Appendix 1 Categorising Presentments

Chapter 1 is largely based on the categorisation of presentments, the business brought by officials to manorial courts in response to charges made by stewards. Presentments were just one way business could be introduced to manorial courts, and thus a strict definition based on the phrasing within the rolls has been applied in identifying presentments. Only entries which begin with the statement ‘the [officer(s)] present that … ’ or ‘it is accounted by the [officer(s)] that … ’ followed by ‘and that … ’ have been counted. Crucially, this means the measure only charts the changing functions of presenting officials and not changes in the underlying business transacted in the court.

Presentments are useful as they covered a range of officials’ work and therefore can be categorised to explore the changing nature of officials’ roles. Five key categories are used:Footnote ¹

1. 1 ‘Lord’. This includes presentments directly relevant to the lord and his authority. Key areas include the monitoring of servile incidents, trespasses on seigniorial property, illicit land transactions outside the court, the lord’s rights to various types of forfeit property, collective payments made by tenants, and individual payments concerning rent and non-attendance at court.

2. 2 ‘Royal’. This includes presentments related to meeting royal requirements. Key areas include peacekeeping, enforcing legislation such as the assize of bread and ale (which regulated the quality and sale of these products), maintaining royal roads and the tithing system, as well as collective payments to the monarch.

3. 3 ‘Community’. This includes presentments focused on common issues for the community and its individual members. Key areas include the management of commons, maintenance of roads, fences and bridges, trespasses on tenants’ crops and the monitoring of bylaws.

4. 4 ‘Land’. This includes presentments focused on land transfer. Key areas include inheritance and intervivos transfers (where living tenants transferred land).

5. 5 ‘Misconduct’. This includes presentments designed to control misbehaviour.

Two further categories are included but not primarily used in the study:

1. 6 ‘Monitor’. This includes presentments seen only at Worfield and Fordington. Owing to their leet structures, a substantial role for their juries leet was to confirm the presentments made by other officials.

2. 7 ‘Nothing’. This includes all cases where officials explicitly said they had nothing to present.

There are two important limitations to the categorisation approach. On a practical level, the issue of record survival is paramount as it can change the number of presentments in any given decade. This is matched by changing numbers of sessions per decade caused by either increasing frequency or infrequency in the calling of courts. For the analysis, all decades which record at least ten presentments are included. Fortunately, there is no reason that changes in numbers of presentments surviving should have affected any category of business differently to the others, as presentment lists contained all the different categories intermingled. Thus, changes in proportions of presentment by category remain a valuable measure.

The second problem is that of deciding what business fits into each category, and even how to delineate the categories at all. This is thanks to the lord’s interest in all types of presentment. Manorial courts, including leets, were seigniorial jurisdictions, and existed to enforce the lord’s authority over his tenants. Therefore, to some extent lords were the beneficiaries of all presentments made in these courts; lords accrued the profits of amercements and the forfeited pains which resulted from punishments for presentment. Stewards, as the lord’s representative, had considerable influence over the presentment process. However, a crude division can be established between business where the lord was a direct beneficiary, for example in amercing tenants for failing to repair seigniorial property, and where he was an indirect beneficiary of the punishment, such as when an offender was presented for overstocking common land, where those affected by the offence were clearly the commoners rather than the lord.

Presentments concerning land prove the most difficult to fit into one category. For example, when it is presented that a tenant has died and that his or her heir must pay a heriot and entry fine to inherit the land, one could argue that the lord is the beneficiary, the jury ensuring he gets the revenue owed to him via the inheritance. However, at the same time, the jury is ensuring the correct inheritance of the land, allowing the heir his or her claim according to custom. Thus, even though inheritance presentments are enforcing a seigniorial right, the fact that they were effectively allowing tenants to transfer their land to their heirs means that they have been treated in the separate land category. In the case of intervivos transfers, these have been included if they were made legitimately in the court, even if on some occasions the beneficiary is presented as not coming to pay the entry fine due to the lord for taking on this property and consequently it is ordered to seize the land. This is because while this was ensuring the seigniorial right to profit from transfers, there was still at least an attempt by one party to make a legitimate transfer. In cases of alienation without any licence by the court, transfers have been categorised in the lord category.

