Excerpt: ... not true that the most comprehensive of these tendencies was the accumulation of capital in the hands of the villains, and their desire to improve their social condition. The immediate affect of the commutation of services and similar changes at this time was to leave their social condition untouched, whatever the final result may have been. These villains did not buy themselves free of the marks of servitude. Their gradual emancipation came for other reasons. At Witney, for example, where the works of all the ...
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Excerpt: ... not true that the most comprehensive of these tendencies was the accumulation of capital in the hands of the villains, and their desire to improve their social condition. The immediate affect of the commutation of services and similar changes at this time was to leave their social condition untouched, whatever the final result may have been. These villains did not buy themselves free of the marks of servitude. Their gradual emancipation came for other reasons. At Witney, for example, where the works of all the native tenants had been commuted by 1376, they were still required to perform duties of a servile character: they were all to join in haymaking and in washing and shearing the lord's sheep, to pay pannage for their pigs, to take their turn of service as reeve and tithingman, and to carry the lord's victuals and baggage on his departure from Witney as the natives were formerly wont to do.75 This example, taken at random, is typical of the continuance of conditions which should make the historian hesitate before adopting the view that the social condition of the peasants was improved by the new arrangements made as to the bulk of their services and rents. But more than that, the terms of the new arrangements are not those which would be offered by well-to-do cultivators in whose hands the profits from the soil had accumulated. In all of these cases the new terms were advantageous to the tenants, not to the lord, and advantageous in a strictly pecuniary way. The lord had to grant these terms because the tenants were in the most miserable poverty, and could no longer pay their accustomed rent. Neither the Black Death, whose effects were evanescent, nor the desire of prosperous villains to free themselves of the Pg 68/224 degrading marks of serfdom was an important cause in the sequence of agrarian changes which took place in the fourteenth century. Serfdom as a status was hardly affected, but a thousand entries record the poverty and...
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