Serfdom and Freedom in Medieval England: A Reply to the Revisionists

Historians of medieval England have studied serfdom extensively since the nineteenth century. However, in the 1960s M. M. Postan criticized them for paying more attention to the peasants' legal status than to their economic conditions and for overestimating the negative effects of serfdom. He claimed that the chief disabilities of servile status were balanced by the benefits of landholding and although the serfs were downgraded socially they could redeem their freedom by paying a reasonable sum of money to their lord. The fact that only a few of those who could have afforded it purchased their freedom was interpreted by him as an indication that the serfs were more interested in land acquisition than in manumission.¹ Postan's revisionist interpretation was reinforced and elaborated some twenty years later by John Hatcher in a brilliant article.² I will review it here in order to test the validity of the revisionist interpretation of serfdom through Hatcher's article, and also present a different view of the nature and history of this institution.

Hatcher begins his review of serfdom with demography. He argues that Kosminsky's estimate of 60 per cent unfree peasants in 1279 in the six counties for which Hundred Rolls returns survive does not represent the national picture.³ He argues that if we take a sample of rural, urban, aristocratic, and clerical households the percentage of villeins' households does not exceed 33.⁴ Similarly, Edmund King has estimated that 40 per cent of peasant households were those of villeins.⁵ Bruce Campbell has recently offered a more comprehensive estimate based on a national sample of 4090 manors obtained from the Inquisitiones post mortem (IPMS) between 1300 and 1349.⁶ He calculated that during the period 1300-49, between 50 and 52 per cent of all the tenanted land was held by serfs and 48-50 per cent by freemen. Nonetheless, Campbell argues that, since the mean size of free holding was smaller than that of customary holding, the number of free tenants is likely to have equalled or even exceeded the number of servile tenants.⁷ Even if Campbell's estimate is correct and the percentage of serfs was only about 50, we have to remember that the majority of the freemen in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century villages must have been related through marriage to serfs.⁸ As peasants provided their relatives with land, and supported and helped each other in everyday life, hard times and old age, freemen were inevitably affected when their unfree relatives and neighbours suffered from seigneurial restrictions and exactions.⁹

Hatcher follows his demographic exercise by an examination of the status and conditions of serfs, in order to show that Robert Brenner was mistaken in claiming that serfdom was exploitative to such an extent that it caused an agrarian crisis of the late thirteenth century.¹⁰ He argues that while unfree peasants were burdened by many obligations and restrictions, they nevertheless enjoyed security of tenure. Moreover, as the disabilities of serfdom were largely financial they were less oppressive than they appear. Labour services were often commuted, and the obligation to serve as manorial officers could be avoided by paying their landlords a fine. Similarly, for a licence fee serfs could take possession of their inheritance, marry their daughters, send their sons to be educated or to enter the church, leave the manor, alienate land, and sell animals. Even tallage, one of the hallmarks of serfdom, frequently became a fixed, often annual payment. The weight of the dues and rents was not heavy, as landlords were restrained by custom.¹¹ Hatcher also argues that there are many indications that by the later thirteenth century the unfree were normally paying less for their lands than they would have had to pay if their rents had been freely negotiated.¹² His claim has been recently confirmed by Junichi Kanzaka's new study of the Hundred Rolls. He showed that although customary tenants paid on average a higher rent than freeholders, they nonetheless paid significantly less than the going market rent.¹³

Hatcher and Kanzaka are...