At the turn of the fifteenth century the Kibworth reeve, William Polle, like his neighbours the Browns, the Sibils and the Botons, could look back on five or six generations of family success, back to the days of Henry III and the horrida bella of the thirteenth-century civil war that had changed the village for ever. The villagers had divided feelings about the government and the commons, though they were loyal to the king himself as the personification of England, fount of the law which they knew was there to serve them too. In the collective popular memory of English history, the time of Henry’s son, Edward I, when Merton became their landlords, had been a time when ‘peace returned, and weapons were put aside; when dark clouds blew away, and sunshine came.’ For William Polle (perhaps through the stories told by his grandfather Henry), the family memory easily went back to those years of Edward’s reign before 1300 when ‘the English were joyful’, in the palmy days before the Great Famine, the ‘evil days of Edward II’ and the horrors of the Black Death.
Much had changed since his grandfather had been buried in the churchyard of St Wilfrid on the eve of the Famine. Still with his wife Emma, William by now had been reeve for fourteen years, just as his father Roger had been reeve for twenty years till his death in 1348, also having served at times as constable and ale-taster. The family took pride in having been long-standing officers in the village, just as in his turn William’s son Robert would be. But the years of famine and plague had taken their toll across his wider kin. Plague had become an almost permanent presence in the village in the last half-century. Two thirds of the village had died in 1349, but more deaths had followed in a steady wearing away of the manpower and morale of the community over the next five decades, to culminate in a final savage spasm in 1412. A man who carried in his mind (as reeves must) a detailed picture of the village population and the interweaving of its kin groups over recent history, William was all too well aware that in his time, over the four branches of his own family, the names of seven male members had been struck through in the tenants’ lists, in addition to many kinswomen and children, all victims of the pestilence.
At the turn of the century in 1400 there were complaints across the nation about the failures of Henry IV’s government, and its exactions. Henry, it was murmured, was an inauspicious usurper who had overthrown Richard II unjustly: ‘aboute this tyme the peple of this land began to grucche [grouch] agens kyng Harri, and beer him hevy, because he took thair good and paide not therefore; and desired to haue ageen king Richarde.’ Stories even circulated among travelling brokers on the road that Richard was not dead, ‘wherof moche peple was glad …’ The local abuse of power renewed talk of Magna Carta, ‘that no one should be arrested or imprisoned without response, or due process of the law … which the charter has confirmed in each parliament’.
The national mood then was grim: above all because of a general economic decline, which is vividly revealed in the manorial rolls for Kibworth. The great changes in employment patterns now becoming evident across the country had been under way before the Black Death, the heavy rent arrears in Kibworth for example already mounting up in the 1320s after the Great Famine. But everything was accelerated by the plague, and among the survivors it was the same whether one migrated or stayed put in the village. As William Polle and his kin saw it, the plague had hit the family hard, with the loss of so many of its menfolk. The oldest branch was headed by his cousin Nicholas and his wife Felicia; now the fifth generation after Robert (a freeman who is named in the Hundred Rolls in 1279), they had no children who survived to adulthood. Cousin William died of plague with no male heirs; as did another cousin Nicholas. The plague also killed three brothers in the third branch – Roger, Will and Robert – leaving only their sister Alice. So only our William came through, living a long life through the Black Death to 1406. William and his son Robert held the key village office of reeve for an astonishing fifty-six years between them. Clearly the Polles were generally respected and trusted, despite the inevitable village feuds with the likes of the cantankerous butcher John Pychard junior, who seems to have been able to pick quarrels with his neighbours almost at random.
As he entered the first quarterly court rentals arrears of the new century, William was well aware of the physical decline of the village. Adam Brown (now happily in business in Coventry for part of each year) may have raised his neighbours’ eyebrows with his fine new house by the Slang in Main Street in 1385, and other free tenants of old families kept good homes, but many of the customary villagers, let alone the serfs, of whom there was still a handful in the village, lived in increasingly depressed conditions. The loss of so many villagers in 1349 and during later outbreaks of the plague had left a surplus of rentable housing, barns, sheds and farmhouses. Of these many are now described in the court rolls as ‘empty’, ‘in need of repair’, ‘derelict’ and even ‘ruinous’. Over the next two generations many better-off survivors accumulated more property and land at low rents, then rented them out to other villagers, or farmed them with seasonal labour or with their own servants. But needless to say they no longer wished to be held to every term of the customary manorial conditions of rent, especially the landlord’s onerous repair clauses.
