1. Background

In medieval England, the relationship between the king and those who held their lands directly from the Crown (a capite), as opposed to holding them from another nobleman or senior member of the clergy, was of vital importance to both parties. The designation ‘tenant-in-chief’ brought great prestige, but also carried heavy responsibilities since these landholders were originally responsible for providing knights and soldiers from their own dependents for the king's feudal army. Even as the system became increasingly one of mutual financial obligation, these men remained the king's natural counsellors.Footnote ¹

Both tenants-in-chief and monarch had a crucial interest in the smooth operation of the system of the tenure, especially when such a tenant died, at which point the landowning family would be anxious for the rightful heir to inherit smoothly and the king keen to obtain his feudal dues and secure a dependable ally. A careful, bureaucratic and well-recorded procedure was, therefore, established. On the tenant's death, an inquisition post mortem was held in each county in which he or she held land to establish the value of the holdings; meanwhile, the land would temporarily revert to the Crown (escheat) until the heir paid a sum of money (relief) and could then take possession (seisin) of the estates.

If, however, the heir was under age (under 21 for a male heir, under 16 for an unmarried heiress and 14 for a married one), he or she would be subject to a wardship under which the custody and income of their lands and the right to arrange their marriage passed to the monarch until they came of age. The wardship and marriage were not usually kept in Crown hands, but were sold, often simply to the highest bidder, unless outbid by the next of kin. When an heir did come of age, he or she passed out of wardship but could not enter upon their inheritance until they had sought a royal writ to initiate a separate procedure by which a group of jurors was summoned and required to swear that the heir was truly of age.

Unusually, the procedure required individual jurors to justify their knowledge of an heir's age by reference to some other personally remembered event. After he had sworn to the heir's age, each juror was asked how he knew of the birth (qualiter hoc sciit). In response, jurors offered a variety of justificatory testimonies which referred to events in their own lives. In this sense, the jurors were treated as individual witnesses as well as corporate oath takers. Between 1246 and 1430, 10,181 proof-of-age testimonies were recorded from at least 10,036 individual jurors. (Some names were not recorded.) Of these, 858 jurors specifically mentioned a land transaction in their testimony. Typical were two Northampton jurors at the proof of John Mares in 1297. One testified to the age of the heir on the ground that ‘Hugh his father died at the feast of St. Michael before the birth of the said John, and he paid relief for his land (terram suam relevavit) at Christmas following, which relief was 21 years ago last Christmas’. The other juror agreed, ‘because at the feast of St. Andrew before the birth of the aforesaid John he acquired a virgate of land in Ashby from John the father for a term of years’.Footnote ²

The land transactions mentioned by jurors refer overwhelmingly to acquisitions – inheritances, leases and conveyances. Only five land references specifically mentioned the loss of land and a further 11 contained indication of a dispute of some kind where the outcome was not always clear. Whether by the convention of the record or by the inclination of jurors, the picture gained from land mentions is, therefore, a positive one from the jurors’ point of view, mirroring the nature of the hearing itself, whose purpose was of course to facilitate the heirs’ acquisition of their inheritance.

2. The records

Records of proof-of-age hearings for tenants-in-chief of the Crown are extant from all English and some Welsh counties, starting from the late thirteenth century and continuing into the sixteenth.Footnote ³ They are to be found in bundles in roughly chronological order in The National Archives, classes C 132–42 (one file per monarch, Henry III–Henry VII), E 149 (covering Henry III–Richard III) and E 150 (Henry VII). Such records continued to be taken, though latterly in stereotypical form, until the establishment of the Court of Wards in 1540; they had been finally rendered obsolete in 1538 when Thomas Cromwell ordered the universal entry of dates of birth in parish registers.

Proofs of age began to be translated and published in calendared volumes by the (then) Public Record Office along with inquisitions post mortem at the end of the nineteenth century, beginning in 1898 with those of the reign of Henry VII. At about the same time, a start was made on the earliest inquisitions post mortem – those of the reign of Henry III, the first volume of which was published in 1904. These two series were published at intervals: the Second Series, inquisitions and proofs from Henry VII's reign, was completed in 1954, while the First Series came to an end with volume 21, covering the years 6–10 of the reign of Henry V (1418–1422).Footnote ⁴ It is with these ‘proof-of-age’ records that this article is concerned.Footnote ⁵ It covers the period from the start of the records in 1246 to the end of the reign of Henry V, an almost two-century span which includes the major demographic shocks of the fourteenth century.

