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Between the years 1316 and 1327, Edward II was King of England. His reign was a troublesome one and ended when he was murdered in 1327 at Berkeley Castle. He it was who had taken a large army of noblemen and yeomanry into Scotland, only to be disastrously defeated by Robert Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn; and a second expedition against the Scots was no more successful.
But while the yeomen of England were fighting the Scots, what were the yeomen of Littleport doing? The village, which was by no means small, was remote and isolated, surrounded by water and swamps, and under the administration of the Bishop of Ely, who was lord of the manor. The village supplied him with 40,000 eels annually, apart from other dues, and he was responsible for settling the disputes of the villagers. And the Court Rolls of this period reveal that of these quarrels there were plenty; for the people all lived on one small hill rising above the surrounding fen, people whose sole occupation was the getting of their livelihood from nearby sources. They fished in the same waters, grazed their cows and goats on the same common, and shared the same carts for their fetching and carrying. Every moment of their working day--and that was from sunrise to sunset--brought them in contact with their neighbours. It is small wonder, therefore, that their disputes were frequent and vigorous.
One lady, named Mistress Rohese (Rose) Bindebere, was for a time quite a troublemaker. She first appeared before the jurors in 1319, when she was accused of mowing sedge before the date stated in the by-law. This, however, was but a small offence, for two years later, in October, 1321, she began her brief but exciting dispute with a man called Ralph Bolay, She had a vigorous argument with him, and the court discovered that Rohese had called Ralph a thief and he had replied by calling her a name which, to say the least, cast a grave doubt upon her morals. The strange thing is that the court decided that, of the two insults, that received by Ralph was the greater, so that the unfortunate Rohese, having failed to get damages for the insult she had received, was obliged to pay her rival one shilling fur the insult which she had given him.
The dispute did not end here. Rohese owned a half-acre which her late husband Walter had contrived to have legally transferred to him, and Ralph Bolay, only two months after his last court appearance, appeared again, claiming that this half-acre belonged to him, since Rohese's husband had obtained it only by bribing the clerk of the Court. But this time Ralph lost his case and was fined 3d. for bringing a false charge.
Rohese, perhaps feeling triumphant, plotted revenge; for she selected a spot very close to Ralph's home, and built on it a lavatory, hoping that it would cause him intense annoyance. It did. And Rohese found herself again in court and was obliged to pay Ralph 6d. damages. From then on, she had apparently had her fill of the Bishop's court, for she took care to avoid any further such trouble.
Ralph Bolay, on the other hand, was frequently in trouble. In 1319, he was accused of mowing sedge before it was ready, the following year he was fined 3d. for not repairing a house which he had let to a certain Henry Whitring, and in 1324, he was accused by Thomas Brokenhorn of owing him a whole year's rent, in addition to a sum of 24s. 2 1/2d. This latter sum was the total cost of the shoes which Ralph and his wife had had from Thomas Brokenhorn over the remarkable period of twelve years, during which time he had never paid a penny of his debt. Ralph's last appearance was in 1326, when he was fined 6d. for reaping half an acre of the Lord Bishop's barley.
Another notorious fellow was called John Fox. In 1317 he was fined 3d. for trespassing on the land of John of Elm, and for stealing some of his sedge. And in the following year he had contracted to carry some sedge for John Mountfort, and he was fined 2d. for not keeping the contract. But in 1319, he appeared on a much graver charge, and was found guilty of having "broken the house" of Simon and Margery Breton. This escapade cost John ten shillings. Later that year he was on the side of authority in the official position of hayward, but this must have been uncongenial to his temper, for in September, 1319, he paid the Bishop two shillings to be released from this employment. And in the following December, his earlier enemy, John Mountfort, broke into his house and assaulted him with a drawn knife. For this John Fox received two shillings compensation, and henceforth he was almost completely respectable.
John of Elm, mentioned above, appeared in court on two other occasions, both in 1319. On the first occasion he "perturbed Oliver Beucosin at Wille by carrying off his oars from his boat," and for this he was fined 6d. two months later he was in court again, accused of retaining 6d. of the marriage-portion due to his daughter. But Henry Shepherd, his new son-in-law, was not to be tricked, and John had to pay his 6d. after all.
Some of the offences committed were strange indeed; a yeoman called John Fisher, in 1318, was fined one shilling because be had put his dungheap in a public lane and had prevented people passing. And three years later he was fined 6d. for building a pigsty on the common. John Daune, when he was short of sedge for thatching or lighting his fires, occasionally carried off handfuls from his neighbours' stacks. And Henry Beucosin and his wife were both turned out of the village for stealing fowls and geese.
