The end of villeinage

The exact circumstances and chronology here remain obscure. Probably the process would have occurred with or without the rebellion of 1381. Lords unable to persuade their peasants to remain on the land, faced with the flight of labour to towns or other jurisdictions, slowly and in some cases reluctantly began once again to lease out the majority of their estates, transforming themselves from high farmers into rentiers. The processes of the twelfth century, in which a predominantly leasehold economy had yielded place to the great demesne estates of the Church and aristocracy, was put into reverse. Within a generation of 1381, and in many cases even before the turn of the century, land had been leased to a new generation of farmers, in many cases themselves the beneficiaries in the rise of prospects for the yeomanry and upper peasantry. The manor, itself the principal unit of land management and legal authority since the late eleventh century, declined, like villeinage, to a mere shadow on the landscape. In its place, fully formed, loomed the parish with its church wardens and its ability to function as a unit of tax collection and poor relief. The rural society of parishes known to Jane Austen and to Thomas Hardy was born from circumstances rather more revolutionary than the readers of either of these authors might suppose.

In the meantime, the Peasants’ Revolt had to a large extent proved an urban rather than a rural phenomenon, its greatest crises fought out in towns such as Canterbury or York and ultimately in London. The very speed with which the rebels captured London, as in 1215 against King John or in 1264 against Henry III, and the near total paralysis to which this reduced royal administration, is an important indication of how easy it remained to cross the gulf between order and anarchy. Much as he might claim to control dominions stretching from Scotland to Spain, the King of England did not even possess the resources to prevent a few thousand peasants armed for the most part with staves and stones from seizing the very control-centre of his administration, making free with the King’s bedclothes, his private treasures and even his own mother. Those who witnessed the resulting spectacle were haunted by the memory of a world turned upside down. In his Parlement of Foules (c.1382), superficially an apolitical meditation on love as birds are shown gathering to choose their mates, Chaucer has the assembly suddenly interrupted by the noise of the lower orders, domestic and base birds capable only of incomprehensible cacophony: ‘Kek, kek! Kokkow! Quek quek!’

Just so must the babble of the crowd have sounded to those in London a year before. John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, also resorted to animal metaphors, likening the peasantry to oxen or donkeys, demanding to be fed on the best hay and to be loaded with jewelled harness. In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s portrait of the ploughman is intended as satire precisely because, at a time of discontented labour, here was a peasant prepared to help his neighbours without pay, gladly taking on such detested jobs as muck-spreading and ditch-digging. More typically, Chaucer’s band of pilgrims included such base figures as a carpenter and a dyer, artisans displaying their wealth in high-quality clothes, fine livery and silver knives. The assumption made by most readers, that all of these figures rode rather than walked to Canterbury, is in itself an indication of the extent to which they had risen in the world, literally as well as figuratively. The Smiths and Bakers, Carpenters and Dyers who today rule the academic or political establishments, as their surnames proclaim, are themselves the heirs to such newly risen, horse-riding folk.