2 Kussmaul, A., Servants in Husbandary in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981), especially pp. 97–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the last decline, and the variants which developed during that decline, see also Snell, K.D.M., Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 67–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Throughout this paper I use the definitions of Poos, L.R., A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991), p.181CrossRefGoogle Scholar: servants were generally ‘unmarried, and resident in employers’ households, and they received a major portion of their remuneration in the form of bed and board’ while labourers ‘largely occupied their own households’ (the cottages of medieval rentals) although, as we shall see later, there are variants which complicate these distinctions.

3 Kussmaul, , Servants, pp. 23, 104.Google Scholar

4 Howkins, A., ‘The English farm labourer in the nineteenth century: farm, family and community’, in Short, B. (ed.), The English Rural Community: Image and Analysis (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 89–90Google Scholar; Snell, , Annals, p. 94.Google Scholar

5 Kussmaul, , Servants, p. 130.Google Scholar

6 Howkins, , ‘English farm labourer’, p. 86Google Scholar and Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1850–1925 (London, 1991), p. 22.Google Scholar See also the classic early paper by Sheppard, June: ‘East Yorkshire's agricultural labour force in the mid-nineteenth century’, Agricultural History Review 9 (1961), 43–54.Google Scholar

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8 Smith, R.M., ‘The people of Tuscany and their families in the fifteenth century: medieval or Mediterranean?’, Journal of Family History 6 (1981), 123CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Poos, , A Rural Society, p. 225.Google Scholar

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10 Fox, H.S.A., Ravenhill, W.L.D., Thorn, F. and Thorn, C., ‘Agriculture and rural settlement’, in Kain, R.J.P. and Ravenhill, W.L.D. (eds.), An Historical Atlas of South-West England (ExeterGoogle Scholar, forthcoming), map of land values based on inquisitions post mortem, which show up North Devon as very lowly valued; Fox, H.S.A., ‘The occupation of the land: Devon and Cornwall’, in Miller, E. (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 1348–1500 (Cambridge, 1991), 154, 157–8Google Scholar, for trends in land use; Fox, , ‘Farming practice and techniques: Devon and Cornwall’, in the same volume, pp. 305–6Google Scholar, for crop combinations in the region.

11 Rankings from Hoskins, W.G., ‘The wealth of medieval Devon’, in Hoskins, W.G. and Finberg, H.P.R., Devonshire Studies (London, 1952), p. 223Google Scholar, and from Sellman, R. R., ‘Relative urban wealth in 1524/5’, Devon Historian 29 (1984), 14–15.Google Scholar

12 Fox, H.S.A., ‘The people of the Wolds in English settlement history’, in Aston, M., Austin, D. and Dyer, C. (eds.), The Rural Settlements of Medieval England: Studies Dedicated to Maurice Beresford and John Hurst (Oxford, 1989), pp. 99–100.Google Scholar

13 Full details concerning the specialisation in rearing, backed up by incidental references and by numerical analysis of the age/sex composition of the herds, in Fox, , ‘Farming practice and techniques’, pp. 316–7Google Scholar; Smith, L. Toulmin, The Itinerary of John Leland (5 vols, London, 1907–1910), I, 172.Google Scholar

14 Evidence for marketing of bovines from the North Devon manor of Ash water perhaps suggests southwards and westwards sales, for the fairs visited by the lord were at Tavistock, Launceston, Brent Tor, Holsworthy and Week St Mary: Devon Record Office (hereafter D.R.O.), Cary Mss, Ashwater accounts of 1467–8, 1476–7 and 1477–8. For movements of cattle eastwards towards East Devon see Cornwall Record Office, Arundell Mss, Hartland account of 1448–9 and Alcock, N.W., ‘An East Devon manor in the Later Middle Ages, part i’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association 102 (1970), 166.Google Scholar For Crediton, Finberg, H.P.R., Tavistock Abbey (Cambridge, 1951), p. 133Google Scholar; Alcock, , ‘An East Devon manor’, 166.Google Scholar Maryanne Kowaleski tells me that there are numerous other references to indicate the importance of Crediton as a place for the sale and purchase of cattle.

