England was the first society in the world to industrialize and historians from Marx and Engels to Weber, Tawney and others have long argued about the forces in society that brought this about. What were the conditions of work, class, family, marriage, labour relations, etc. that led the communally organized agricultural society of the fourteenth century to become the industrial society of the nineteenth?
We left Kibworth at the time of the Black Death with its feudal order, where the bulk of the population still worked the land and the peasants owed obedience, as well as labour and surplus, to a small elite. But how did the change then happen from a feudal order to a capitalist one, from an agrarian, close-knit society of self-sufficient peasants to an industrialized economy with a large, landless proletariat of wage-earners? And how did rural England become a diversified, regionally orientated society of commercial farmers, artisans and landless labourers who supported an industrial urban society?
Of course, social conditions in England in the Middle Ages differed from region to region – from the hill settlements of Devon to the mining towns of Northumberland – and in the English Midlands we have to take account of the remarkable proportion of smallholding freemen after 1086. But in the later Middle Ages a broad pattern of English history emerges from the south coast to the foothills of the Cheviots, in all villages that share the open-field system. The core idea behind the feudal order was that those with land and power claimed – and could enforce – the right to the labour and surplus of the bulk of the population. However, from the fourteenth century onwards there was growing pressure to abolish labour services and replace them with work for money. The final abolition of serfdom was a long battle; archaic renders survived for centuries on many estates, as did the resistance to change on the part of rapacious landlords. As late as 1549 the Norfolk rebels of Robert Kett urged in their petition ‘that all bond men be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood shedding’. The capitalist system of course is also organized so that the rich and powerful may take part of the surplus of the workforce, and it could be said that this is still so for the mass of the population in the twenty-first century. But the broad story of England’s history through the late medieval and early modern periods is of the freeing of the ordinary people from labour dues and the growth of personal and political freedom.
The Kibworth story is a microcosm of this great national movement. Indeed, the village records are so detailed that we can take individual family stories as examples of the whole tale. One particular case of self-advancement involves a Kibworth family who rose from being poor villeins in the thirteenth century to craftspeople and then mercers, aldermen and urban guild members in Leicester and Coventry in the fifteenth, with one branch of the family even making its fortune in London. Such revolutionary changes start to be traceable in the post-Black Death period, and they came about through education and literacy, through ideas about individual conscience, but also through mobility, the availability of money and changing patterns of work.
In the village the Black Death had devastated some of the long-standing families who hitherto had had a monopoly over the customary land in the open fields. Some like the Polles, as we have seen, never recovered, losing three of the four branches of their family by the end of the fourteenth century. Now smaller households with larger holdings made it difficult and unnecessary to maintain pre-1349 levels of arable cultivation, so the village began to see the evolution of new uses of land resources, and new ideas about work and labour relations.
In the village, conditions for survivors offered many opportunities if the gene pool of the family had held out. Here again the Merton documents from Kibworth Harcourt enable us to see close up how these changes happened. After the initial catastrophe of 1349–50 the new reeve, John Church junior, and his village officials had managed to fill all the tenancies despite the loss of two thirds of the tenants. But over the next two or three generations the plague continued to flare up with a frequency which must have caused the community deep and gnawing anxiety. As many as twenty-five tenants died in 1361, the faded brown of their names in the tithing list struck through, line after line in fresh black ink. Later notes in the Kibworth court books show that the threat remained for decades. In 1375 six more tenants’ deaths are entered and there were more again in 1378–9. Between 1389 and 1393 nine tenants died of plague, a few more in 1395, and there was a last spasm in 1412. The three generations after 1349 then lived in constant fear of the return of the pestilence and there are many signs in the court rolls in Merton of growing hardship, with derelict properties and eventually a failure to take up tenancies which meant that rent revenues declined and rent arrears began to pile up for the college administrators.
Unlike the Polles, the Browns were one family who managed to ride out the storm. An old family in the village (their name is Anglo-Saxon) Robert Brown senior is the first member of the family to appear in the first Merton records in 1270. By the 1280s we find that there are three branches of the family, each with its own separate holding and house. Three of the male heads of the family are described as villeins. Robert had a house on ‘the king’s highway’ (today’s Main Street) with a garden and about fifteen acres in the open fields; his son William had a house and a virgate, thirty acres of strips in the field; and Henry also had a house and a virgate. But in the 1280s Robert’s son William was also the holder of one of the coveted free tenancies, ‘one messuage at a rent of one penny’. It was the beginning of the family’s amazing tale of advancement.