3. Proofs and the transfer of land

What, then, can the records of proof-of-age hearings add to our knowledge of the late medieval peasant land market? Since the publication of a fourteenth-century Peterborough cartulary in 1960, historians have been aware that unfree villeins, who of course had, in theory, no access to courts of law other than the manor court of their lord, were buying and selling land – often very small plots and often by charter.Footnote ⁶ Moreover, many manor court records of the surrender of customary land and entry of a new tenant may have been, in fact, actual sales, particularly where the record states that the land was surrendered to the use (ad opus) of a named person.Footnote ⁷ Subsequent studies of particular regions or manors discovered similar phenomena: the fragmentation of standard virgate holdings in some places under ‘market’ pressure and their replacement by a pattern of some large, some small holdings; wide regional variety in the strength of the market because of differing environmental pressures, historical traditions and lordly attitudes; significant changes in the peasant land market over time, especially those associated with the demographic shocks of the famine conditions between 1315 and 1322 and the Black Death beginning in 1348.Footnote ⁸ Work on the market in free land specifically is more limited.Footnote ⁹ Some trends are apparent, however: both Mike Davis and Jonathon Kissock, and Margaret Yates, for example, in their analyses of feet of fines discerned increased levels of land transfer in the famine of 1315–1322.Footnote ¹⁰

The evidence from proof hearings can be used to compliment the sort of evidence mentioned above and as a source, it has strengths as well as weaknesses: firstly, it is a national source covering, albeit intermittently, the whole country; secondly, it gives evidence on a wide range of participants, but especially those of great interest in any analysis of the whole land market – prosperous peasants; thirdly, proof testimony refers to the memory of all types of land transfer, customary and free, thus contributing to an overall picture of the market; and fourthly, as we shall see, it preserves, however imperfectly, something of the subjectivity of the jurors. Using these strengths, the rest of this article will analyse the relative frequencies of the mention of land transfers to examine the possible effects of successive demographic and economic shocks on land transfer in the fourteenth century. More importantly, it will also scrutinize the changing language of land testimonies to uncover aspects of the land market, especially the development of what may be called an individualistic, commercial sense in the minds of participants, traditionally said by historians to be characteristic of early modern capitalism, but seen now as originating much earlier.Footnote ¹¹

4. The Jurors

Jurors summoned to a proof hearing were typically established members of a local community who could be expected to recall the birth of the heir who was claiming to be of age. The most common marker of status recorded of jurors was that of ‘knight’, but only 158 were so designated, which amounts to only about 1.5 per cent of the total number of jurors (10,036). A further 13 were designated as ‘esquire’. As for the rest, their status was left unrecorded apart from nine who were described as of ‘free condition’, and a handful of clerics. These figures tend to confirm Christine Carpenter's conclusion that juries for inquisitions post mortem in the fifteenth century were mostly of only ‘village status’, despite the presence of the occasional knight or member of the gentry.Footnote ¹²

This impression is also confirmed for an earlier period by comparison of the surnames of proof jurors with the holders of manors in fourteenth-century Gloucestershire, as identified by Nigel Saul.Footnote ¹³ Four hundred and twenty-nine Gloucestershire jurors were identified in the fourteenth-century proof-of-age records, of whom the surnames of only 12 (2.8 per cent) coincided with one of the manor-holding families. Similar results were found for Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.Footnote ¹⁴ The significance for our purposes is that many people of this middling sort were likely to be involved in land transfer activity, there is no reason to suppose that jurors recalling land transfers were untypical of proof or inquisition jurors as a whole.

