Autonomy and Community: the Royal Manor of Havering, 1200-1500 (review)

Reviews 139 'expanding their mature years upon the conquest of Granada' (p.140); we are told that, on one occasion, in order to follow up another matter, 'Ferdinand broke off his persecution of the Moorish war . .. ' (p.112). In view of what was finaUy to happen in Granada on the score of religion, perhaps 'persecution' could be allowed to stand Grahame Harrison Department of History University of Sydney Mcintosh, M.K., Autonomy and Community: the Royal Manor of Havering, 1200-1500 (Cambridge Studies in Medievd Life and Thought, 4th ser., no. 5), Cambridge, C.U.P., 1986; pp.xiv, 319; R.R.P. A U S $107.00. Although the topic of this book is the history of a single manor there is something in it for a wide range of historians: from those interested in manorid diversity and the nature of ancient demesne to those concerned with theories of the origins of individudism, proto-industridisation, and the transition from feudatism to capitdism. In short, the author successfully relates her story to broader issues within and beyond late medievd English history. T w o things make this possible: the time span (1200-1500) and the size of the manor of Havering. Havering was an unusudly large manor encompassing the three villages of Hornchurch, Romford and Havering itself (later Havering-atte-Bower), and they in turn were the sites of an Augustinian priory, a market and a royd residence with a park. The generd impression is that Havering was a microcosmic medieval world with a great degree of autonomy, privilege and economic freedom. As the author puts it 'Havering's history illustrates life at one extreme of the spectrum of persond and collective freedom during the later Middle Ages' (pp.3-4). Its residents enjoyed the privileges of ancient demesne, virtud hundredd jurisdiction and a distinctly non-peasant-like economy in which tenants and sub-tenants dike possessed therightto buy, sell or divide holdings as they wished Alan Macfarlane fans would be deUghted! As such, however, Havering was very much an atypicd manor. Other dissimilarities were the absence of a 'high farming' era in the thirteenth century, when a period of intense individual assarting lasting from the Norman Conquest to c.1251 gave way to a period of wholesde leasing of the demesne to the tenantry between 1251 and 1275, almost a century before its more generd practice elsewhere. Nor does Havering appear to have experienced a marked recorded demographic crisis in 1348-9. The author makes the weak suggestion that a superabundant pre-Plague population must have replaced rapidly plague- 140 Reviews stricken tenants, resulting in a fully recovered manor by the time of the 1352/3 extent, which shows aU holdings fully occupied. The avdlable evidence simply suggests that the later outbreaks of plague in 1361-2 and 1369 were far more severe than that of 1348-9 on this particular estate. There were, of course, ways in which Havering's history did illustrate some of the more generally accepted themes of late medievd English history. These included decUning agricultural yields and rents in the late thirteenth/early fourteenth centuries, active participation in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 - arising, no doubt from 'the ease and riches that the common people were of - and increasing involvement in a market economy, which was accelerated by the London 'pdl*. An extremely meritorious aspect of the book lies in its treatment of women. The author has skilfdly incorporated references to the important role of women in this society well beyond what is suggested in the Index. For the most part, her argument is that tenurid freedom and the commercidised but not deeply capitatised economy operated in favour of femde independence, dthough this was certdnly not true of femde brewers and de-seUers, who were dmost totdly replaced by men in the second half of the fifteenth century. It is clear that the book has been written as a prelude to a forthcoming volume on Havering-atte-Bower in the sixteenth century. Precocity of development is the dominant theme, with c.1460 as the turning-point Between that date and 1500 many of the developments normally recognised as characteristic of the late sixteenth/early...