Late medieval society

Abstract

To state that standards of living varied with social rank is a truism; to define the groups that can be used in our analysis presents us with a hard task. There is no lack of information, as the medieval sources contain a bewildering plenty of titles and social labels. Because of England's linguistic peculiarities, the names of social groups appear in our documents in three languages – Latin, French and English. They varied from region to region, and they changed over time. To look at the main developments, let us take three samples, slices of evidence compiled at roughly 100-year intervals, in 1279, 1379 and the late fifteenth century. The Hundred Rolls of 1279–80 provide our first cross-section through English society. They survive in their most detailed form as surveys of villages from six counties, a fragment of an ambitious attempt to carry out a nationwide survey of land-holding in much more detail than the earlier Domesday Book. Let us take a single example, the survey of the Oxfordshire village of Ducklington. Here was a lord ( dominus ) called Richard de Carbroc, who held about 300 acres of arable land in demesne, that is under his direct control. His subordinates were listed under three headings: ‘free tenants’ ( liberi tenentes ), who were sixteen in number, ‘serfs’ ( servi ), of whom there were twelve, and five ‘cottars’ ( cottarii ). Thus tenure is used as the basis of classification. This was common to other thirteenth-century writings, and of course words such as dominus and servus derive from a need also to define social and legal status.