15 For the relative buoyancy during the Later Middle Ages of the urban economies of Exeter and other towns in its network see Carus-Wilson, E.M., The Expansion of Exeter at the Close of the Middle Ages (Exeter, 1963)Google Scholar and, for the most recent assessment, Goldberg, P.J.P., Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992), p. 80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For meat marketing and leather working in East Devon see Kowaleski, M., ‘Town and country in late medieval England: the hide and leather trade’, in Corfield, P. J. and Keene, D. (eds.), Work in Towns 850–1850 (London and Leicester, 1990), pp. 59–62Google Scholar. Sidbury, discussed in the following section of this paper, is an example of a village with the trades of butcher, skinner, cobbler and glover in the Later Middle Ages.

16 The reconstruction in this paragraph comes largely from analysis of incidental, but very numerous, references to aspects of farming in the court rolls of Ashwater which I have sampled as systematically as possible between 1403 and 1489. The court rolls are among the Cary Mss, once at Dymond and Co., Torquay, now being listed at the Devon Record Office. Hereafter I shall cite these simply as Cary Mss. References to trespass by cattle and other animals, to strays and to dilapidated hedges are found in almost all of the court rolls. Other references: Cary Mss, Ashwater court near John before the Latin Gate, 9 Hen. VI (20 animals); Ashwater court near St Margaret the Virgin, 10 Hen. V(an example of rustling); Ashwater court near St Cuthbert, 19 Hen. VI (accommodation); Ashwater court near Invention of the Holy Cross, 4 Hen. 7 (steer house: reading slightly obscure). For rot and patches of moor ‘attached to particular estates’, Vancouver, C., General View of the Agriculture of the County of Devon (London, 1808), pp. 277, 290, 339–41, 343.Google Scholar

17 ‘Farm holding’ defined throughout this paper as a messuage and one acre or more, whereas a ‘cottage holding’ is a cottage with no land. The assumption of the paper, that the occupiers of cottage holdings had a potential surplus of labour while the occupiers of farm holdings did not, is obviously a crude oversimplification; the occupiers of some small farm holdings, sometimes called smallholders in this paper, would have been in an intermediate position in this respect.

18 Cary Mss, rental of 1464 and survey book, mid sixteenth century. The latter also contains details of the sizes of demesne closes. The demesne closes were certainly at lease to the tenants in 1464.

19 Cary Mss, rentals of 1346, 1397, 1464 and temp. Hen. VIII; survey book, mid-sixteenth century; account of 1377–8 for just one example of decayed cottages. A useful church rate of 1752 (D.R.O. 2466A/PW/2) shows that cottagers were still virtually absent from the parish at that date.

20 Sidbury is discussed in the following section of this paper; P.R.O. C.138/52 for Uffculme.

21 Allen, R.C., ‘The two English agricultural revolutions, 1450–1850’, in Campbell, B.M.S. and Overton, M. (eds.), Land, Labour and Livestock: Historical Studies in European Agricultural Productivity (Manchester, 1991), p.246Google Scholar; Williams, W. M., A West Country Village, Ashworthy: Family, Kinship and Land (London, 1963), pp. 14, 21, 47.Google Scholar See also Reed, M., ‘The peasantry of nineteenth-century England: a neglected class?’, History Workshop 18 (1984), 56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Assuming entry into tenure and marriage in the early 20s and death in the 40s.

23 Cary Mss, Ashwater court near St Luke the Evangelist, 23 Hen. VI and court near St Katherine, 23 Hen. VI.

24 Poos, , A Rural Society, p. 198.Google Scholar

25 The rental of 1346 indicates that most of the cottages were near the church and gives the location of all of the farmsteads, allowing a complete reconstruction of the settlement pattern before the Black Death. This has been done by Barker, A.E., ‘Insular farms and muddy lanes: pre-Conquest and medieval settlement on the Culm Measures of Devon’, unpublished M.A. dissertation, Department of English Local History, University of Leicester, 1985Google Scholar, Figure 4.1. The same dissertation (pp. 47–9) discusses settlement contraction at Ashwater. For a series of maps demonstrating (for another North Devon manor) how the degree of isolation increased as population and farmsteads declined in number during the Later Middle Ages, see Fox, H.S.A., ‘Contraction: desertion and dwindling of dispersed settlement in a Devon parish’, Medieval Village Research Group Annual Report 31 (1983), 40–42.Google Scholar

26 The extreme case would be a Midlands region where many of the villages were becoming deserted or severely shrunken, the remaining population of lords and large farmers with extensive sheepwalks then having few local pools of cottagers from which to draw labour.