In about 7 per cent of testimonies, a juror's employment or occupation was explicitly mentioned in the record.Footnote ¹⁵ Of these, almost a third were described as servants, usually of the land-owning family whose heir was the subject of the hearing. Within this group were 78 bailiffs, 46 clerks, 28 stewards, 15 butlers and 13 esquires, but only three carpenters, two carters and one thresher which confirm a picture of important but local responsibility. A few jurors attained such relatively high-status positions as warden of the local castle, but far more were associated with humbler roles like the warden of the parish funds, or the local guild. Three jurors reached the height of a coroner's position, but considerably more were merely called as his witnesses when he was conducting an inquiry. Similarly, jurors’ involvement with the king's justice tended to be as low-level litigants, witnesses or court officers.Footnote ¹⁶

5. Problems and possibilities

Before turning in detail to the records, however, mention must be made of some long recognised problems with these testimonies.Footnote ¹⁷ Firstly, jurors were remembering events that took place over 20 years previously (for male heirs) with all the problems of memory that entailed; secondly, the records were medieval legal texts typical in their conventional range and stereotypical vocabulary; and thirdly, the copying of previous testimonies by jurors or their recorders both from within and between hearings was commonplace, and such widespread plagiarism has been seen as an insuperable barrier to their systematic use.

On the question of memory, for a juror's testimony to be legally valid it had at the very least to be plausible – to fellow jurors, the family of the heir, the court officials and the system itself, so that even if a memory was inaccurate or even invented, it had to be something that might have happened to real people. For the purposes of the following analysis, the accuracy of memory or the intentions of the juror is not crucial. Given a sufficiently wide range of possible testimonies, those chosen for the record can still give genuine cumulative insight into the minds and preoccupations of the participants, whatever their veracity in particular cases.Footnote ¹⁸

It is possible also to underestimate the importance of memory to the medieval mind. Michael Clanchy has pointed to the weight that continued to be placed on the value of oral recollection long after the common use of writing had percolated down to freemen and villeins – an occurrence which he places around 1300. Years after writing was widespread, ‘the living memory voiced by wise men of age and experience’ continued to be valued, even preferred, to the ‘artificial memory of written record’.Footnote ¹⁹ This was particularly true in the conservative legal arena. Indeed, the testimonies themselves bear witness to the very slow adoption of writing over memory and the reluctance to trust written documentation alone.Footnote ²⁰ That jurors took their testimonies seriously is also evidenced by those testimonies that refer to an incident that can be independently checked. 148 testimonies – about 1.4 per cent of the whole (10,181) mention a datable event. Of these, only 6 per cent appear to be misdated, and in only a handful of cases was there any likelihood of deliberate deceit.Footnote ²¹

Such examples do not fully address the problem of simple, even honest, inaccuracy. The proof hearing was from the start rather circular: a juror swore that a birth was on such-and-such a date and that he remembered because some personal event took place at the same time, but this is no proof of the accuracy of either date. Against this, J.C. Russell compared the ages of under-age heirs given in inquisitions post mortem with those recorded for the same heirs in their proof-of-age hearings and found the ages given tallied within plus or minus three years in 181 out of 190 hearings.Footnote ²² Moreover, we know that one reason for the popularity of land transfer in the repertoire of legal acceptability was the fact that it often attracted dated written evidence that some recorders would actually examine during the hearing.Footnote ²³ For the jurors, the attraction would also have been the semi-public nature of a land transfer – the local witnesses, the ceremony of homage and the long village memory – which would have assured and reinforced the individual's recollection.Footnote ²⁴

By their nature, the records imply that jurors simply uttered their contribution off the top of their heads, but occasionally, we glimpse the preparation that went on before the hearing itself. For example, a note attached to the proof of Laurence de Paveli, the firstborn of twins, refers to a meeting of the family and the jurors which took place before the official hearing. The note reads, ‘the brothers are twin sons born on the same day but Laurence being the firstborn is his next heir; all of which the said Philip (the other twin) in the presence of his mother and the jurors, and also on Thursday the morrow in the presence of the escheator, acknowledged to be true’.Footnote ²⁵ Some recorders, too, often showed a commendable concern for veracity. Witness, for instance, the clerk's evident exasperation at this rambling testimony: ‘Thomas de Northwode, knight, says the said Emery was 21 in Mid Lent last, for he was born at Melebrok in the same year in which the tournament was at Bedeford, when Sir Reginald de Grey and Sir Emery, the father, led an ass between Bedeford and Elvestowe where the king then was, and then he was with the said Emery; the tournament was twenty-one years ago at Shrovetide last but he cannot tell how he knows of the lapse of so much time and he has no other knowledge of the age but by report of the county’.Footnote ²⁶ (The clerk could see that the string of circumstantial detail and ‘the report of the county’ hardly contributed to a legally water-tight testimony.) It is also likely that jurors were questioned much more closely than the extant records suggest.Footnote ²⁷