The last years of the fourteenth century, then, had been a time of economic hardship, rising prices and social unrest, when the real long-term effects of the Black Death made themselves felt. And in 1401 a dangerous level of confrontation was reached in Kibworth Harcourt. Rent arrears when William took over as reeve had been nearly £15, the highest since the plague year of 1361. As this situation persisted, the college now threatened twelve tenants with steep fines if they did not repair their houses. Most of these tenants had two or more houses by this date (accumulated as the result of tenancies left vacant by plague) and this was not seen by the villagers as a fair or reasonable demand so they refused. At the same time thirteen other tenants surrendered their holdings as a joint protest. It is clear that Polle sympathized, for the rent arrears were not collected.
Through this time, from the Peasants’ Revolt to the middle of the fifteenth century, a continuous thread in the court books (which is found in many other places over the country) is a feeling of dissatisfaction with the system in general. For poets and balladeers of the time, now using English to speak on behalf of the ordinary people, it was a common theme: ‘The world is like a false lemman [lover] ffayre semblant and much gyle … God made lords governors to govern people in unity … Each king is sworn to governance, to govern god’s people in justice.’ The treasury of a kingdom was not only the outward show of kings and their chivalry, rich merchants and learned clergy, but ‘corn stuffed in store’ and ‘a rich commons’, wrote a poet in 1401. A king without commons was no king:
A kyng withoute rent
might lightly trussen [‘pack up’] his treasure.
For commons maintaith lords honour, holy church and religion,
For commons is the fairest flower
That ever god set on earthly crown.
One important by-product of this time of stagnation and plague outbreaks was that the birth rate dropped and population stayed low in the country as a whole: indeed there were still only 2.5–3 million when Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, half what there had been in 1300. This story is mirrored in Kibworth. In the village, people were marrying later and having smaller families. Some indeed were not marrying at all, a surprising fact in any traditional rural society where heirs are always needed to work the farm. To take William’s family, his cousin Nicholas had died in middle age in 1396 with no heir, his uncle Nicholas had died celibate in the 1380s (highly unusual for a medieval peasant) and his three cousins produced just one daughter between them; a dramatic drop in the fertility of the family. So by the fifteenth century the family lands became concentrated into the hands of one branch, the reeve William’s descendants.
It is at this time that we begin to see the change from a traditional extended peasant kin group with several branches in one village to a much smaller nuclear family practising prudential marriage, the men and women marrying late (in their mid- to late twenties) and having smaller families. This is the English pattern of prudential marriage, husbanding the patrimony, what will become known as possessive individualism, which historians now see as one of the crucial social changes in the rise of capitalism (though it was a pattern fatally broken for the Polles by the inheritance strategies of William’s great-grandson John, the wealthy village bailiff in Henry VIII’s day, who unwisely split the family land between his four sons).
Though the fifteenth century saw a long period of stagnation, there were dramatic changes in labour relations across England. The consequence was a change from the feudal order to capitalism, from an agrarian, communally organized, close-knit society of self-sufficient peasants to a diversified, regionally orientated society of commercial farmers, artisans and landless wage-earning labourers, supporting a growing urban and commercially minded society. What happened in Kibworth is revealed in extraordinary detail in the Merton archive. As we saw, during the summer of blood of the Peasants’ Revolt the Merton rolls betray no hint of political unrest in Kibworth, unless it be Nicholas Gilbert (the reeve in 1381) silently and tactfully remitting the tenants’ arrears that summer. In fact the villagers were already embarked on their own plans for reform of lord and tenant relations. In this they were ultimately successful; it took time but not blood.