27 P.R.O. C.134/99 and Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1387–93 (London, 1962), p. 89Google Scholar; P.R.O. E.315/385; D.R.O. 1258M/D/70, court rolls of Werrington in which transfers of cottage holdings are noticeably absent.

28 The evidence is suggestive but not conclusive: Putnam, B.H., The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers (New York, 1908), p. 167Google Scholar of the separately paginated appendix.

29 D.R.O.C.R. 1094 and subsequent numbers. For a discussion of the practice of replacement, as servants, of a head of household's children by the children of others, see Smith, R.M., ‘Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England 1250–1800’, in Smith, (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-cycle (Cambridge, 1984), p. 24.Google Scholar

30 Dymond, R., ‘The customs of the manor of Braunton’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association 20 (1888), 280.Google Scholar

31 Fox, H.S.A., ‘Exploitation of the landless by lords and tenants in early medieval England’, in Smith, R.M. and Razi, Z. (eds.), Medieval Village and Small Town Society: Views from Manorial and other Seigneurial Courts (Oxford, forthcoming).Google Scholar Finberg produced good evidence to show that on occasion the censura of the West Country could be used as a term for tithingpenny: Finberg, , Tavistock Abbey, p. 208.Google Scholar On other manors, though, it appears not to have been connected with frankpledge but was rather a manorial tax on the landless.

32 D.R.O. 314M/M/2.

33 My figure of 40 per cent of Bratton Clovelly 's farmers with servants is no doubt approximately correct but its calculation is rendered difficult by the scrappy nature of the rental (also D.R.O. 314M/M/2) used to estimate the number of farm holdings there in the Later Middle Ages. The early modern sample is from Kussmaul, , Servants, p. 12Google Scholar, using listings of inhabitants between 1688 (Clayworth) and 1752 (Forthampton and Swinley).

34 D.R.O. 1258M/G/3, account of 1378–9.

35 Cary Mss, Ashwater court near Michaelmas, 9 Hen. V.

36 This is clear from differences in the demography of rearing and dairying herds: see Fox, , ‘Farming practice and techniques’, pp. 315–17.Google Scholar

37 Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1387–1393 (London, 1962), p. 45.Google Scholar

38 Penn, S.A.C., ‘Female wage-earners in late fourteenth-century England’, Agricultural History Review 35 (1987), 7Google Scholar; Roberts, M., ‘Sickles and scythes: women's work and men's work at harvest time’, History Workshop 7 (1979), 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Cary Mss, Ashwater account of 1463–4; Cornwall Record Office, Arundell Mss, Hartland account of 1390–1; Duchy of Cornwall Office and P.R.O., ministers’ accounts for Dartmoor, recording payments to the drovers – their sex is not specifically stated but their traditional generic name, ‘moormen’, recorded at an early date, reveals all. ‘Drover’ is recorded as the occupation of Richard Frende of Ermington, a Dartmoor border manor, in the 1460s: Kingsford, C. L. (ed.), The Stonor Letters and Papers 1290–1483, I, Camden Society 3rd ser., 29, 1919, 64.Google Scholar

40 Skeel, C., “The cattle trade between Wales and England from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4th ser., 9 (1926), 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haldane, A.R.B., The Drove Roads of Scotland (London, 1952), p. 23Google Scholar; Colyer, R. J., The Welsh Cattle Drovers (Cardiff, 1976), p. 61.Google Scholar

41 Cary Mss, Ashwater rental of 1464; sample of Ashwater court rolls as in note 16 above; Royal Institution of Cornwall, HB/20/12; P.R.O. E. 315/385; D.R.O. 1258M/D/69; Dean and Chapter Archives, Bishop's Palace, Exeter (hereafter D.C.A.), 2945; D.C.A. 2937; P.R.O. E. 315/385. The rental of Werrington may well be incomplete.

42 For, example, there may have been regional differences in the prevalence of the custom of widow's freebench; then again, if freebench applied, as it often did, only to the old inheritance of a family, rapid circulation of tenures among families during the Later Middle Ages (certainly a feature of the land market at Ashwater) would tend to extinguish the custom. I am most grateful to Professor Mavis Mate for fruitful discussion on these points.