Master and Mistress Richard Mauntele were once involved in a quarrel with Mistress Alice, who had defamed the character of Mrs. Mauntele. The latter went to court and received 40d. in compensation, but was apparently dissatisfied, because later her husband "falsely and maliciously defamed the lord's court" by saying that nobody could get justice in it. This piece of extravagance cost him one shilling. And five years later he and his wife--a different wife this time--were fined 6d. for unjustly accusing Alice of Gunton of selling oats and beer by false measure.
One of the strangest accounts is of William Fowler of Marchford, who broke into Walter Albin's house and stole much of his property, having obtained the consent of Walter's wife, "which consent he obtained by frequently kicking her."
The livelihood of the villagers was drawn entirely from their common rights in field and fen, and these rights were jealously guarded. The man who abused them was in effect robbing the whole community and therefore could not be tolerated. Thus John Packer was fined for collecting sticks and selling them out of Littleport, for John was turning what was common property into his personal profit. Similarly, John Beystens was caught twice fishing at night, thus taking an unfair advantage of his fellow-villagers, And William Godloke (Cutlack) and several others were found guilty of selling local bitterns' eggs out of Littleport, and thus converting public property into private profit, Stephen of Priesthouse was fined for putting his dungheap on the common, for no individual could be allowed a privilege not permitted to others. This was the very basis of the old feudal system.
The Lord Bishop himself had to guard his rights, and he did so with considerable shrewdness. For example he owned a hand-mill, and when William Hasel set up another in opposition, he was fined 2d. for his initiative. Mistress Alice Balle was fined 3d. because she slandered the quality of the lord's corn, so that nobody else would buy it. John Christmas and Henry Fisher were fined because they allowed their pigs to damage the lord's corn, and even the Vicar was fined for allowing his dog to chase hares in the lord's fields. And the village boatman, William le Meyre (Mears?), was fined because he refused to transport some of the Bishop's men from "foreign parts."
In a society where wealth was measured in pence, any kind of financial trickery was a serious crime. At times the court seems to have been a little too strict, as when Henry Sweetgroom sold two ewes which later died of the rot. He was fined 18d, because he had previously stated that they were healthy. When John Tepito was village hayward he was soon found to be a competent rogue. He frequently made fines which he kept himself, rode and hacked the Bishop's horses all over the Isle unnecessarily, and devised an excellent trick for his personal enrichment: he assured William Abbot that he had been chosen to fight for the King in Scotland, and since William had no wish to do any such thing, he was readily persuaded that, if he paid the hayward two shillings, he could be "bought off" In fact, the whole story was fictitious and William had never been chosen to serve at all.
These accounts give a vivid picture of Littleport under the feudal system. This lasted with very little change from the conquest of the Fens by William of Normandy until the Industrial Revolution. Every-one was satisfied, for each knew his rank in society and never stepped above it. There was class-consciousness, but there was no class-warfare, for the lord of the manor and the villagers had a mutual respect for each other. All the peasants obtained everything they required--food, clothing, building materials--from the same fields, woods and waters, and this meant that no individual must attempt to raise himself above his neighbours, since to do so was to rob the whole community of some of its rights. The system necessitated a complete absence of the competitive spirit and correspondingly there was no "doing-down" of one's neighbours. The basis of the economy of the community was mutual assistance (for when John Tepito was found guilty of the above frauds, the very men who had exposed him stepped forward to act as pledges for his future good behaviour).
This period came to an end with the enclosure of the common. The villagers were forced to stand by helplessly while the land which had been their common property for centuries was fenced in by rich land-owners. They saw their only source of livelihood being taken from them, and class-hatred began to arise. They had not resented the old lord of the manor because they knew that he was as necessary for their well-being as they were for his. But these new landowners, on the other hand, deprived them of their only source of well-being. And the men now discovered that their only means of getting bread for their families was to sell their bodily labour for money--something hitherto unknown to them--and as there were more men than there were jobs, a new spirit of competition and rivalry was born. It was the death of the old feudal England and the birth of the new industrial England (for a shirt-factory would have been unnecessary before the enclosure but was invaluable after it). It was the beginning of a society based on money and property, and the death of one based on every man's right to draw sustenance from the soil on which he lived.
V.G.W.
