The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 7

More frequently one is left to infer the actual process of division from the way in which the Rentals describe holdings as being occupied by groups or partners.h.i.+ps[164] of tenants, who share the land between them, each being responsible for a part of the rents and services owing from the virgate. Such an arrangement does not imply that there is any partners.h.i.+p in actual cultivation, any partners.h.i.+p in the modern sense of the word. It means, on the contrary, that the different parts of the holding are divided among several different cultivators, and that its apparent unity is quite artificial, simply a fiscal expression to enable the authorities to see that it renders its share of payments and services.

[162] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 129, Rental of Dupehale (Dippenhall) 1287: "Edmunde de Bosco and William de Bosco hold 2 cotlands which were formed out of one virgate of land which Adam de Bosco formerly held."

[163] _Ibid._, p. 153: "Margery Palmer comes and surrenders into the hands of the lord a virgate of land with a house in Crondal, and Galfrid her son comes and gives to the lord 6s. 8d. to have seizin thereof, upon this condition, that the said Margery have the third part, and two pieces more, of the aforesaid tenement, for the term of her life."

[164] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 117, Rental of Yateleigh, 1287: "John de la Perke and Thomas Squel hold one virgate of land containing 22 acres, on payment therefor of 2s. 10d. on the Feast of St. Michael and 7-1/2 for Pondpany, and one stoup of honey, and 75 eggs, and shall perform all services like Thomas Kach.... Walter le White and Osbert de la Knelle hold one virgate of land containing 29-1/2 acres.... Roys de Pothulle and John le White hold one virgate of land containing 29 acres."

Again there is much leasing and sub-letting of land by the more prosperous of the customary tenants. Like labourers who hold allotments to-day, they often find it convenient to hire extra land and at the same time to let out parts of their own holdings, which may be inconveniently situated, or hard to work, or for some other reason not worth retaining.

Thus in Lancas.h.i.+re the c.l.i.theroe[165] court rolls show many fines being paid in the early fourteenth century for permission to "tavern," that is simply to lease, land. In 1351 there are several tenants on the manor of Sutton[166] in Hamps.h.i.+re who have leased cotlands from the larger customary tenants. At Crokeham on the neighbouring manor of Crondal[167]

we hear as early as 1287 of one tenant paying 12d. for his holding "through the rents of" another customary tenant, who stands as an intermediate landlord between him and the manorial authorities. On this manor, indeed, sub-letting of land proceeded very far, and had created by the middle of the sixteenth century exactly the result which one would have expected, the existence, namely, of a considerable number of subtenants holding land from the copyholders and known by the name of Hallmote[168] tenants. Nor is mere subtenancy the most elaborate of the arrangements which arise among these Lilliputian capitalists. The peasants deal in land, and naturally they employ land agents to act as brokers for their bargains. When "Robert Bagges surrenders one bovate of villein land into the hands of the lord for the use of Symon Clerk, and the same Symon forthwith surrenders the aforesaid bovate to the lord for the use of William Flaxman, and William Flaxman pays 12d. to enter thereupon,"[169] may we not say that we have the whole machinery of land speculation, seller, middleman, and client, complete?

[165] _Court Rolls of the Lords.h.i.+ps, Wapentakes, and Demesne Manors of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster_ (edited by W. Farrer).

Halmote of Colne, 1323: "Thomas le Harper for taverning 3 acres of land, 6d. Roger ... for the same of 2 acres of land, 4d.,"

and _pa.s.sim_.

[166] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 140: "John Thomas holds a messuage and a 'ferdell' of land, excepting one cotland and a perch.... Thomas le Freyn holds of the above a cotland and a perch."

[167] _Ibid._, p. 134: "William de Suche gives to the lord 12d.

yearly, to be allowed to hold 6 acres through the rents of Hugh of Wyggeworthale."

[168] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 159-383. Customary of 1567. The name does not necessarily imply subtenancy in any way, the Hallmoot being simply the court of the manor. At Yateleigh one copyholder, Richard Allen, held about 263 acres, of which about 126 were held from him by 21 subtenants (pp. 258-265 and 378-379).