In Kibworth over half of the landholding population had died out in twenty-five years between 1349 and 1374 but the village itself survived and within thirty years the 1377 and 1381 tax rolls give us portraits of villagers and the two generations of children that had been born since the plague, despite the aftershocks of the outbreaks of 1351, 1361 and 1375. Robert Brown junior of Kibworth survived the Black Death and held on to all his parcels of land. As survivors, households like his were ideally placed to ensure their genetic inheritance was passed down along with the family plots, and by 1377 poll tax returns show a surprising partial recovery of population and strong indicators that the drive towards diversification and economic change that we detected before the plague had not been halted. The documents indeed start to note more diverse job descriptions – drapers and merchants in the village, and ironmongers, slaters, skinners and drapers among Kibworth people working in Leicester. As a sign of the times, quite ordinary families now employ servants, twenty-five of whom are listed in Kibworth.
The Black Death also seems to mark a watershed in village life in terms of family mobility. As we have seen, English people even before the Conquest moved about. From the thirteenth century villagers moved, sometimes illegally, and sometimes surprisingly, in the case of the unmarried girl who left the Merton estate at Barkby and travelled all the way to St Andrews in Fife in the wake of Edward I’s armies – not, it appears, for work but following the man in her life.
But after the Black Death the bonds that had lasted since the ancient world seem suddenly to begin to break down. With increased literacy, stronger political awareness and more personal commercial ambition, people travelled to find employment much more than they did before the plague. Members of old Kibworth families like the Godyers, the Coupers and the Wylmots moved to Leicester, following a number of village artisans and craftsmen – and women – from the village who appear in guild rolls and tallage lists in the city simply as ‘of Kibworth’. Others, including the Heyneses and another branch of the Godyers, went to Coventry. Landlords’ lists meant that in theory no unfree person could leave the village without permission and this rule had been strictly adhered to in earlier times, but by 1363 the attractions of the city proved too great and the college simply gave up trying to control the people who went away in search of new work and a new life: the injunction was abandoned in the face of day-to-day reality. Most people seem to have sought work within a five-mile radius of the village. The brothers Roger and John Man migrated to Shangton after the Black Death; they were perhaps the most mobile of any family that can be traced through the documents. They made ten moves in less than thirty years, probably looking for employment at the best rates, travelling around the villages in the area picking up seasonal work as labourers and servants and renting properties in other villages – a pattern of rural employment that would persist in England until our own time. In her late-twentieth-century memoir, the former landgirl Rose Holyoak describes working at fifteen different farms in a dozen Midland villages over a decade or two during and after the Second World War. The 1380s tell the same story, with John Man of Kibworth moving between the two Kibworths, Saddington and Stonton Wyville, and being taxed at Fleckney, for example, as a simple operarius – a worker. Through the early fifteenth century the Mans are simply what we would call agricultural labourers, but by the Tudor period the family had risen, with one of their descendants still in the neighbourhood and deemed to be worth £18 in goods, putting him in the middling ranks of free-holding farmers: an English yeoman.
So why, apart from money, were people like the Mans prepared to move away from the support of their family and neighbours, from the comfort of their village? No autobiography of a medieval peasant survives to tell us, but psychological concerns no doubt also played their part in persuading young men like Roger and John Man to give up the security of customary land in their own village and venture into the uncertainties of life as a newcomer – one of the sometimes mistrusted adventitii – in another community. Perhaps they preferred to make a living where they would be paid in hard cash, perhaps they wanted to find a wife; and maybe too they were attracted to the variety of the life and the sense of freedom not open to many at the lowest level of society in the Middle Ages. Their neighbours the Browns, though, rose not by travelling throughout the area but by systematically bettering their status through business deals, good marriages and then finally by permanent migration away from Kibworth, and theirs in some ways is a classic English story. In 1381 Adam Brown still had strips in the common field in Kibworth, though now employing servants and hired labour; but he made the move to the city and there he made it bigger than any of his neighbours.
