The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England: From Bondage to Freedom by Mark Bailey (review)

Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, exhibiting a nuanced approach to historical and archival contexts, critiquing established theoretical propositions about historical systems and causality, and drawing conclusions sensitive to their sometime conditionality, this excellent study is an exemplar of qualitatively sensitive, quantitative history at its best. Mark Bailey comprehensively alters scholarly understandings of, and approaches to, researching English serfdom’s nature, heyday, and decline. The serfdom that this reviewer learned about no longer exists, and the nature and causes of its disappearance have been dramatically shifted. This is one of those rare works that demands that textbooks be rewritten or discarded.

Bailey begins by exploring the definition of serfdom and its role as a subject within wider historiographies. He lucidly discusses how serfdom and serfs have been integral parts of now slightly antique historiographical debates and propositions relating to the development of England’s rural economy. He addresses standing hypotheses concerning the timing and causes of serfdom’s decline, all while subtly undermining those propositions by revealing how theoretical they actually are. In charting its place in such historiographies, Bailey reveals serfdom between c. 1350 and c. 1500 to have been surprisingly little studied in its own right, and shows how, with limited evidentiary underpinning, theories on its decline have come to be considered established facts.

From this position, Bailey reviews evidence for the decline in personal serfdom in the century and a half after the Black Death, seeking to provide a more satisfactory understanding of the link between medieval villein tenure and early modern copyhold. Bailey begins with a seemingly encyclopaedic chapter of servile incidents by which serfdom can be defined and discerned in the available source materials. While ostensibly a survey of features of serfdom, it is quite an interrogative study of the same on its own. Drawing on previous studies, Bailey presents the normal view that villein tenure in England had ‘effectively disappeared’ by 1420 and personal serfdom by 1480, both trends apparently commencing about 1380 (p. 61). Continuing his approach of presenting established scholarly views and yet undermining their assumptions, in the chapter that follows, Bailey takes aim at ‘the excessive simplicity of prime mover explanations’ that often used limited data to posit causes for serfdom’s decline (p. 82). He charts the relative significance of manumission, economics and demography, peasant resistance, and migration, presenting standing cases for each while building an overall argument in favour of further case studies.

The second half of the book offers numerous case studies. Bailey presents in considerable detail his qualitative and quantitative analyses of various manors and their sources, ranging across a diverse range of deliberately chosen samples. Particularly concerned to provide analytical coherence in the face of disparate evidence, Bailey sets out to provide each manor with its own chronology of serfdom, based on its own pre-Black Death ‘base-line’, and to identify a range of manorial types, as representative as possible of the available evidence and the wider later medieval English experience. These are then presented in detail, qualifying the evidence, presenting it quantitatively, and providing a brief overview for each manor. It is a refreshing change from large studies that demand the numbers and the number-gatherers and -crunchers all be taken on trust. Through this process, Bailey is sensitive to the source material, trusts readers to be capable of understanding the evidence contributory to the arguments when guided through it, and provides a good case study of historical research methodologies at work, as well as offering these case studies of manors ranging from large ecclesiastical holdings to small manors held by lower gentry.

Finally, Bailey turns again to the bigger picture, and with the compiled evidence shows fairly comprehensively that villein tenure was ‘in fact, in headlong retreat from the 1350s, and had largely decayed by the 1380s’ (p. 287). Bailey also complicates the...