[169] Footnote in _The Rebellion of Wat Tyler_, by Petruschevsky (Russian), p. 210: "Ricardus Flaxman qui de domino tenuit in bondagio unum messuagium et II. bovatas terrae et xvi acras terrae de Forland quae quondam fuerunt Johannis Colyn ad terminum xx.

annorum ex dimissione praedicti Johannis per licenciam curiae, venit hic et reddidit in ma.n.u.s domini praedictas duas bovatas terrae et acras di' terrae et prati ad opus Willelmi Dolynes deduct' praedicto messuagio." Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, Bdle. 32, No. 307, and _ibid._, p. 211: "Robertus Bagges redd'

in ma.n.u.s domini l bovatam terrae in bondagio ad opus Symonis Clerk Tenend 'sibi et suis, etc. Et idem Symon instanter redd'

in ma.n.u.s domini praedictam bovatam terrae ad opus Willelmi Flaxman sibi et heredibus suis secundum consuetudinem manerii, et dat ad ingressum xiid." Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, Bdle. 33, No.

324: "Instanter" is remarkable.

So far we are on safe ground. But it is not easy to describe the sort of conditions in which this petty commercialism, this emergence of peasants richer and more prosperous than their fellows, takes place. Clearly it implies the existence of small stores of capital, of some surplus over the consumption of the current year, which its fortunate possessors can use as a starting-point for further acquisitions; nor ought this to surprise us, for the usurer who traffics in his neighbours' misfortunes by lending money or corn at exorbitant rates, is by no means an unfamiliar bugbear in the mediaeval village. Clearly, again, we must not look for some single _primum mobile_ to explain how such small capitals could be brought into existence. With all its apparent h.o.m.ogeneity the manorial population had, from the beginning of things, included people some of whom were in so much better a position than others for building up considerable properties as to make it no matter for astonishment that, as time went on, they should improve their advantage and attract more than their share of any increase in wealth which might take place.

The appearance in the fourteenth century of a rural middle cla.s.s is, indeed, much less remarkable than the extreme slowness of its development in the more backward parts of the country. For one thing, even the strictest equalisation of shares could not prevent the holder of exceptionally fertile land from being better off than his less fortunate fellow. Since services and rents were based on the requirements of the demesne, with a view to their rough apportionment among all the peasants, and were not adjusted, like modern compet.i.tive rents, so as to sweep away the surplus arising on superior sites, the occupants of the latter could build up, under the aegis of custom, the nucleus of a very considerable property.[170] For another thing, the mere fact that the village was subordinated to a lord, who exploited it by means of officers and servants, supplied village society with an upper layer of people who had larger opportunities than the ma.s.s of the peasantry for improving their position. Stewards, bailiffs, and greaves were frequently rewarded for their services with grants of land for which only a nominal rent was asked, and of course the most obvious way of using their advantage was further to increase it by adding to their properties. In a somewhat similar position to these were the peasants who were let off easily because their labour was not needed for the lord's estate. It is quite a mistake to think of the mediaeval villager as a man pinned down to subsistence level by the economic pressure which grinds, as in a mortar, the poorest cla.s.ses in modern society. Of course individuals were cruelly oppressed, and when the harvest failed whole communities, as in India to-day, must sometimes have been blotted out at a blow. But the whole story of the extraordinary upward movement which took place among the peasantry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is unintelligible, unless we admit that the legal rightlessness of the villein was, in fact, quite compatible with a good deal of economic prosperity. His liability to the manorial authorities, though in law unqualified, was in reality a liability limited, on the one hand, by the rule of custom, and, on the other, by the fact that he worked, not for an ever hungry world-market, but for a by no means insatiable local demand. Since services were adjusted to holdings, not to holders, a family of five or six persons usually did not send more than one or two to work on the lord's estate, and the remainder had opportunities for economic advancement, which necessarily became greater as the growth of population made the weight of the lord's requirements less exacting.[171] Moreover, the rudimentary specialisation of industrial employments, which can plainly be seen going on in the villages of the fourteenth century, brought into existence the man who was half peasant, half artisan or tradesman, and who could employ the money which he made in trade to carry on his husbandry on a larger scale than his neighbours. Such, for example, were the smiths, carpenters, turners, shoemakers, tailors, butchers, walkers, websters, and shearmen, who appear so constantly in Poll Tax returns.[172] When a weaver is able, though a villein, to leave 3000 marks to his heirs,[173] the village capitalist has plainly come upon the scenes. Nor must we forget that, however self-contained some manors may have been, there were others whose proximity to a chartered town or to a seaport acted as a magnet to draw rural conditions out of the rut of custom. Among the serfs who bought permission to emigrate, there were some who, having made money as town craftsmen, strayed back to their "villein nest," and acquired considerable properties with their hardly ama.s.sed wealth, like the Italian or Austrian peasant of to-day, who, after years spent in the sunless tenements and restaurants of New York, returns at last to be the envy of Calabrian and Tyrolese villages. From several sides at once, therefore, from those who socially rank above the ma.s.s of the population, from the peasant who combines trade and husbandry, from the enterprising serf who sets out to make his fortune at a distance, forces are at work to build up the considerable holdings that are the basis of the well-to-do peasantry of the future.