Urban life had boomed in England from the twelfth century and by 1400 many towns had more than 10,000 inhabitants. London had at least 50,000 or 60,000 (some have even argued twice as many). Leicester though was the first choice for Kibworth people with artisanal skills. Guild rolls and tallage lists in the fourteenth century show many Kibworthians, men and women, joining Leicester guilds as mercers, ironmongers, skinners, slaters, drapers and glovers; becoming residents of Leicester, but still defining themselves as ‘of Kibworth’. The guild entries and tallage rolls are especially rich after the Black Death, as if the survivors were all the more active in seeking opportunity outside the village. ‘John of Kibworth’ is listed as a slater in the city in the mid-1350s; ‘Richard of Kibworth’ describes himself as being of both Kibworth and Leicester in the tallage rolls of 1359–60 and is noted again on the Leicester merchant guild roll of 1362. ‘Robert of Kibworth’ is listed as a corviser, while another Kibworthian, an ironmonger, is recorded as renting a shop in Leicester market in 1375. So although Leicester was only a comparatively small city, there were still job opportunities for people with skills, and it is also clear from the records that some of those who moved or worked there still retained links to branches of their kin who stayed in Kibworth. This was especially true of the Brown family, who found their fortune in the boom time of the late fourteenth century in the urban phenomenon of the day, Coventry.
Only twenty-three miles from Kibworth, Coventry was a day’s ride on the old route south-west through Arnesby, whose tall post windmill on the long ridge was a landmark across miles of open-field countryside. The route to the city took the traveller through Lutterworth, crossing Watling Street into Warwickshire at Brinklow, from where the prospective fourteenth-century job-seeker could see the new spires of Coventry’s great medieval churches.
The fifth-largest city in England, Coventry had doubled in size in just a few decades. Its rapid expansion was encouraged by an ambitious, self-confident town council that financed huge building projects, funded by a rapidly expanding wool and cloth trade. In its late-fourteenth-century heyday Coventry’s get-up-and-go produced an ostentatious building programme that saw it far outstrip the old towns of the Midlands like Leicester. A burst of energy and optimism after the devastation of the plague saw the creation of what was effectively a new town with huge construction projects sponsored by the town council and the guilds. In a few years from 1355 they built two and a half miles of city walls, in fresh-cut red sandstone, twelve feet high and eight feet thick, with twelve gates and thirty-two towers. Inside the city a dramatic cluster of church spires rose towards the heavens: Holy Trinity, St John’s, the huge Benedictine priory of Whitefriars founded in 1342, Greyfriars, whose steeple was completed in 1350, and the 300-foot spire of St Michael’s (begun in 1371 though not completed in Adam’s lifetime) that soared over jettied houses, courtyards, gardens and orchards inside the walls. Here was a city of money, status and opportunity; a city on the rise, inventing new civic rituals, with its mayors and aldermen, its craft and merchants’ guilds, its mystery plays and midsummer processions.
In such a place, especially with kinsmen as fellow guild members, a freeman (or freewoman) could rise even from peasant status. The merchants’ guild was founded in 1340, with St Mary’s as their guild hall, a magnificent building set on a red sandstone plinth, its high roof embossed with angels, unicorns and swans, set literally in the shadow of St Michael’s great spire. Three more guilds followed, to cater for the swelling ranks of merchants and craftsmen, and the city drew several Kibworth men to make their fortunes here after the Black Death. Again the Merton rolls allow us an insight into the beginnings of this great movement in English and British history which is still going on: the movement of the population away from the villages into the city, and from agriculture to commerce.
In 1363 Robert Godyer and John Heynes both arrived in Coventry from Kibworth after the second great outbreak of the plague had caused heavy losses in the village. Robert Godyer’s son Roger arrived two years later and lived with (and was probably apprenticed to) Arthur the wiredrawer – making metal wire for jewellers by hand on a draw bench. But the people from Kibworth whose rise we can trace in the most detail are members of the Brown family.