Appendix 2 Identifying Individuals

Much of the statistical analysis of officeholding in chapters 2, 5 and 6 relies on identifying individuals holding office within the same set of court rolls across time or between different sets of records. Identifying individuals within manorial records is not straightforward, owing to the difficulties posed either by the same individual being recorded under different surnames or by two individuals sharing the same name.Footnote ¹ Fortunately, the first problem is confined largely to the pre-Black Death period, with surnames generally becoming more fixed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Footnote ² The second problem is more pertinent, especially if one assumes that families with shared surnames often provided multiple officers. Fortunately, court clerks did try to distinguish between individuals by providing descriptive additions to names.Footnote ³ Devices used as ‘secondary identifiers’ include occupational identifiers (such as John Buk (active 1416–50) and John Buk Bateman (active 1423–38); locative identifiers (such as William Rowley of Wyke (active 1508–40) and William Rowley of Newton (active 1524–41); and most ubiquitously, junior and senior (such as John Atte Lane snr (active 1462–72) and John Atte Lane jnr (active 1468–88).Footnote ⁴

The methodology to identify individuals adopted a two-stage process. Firstly, all names of officers were extracted and standardised to account for various spellings but with any secondary identifiers retained. Secondly, names were turned into individuals identified by a unique ‘officer number’. This last process was performed chronologically and worked on the assumption that any names, either unmodified or with the same secondary identifiers, appearing within a space of five years denoted the same individual. This rule was suspended for long breaks of more than five years in the record, for which it was assumed that a name appearing in the final year of records before the break, and the first year of records after the break, could potentially be the same individual, subject to checks explored below. Individuals with the same name and different secondary identifiers were assumed to be different individuals when they appeared in the same session. Occasionally, one individual appears to have initially appeared with their name unmodified, then appeared with a secondary identifier, and then later appeared again without modification. If no session could be found where both the unmodified and modified name served in office simultaneously, it was assumed that this was the same individual, both with and without secondary modifier. The same five-year rule was applied when linking individuals in court rolls with those in other records.

The most difficult issue arose with the appending of the terms ‘senior’ and ‘junior’ to individuals with the same name who served simultaneously, as such relational identifiers changed over time. Thus, at Worfield one man named John Baker served 1548–79. However, from 1580 onwards there are two John Bakers, referred to as senior and junior. However, from 1585 until 1600 the designators again disappear, with a single John Baker appearing.Footnote ⁵ In these cases, it has been assumed that emergence of the use of snr and jnr as secondary identifiers refers to a period of crossover between an older and younger individual with the same name, while the disappearance of identifiers represents the withdrawal, most likely through death, of the senior, and thus older individual. So in this scenario, it is assumed John Baker I served 1548–84, while John Baker II served 1580–1600. While undoubtedly it is possible that a senior man may have outlived a younger individual, in the absence of more concrete information this is the safest assumption.

A final check was performed by examining the length of officeholding career of individuals. A sixty-five year maximum length was assumed, with any apparently longer careers assumed to be the conflation of two men. In these cases, two individuals were created by splitting the names at the longest gap between appearances of the name. Throughout all the rules outlined above, each name was treated on a case-by-case basis, especially if there was other evidence to help distinguish individuals, such as the clerk using two surnames simultaneously to describe a single individual.

Appendix 3 Population Estimates

The estimates of total population and the population of adult males used in this book are based on a series of national taxation records that survive between 1327 and 1603. These consist of the 1327 lay subsidy, the 1377–81 poll taxes, the 1524–5 lay subsidies, and the 1563 and 1603 diocesan population returns, although the records do not survive for each return for all the case studies. In each case, the records only account for a varying proportion of the actual population of the communities surveyed, and thus various multipliers were applied to the numbers given in the documents to achieve estimated ranges of population. These multipliers are based on those found in relevant secondary literature.

Table a3.1 summarises the actual returns and multipliers applied, while the footnotes detail the sources of both the returns and the multipliers used. As a final set of caveats, it is vital to remember that these are very imprecise estimates of population, and likely reflect trends better than absolute levels of population. It is further important to remember that none of the returns used the manor as a basis for assessment, but rather the vill for the lay subsidies and poll tax, and the parish for the diocesan population returns. This means that these estimates are not necessarily related to the number of tenants, with inhabitants included who may not have held land in the manor, and non-resident manorial landholders excluded.