The confrontation between the peasants and the college in 1401, with the organized action over repair clauses, had been the first step. The surrender of their holdings by thirteen tenants as a joint protest had only been a token as in practice they continued to hold their lands and the college continued to collect their rents. But all this was a dress rehearsal for full-scale action by the community of the village. In the next few years the Merton archives reveal more cases of the villagers rejecting the custom of the manor. For example, since the very beginning of Merton’s tenure of Kibworth Harcourt the village court had been required to record and investigate fugitivi, runaways from the village who left the lord’s lands without permission of the college. But as we have seen, this kind of migration increased after the plague, with many villagers travelling away to seek work, even settling down as paid workers in cities like Leicester or Coventry. In 1407 the tenants refused to present to Merton the names of men who had left the village without the lord’s permission; and after 1409 the listing of absconders and absentees was finally abandoned altogether by the new reeve, Robert Polle, son of the old reeve, William. From this time the college documents show the fellows were still in legal arguments about the legal status of some of their tenants: one bundle records a lengthy investigation into the villein status of the Polles, tracing their ancestry back (some as freemen, some as villeins) to the college’s acquisition of the village in 1270.
The old bonds of villeinage then were becoming unworkable simply because of changing times and conditions, but chiefly because the peasants refused to make them work. To make matters worse, in 1413–14, as we have seen, the Lollard heresy which had been a bubbling undercurrent in village life for the last thirty years flared into life: another disturbing development for the fellows of Merton, who themselves had already been implicated in Wycliffism. Among the peasants from the Kibworth area who declared their allegiance to the Lollard leader Oldcastle were men from old families with wide kin networks and real presence in the administration of the village: Browns, Polles and Valentines. The ringleader, Walter Gilbert’s brother Nicholas, had been a long-respected college representative in the village. Both men were among those hanged and burnt a week later in St Giles’ Fields. To the fellows of Merton, long a source of suspicion to government and Church for their Lollard sympathies, the village was proving to be a little too free-thinking for comfort.
Things continued to go from bad to worse. In 1422, while Henry V was away fighting on two fronts in France, many tenants at home were finding themselves ruined or impoverished. At this point their feudal lord, the Earl of Warwick, demanded a feudal aid of £16 from Kibworth Harcourt, a war tax on all the tenants. For the reeve, Robert Polle, it was the last straw. By the end of the year sixteen tenements were in his hands: one third of the manor was without tenants. In the manorial court Robert struggled to let small parcels of land at low rates to help balance the books, but over the next decade the college lost £95 in rents – a large sum for the time, getting on for £50,000 today. Needless to say the tenants felt deeply aggrieved and now as a group they finally put their foot down over the question of customary dues. On top of national taxes and war aids, the double bind of labour services and rent increases, with extra landlord’s costs, was no longer supportable, or – as they perceived – enforceable. In discussion with the reeve and the college steward they let it be known that they wanted traditional labour services regularized across the board to straight money transactions. Eventually the college gave way.
First, in 1427 the college agreed that henceforth all eighteen customary virgates (villein tenancies) were no longer to be held in bondagio; from now on they were to be held ad voluntatem, ‘at the will of the lord’, in other words on the basis of a negotiated contract paid in cash. Customary status then would no longer be the determining factor in labour law. At the same time the college also consented to reduce the rent by 3s 4d per virgate per annum (a rental which would remain fixed till the eighteenth century!). A great deal of reorganization was required as a result of these changes, and negotiations and adjustments occupied the village court in the court rolls for over ten years until 1439. Arguably, this was as big a change as the enclosure of the open fields in 1779, perhaps greater, for in effect it signalled the end of the feudal order in Kibworth.
Over the next few years through the manorial court under their elected reeves the peasants negotiated the new conditions of employment with the Merton fellows and their agent, who came up on regular visits to meet with tenants. Finally in October 1439 a special Court of Recognition was held at Kibworth, chaired by the bailiff and the reeve, to finalize and record the mutual consent of both parties – the college and the tenants – to the new tenurial arrangements. This kind of thing was happening all across England in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though it is rare to be able to see the minute details as we can here.