43 D.C.A. 2944, 2945.

44 For some fifteenth-century cottage vacancies see, for example, D.C.A. 4805. The manor was still notable for small farms and independent cottagers in the seventeenth century: D.R.O. 906M/M/16.

45 Farm holdings defined as in note 17 above. The figure excludes some very small parcels of demesne (mostly acres and half acres) leased to some tenants.

46 Marshall, W., The Rural Economy of the West of England (2 vols, London, 1796), II, 144Google Scholar; D.C.A. 5054, 5055 and D.R.O. 906M/M/1; heriots in court rolls between 1421 and 1500 at D.C.A. 4798–4835; Fox, , ‘Farming practice and techniques’, p. 319Google Scholar, n. 342. Oxen were more valuable than cows and, assuming that the Dean and Chapter's practice was to take the best beast as heriot, the taking of a cow should indicate lack of oxen on the holding concerned (oxen were the plough beasts of the region).

47 Fox, , ‘Farming practice and techniques’, pp. 318–19Google Scholar; D.R.O. 123M/E/31.

48 Above note 15 for the towns. For commercialisation in meat and leather Kowaleski, , ‘Town and country’, pp. 59–62.Google Scholar For commercialisation in dairying, D.R.O. 1258M/G/3, account of 1378–9 (sale to a merchant of the whole of the season's milk from the demesne cows at Bishop's Clyst).

49 D.C.A. 2945.

50 Tenants of farm holdings at Sidbury were allowed to pasture the commons with as many animals as their tenures could support (D.C.A. 4830), indicating a general lack of stinting on these generous wastes. For Northleigh and Churchstanton, D.R.O. 123M/TB/349 and P.R.O. E. 315/385.

51 Heriots from court rolls as in note 46 above. The curtilages of these cottages were very small, as is clear from inspection today and from D.C.A. 2945 which singles out an exceptionally large one for special mention.

52 D.R.O. C.R. 1288 m.17 and P.R.O. E. 134/5 Jas I/Mich.1. Turbaries were found on most of the hilltops of East Devon during the Middle Ages.

53 Bourne, G., Change in the Village (London, 1920 edn), p. 133.Google Scholar For the large contribution of common rights to the standards of living, and independence, of cottagers see Everitt, A., ‘Farm labourers’, in Thirsk, J. (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV, 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1967), 403–6Google Scholar; Armstrong, A., ‘Labour’, in Mingay, G.E. (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, VI, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989), 721–8Google Scholar; Neeson, J.M., Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.

54 For references in court rolls to a Sidbury spinster who stole two and a half pounds of wool dyed sanguine from a house and to a labourer whose chattels included a ‘turne’ or spinning wheel and ‘a payr of cardez’ used to tangle and interlock wool ready for spinning see D.C.A. 4835. The medieval manorial documentation for Sidbury is full of references to ‘shops’, probably sheds for spinning and weaving; Alan Everitt tells me that, later on, the place was noted for lace-making, a craft which may have replaced, or developed as an addition to, the arts of spinning and weaving. For the region as a whole see H.S.A. Fox, ‘Rural industry’, in Kain and Ravenhill (eds.), Historical Atlas.

55 Calendar of Charter Rolls, II (London, 1906), 403Google Scholar; White, W., History and Gazetteer and Directory of Devonshire (Sheffield, 1850), p 244.Google Scholar The fair was at Michaelmas, the end of the cheese-making and fattening season: D.C.A. 5054 and subsequent accounts.

56 Occupations and names from rentals (above note 43), court rolls (above note 46) and a few from account rolls. The soaper could well have used the ashes of ferns, for which see Nichols, J., The History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, 4 vols (London, 1795–1811) III, 132Google Scholar, note 1.

57 D.C.A. 5068.

58 Itinerary of John Leland, I, 224. The earliest references to the South Hams as a distinctive region (apart from incorporation of the term into place-names and a probable use in a charter of the ninth century) are from the fifteenth century: Cary Mss, Ashwater court near St Denis, 15 Hen. VI and B.L. Eg. Ms. 3671, f. 23.

59 Fox, , ‘Occupation of the land’, pp. 154–5Google Scholar and ‘Farming practice and techniques’, pp. 306–7, 315–6, 319.