To tell Adam Brown’s story we need to go back to the 1380s and a house on Main Street in Kibworth Harcourt, which was long afterwards known in the Merton rolls as ‘Browns Place’. Amazingly for a peasant’s house, it has survived; the bailiff’s house in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then a yeoman farmer’s house, it is still lived in today, known as the Manor House, though in fact it has never been the manorial residence. There has been a house on this site since Anglo-Saxon times, and from recent dendrochronological investigation it is now known that the oldest surviving part of the present house was built somewhere between 1320 and 1350. A new open hall made from huge oak timbers was added in 1385, perhaps by Adam Brown and his wife Joanna. The trees were felled to order and the builders used green wood (which is how the dendrologists can date the building so accurately – they were able to get a good core sample from one of the hall beams). No building account survives for the 1385 job, but later Merton accounts from the middle of the fifteeth century record the construction of a further extension to the house, perhaps the late-medieval range along the road (where there is a fine ‘dragon beam’ in the ceiling of the corner room, though no good tree ring sample was forthcoming). We have a good idea of what would have been involved in 1385: stone (for the house platform) carted from Medbourne, slate from Kirby, lime and plaster from Barrow on Soar; the big frame timbers from Temple Rothley woods, and lesser timbers for the joists and lathes from the timber market at Lutterworth. Tiles and nails would have come from Leicester, where a leading ironmonger was a Kibworth man.
The building of the 1385 hall looks like the rebuild of an old house to mirror the Browns’ growing social status in the village. Only four years after the Peasants’ Revolt had rolled like a black cloud on the horizon towards Market Harborough, the world had moved on and Adam Brown had much to be pleased with. He could look back on his family story over several generations, back to his ancestor Robert’s days during the reign of Edward I in the 1270s. A young man at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt, Adam had married Joanna and had young children. He was obviously a man of energy and initiative; he had diversified into other businesses in the two decades after the plague and in the 1381 tax returns, by then about thirty years old, he is already described as a draper. So he had a taxable income, he was comparatively well-off, and now he began to spread his wings. His trade first led him to the local market at Harborough, five miles to the south, where he mingled with the other mercers and the spicers and dealers who sold the dye he needed for his cloth. They in turn connected him to wider horizons and specifically to Coventry, where wool was imported and luxury fabrics exported. Coventry was home to many drapers, mercers and dyers whose Coventry blue cloth – ‘true blue’ – was sought after across Europe for its luminous purity and fixity of colour. And there Adam and Joanna’s rise can be tracked, from free tenants holding a house for 1d rent in 1280, to burghers trading with the ports of the Hanseatic League.
Adam’s rise happened, as such things often do in life, through contacts, friendship and marriage. We first pick up these connections in the 1390s. His life in Kibworth still involved him with his neighbours, the old families in the village, the Swans, the Peks, the Polles and the Parkers, in the day-to-day business of the open fields, the buying and selling of strips, the deliberations of the manor court; but advancement came through his wider circle of friends through his business dealings in Market Harborough. On 4 February 1398 Adam granted friends in Harborough, including Robert Michell of Harborough and the spice dealer Will Andrews, a tenement in Kibworth. This deed was witnessed by four of Adam’s Kibworth friends, John Pek, Will Polle, Will Parker and Rob Swan. The Michells were an important family in both Harborough and Coventry who provided several Coventry mayors in the fourteenth century. The Andrews family had eighty years’ standing as dealers in Harborough – maybe they were old contacts (as we saw above, the family had dealings with Robert of Kibworth back in 1299–1317). But what this deed tells us is that by then Adam Brown had dealings in Coventry and his friends there were up-and-coming people, members of the town council, merchants, dyers, drapers and mercers; the kind of people who attended guild dinners and wore the ermine in the street processions at Corpus Christi.
By 1405 Adam is described as ‘Adam Brown of Kibworth merchant’ in the Merton documents, in one of which (a house purchase witnessed by the same Kibworth friends) we learn that his son William has married Agnes, the daughter of Richard Dodenhall of Coventry. Turning to the guild records of Coventry from the same time we now find that ‘Adam and Joanna Brown of Kibworth’ are both entered into the Guild of Holy Trinity in Coventry among the ‘brethren’ and ‘sisteren’ in the pre-eminent social group of the city. Membership of the guild was a real mark of Adam and his wife’s status but more importantly it conferred the right to trade, and if they wished it even gave them docking rights – quayage – in the port of Bristol. Now they could make and sell cloth made from wool grown on sheep in Kibworth and dyed by Coventry dyers, and export it to Europe and perhaps the Baltic ports. The Coventry guild records also reveal the identity of Adam’s daughter-in-law, for Adam’s son William had married the daughter of Richard Dodenhall who had been Mayor of Coventry in 1383: a match unthinkable for the pre-Black Death Browns in Kibworth. The Browns of Kibworth were now linked to the civic life of Coventry with a web of connections through the city’s guilds and the vast network of organized charities that played such an important role in pre-Reformation England.