[170] See below, pp. 115-121.

[171] See _E.H.R._, vol. xv. pp. 774-813; Vinogradoff's review of Page's _The End of Villeinage in England_.

[172] Powell, _The Revolt in East Anglia_, Appendix I.; and Putnam, _The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers_, pp.

80-81.

[173] Scrope, _History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_.

p. 233.

But while these causes were always operating on individuals, the most potent influence in forming a cla.s.s of prosperous peasants was, no doubt, the spread of commerce and its reaction on agriculture. Its effect is shown by the fact that it is just in those parts of the country where trade is most highly developed, and where, therefore, the use of money and the growth of wealth encourage speculation of all kinds, that the commercialising of landed relations.h.i.+ps, and the appearance of a middle cla.s.s, arises earliest and spreads furthest. The change is specially noticeable in the Eastern counties, which, from an early date, are the home of industry. Examples of the extreme variety and irregularity in the holdings of the customary tenants on the manors of Suffolk in the sixteenth century, which we have already contrasted with the arrangements in the backward parts of the country such as Northumberland, begin to make their appearance at a very early date in that county of fisheries and manufactures. At Hadleigh,[174] where the woollen industry has set money in circulation, the processes both of splitting up the customary holdings, and of letting two or three of them to a single tenant, is conspicuous at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and has completely altered the distribution of property which existed a century before. At the little fis.h.i.+ng village of Gorleston[175] at the end of the thirteenth century each of the former tenancies was divided up among several tenants, sometimes three or four, sometimes eight or ten, and once as many as twenty. At Hawstead, in the same county, the free tenants have let off part of their holdings and added to them by leasing additional land in its place. In short, whenever trade becomes a serious factor in rural life, one finds a very general tendency for new arrangements of land to grow up side by side with the customary holdings, which are the backbone of the manor, because it is from them that the lord extracts his services for the cultivation of the desmesne. As long as the necessity for labour services continues, the number of holdings does not undergo any appreciable alteration, but the number of holdings ceases to be a guide to the number of holders.

[174] _Victoria County History of Suffolk_, Unwin's article on Social and Economic History.

[175] _Ibid._

It is clear that the organisation of the manor is compatible with a good deal of s.h.i.+fting of property among the customary tenants, and that an alteration in its arrangements begins at a comparatively early date, without any external shock and through the desire of such tenants as can afford it to buy and lease land from other tenants who are less well off. If such a tendency were at all general, it would explain the gradual aggregation of larger holdings into fewer hands, and the appearance of considerable inequality in economic status among members of the village community whose legal position was the same. Sometimes, indeed, the authorities of the manor think that the process is going on too fast, that tenants have forgotten that, though they deal in land as though it were their own, it is really the lord's, and that they must not jeopardise the rents and services which he expects from it by alienating it without his permission. Sometimes a day of reckoning comes, when "tenants having more than one customary tenement" are "to show cause why they should not be excluded from the other tenements but one, unless license be granted them."[176] But in view of the mult.i.tude of transactions which come before us, we can hardly doubt that licence was nearly always granted if the purchaser or lessee was thought by the steward to be substantial enough to make the land do its duty,[177] and that tenants who wanted to buy and sell, lease and let, had very little opposition to expect from the lord or his steward.

