Changes Brought About by the Black Death
In the middle of the fourteenth century, in the reign of King
Edward III, came the Black Death. It carried off half the
population of the country at least, and all classes of society felt
its effects.
We have said that in some of the old parish churches you can
see, by some of the work done just after this time, that the
builders were very much poorer than they had been, and had to
finish off in a very plain fashion work begun on a grand scale.
You must remember, too, that there were several different kinds
of landowners or overlords--the king, the great lords, bishops,
colleges, and monasteries. The manors, of which these estates were
made up, in the course of centuries were divided and subdivided
in many ways as the land became more valuable. Many people might
thus have an interest in one manor which a couple of hundred years
before had been in the hands of one person only. That made law
business very complicated when these little parcels of land changed
hands.
Though manors could not be bought and sold outright, little by
little money was paid to have bits of manors and the various
rights in manors let out, or leased, for a term of years. This
was especially the case with property in towns, and with lands
belonging to corporations, like colleges and monasteries, which
were often scattered about in various parts of the country.
On the manors in the country districts the same thing was going
on, though perhaps more slowly than in the towns. It became much
more convenient for the villeins and cottiers, and other tenants of
a manor, to pay a rent to the lord instead of actually working on
the lord's land. At first this rent was paid in the produce of the
land--a few hens or eggs, a calf or a lamb, or so much corn, till
by and by we find actual payments in money as rent.
Then, too, a class of labourers had gradually sprung up on the
manors. As the tenants and villeins began to pay to the lord a
quit-rent, instead of working so many days a week on the land,
the lord of the manor had to employ persons to do the work on his
home-farm. These would naturally be the cottiers and serfs on
the manor--the "landless men"--who thus became what we know as
labourers.
All these had to be accounted for in the manor court, which was
held regularly every few weeks. If a labourer was missing he was
sought for, and brought back to the manor, which he might not leave
without his lord's permission. It is quite true that if he could
only remain unclaimed in some borough town for a year and a day he
was no longer bound to the lord of his native manor; but the towns
did not encourage strangers, as we have seen. If, however, labour
happened to be wanted in the town, no doubt his being there would
be "winked at" and no notice would be taken of his "harbouring"
there; and in this way numbers managed to get their freedom.
But it was not an easy matter for a labourer to get away from his
native manor. After the Black Death, labour became very scarce,
for on some of the manors almost every tenant and labourer died.
All over the country land-workers were wanted badly; and tenants
and landlords, when they were so hard pushed, were glad to employ
almost any man who appeared, and they did not trouble to ask whose
"man he was" or whence he came.
The wages of the labourers, of course, went up; but before very
long the landlords saw that that would not do; it made their
farming so much more expensive, and so their incomes tended to grow
less and less. Law after law was passed to get the labourers back
to their native manors, and to keep down the price of labour.
[Illustration: _Labourers felling a Tree, Fourteenth Century.
From a manuscript in the British Museum_]
All classes of overlords, and especially the colleges and
monasteries, had much difficulty in working their lands, and so the
custom of letting them out in farms increased a good deal after the
Black Death.
At first the owners let out these farms with a certain amount of
stock on them. They were let for so many years, or for so many
lives. At the end of the time the farm had to be given up and the
stock replaced as it had been at the first. The land belonging
to the farm was mixed up with the land of other tenants in the
manor, in the big unenclosed fields, and had to be farmed still
according to the old customs of the manor. Some of the very oldest
farms existing to this day began in this kind of way, and there
are possibly a few of the very oldest farm-houses which were first
built early in the fifteenth century.