The young William and his new wife Agnes Brown set up house in Erle Street, close to the cluster of churches in the centre of Coventry and a few yards from the merchant guild building of St Mary’s, whose magnificent hall was finished in the 1390s. It was an area of wide lanes and jettied houses near to the cathedral, of which one tiny corner still survives at Bailey Lane – a little hint of the ‘many fair streets builded with timber’ described by later Tudor travellers. Erle Street survived into the Second World War along with a wonderful collection of medieval buildings in Old Palace Yard which was partly destroyed by the Blitz in 1940, partly (and more unforgivably?) by planners and developers in the 1950s. Here the Browns prospered and eventually moved house again. William appears in the Coventry tallage roll of 1424 as a draper living in Much-Parke Street paying tallage of 6s 8d for the king’s war loan. William and Agnes soon had a son and named him Adam, after William’s father.
William did not break his connection with Kibworth though: he still kept a house and land in the village, renting out strips, and employed servants or younger kinsmen. In 1434 he gifted some plots of land in Kibworth to William Wymondeswold of Coventry and his kinsman Thomas Brown of Kibworth. But by now William is described as ‘William Brown of Coventry and Kibworth’ – Coventry now taking precedence in the family picture of itself. It is a measure of his status now that the witnesses to the document, along with four Kibworth men, are John Michell, Mayor of Coventry that year, Robert Southern, bailiff, and William Donington, who was bailiff and recorder at Coventry for nearly fifteen years in the 1430s and 1440s. Donington was originally a Leicestershire man too, so perhaps a local network was still at work here: the medieval village by now had many connections beyond its immediate region.
Whether Adam kept in contact with other branches of the family back in Kibworth we have no means of knowing but of course it is more than likely that he did, and one story may illustrate this. As we have seen, one of Adam’s kinsmen was the Lollard William Brown of Kibworth, who played a role as a wandering preacher before the rising of 1413. Recent research into the Coventry mercantile elites has shown that there were many Lollard sympathizers in the city from this time up to the 1431 Lollard Coventry revolt: among them the wealthy neighbour of the Browns in Erle Street, Ralph Garton, whose wife was executed in the aftermath. Garton had given financial help to impoverished Lollards from other towns who took refuge in the city. In this context a Merton document may be revealing about Adam Brown’s sympathies. In 1400 Adam made a gift of a house in Kibworth to support Roger Dexter, a well-known Lollard dissenter who, with his wife Alice, was forced to do public penance in Leicester in 1389 (their story is told in Chapter 11). So Adam Brown, a self-made man and pillar of the Coventry community, had connections with Kibworth Lollards – people with a ‘lifelong commitment to heresy’. Adam may have risen but he had not forgotten his roots or his friends in Kibworth, and perhaps his Lollard kinsman William Brown received financial support from his wealthy relative in the Holy Trinity Guild at Coventry.
Such was the fruit of conversations hidden in the official sources: the talk of men (as one Lollard said) ‘sitting in taverns and talking at table’: the unspoken gaps that lie behind the dry formulas of medieval court books. Adam Brown’s immediate family though never fell foul of the law and the third generation after the Black Death saw them firmly ensconced in the oligarchy of one of England’s thriving cities. With houses and land in Kibworth and a house in Coventry, they belonged to both places, tenaciously holding on to strips in the fields of their ancestral village, with friends and business partners in both places. All of which shows how the horizons of a medieval village, which were never narrow in the first place, widened out in the late fourteenth century. The land in William’s grant eventually came back to ‘Adam Brown chaplain’, who granted the land to the vicar of Kibworth, whence it descended to Merton College in 1477. The Browns finally disappear as Kibworth tenants in 1484, but in the sixteenth century their old family plot was still known as Brown’s Place, as if its former inhabitants still cast their influence over Main Street.
