The foregoing chapters have dealt in some detail with the physical nature of the Templar estates in Lincolnshire and the mixed farming which was practised. They have dealt only incidentally with the three groups of people who depended upon the estates for their livelihood or benefitted from them as a result of royal patronage. Firstly, there were those who were intimately involved with the agriculture: the famuli, the craftsmen and the seasonal workers. Secondly there were the clerics, the corrodians and the imprisoned Templars, all of whom depended on the estates for their wages or pensions. Thirdly, there were those who bought standing crops, or as a result of royal patronage were given livestock, individual manors or even estates at the pleasure of the king. This chapter considers who these people were, what they did and how the sequestration of the Templar estates affected them.

The workers: people engaged in agriculture, estate maintenance and management

The arduous manual work on the Templar estates was the province of the famuli, whom Dyer describes as ‘full-time servants on manors’. Similarly, Postan refers to famuli as ‘workmen hired or otherwise retained for continuous service’. Bennett agrees that the famuli were ‘a body of servants who were primarily on the manor to cultivate his [the lord’s] lands and to tend his flocks and herds’. More specifically, with regard to the Templars, Barber defines the famuli as ‘persons apparently linked to the Order so that they could obtain certain spiritual benefits’. In Lincolnshire, the famuli comprised the labourers and craftsmen upon whom the manors of the Templar estates were completely dependent for their operation.

Generally, the accounts refer to the famuli en masse and so no individual can be identified by name. Neither can the number of famuli on a given estate be more than an estimate as their number is never enrolled; the numbers of livestock are more carefully recorded. The purpose of the accounts was to itemise estate income, expenditure and the value of moveable and therefore saleable property. The famuli were only of interest in that they represented expenditure on wages both in cash and kind, the latter usually in the form of grain and pottage.