The document is now on paper instead of vellum, itself a sign of the times. At the top it reads ‘The Sunday after the Feast of St Dionysus a Court of Recognition between the customary tenants of Kibworth and the house of scholars of Walter of Merton at Oxford’. Then comes a list of all eighteen customary tenants by each of which in the margin the scribe has written ‘ad voluntatem’. They are familiar names: Robert’s cousin Simon Polle, John Chapman, Robert Brown (cousin of the Coventry drapers), Tom Saunders, John Pychard the butcher and other members of old village families, the Heyneses, Peks and Swans. More than 170 years on from Merton’s assumption of the lordship, the village community was still a coherent group run by the same families.
In English medieval law, status – as legally defined with recorded precedent – was everything. It determined freedom, work, education and movement. Hence some earlier writers had railed against ‘those foolish men that would allow serfs an education’. Back in the bad old days close to Kibworth at Stoughton a legal case had concluded ‘once a villein always a villein’ as a triumphant shriek from a sneering landlord. A Merton investigation into the villein status of the Polle family in the fifteenth century produced a complete account of the family history in an attempt to prove their ancient villein status (though Robert in the Hundred Rolls of 1279 was clearly free, as was the head of another branch of the kin, Nicholas, a free tenant in 1280: the great-great-grandfather of our Robert, who was reeve between 1406 and 1443). Others, though, had been ‘customary tenants’ or villeins. The 1439 Court of Recognition meant the abolition of villein status and the de facto adoption of primogeniture, with the acceptance of leasehold, indentures and transfers; in other words, personal and economic freedom for most of the villagers. Also abolished was the legal category of ‘bondman’ and of certain land being described as ‘bondland’. In the past to hold bondland, in bondagio, could make you a bondman. Gone too were the labour services attached to bondland. There were now just fixed rents, which could not be raised by arbitrary will of the lord.
The Kibworth 1439 agreement also had a long-term effect on farming practices and the organization of the open fields. It confirmed the amalgamation of customary half-virgate tenancies (the small peasant holdings for one family) into single and multiple virgate holdings. This meant that tenants could hold unequal amounts of land in the three open fields and could keep double the number of beasts on the meadow, or more. So the administration of the farming cycle had to become more flexible and the need for by-laws began to assert itself. (Oblique references to by-laws became common in the rolls; the first by-law was enrolled in 1430, the first ones still written in Latin, later in English.) This process continued so that by the seventeenth century the open fields in Kibworth were already much diminished after well-off yeoman farming families like the Heyneses and Rays had consolidated sizeable individual holdings in the open fields, amalgamating field strips over time. It may be for this reason that there was little push for enclosure in this part of Leicestershire during the Agricultural Revolution in the eighteenth century, and the enclosure of the open fields, when it came to Kibworth Harcourt in 1779, was arranged with little disturbance. The process had been going on for a long time and the last flickering was due in part to satisfy the desire of the college to tidy things and come up to date.
The 1439 agreement had far-reaching effects. It even brought changes in the look of the village, with extensive rebuilding over the next few decades, increasingly using brick, as families improved their own homes. The modern village is well on the way as it first appears in visual representation in a 1609 Merton map, with brick houses and chimneys. The late-fifteenth-century farmer’s house known as Priory Farm is typical of the new style of English domestic architecture: no longer a medieval open hall but a long house with a second floor and private bedrooms. Out in the fields too the industrially farmed landscape of the High Middle Ages was changing: the great brown swathes of open fields, without hedgerows or trees, was giving way to mixed farming with a shift away from arable to pasture. With greater flexibility open to them now, some tenants concentrated on stock and others on arable. Large areas of arable land went down to permanent pasture in the three open fields. Commercial farming had arrived.