The story of this particular Kibworth peasant family didn’t end though with an upwardly mobile marriage and a house in Coventry. It didn’t end with the Browns of Kibworth at a civic feast under the star-studded roof of St Mary’s hall, passing the loving cup with the other guild members. In fact Adam’s son William and his brother John also became councillors. Rich by then and a draper by trade, William was made bailiff and both were electors, members of the mayor’s council who sat in chamber, two of the ‘worthy men’ for example who lent the Earl of Warwick a hundred marks towards his campaigns in France in the 1420s. William’s second son (we are now in the third generation from our Kibworth draper Adam and nine generations from the free tenant William noted in the documents in 1280) was called Thomas and is described as both a weaver and a draper. He was rich enough to contribute cloth towards the needs of the army fighting in Normandy when war resumed in the summer of 1449 (Rouen fell that October and the English were driven out of Normandy for good the following year). In 1451 Thomas is described as a ‘linen draper’, one of the worthies of the city called on to consider the state of the town’s fortifications on the eve of the Wars of the Roses. Then the next generation of Browns sees Nicholas as warden of the city in 1478 and a member of the town council; he was an elector in 1483–4, around the time when the family finally disappear from the Merton records for Kibworth as tenants, leaving only a branch of their kin as wage labourers holding a rented cottage.
In the following year of 1485, however, there is one more clue to the family fortunes. That year the Coventry recorder’s office became vacant and was offered to John Brown, who was perhaps Nicholas’s son or brother, in the event that one Thomas Kebell did not accept it. (Kebell was a Londoner who also had land in the Kibworth area and was probably part of the Browns’ old circle of friends.) The letter making the offer survives in the Coventry Leet Book, one of the most magnificent civic documents from any English town in the Middle Ages. The mayor was Robert Only and his letter is dated January 1486:
Ryght worshipful sir I recommende me unto you in my most herty wyse desiring your welfare, praying you that ye wyll gyff credence to the bryngher of this letter … writtyn at Coventre Your true lover Rob Only Mair of the Citie of Coventre
To the right worshipfull John Brown be this deliverd
John’s reply is also preserved in the city’s Leet Book. It begins with the lovely formalities of fifteenth-century letter writing:
Right worshypfull and my verray good maister, I recomende me to you, thankyng you in full hertly wyse for your letter, and that it hath pleased you so to remember me as ye have don; and of me never in eny wyse deservyd …
Regretfully, however, John Brown turns down the request: ‘I think myself full unable thereto,’ writes John, saying that he has been so long in London that he now knew nobody intimately in Coventry save Robert Only himself and Mr Symonds, who had been mayor in 1477, so he could not help:
but I trust it shal-be my fortune hereafter som-thyng to do that shal-be to your pleasure:
writtyn at London the Monday next after the fest of the Circumcision of our Lorde
Yours
J Broun
This is not the first letter written by a Kibworth person in the medieval period, but it contains a fascinating story. By 1485, the year of the battle of Bosworth, John Brown is a Londoner and will indeed rise to become an alderman and knight, having made the same journey as so many ordinary English people over the coming centuries, a journey from the village, to the city and then to the capital. As an English yeoman family’s tale of advancement it could hardly be bettered.
But this is still not quite the end of a story that has taken us from thirteenth-century farming in Leicestershire to the City of London. Adam Brown’s family was last seen in Coventry in 1497; they disappear from the records of the city in the 1490s in the reign of Henry VII. By then Coventry was in grave economic decline, its troubles the subject of street songs and popular ballads. Just the time perhaps for the family to move on and seek new pastures. The timing suggests that the Browns had not lost their knack of knowing how to look after themselves and when to make their move. Just as they had left Kibworth in the stagnation of the early fifteenth century when opportunities in the village were at their thinnest, making an advantageous marriage into a leading Coventry family, in London at the end of the century there was also a grand marriage. Then William Brown, mercer, merchant of the Staple of Calais, a rising star in the cloth trade and son of John Brown, knight and alderman of the City of London, married a wealthy heiress, Katherine, daughter of Edmund Shaa, knight, and his wife Juliana. Was this our John, author of the letter to the mayor, the Coventry draper whose ancestors had come from Leicestershire and whose distant cousins still paid seasonal labourers to work on their strips ‘under Blacklands’ in the East Field of Kibworth Harcourt? We cannot be absolutely certain – the name after all is a common one – but the circumstances and the timing fit perfectly, and there could hardly be a more perfect story of the rise of an ordinary English family in the late Middle Ages.