On the other hand, some recorders were quite content to ‘recyle’ testimony from previous hearings, particularly if they were from the same or nearby counties and had been heard recently, and so were more likely to be conveniently to hand. The priority was always to produce an effective legal document rather than an accurate record of real experience. Such plagiarism is systemic and ranges from similar phrasing of individual testimonies to the wholesale copying of virtually complete texts.Footnote ²⁸

As far as the stereotypical nature of the records is concerned, it is true that the need to produce an effective legal document that would trigger the inheritance of the heir meant that testimonies recorded were quickly limited by convention to a ‘safe’ set of about 15 common types. Of these types, by far the most common was a reference to a birth, death or marriage in a juror's family, which together make up over a third of all testimonies. Similarly, a group of testimonies referred to land transfer directly (just under 10 per cent of all testimony), or more obliquely by the mention of the writing that a land transfer often generated or the legal or quasi-legal activity it involved (over 14 per cent of all jurors mentioned a written document, predominantly land charters, lease agreements, contracts or wills; almost 5 per cent of jurors referred to a legal matter, often involving land). By contrast, the mention of less common events like crime or violence (under 5 per cent), or travel (just over 5 per cent) never matched the major preferred evidential groups in popularity. These ‘vivid’ testimonies themselves sometimes show a frequency pattern that mirrors those concerning land transfer. References to crime and violence, for example, peaked between 1360 and 1389, remembering events around the first and subsequent outbreaks of the plague, at the same time that jurors were recalling the highest proportions of land transactions. It seems possible that testimonies were reflecting, however imperfectly, actual increases in the incidence of both crime and land transfer during the same period.

Nevertheless, recorded testimonies cannot normally be read as direct accounts of a juror's experience. At the very least they were filtered through the legal conventions of the hearing. This is shown by the fact that over the whole corpus of testimony between 1246 and 1430, only about 9 per cent are unique to an individual juror in the sense that the wording and content are not echoed in any other testimony. Moreover, traumatic events which one might expect to be recalled, like the recurrent outbreaks of plague from 1348 to 1349 onwards, received scant mention in the record – only 13 testimonies explicitly recalled the ‘plague’ or ‘pestilence’. The distance between jurors’ experience and the requirement for a formal stereotypical testimony – recorded, of course, in Latin – is clear on the rare occasions when these conventions were bent if not broken. Three Devon jurors, for example, told the following rambling and exceptional story, faithfully and unusually transcribed more or less verbatim by the clerk. The record states that ‘they remembered meeting Lady Katharine proposing to ride to Shute and expecting to be the godmother of William (the heir). There she met Edward Dygher, a servant whom she reproached for being merry and talkative. He asked her where she was going. To which she replied quickly that she was going to Shute to make her nephew a Christian. Grinning he answered in his mother tongue, ‘“Kate, Kate ther to by myn pate comyst ow to late” because the baptism is (already) performed. Mounting her horse again she rode home very angry, not seeing the child's mother for six months’.Footnote ²⁹

It also seems that reference to land acquisition more often gave an accurate representation of an individual's own experience than more vivid references did. Land testimony is much less likely to echo the exact content or wording from other hearings and so be ‘borrowed’ by recorders to complete their legal document.Footnote ³⁰ Similarly, jurors offering land testimony were less likely to be influenced by other jurors in the same hearing into repeating virtually the same testimony. Conversely, ‘vivid’ testimonies like those referring to accidents, crime or violence much more often come in strings with very similar wording, and one juror echoing another. Land testimony was not generally like this; it was, in this sense, a gold standard and, with recollections of birth, marriage or death, a systemically preferred option. (Together, such references – birth, marriage and death, land transactions and their often associated legal ramifications – make up almost half of the total number of testimonies.)