[176] _Merton Doc.u.ments_, "A table of the Matters, Orders, and Customs Conteyned in Severall Courts of the Manor, 1563": "Daye given to all ye tenants of ye manor to remove and expell their undertenants by Michaelmas that shall be in ye yeare 1563, upon paine of every delinquent forfeiting 20s." "Daye given to the aforesaid tenants having above one customary tenement to be here at ye next court to shew," etc., as above. See the Customary of High Furness quoted below, p. 101; also Hone, _The Manor and Manorial Records_, pp. 177-178, Court Rolls of Payton, Oxon.: "And the aforesaid Laurence Pemerton, in his life time, subst.i.tuted Walter Milleward as his subtenant ... contrary to the custom of the Manor without license; therefore let him have a talk thereon with the King's officer before the next court."

[177] This is the meaning of entries of two names as "sureties"

when land changes hands. See _Crondal Records_, Court Rolls of 1281 and 1282, _pa.s.sim_.

After all the picture is one which we ought not to have any difficulty in understanding, if once we get rid of the idea, born of our melancholy modern experience, that the buying of land in small parcels is for the small man the road to ruin, a luxury in which none but the well-to-do can afford to indulge. We have all heard much of the iniquities of the English system of land transfer, and have contrasted its c.u.mbersomeness, its expense, its uncertainty, with the facilities for buying small plots offered by methods like those of France, where sales and mortgages are entered in a public registry, which any one has the right to inspect.

But we need not look to the Continent or the British Dominions to see a market for real property working freely and smoothly. In our period by far the most general form of tenure was one customary tenure or another, and whatever the disadvantages of customary tenure may have been--and they were many--they had one great compensating advantage. Customary holdings could be transferred easily, cheaply, and with certainty, by surrender and admission in the court of the manor. Since there was no doubt that the freehold was in the lord, there was no expensive investigation of t.i.tles to eat up the prospective profits of the purchaser, and the Court Rolls offered a record, one is tempted to say a register, of the nature of the interest which a tenant had had in any holding from time immemorial. Of course the adjustment of the respective claims of lords and tenants raised very knotty problems, and these will be examined later. But, as long as they were in abeyance, the fact that peasant holdings could be transferred so readily contributed to the breaking up in the regularity of manorial arrangements, to the pa.s.sage of land from one family to another, and to the formation of larger properties out of small.[178]

[178] Since writing the above I have seen that the same view of the advantages of copyhold (the descendant of villein) tenure is taken by Dr. Hasbach, who quotes an eighteenth century writer to the effect that copyhold as compared with freehold land had the advantage of "the greater certainty of its t.i.tle and the cheapness of its conveyance" (Hasbach, _A History of the English Agricultural Labourer_, pp. 72-73).

Such petty transactions among the peasantry were not, however, the only way in which substantial peasant properties came into existence. In addition to the transference of land from one tenant to another there were other causes working to produce much the same results. The first was the continuous taking in of plots of waste land by tenants who got permission from the manorial authorities to make encroachments upon it.

The second was the abandonment of the system of cultivating the demesne by the labour rents of the tenants. Long before the enclosing of the common waste by lords of manors and farmers had become a very serious grievance--that it was a grievance at an early date is proved by the Statute of Merton[179]--one finds arrangements being made for bringing unused land under cultivation. Sometimes this movement goes on on a very large scale indeed; the Abbey of St. Albans gets a licence from the King in 1347 to "improve its wastes aforesaid and to grant and let them for their true value to whomsoever of their tenants comes to take them;"[180] and about the same time 500 acres of waste in the forest of High Peak[181] are let by the Crown to three tenants, much to the disgust of the neighbouring commoners. Usually the encroachments on the waste take place piecemeal. The process by which piece after piece was clipped off it and added to the tenants' holdings is shown very clearly in Rentals and Court Rolls. Occasionally it goes on without sanction; a tenant surrept.i.tiously draws into his holding an extra piece of land for which he pays nothing, and is only found out when he has occupied it for some time. But this is rare, for such encroachments are a source of profit to the lord, both in the payment made for the original permission to make them and in the rent coming from them, and the steward is therefore careful that they should be made through the court and entered in detail on the rolls of the manor. Thus at Ashton-under-Lyne,[182] in 1422, both freeholders and customary tenants had made large intakes of wood and waste and were paying for some of them as much as 13s. 4d. and 10s. The Halmote Court of Colne[183] in 1324 shows many tenants paying a few pence for acres and half acres of waste. At Yateleigh,[184] in 1287, almost every one of the fifty-three customary tenants held, in addition to his land in the open fields, land taken from the waste amounting in the aggregate to 37 acres, while some possessed no land at all except that which they had thus reclaimed. In the t.i.thing of Aldershot,[185] on the same manor, one tenant held 52 acres in encroachments. At Crokeham[186] another held 63-1/2 acres in addition to the standard half virgate of customary land; another, at Southwood,[187] 16 acres.

