Population changes and the transfer of customary land on a Cambridgeshire manor in the fourteenth century

Abstract

In their pessimistic accounts of the economic conditions of the English peasantry in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries Professor Postan and Dr Titow not only used evidence on entry fines, rents, shrinking holding sizes, limited livestock resources and the coincidence of harvest failures and surges of tenant deaths, but also gave considerable attention to the position of the widow in the network of village land exchanges. They showed that marriage to widows who had succeeded to their husband's land was a prominent means of access to property by males, on manors without sizeable reserves of colonizable land. Dr Titow's analysis of these matters was static over space rather than dynamic over time. In this discussion we wish, with the aid of a detailed manorial case study, to consider the position of widows in the context of the inheritance and land transaction practices exhibited by the customary tenants on the Abbot of Crowland's Cambridgeshire manor of Cottenham. Our focus will be on the first eight decades of the fourteenth century, when demographic changes substantially shifted the ratio of labour to land in favour of the customary tenants. Cottenham was one of the three Cambridgeshire manors of the Abbot of Crowland for which Miss Page estimated the intensity of mortality from plague in 1349. Her calculations showed 33 out of 58 tenants (57 per cent) dying in the plague.

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