The Homestead Moat: Security or Status?

Abstract

The conventional wisdom on the origins and purpose of homestead moats is that they functioned as indicators of status. But that makes no distinction between manorial and homestead moats, and fails to take account of the combination of circumstances in early fourteenth-century England that resulted in a subsistence crisis of devastating proportions: the worst, it is now believed, in our recorded history. In 1300, many rural areas were already dangerously overcrowded. But it was the Agrarian Crisis of 1315–22, starting with back-to-back harvest failures and the Great European Famine of 1315–17, that caused the starving ‘undersettles’ to turn to crime and brought a tide of criminal violence to the localities. Harvests improved, but the violence continued until the Black Death (1348–49), fuelled by poverty and unprecedented taxes. And it is the argument of this paper that homestead moats, far from being the trophy assets of a would-be gentry class, were in reality precautions against the criminal activity to which all well-off householders were exposed.