Yet, even here land testimony had its own conventions: it was overwhelmingly concerned with the acquisition, not the alienation, of land. If they were not witnesses to a land transaction, jurors were likely to be buyers not sellers, inheritors not dispossessed and gainers not losers.Footnote ³¹ It is easy to account for such a bias. Jurors were picked because they were substantial members of at least a village community and so were more likely to have been involved in successful land acquisition. The hearing itself was also a significant step on the legal path to an heir coming into his or her inheritance. Village jurors, many of whom might owe allegiance to the heir's family, would be likely to want to contribute positively to a happy, if anxious, occasion.Footnote ³²

The elements within each category of testimony varied significantly over time. In some decades, for example, references to death outstripped those to birth or marriage. The mention of writing increased tenfold in the first half of the fourteenth century. References to land transfer, as we shall see, fluctuated in ways that accord with evidence from other sources. The wording and form of individual testimonies also show significant variation over time – details mentioned, the order of statements, the vocabulary used. For example, the words used to describe an inheritance or a purchase did not remain static – nor did the details mentioned in crime references, or the way a wife was referred to in a marriage. This changing language can throw an oblique light into the minds of those who produced the texts, whatever their intentions at the time.Footnote ³³

6. Frequencies of mention

Turning first to the simple frequencies with which land transfers were recorded in proof-of-age hearings, the rate of recall decade by decade appears in Table 1. It seems to have remained relatively stable from 1270 to 1330 when between about 5 and 10 per cent of testimonies contained a reference to land transfer, and the number and proportion of jurors making such reference remained broadly similar from decade to decade. In the 1330s, both the number and proportion of land remembrances rose. The decade's peak years for both the number and proportion of land transfer memories were 1335 and 1336. This trend continued into the 1340s, introducing a period down to 1380 when land transactions of every kind occupied the recorded memories of a rather higher number and proportion of jurors. After 1380, they fell away to levels not unlike, or even below, those of the early decades of the fourteenth century. The most active decades in terms of the proportion of juror mentions were the 1340s and 1370s. In terms of raw numbers, the period between 1350 and 1380 contains almost half the total recorded remembrances. These figures suggest a significant surge in land transfer activity about 20 years before, both during the time of Great Famine of 1315–1322 and the onset of plague outbreaks from 1348.

Table 1. References to land transactions in relation to all testimonies

Sources: All tables sourced from the author's proof-of-age data set (see text).

Given the nature of proof testimonies, their stereotypical form, the ‘recyling’ of testimony material both within and across hearings and the fact that jurors’ recollections of events that happened 20 years previously may reflect their current concerns as much as what actually occurred two decades previously – as well as unknowable changes of fashion in the conventions of legal recording – it would be unwise to assert a direct statistical link between the land market and the rate of mention in the proofs. Suffice it to say that the bulges in the number and proportion of remembered land transfers from the 1330s onwards, recalling land transfers roughly 20 years before, broadly accord with evidence from manor rolls and feet of fines as to the effect of the great demographic shocks round 1315–1322 and from 1348 onwards on the availability of both customary and freehold land for the survivors.Footnote ³⁴

One other simple statistic may give a clue to the nature of that impact. Table 2 gives an average figure for each decade of jurors’ ages at the time when they acquired land, calculated by subtracting 21 years from their age given at the hearing. In this way, we can have a rough indication of a juror's age when he acquired his land. On this basis, in the 1330s, jurors remembered leasing land (roughly 21 years previously) when they were aged on average 24 years. In the following decade, they recalled purchasing land when they were on average 23 years old. It seems possible, therefore, that an estimated national mortality of perhaps about 10 per cent did open the way for younger men to acquire land during and after the famine period between 1315 and 1322.Footnote ³⁵ By contrast, in the decades from 1370 to the end of the century, there was an increase in the average age of jurors at the time of the recalled land transactions, which in this case were those of the plague period, beginning in 1348 and running through to the 1360s and beyond. By the 1380s, the average age of jurors at the time of the remembered land purchases climbed to just over 36 years, lending some weight to the notion of a ‘consolidation of a peasant aristocracy’ as the landholdings of the already landed increased and the gap between prosperous village families and the rest grew wider.Footnote ³⁶ Again, numbers are too few for definitive conclusions and doubts exist over the accuracy of the age recording of jurors – ages are often rounded up or down to whole decade approximations (30, 40, 50, etc.) and the record commonly places the Latin phrase et amplius (and more) after the stated age, emphasizing further the estimated nature of the given age. In some cases, ages are even seemingly copied in sequence from previous hearings. All these factors should make us doubly cautious while noting the confirmatory evidence from other sources.Footnote ³⁷

