The fifteenth century witnessed important developments in the management of the estates of Malmesbury Abbey. Unfortunately, the evidence is fragmentary or circumstantial, but at some point following the death of Abbot Walter Camme in 1396 the demesne manors of the Abbey were all leased out, and the supervision of agricultural work was no longer a responsibility of the abbot and obedientiaries. The exact chronology is not known but by the time of an inquisition post-mortem following the death of Abbot Thomas Bristow in 1456 only cash income from the manors was recorded, almost certainly indicating that all the demesnes had been leased out.

As in the rest of England, the labour shortages after the Black Death eventually led to the collapse of serfdom on the estates of Malmesbury, and by the early Tudor period only a tiny minority of families in Wiltshire were, in the eyes of the law, villeins. The late medieval estate records of Glastonbury Abbey relating to its north Wiltshire manors are much more comprehensive than any Malmesbury Abbey documents for the same period, but it is reasonable to assume that the trends in the manors held by Malmesbury were similar to those in nearby Glastonbury lands. The Glastonbury estate rental of 1518 made a careful note of any tenants who were serfs, and in the four manors near Malmesbury only one family was identified as having villein status. Serfdom had almost, but not quite, disappeared from north Wiltshire. Malmesbury Abbey did not welcome the disappearance of serfdom, and as late as 1500 the abbot of Malmesbury was accused of wrongly imprisoning a prosperous farmer called Robert Carter, and seizing his livestock, on the grounds that he was the Abbey's villein. Just two years before the Dissolution, in 1537, the last abbot of Malmesbury, Robert Frampton, was charged with falsely claiming that a local man was his ‘bondman’ or serf.

Although the Abbey leased out the demesne farmland during the fifteenth century, wooded closes were retained in several manors. At these locations the abbot had the right of ‘free warren’ entitling him and his guests to hunt specific birds – pheasant and partridge – and hares and rabbits.