[179] 1235, c. 4. One may remark, however, that the power which a single freeholder had had before 1235 to prevent the breaking up or enclosure of common pastures, even when he had more than was sufficient for his own beasts, was a genuine hards.h.i.+p for the lord, for other freeholders, and for the customary tenants; see the remarks in Pollock and Maitland (_History of English Law_, vol. i. p. 612).

[180] _Gesta Abbatum Monasterii St. Albani_, vol. iii. pp.

120?-121, quoted by Petruschevsky, _op. cit._, pp. 179?-180.

[181] _Victoria County History_, Derbys.h.i.+re, vol. ii. p. 170.

[182] Glover, _History of Ashton_, p. 355. "Richard the Hunte ... for an intake 3d. ... Thomas of the Leghes for the one half of the intake in Palden Wood 13s. 4d. The same Thomas of the Leghes for an intake besyde Alt Hey 10s."

[183] _Court Rolls of the Lords.h.i.+ps, etc., of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster_ (Farrer). Halmote of Ightenhill, 1324, January 18: "John de Briddeswail for entry to half an acre of waste in Habrincham, 6d., for the same yearly, 2d." Same court, May 7, 1324.: "Richard le Skinner for entry to 4 acres of waste in Sommerfordrod, 6d., for the same yearly, 6d.," and _pa.s.sim_. In the north of England there seems to have been very much colonising of the waste, perhaps because original settlements were small. See Turner, _History of Brighouse, Rastrick, and Hipperholme_, pp. 66?-67, and _Trans. Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society_, vol. vii., Rochdale Manor Inquisition.

[184] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 116?-120, _e.g._ "Robert, son of Peter de la Pierke, holds one acre of encroachment land on paying 4d."

[185] _Ibid._, pp. 123-?127.

[186] _Ibid._, pp. 131?-134. "Richard Wysdon holds half a virgate of land containing 16 acres.... The same holds 63-1/2 acres, which were in his ancient occupation, and were found to be over and above his said virgate, and (included) in many encroachments."

[187] _Ibid._, pp. 122-?123: "William of Southwoode holds 16 acres of encroachments and other detached pieces."

The process of nibbling away the waste was, in fact, very general, and was a natural and inevitable one. The lord gained by leasing part of it to be broken up and cultivated, while, so long as sufficient land was left for grazing, the tenants gained by getting land which they could add to their holdings, and on which the growing population could settle.

It must be remembered that the area under cultivation was everywhere an island in an ocean of unreclaimed barrenness which cried out for colonists.[188] In the Middle Ages land was abundant and men were scarce; the land wanted the people much more than the people wanted the land. Moreover, with the simple methods of cultivation prevailing, the number of persons which a villein's holding could maintain was strictly limited, and the tendency to "diminis.h.i.+ng returns," with the consequent difficulty of maintaining a growing population on the same area, must have come into play very soon and very sharply. Surveyors[189]

appreciated this, and pointed out on some manors that unless the tenants' holdings were enlarged they could not make a decent living and, what was more important to the authorities, could not perform the customary services. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that at a comparatively early date the manorial population began to overflow the boundaries of the customary land and to occupy the waste, with the result that the area under cultivation grew, in some cases, enormously.[190] We can hardly be mistaken in supposing that this was the chief cause of the remarkable difference in the amount of land which strikes one when one compares some of the surveys of later and earlier dates. In any case the result was to increase the opportunities possessed by the more prosperous tenants, who could afford to rent additional land, of adding to their holdings, and thus to produce a growing inequality in the distribution of property among them.