60 P.R.O. C. 134/16/9 for high valuation of arable land at Stokenham; Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1399–1422 (London, 1968), p. 71Google Scholar for crops and cows; Huntington Library, San Marino, HAM box 64, rental of ‘1577’.

61 P.R.O. S.C. 11/765; Huntington Library, San Marino, HAM box 64, rental of ‘1577’.

62 The week-works, heavy by Devon standards, are described in P.R.O. C. 134/16/9 and Huntington Library, San Marino, HAM box 64, rental of ‘1577’.

63 To judge from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century court rolls (D.R.O. Cary Mss) each of the small cliff-top commons belonged to a particular hamlet and grazing rights (largely for sheep) and rights of occasional cultivation were jealously guarded by the occupants of the farm holdings of that hamlet; the total acreage of the commons was very small compared to the total arable acreage, as it is to be expected on this fertile manor, so there was no opportunity to allow generous rights to cottagers, as at Sidbury. A detailed discussion of fishing as a by-employment among farmers will eventually be found in H.S.A. Fox, Village Origins: The Fishing Village (forthcoming).

64 For this argument see Postan, M. M., ‘Medieval agrarian society in its prime: England’, in Postan, (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, I, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1966), 623Google Scholar and Fox, ‘Exploitation of the landless’.

65 For example, the family names of Chaunte, Viel and Stede are associated only with cottagers in the rental of 1347 but by 1390 members of these families had become occupiers of farm holdings.

66 See below note 93.

67 Newby, H., The Deferential Worker: A Study of Farm Workers in East Anglia (Harmonsworth, 1979 edn), pp. 40–41, 178–94Google Scholar; Armstrong, A., Farmworkers: A Social and Economic History 1770–1980 (London, 1988), pp. 236–9.Google Scholar A study of tied cottages in Devon in the present century is Fletcher, P., ‘The agricultural housing problem’, Social and Economic Administration 3 (1969), 155–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68 The Revd J.M. Wilson cited in Armstrong, , ‘Labour’, p. 810.Google Scholar

69 Newby, H., Green and Pleasant Land? Social Change in Rural England (London, 1979), p. 137Google Scholar; Hasbach, W., A History of the English Agricultural Labourer (London, 1908), p. 203Google Scholar; Newby, , Deferential Worker, p. 40.Google Scholar

70 The rental of 1390 has many tell-tale signs of a manor whose tenants had been severely affected by loss of population.

71 Cary Mss, Ashwater court near St Denis, 15 Hen. VI.

72 Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1399–1422 (London, 1968), p. 71Google Scholar; Huntington Library, San Marino, HAM box 64, rental of ‘1577’.

73 For medieval women apple-pickers in the South Hams see D.R.O. 48/13/4/1/2, account of 1474–5.

74 In the nineteenth century it was usual for the tenant of a tied cottage to take a small reduction in wages in return for the accommodation, but we do not know whether or not this was the practice in the Later Middle Ages. The reduction was an advantage to the labourer because it was usually less than the true rental value of a cottage; it was an advantage to the farmer at times of high labour costs.

75 Dyer, C., ‘The social and economic background to the rural revolt of 1381’, in Hilton, R.H. and Aston, T.H. (eds), The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), p. 25.Google Scholar

76 We know the values of the ‘issues’ of the gardens of vacant cottages, because reeves had to answer for them in their accounts. They were invariably lower than the rental value: for example Cornwall Record Office, Arundell Mss, Clayhidon court roll for 1411; D.C.A. 5031 (Dawlish in 1419); D.R.O. C.R. 521 (Aylesbeare in 1452); D.C.A. 5065 (Sidbury in 1477).

77 An example is in Poos, , A Rural Society, p. 20.Google Scholar

78 Fox, H.S.A., ‘Tenant farming and tenant farmers: Devon and Cornwall’, in Miller, (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 726–9.Google Scholar

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80 D.R.O. Cary Mss, Stoke Fleming rental; P.R.O. S.C. 11/163. I have compared the Stoke Fleming rental with the lay subsidy a year later: Stoate, T.L. (ed.), Devon Lay Subsidy Rolls 1524–7 (Bristol, 1979).Google Scholar Axmouth, with some very good soils and, moreover, with a harbour of a kind via which grain could be exported, possibly, like Stokenham, specialised in grain growing.

