Free The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer Page B

is not that uncommon after the Great Plague, when lords are increasingly eager to offload the financial risk of managing their estates by renting them out lock, stock, and barrel for fixed rents. 19 The franklins who take on such an estate further blur the distinction between the gentry and the peasantry by marrying the daughters of esquires. A man who appoints his own bailiff, is attended by servants, has cousins among the gentry, and lords it over his fellow villagers in the manorial court hardly fits the usual image of a peasant.
    The majority of freemen are not as well off as farmers of manors. Like villeins, most of them have less than a yardland in the common fields. Obviously they cannot farm all thirty acres at once—a third or so must be left fallow—so they have to earn a living from their remaining fifteen or twenty acres. In a good year this will leave them with a cash surplus; in a bad year they will struggle to get by. They may have other rights, such as the right to graze their livestock on the lord’s common or to gather firewood in the wood, but the freeholder has a hard time of it when sequential harvests are bad. Those freeholders who have less than eight acres—about half of all free peasants—have the hardest time of all. In terrible years (like the Great Famine of 1315-17) they can see that the villeins are economically better off than they are. In such circumstances there is little to do but sell up to a wealthier, more secure franklin and start laboring.
    For all these reasons, when you trot into a village on your palfrey, and see one villager’s wife leaning over a wall talking to another, and think to yourself how harmonious everything seems to be, just reflect that there are many inequalities, tensions, and fears which you cannot see. The three or four families from which the local officers are most often drawn (the reeve, jurors, chief tithing-men, ale-tasters, constable, and hayward) may well be resented by those who have suffered most from their accusations in the manorial court. Some families consider other families beneath them on account of their villein status or because one of them is a servant. In most places the manorial lord will be held in a special position of esteem or hatred. The general philosophy—especially in the early part of the century—is that the harsher a lord is towards his tenants, the more he will be feared and respected, be he an abbot or a knight. And on the whole peasants
do
respect their lords. This is not surprising when you reflect that villeins in particular are dependent on their lords for their lands and their livelihoods, as well as customary feasts at harvesttime and Christmas. It is relatively rare for tenants to ransack and loot their lord’s houses and granges. The idea expressed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381—that all peasants should be freed from their manorial bonds—is a reflection of the changing circumstances after the Great Plague and not of a long tradition of widespread interclass bitterness.
Those Outside the Three Estates
    You will already have realized many of the shortcomings of the “three estates” model. Bishops may take up arms and fight, and are manorial lords just like earls and barons. In some cases a rich peasant may be indistinguishable from a poor gentleman. But a bigger failing with the model lies in the fact that many people fall outside it altogether. For example, where are the merchants? As shown in chapter 1 , about an eighth of the population lives in a town; so where do these people appear in the scheme of “the three estates”? They hardly count among “those who work,” as their income does not support a lord. And what about everyone else? Where are the jugglers, the acrobats, and the jesters? What about the mariners, servants, and the emerging professions such as physicians and lawyers? Where do they fit into the three estates?
    The people who fall outside the three estates are among the most