[188] Thorold Rogers _(Agriculture and Prices_, vol. i. p. 34: "Not much less land was regularly under the plough than at present") thinks otherwise. But (i.) modern agriculture has many ways of using land besides keeping it "under the plough"; (ii.) we know that in the eighteenth century large tracts now cultivated were barren heaths, and it is difficult to believe that these had been cultivated in the Middle Ages.

[189] See below, p. 189. The instances there quoted are later than the period with which we are now dealing, but as they mostly come from Northumberland, a very conservative county, they are perhaps to the point.

[190] _e.g._ at South Newton in Wilts.h.i.+re (see p. 74), t.i.thing of Swanthrop in Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings was in 1287 about 360 acres, and in 1567 about 607 acres, and t.i.thing of Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings was in 1287 about 181, and in 1567 about 284. But these figures are not altogether satisfactory; and sometimes one finds a reduction, _e.g._ at Dippenhall (from about 287 acres at the earlier date to about 275 at the later date). The plague relieved the pressure of population, and thus removed one incentive for breaking up the waste; on the other hand, it left the survivors much better off, and thus more able to increase the scale of their husbandry. But until we know much more about the growth of population we shall not make much of general comparisons of this kind.

If the instances which have been given above are at all typical of the state of things on many manors, the economic rigidity of rural life in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries must have been a good deal less than is often suggested. The legal forms are stiff and unchanging, but the life behind them is fluid, and produces all sorts of new combinations and arrangements which make legal forms a better index of what was a hundred years before than of what at any moment is. In particular one finds considerable movement going on before the Great Plague. The more fully manorial records are explored, the more difficult does it seem to generalise about the effects of that great catastrophe.

One cannot say that it was the beginning of the commutation of labour services into rents, for on some manors they were partially commuted before it, and on some they were not entirely commuted till nearly two centuries later. One cannot say that the leasing of the demesne was due to the Plague; for where the labour supply was small, parts of it were leased already,[191] and after the Plague the authorities of different manors met the crisis in different ways, sometimes beginning by letting the demesne only to return later to the older system. It may be suggested, however, that its influence has been somewhat exaggerated by those authorities who would have us regard it as the watershed of economic history. No doubt the Great Plague was the single most important event in the economic history of the fourteenth century, just as the Irish famine of 1846 was the single most important event in the economic history of Ireland in the nineteenth century. But neither the Irish famine nor the Plague had the effect of sweeping economic development on to wholly new lines. What they both did was enormously to accelerate tendencies already at work. The customary tenants were buying and leasing land from each other before the Plague, and before the Plague some lords were leasing out their demesnes, but on a small scale.

After the Plague the death of many holders and the poverty of many survivors caused land to come into the market on a vastly greater scale and at a cheaper rate, with the result that the aggregation of holdings, the beginnings of which have been described as above, proceeded with vastly increased rapidity. That this was the case immediately after the Plague is shown by the familiar entries[192] as to the transference of holdings which have lost their cultivators in the Court Rolls. The movement seems to have continued, however, long after the immediate effects of the Plague had pa.s.sed away, and to have resulted on some manors in the fifteenth century in something which might almost be called free trade in land. One finds a readiness to buy and sell customary holdings which belies the idea of the manor as a rigid organisation in which little room was left for changing contractual arrangements, and one finds also the natural result of the rising commercialisation of land tenure in the grouping of several holdings under one tenant, in the appearance of the practice of some tenants sub-letting lands to others, and in general in the pa.s.sing of property from the economically weak to the economically strong, which naturally does not go on rapidly till there is a market in which they both can meet.

[191] _e.g._ at Hadleigh in 1305 (_Victoria County History_, Suffolk, Unwin's article); at Crondal in 1287 (_Crondal Records_, p. 110); at Ormsby in 1324 (Ma.s.singberd, _History of Ormsby_).

[192] _e.g._ Scrope, _Castle Combe_, p. 164. Court Rolls of 1357: "Johannis filius Johannis Payn venit et finem fecit c.u.m domino per 12d. pro ingressu habendo in illo messuagio et virgata terrae quae Johannis le Parkare quondam tenuit.... Et dictum tenementum concessum est ei ad tam parvam finem eo quod dictum tenementum est ruinosum et deca.s.sum; et existebat in manu domini a tempore pestilentiae pro defectu emptorum." Ma.s.singberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls for years 1349?-1352. Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_. Page, _The End of Villeinage in England_.