81 B.L. Harl. Ms. 4766, f. 8–11 v., a rental which lists farmers and cottagers and which records a rack for the drying of cloth. The involvement of Dean people in the tin industry is clear from the list of tinners in P.R.O. E. 179/95/28. The theme of a linkage between cloth-making and tin-working is developed in Fox, ‘Rural industry’.

82 Kussmaul, , Servants, p. 130.Google Scholar

83 Salter, H.E. (ed.), Eynsham Cartulary, II, Oxford Historical Society, 51 (1908), 21–2Google Scholar; Clough, M. (ed.), Two Estate Surveys of the Fitzalan Earls of Arundel, Sussex Record Society, 67(1969), 138–9Google Scholar; King, E., ‘Tenant farming and tenant farmers: Eastern England’, in Miller, (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 633, 635Google Scholar; Eynsham Cartulary, II, 128–33.Google Scholar

84 Harvey, B. (ed.), ‘Custumal (1391) and bye-laws (1386–1540) of the manor of Islip’, being part of Oxfordshire Record Society, 40 (1959), 96–103.Google Scholar The distinction was clearly in the mind of the compiler of the rental, because he took pains to interlineate the prefix on at least one occasion.

85 Hilton, R.H., The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), p. 52Google Scholar; Poos, , A Rural Society, p. 204.Google Scholar

86 Kenyon, N., ‘Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard III’, Economic History Review 4 (1932–1934), 429–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Penn, S.A.C. and Dyer, C., ‘Wages and earnings in late medieval England: evidence from the enforcement of labour laws’, Economic History Review 2nd ser., 43 (1990), 371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

87 In this equation the employer would have been able to make a saving only if the sum which he docked from the cottager's wage was greater than the rent which he paid to the lord for the cottage.

88 Poos, , ‘Social context of Statute of Labourers enforcement’, pp. 32, 36.Google Scholar

89 Statutes of the Realm (London, 1810), I, 311–13Google Scholar; Rotuli Parliamentorum (London, 1783), II, 340–1.Google Scholar

90 Ault, W. O., ‘Open-field husbandry and the village community: a study of agrarian by-laws in medieval England’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 55 pt. 7 (1965), 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Concern over full deployment of all hands at harvest time is evident even in the thirteenth century when in general villages were far fuller of people than in the fifteenth; this is a reflection of the crucial nature of harvesting and the need for the operation to be crammed into those days when the weather was most suitable.

91 Miller, E., ‘Tenant farming and tenant farmers: Yorkshire and Lancashire’, in Miller, (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, 599Google Scholar; Booth, J. (ed.), Halmota Prioratus Dunelmensis, Surtees Society, LXXXII (1889), 126.Google Scholar

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93 The reference from Sampford is a laconic one in an account roll for 1422 which simply states that all the occupiers of farm holdings were paying the rents for the manor's 24 cottages ‘between themselves’ (inter se), and one has to envisage a possible by-law by which they bound themselves to this arrangement: P.R.O. S.C. 6/1118/6.

94 Lennard, R., Rural Northamptonshire under the Commonwealth, Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, V (Oxford, 1916), 47Google Scholar; Barley, M.W., The English Farmhouse and Cottage (London, 1961), pp. 247–8Google Scholar and especially note 1 on p. 248.

95 Kerridge, E. (ed.), Surveys of the Manors of Philip, first Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery 1631–2, Wiltshire Archaeological Society Records Branch, 9 (1953) 53, 58, 103Google Scholar; Barratt, D.M. (ed.), Ecclesiastical Terriers of Warwickshire Parishes, II, Dugdale Society Publications, 27 (1971), 93Google Scholar, 169n.

96 See, for example, West, J., Village Records (London, 1962)Google Scholar, plate 7; Bendall, A.S., Maps, Land and Society: A History, with a Carto-bibliography of Cambridgeshire Estate Maps, c. 1600–1836 (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar, plate 17a; Straker, E., The Buckhurst Terrier 1597–1598, Sussex Record Society, 39 (1933)Google Scholar, plate xii-xiii. A very instructive example is a map of Kenton, Devon, which may be compared with a written survey of the manor, the former showing ‘extra’ buildings in some tofts, the latter listing some cottages as appurtenants of farmhouses: D.R.O. 1508M/maps/Kenton/l and 1508M/Lon./estate/valuations/4.