Almost immediately a greater differentiation between economic groups is revealed in the college archive: a number of thirty- and sixty-acre holdings emerge, soon to become a hundred acres or more, held by husbandmen, yeomen and eventually by gentlemen. This is the real beginning of the class of free English yeomen farmers who will be such an important agent for economic growth and cultural and religious change in the Tudor period, especially in the East Midlands and East Anglia. A social class below the rich shire gentry of the fifteenth century, these people (like the Polles, Clerks, Browns and Peks in Kibworth) are the well-to-do middling farmers whom we have traced through this story in detail from the thirteenth century (many of them clearly descended from the free peasantry in Domesday Book). In court cases of the Tudor period some of these people could accurately recall a dozen or more generations by name back to the early-fourteenth-century poll taxes. Altogether a greater diversity of class and status began to emerge in the village: gentlemen, lawyers, clergymen, yeomen and husbandmen, and artisans who lived in cottages but were not necessarily poor. Genuinely poor were the day labourers looking for work at the hiring fair on the Bank at Beauchamp and the widows and others living in cottages in the mud houses on the insalubrious edge of ‘the Marsh’ at the eastern end of Kibworth.
In the Merton archive the 1448 building accounts for a house still standing in Main Street may perhaps be seen to epitomize these changes in wealth and class. The identification of this house in the Middle Ages is not certain, but it is likely that this is the site called Brown’s Place in the Merton records where, as we have seen, a surviving range is dated to the decade or two from the 1320s and a hall from 1385, very likely built by Adam Brown, the successful draper who made his fortune in Coventry. In 1448 a new big range with a hall and farm buildings was constructed running along Main Street on a large ironstone platform on the slope where the droveway goes out to the open fields by the horse mill and pond. After many rebuildings no firm dendrochronological dating could be gathered from this part of the house, but a fifteenth-century ‘dragon beam’ still holds up a jettied upper storey at the corner by the Slang. The house was occupied by the families of reeves and bailiffs through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the Peks, Clerks and Polles. The 1448 accounts are entitled ‘Expenses at hand of John Caunden ordered the administrators of Merton College’ and list in full the construction costs for a hall with chambers and outbuildings, itemizing wages to twenty villagers for cartage and labour, including carpentry, plastering and painting. Over fifty entries give a great impression of the intensive labour on one fine village house:
To John Parke for the carriage of lime
For the carriage of timber from Temple Park [Rothley]
Idem Slate from Kirby
Idem Stone from Medbourne
To John Simkin for the carriage of lime from Barrow on Soar
To Thomas Wynllof carriage of timber from Temple Park
To John atte Hulle for readying the ground for the hall
To John Cawnden carriage of timber and lathe from Lutterworth
And ten cartloads of stone bought at Medbourne
To Will Peek ‘for painting of the woolhouse’
‘The plasterers for their labour’
To John Reynolds for 800 big timber nails
700 ‘pricking’ nails
4000 lathenayle [lathe nails]
Extra payments were made to masons and carpenters for labour on the hall, the chamber and the stable, and on other barns and outbuildings. There are also records of payments for bread when the carters were carrying the stone to Kibworth (the equivalent today would be sandwiches) and for pork and veal, and ale.
So just before the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses the reeve, now generally known as the bailiff, had a very substantial house, where perhaps the fellows of Merton and their agents would stay when they made their regular visits to the village. By now the bailiff had become a man of real substance and influence in the village.
In the early Tudor period, from the 1490s to the 1530s, we can get our first really good impression of the furnishings of such ‘middle class’ houses through villagers’ wills and their attached inventories. Wills or deathbed testaments began to be used widely among this yeoman class in the late fifteenth century – over 20,000 survive from Leicestershire alone from the 1490s to the 1590s but this is a pattern common across England as a whole. Discussed in detail in the next chapter, they offer a close picture of these upwardly mobile farming households with their furniture, clothes and material possessions and luxuries, using hired servants (as many as six in the Polle household), sending younger sons away to study law or enter commerce and giving their daughters generous dowries.
