses by this date (accumulated as the result of tenancies left vacant by plague) and this was not seen by the villagers as a fair or reasonable demand so they refused. At the same time thirteen other tenants surrendered their holdings as a joint protest. It is clear that Polle sympathized, for the rent arrears were not collected.
Through this time, from the Peasants’ Revolt to the middle of the fifteenth century, a continuous thread in the court books (which is found in many other places over the country) is a feeling of dissatisfaction with the system in general. For poets and balladeers of the time, now using English to speak on behalf of the ordinary people, it was a common theme: ‘The world is like a false lemman [lover] ffayre semblant and much gyle … God made lords governors to govern people in unity … Each king is sworn to governance, to govern god’s people in justice.’ The treasury of a kingdom was not only the outward show of kings and their chivalry, rich merchants and learned clergy, but ‘corn stuffed in store’ and ‘a rich commons’, wrote a poet in 1401. A king without commons was no king:
A kyng withoute rent
might lightly trussen [‘pack up’] his treasure.
For commons maintaith lords honour, holy church and religion,
For commons is the fairest flower
That ever god set on earthly crown.
One important by-product of this time of stagnation and plague outbreaks was that the birth rate dropped and population stayed low in the country as a whole: indeed there were still only 2.5–3 million when Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, half what there had been in 1300. This story is mirrored in Kibworth. In the village, people were marrying later and having smaller families. Some indeed were not marrying at all, a surprising fact in any traditional rural society where heirs are always needed to work the farm. To take William’s family, his cousin Nicholas had died in middle age in 1396 with no heir, his uncle Nicholas had died celibate in the 1380s (highly unusual for a medieval peasant) and his three cousins produced just one daughter between them; a dramatic drop in the fertility of the family. So by the fifteenth century the family lands became concentrated into the hands of one branch, the reeve William’s descendants.
It is at this time that we begin to see the change from a traditional extended peasant kin group with several branches in one village to a much smaller nuclear family practising prudential marriage, the men and women marrying late (in their mid- to late twenties) and having smaller families. This is the English pattern of prudential marriage, husbanding the patrimony, what will become known as possessive individualism, which historians now see as one of the crucial social changes in the rise of capitalism (though it was a pattern fatally broken for the Polles by the inheritance strategies of William’s great-grandson John, the wealthy village bailiff in Henry VIII’s day, who unwisely split the family land between his four sons).
Though the fifteenth century saw a long period of stagnation, there were dramatic changes in labour relations across England. The consequence was a change from the feudal order to capitalism, from an agrarian, communally organized, close-knit society of self-sufficient peasants to a diversified, regionally orientated society of commercial farmers, artisans and landless wage-earning labourers, supporting a growing urban and commercially minded society. What happened in Kibworth is revealed in extraordinary detail in the Merton archive. As we saw, during the summer of blood of the Peasants’ Revolt the Merton rolls betray no hint of political unrest in Kibworth, unless it be Nicholas Gilbert (the reeve in 1381) silently and tactfully remitting the tenants’ arrears that summer. In fact the villagers were already embarked on their own plans for reform of lord and tenant relations. In this they were ultimately successful; it took time but not blood.
The confrontation between the peasants and the college in 1401, with the organized action over repair clauses, had been the first step. The surrender of their holdings by thirteen tenants as a joint protest had only been a token as in practice they continued to hold their lands and the college continued to collect their rents. But all this was a dress rehearsal for full-scale action by the community of the village. In the next few years the Merton archives reveal more cases of the villagers rejecting the custom of the manor. For example, since the very beginning of Merton’s tenure of Kibworth Harcourt the village court had been required to record and investigate fugitivi, runaways from the village who left the lord’s lands without permission of the college. But as we have seen, this kind of migration increased after the plague, with many villagers travelling away to seek work, even settling down as paid workers in cities like Leicester or Coventry. In 1407 the tenants refused to present to Merton the names of men who had left the village without the lord’s permission; and after 1409 the listing of absconders and absentees was finally abandoned altogether by the new reeve, Robert Polle, son of the old reeve, William. From this time the college documents show the fellows were still in legal arguments about the legal status of some of their tenants: one bundle records a lengthy investigation into the villein status of the Polles, tracing their ancestry back (some as freemen, some as villeins) to the college’s acquisition of the village in 1270.
The old bonds of villeinage then were becoming unworkable simply because of changing times and conditions, but chiefly because the peasants refused to make them work. To make matters worse, in 1413–14, as we have seen, the Lollard heresy which had been a bubbling undercurrent in village life for the last thirty years flared into life: another disturbing development for the fellows of Merton, who themselves had already been implicated in Wycliffism. Among the peasants from the Kibworth area who declared their allegiance to the Lollard leader Oldcastle were men from old families with wide kin networks and real presence in the administration of the village: Browns, Polles and Valentines. The ringleader, Walter Gilbert’s brother Nicholas, had been a long-respected college representative in the village. Both men were among those hanged and burnt a week later in St Giles’ Fields. To the fellows of Merton, long a source of suspicion to government and Church for their Lollard sympathies, the village was proving to be a little too free-thinking for comfort.
Things continued to go from bad to worse. In 1422, while Henry V was away fighting on two fronts in France, many tenants at home were finding themselves ruined or impoverished. At this point their feudal lord, the Earl of Warwick, demanded a feudal aid of £16 from Kibworth Harcourt, a war tax on all the tenants. For the reeve, Robert Polle, it was the last straw. By the end of the year sixteen tenements were in his hands: one third of the manor was without tenants. In the manorial court Robert struggled to let small parcels of land at low rates to help balance the books, but over the next decade the college lost £95 in rents – a large sum for the time, getting on for £50,000 today. Needless to say the tenants felt deeply aggrieved and now as a group they finally put their foot down over the question of customary dues. On top of national taxes and war aids, the double bind of labour services and rent increases, with extra landlord’s costs, was no longer supportable, or – as they perceived – enforceable. In discussion with the reeve and the college steward they let it be known that they wanted traditional labour services regularized across the board to straight money transactions. Eventually the college gave way.