97 For a recent summary of the concept of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ villages see Short, B., ‘The evolution of contrasting communities within rural England’, in Short, (ed.), English Rural Community, pp. 19–43Google Scholar. The standard work is Mills, D.R., Lord and Peasant in Nineteenthcentury Britain (London, 1980).Google Scholar

98 Poos, , A Rural Society, p. 225.Google Scholar

99 The argument is most fully developed in Goldberg, , Women, Work and Life Cycle, pp. 186–202.Google Scholar For Exeter see Kowaleski, M., ‘Women's work in a market town: Exeter in the late fourteenth century’, in Hanawalt, B.A. (ed.), Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington, 1986), pp. 145–64.Google Scholar

100 P.R.O. E. 179/37–55; Feudal Aids, I (London, 1899), 473–5Google Scholar, an assessment which, though headed ‘Hundred of Wonford’ in fact includes many other parts of Devon; Dunstan, G.R. (ed.), The Register of Edmund Lacy, II, Devon and Cornwall Record Society new ser., 10, 1966, 146–8Google Scholar; Sheail, J., ‘The distribution of taxable population and wealth in England during the early sixteenth century’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 55 (1972), 119Google Scholar, a map on which N. Devon stands out very clearly and the Wolds of Leicestershire are two prongs of diagonally hatched land between the two blank areas marked ‘N.D.’

101 Ibid. The map shows up very clearly the Exe valley and the next valley to the east, that of the Otter. The two next valleys eastwards (Sid and Axe) do not stand out because they were both lined by great heaths which depress Sheail's density calculations.

102 Sources for names as in note 56 above; D.C.A. 5067 for the ‘strangers’.

103 Schofield very thoroughly demonstrated remarkable spatial redistributions during the Later Middle Ages, although he was concerned with wealth, not population and counties not regions: Schofield, R.S., ‘The geographical distribution of wealth in England, 1334–1649’, Economic History Review 2nd ser. 18 (1965), 483–510.Google Scholar A neglected, but highly pertinent, demonstration of how regional population densities could change radically between the early fourteenth century and the early sixteenth is Stanley, M.J., ‘Medieval tax returns as source material’, in Slater, T.R. and Jarvis, P.J. (eds.), Field and Forest: An Historical Geography of Warwickshire and Worcestershire (Norwich, 1982), esp. pp. 242, 250.Google Scholar

104 We have no dimensions of cottages from Sidbury, but one at Stoke Fleming in 1416 was 9 ft. by 12 ft: D.R.O. 902M/M/13. A good proportion of Devon's surviving late medieval farmhouses are in North Devon. Calculations of the profits which could be derived from stock-rearing in this region were presented in Fox, H.S.A., ‘Late medieval farming economies in Devon: Relationship to building traditions’, unpublished paper presented to a Council for British Archaeology conference, Exeter, March 1992.Google Scholar

105 Mills, , Lord and Peasant, p. 60.Google Scholar

106 D.C.A. 5054 and subsequent accounts for the rent reduction; 4798, 4799, 4800, 4801, 4802, 4804, 4805, 4806, 4808, 4810 for flouting of labour laws; Rotuli Parliamentorum, II, 340–1.Google Scholar Another East Devon manor, with tenemental and economic structures very similar to Sidbury's, though even more pronounced, was Ottery St Mary, a neighbour to the west. Here there was a long history of concerted action against authority: Faith, R., ‘The “Great Rumour” of 1377 and peasant ideology’, in Hilton, and Aston, (eds.), English Rising of 1381, p. 45Google Scholar; Rose-Troup, F., ‘Medieval customs and tenures in the manor of Ottery St Mary’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association 66 (1934), 214–15, 218–19.Google Scholar

107 Medieval rentals of the manor give the locations of both farm and cottage holdings.

108 Vancouver, , General View, pp. 97–8Google Scholar; Fox cited in Howkins, , Reshaping Rural England, p. 22.Google Scholar

109 Phythian-Adams, C., –Introduction: An agenda for English Local History’, in Adams, Phythian (ed.), Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850 (Leicester, 1993), p. 6.Google Scholar

110 The reasons for an initial grouping of some cottagers at the core of this manor probably lie in an obscure phase of settlement and demesne origins before, perhaps well before, the Norman Conquest; the initial grouping may later have attracted more labourers to itself.