The will of Amy Polle is typical with its detailed inventory of house contents listed room by room. Amy (or Amice) was the wife of John Polle, the bailiff from 1520 till 1536, and she lists the ‘gret coffer that stands in my parlour’ and her set of best bedlinen – coverlets, pillows and bolsters – together with ‘one feather bed with hangings thereto’. There are many kitchen pots and pans, and a fine collection of gowns and kirtles, fitting for a bailiff’s wife. We learn that she employed no fewer than six servants, probably including a gardener for the vegetable plots behind the yard. Typical of the Kibworth villagers, she also made numerous charitable bequests, including a gift of corn to ‘every poor family in Kibworth’. For a family descended from peasant holders of a virgate in the thirteenth century, the Polles had risen in village society. Some of Amy’s neighbours like the Colmans and Iliffes are recorded from Tudor times till today, and still live in the village. Other very long-lasting families like Amy’s are long gone from the village now, though they have surviving collateral branches in the region.
So many of these stories about reeves, bailiffs and clerks – not to mention Lollard preachers – suggest a level of literacy in the village that might appear surprising given the way we tend to view the lives of medieval peasants. But there has been a persistent underestimation of peasant literacy in the English medieval village. It is very likely that there were literate people in Kibworth even in the eleventh century – a priest or a parish clerk, perhaps, for such a sizeable community; and, indeed, it is not impossible that there were literate laity there in Anglo-Saxon times, when town reeves were expected to know the lawbook. The first literate villager appears in the records in the 1160s – ‘William the clerk of Kibworth’, the village scribe.
By the 1200s everyone in Kibworth, as in most of England, was in contact with reading and writing. You went to church, where the priest used a book and the church had wall paintings carrying poems, songs and religious texts. You knew the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed in Latin. As a freeman or freewoman, and even perhaps as a villein, you may have ‘signed’ a lease of land in the church porch, affixing your own seal. If you went to Leicester to join the merchants’ guild as a draper or ironmonger or wool brogger, you will have kept accounts, which may have required of you some basic literacy and numeracy. And by the end of the thirteenth century there were chantry chaplains in Kibworth drawn from peasant families who must have had a basic reading ability.
There was a long succession of villagers with the title of capellanus or dominus (‘sir’), such as John Godwin in 1280, William Polle around 1300, and John Polle and John Sibil later in the century. Such men appear in the court rolls through to the Reformation; they came from old village families and clearly had some kind of basic education. But how did they become literate? Who taught them? A village school is recorded from the sixteenth century, with a permanent building in the 1620s. But when did it start?
‘On the Sunday next after the feast of St Helen, in the 27th year of King Edward III’ – that is, on 18 August 1353 – a meeting was held at Kibworth Harcourt, perhaps after Sunday church, maybe in the north porch of St Wilfrid’s, or in the bailiff’s house on the Slang, whose northern wing still survives from before this date. The witnesses included William Polle, ‘chaplain’, and Roger ‘the clerk’ along with Roger Polle, Will Heynes and others. In an agreement, Robert Chapman of Kibworth Harcourt and John Dere of Saddington placed a small amount of land in a trust to be administered by trustees: ‘a house in Kibworth next to Nicholas Polle’s old house in Church lane; a rood of land lying above Middlefurlong next to the strip held by Nicholas’ son Henry and abutting the boundary of Kibworth; a rood of meadow in Bradmere’.
Along with two other deeds from the 1350s, this agreement is the beginning of the story of Kibworth Grammar School. It turned up in what became known as the ‘school box’, the first document in a parchment and paper trail that extends over 600 years and which is now being catalogued for the first time. The original purpose of the gifts, in which the Polles and Chapmans appear to have been instrumental, was not to found a school. It was to set up land and property to provide an annual income supervised by a trustee apparently, although never specified in the deeds, for a little village guild, with a preacher or chaplain who would chant special masses for the souls of the members’ ancestors, a typical arrangement of the fourteenth century, especially in the traumatized time after the Black Death.
By the seventeenth century these lands were known as the ‘School lands’, and they provided an income for a grammar school which survived until the twentieth century. The lands were rescued from expropriation during the Civil War, and during the enclosures of 1779 were consolidated with the agreement of local landowners, with three fields still earmarked for the support of the school. Though the school finally closed in 1960, amalgamated by the local education authority, the lands are still known as school lands and their income still supports school trips, such as to the First World War battlefields, for today’s Kibworth High School.
A ‘grammar school’ at Kibworth Beauchamp is first mentioned in 1559, but the village tradition was that it was founded by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick – ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’ – during the Wars of the Roses. The early history of the school is very shadowy, but at a hearing over the endowments in 1651 it was believed that the school’s endowment of land had been preserved at the time of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the chantries during the Reformation through the intervention of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who was then lord of the manor of Kibworth Beauchamp. The documents in the school box show a board of feoffees, all local farmers, going back to the fourteenth century; in later times, from at least 1559 to 1877, land and houses at Kibworth Beauchamp were held by feoffees in trust ‘for the maintenance of a free school’. These feoffees acted as sole governors, received the rents of their tenants, and appointed the schoolmaster, who until 1907 was always a clerk in holy orders.
It is hard to prove there was a school, or even a teacher, before Tudor times, but there were clearly many educational possibilities in the village much earlier. One lay in Kibworth’s relationship with Merton College. Merton was the first formal college at Oxford: the founder’s idea was to create an academic community of university scholars who had a first degree and who wished to study for the MA or degree in civil law or theology. At the same time the statutes of 1270 also provided for the education of another group, of ‘boy scholars’ studying grammar with a status lower than undergraduates and with a master paid to teach them. From 1270 an additional group of twelve poor ‘secondary scholars’ (scolares pauperes secundarii) appears, paid for by money donated by wealthy benefactors. Even before 1277 there are further references in Merton rolls to the ‘poor scholars of Kibworth’. These were evidently boys learning grammar rather than undergraduates. And in the early accounts of Merton from the 1280s and 1290s there are one or two further references to ‘poor scholars of Kibworth’. Presumably some of these boys who learned Latin grammar became clerks and chaplains in the village – which helps us to understand the high degree of literacy among village officials, reeves and capellani drawn from families like the Polles and Sibils.
Clearly there was some kind of reciprocity between the college and Kibworth from the start. But was there some kind of medieval village school, with a teacher? It is certainly possible – teaching might have been held for example in an aisle of the church or in a private house. This might account for educated villagers like William Brown and Walter Gilbert being able to preach with the help of English texts, rather like William Smith, the self-taught Leicester smith, with his compilations of ‘English books’. Though Roger and Alice Dexter were most likely illiterate, Adam Brown the Coventry draper may well have been literate, as his grandson certainly was. The same might go for some village women: like the three Kibworth women, Margaret and Mary Harcourt and Maud Polle, from a small nunnery down the Welland near Stamford, who in their wills, which also found their way into the school box, donated lands in Kibworth for the purposes of prayer (Margaret died in 1407). In this context a fascinating and perhaps unique survival in the archives of Merton suggests that, exactly as tradition has it, there was already a teacher of grammar in the village as far back as the early fifteenth century.
In the summer of 1447, John Pychard, the Kibworth Harcourt butcher, was feeling ‘vexyd and trobuld gretely’ and furious with his neighbour Robert Polle in particular. Pychard was maybe in his forties, a butcher (and grazier?) like his father before him. He had a cottage and half a virgate on Main Street with his wife Agnes and his teenage son, John junior. He was clearly a quarrelsome figure. His tendencies earned him frequent entries in the court rolls – he had more than once drawn blood in brawls.
Off he went in August to one of the village scribes, and got things off his chest by composing a long letter addressed to the Warden of Merton. What follows is part of the text lightly modernized with a little added punctuation. It is perhaps, remarkably, the earliest English letter by an English peasant to survive:
Most worshipful and reverent lord I commend me unto your worthy lordship desiring to hear of your prosperity and bodily health, the which almighty God preserve and sustain unto his pleasans and your wealth and welfare. And if it be pleasing to your worthy lordship that I that am your own poor servant and man unto my power in what service that lieth in me abide upon your lord ye will with all my heart.
The issue bothering him sounds like a typical village conflict, a dispute which John says ‘cost me more than forty shillings’. His complaint was that the Kibworth bailiff had fiddled the court roll in his own favour – and once something was set down in writing in the medieval system, one imagines it was very difficult to gainsay it without a lot of time, expense and personal appearances at the manor court – even, as had already happened to John, a nine-mile ride to Leicester to petition a higher court. ‘And now foully and wrongfully am I put away from it by record of Robert Polle and all my neighbours.’
At the end of the letter comes the surprise that takes this letter out of the typical mundane world of the medieval manorial court:
And furthermore sir we have a young man with us, the which is a goodly scholar for a grammarian [grameryen] after the form of the country, and a likely man of person to do you service. And truly sir he is the son of one of your tenants that is to say the son of Agnes Palmer.
Will Palmer was twenty. His father John died in 1448, and was perhaps sick when Pychard wrote this letter to the fellows of Merton. Pychard’s letter continues, ‘not stopping on his points’:
And truly sir the man deserved to have cunning [knowledge] over all thing notwithstanding he might have masters in the king’s house and in diverse places but he wolde evermore have cunning. And truly sir we pray you all your tenants everyone that ye would cherish him for truly sir he shall be at you in haste and forsooth you will like his conditions have you assayed him a while both for governance and person. No more at this time but almighty god have you in his keeping. Written at Kibworth in the feast of St Hugh the Martyr.
He your own man and poor servant John Pychard.
Pychard’s letter takes us right into social relations in Main Street in the 1440s, into village politics and relations between families. What was his relation with Agnes Palmer? Why had he taken young Will under his wing? And how had Will already in his teens acquired the skills to be accounted a ‘grameryen’? Evidently Palmer was not one of the poor scholars of Kibworth at Merton, otherwise the fellows would already have known him, but he had obviously already taken the first steps up what medieval schoolmen called the ‘tower of learning’. Pychard’s interest in him (for all his cantankerous character) recalls later injunctions by Tudor educationalists that ‘no man goeth about a more godlie purpose, that he is mindfull of the good bringing up, both of hys owne, and other mens children.’
The letter is a clear indication that there was indeed a teacher of grammar in the village by this time. Most likely he was one of the chantry priests paid for by the villagers’ gifts of fields that remained in the school’s possession from the sixteenth century until modern times. Our village story is the same as so many across England in the Middle Ages. To administer the fields and strips Nicholas Polle used writing. Lollards like Gilbert and Brown read vernacular books. The estate manager made notes itemizing nails, boards, plaster and slate on strips of parchment or paper sent in a bundle to Merton. And the butcher (on behalf of ‘all your tenants’) recommends a neighbour’s young son for higher education. For the ordinary folk of England education was a passport to wealth, to changing status and freedom, and to new mental horizons.
Complex changes in history are thus revealed in the fortunes of ordinary families. This slow crystallization was already under way before the Black Death but accelerated after the plague, with changes in employment, in the culture of the people, in personal self-awareness and in religious autonomy (as is evidenced in the Lollard heresy). Education and literacy too played a part in a process which emerges from the lower reaches of society, instigated by the villagers themselves. By the late fifteenth century the manorial labour discipline and all its implications were gone, and Kibworth had taken its first steps on the way to becoming a modern village.
The changes in the mentalities of the English people in this period were psychological and material. Both played a part in the transformation of society which would lead England to become the first capitalist society in history. Historians now agree on the broad picture, but till recently they have been in the dark over how agrarian society changed at grass-roots level between the late fourteenth century and the eighteenth, laying the basis for the swift and radical social and political changes that transformed England from around 1700. Only in recent years as the court rolls of villages across the English Midlands have been examined has it become clear how these things happened. It is clear now that the change was not only in laws and structures of government imposed from above: by 1500 new mentalities are apparent that would shape England’s future path. And these were created not only by the rulers, the jurists and the authors of medieval management texts, but by the peasants themselves.