Table 2. Ages when jurors remembered buying or leasing land

Note: ‘Year’ refers to dates of hearings by decade. The ‘average age at purchase’ and ‘average age at lease’ columns indicate average ages of jurors at the time of the remembered acquisition of land – usually about 21 years before the hearing.

Source: See Table 1.

7. Changing language

An examination of the changing language of jurors’ memories reinforces and extends the impression of the effects of these demographic shocks. Within the testimonial language of land acquisition, it is possible to distinguish three broad categories of transaction. The first was testimonies which mentioned the inheritance of land, often as a result of a death in the family, most commonly a father (34 mentions, or 55 per cent of all death/land testimonies), but including that of a brother (13 per cent), a mother (7 per cent) or more distant relatives, such as grandparents, uncles and named people who may or may not have been relatives. Where a juror did not specifically mention a death followed by a land transfer, he may sometimes have implied it by the use of the word ‘inherit’ or ‘inheritance’. A similar process, though made in the lifetime of a donor, is also implied by the use of the word ‘gave’ or ‘grant’. Taken all together, these variations refer to the generational transfer of land through inheritance or gift.

The wording of the typical testimony of this type at the turn of the fourteenth century seemingly reflected an orderly process of land transfer by inheritance. Adam Willoughby's uncle died, for example, ‘without heir of himself, and his lands etc. descended to the said Adam as his nephew and next heir’.Footnote ³⁸ It was depicted as an unproblematical and straightforward process, as in the case of Henry de Copshull's grandmother whose ‘inheritance’ he simply ‘received’.Footnote ³⁹ This is not to say that the actual process of transfer was without delay. Indeed, it was probably remembered as an anxious time: Hugh de Wyluby, for example, had to wait almost three months from the death of his father in September before paying relief for his land the following Christmas.Footnote ⁴⁰ The transfer process itself was face-to-face: one typical juror's testimony described seeing the infant heir while in the act of paying homage for land to his lord.Footnote ⁴¹ Though not without stress, the transfer was also comparatively stately: after the death of his father, it took Simon de Caldewelle over a month to visit the landowner's family to pay homage – the record itself expresses the process as ‘to do for the meadow what was due’.Footnote ⁴² In a less straightforward case, however – the juror was inherited through his mother on the death of his father-in-law – the homage took place just over a fortnight from the death.Footnote ⁴³ The process could be quite elaborate, particularly when higher-status participants were involved. Both Nicholas de Lytleton and the sheriff of Dorset, for example, were representing others when the former gave homage to the latter, as mentioned in a testimony of 1301.Footnote ⁴⁴ Reference to writing as part of the process of land transfer was growing but was still only mentioned in a small minority of land testimonies (14 per cent) and there were signs of hesitancy in its use.Footnote ⁴⁵

Both the other broad categories of testimony referred to the operation of a commercial market in land.Footnote ⁴⁶ The second type is where a juror uses the words ‘bought’ or ‘purchased’ to signal the direct acquisition of land for money or service. The third category is where the land is obtained for an agreed period of time, a process commonly indicated by the use of such a vocabulary as ‘farm’ or ‘term’. The figures for both are given in Table 3. In the early years of the fourteenth century, the outright purchase of land was mentioned in a comparatively small proportion of testimonies – the figure was roughly between 5 and 10 per cent of land testimonies. Leasing was mentioned by between 10 and 30 per cent of jurors.

Table 3. Inherited, purchased and leased land transaction memories

Notes: Dates refer to proof-of-age hearings. The first percentage figure (from left) indicates the proportion of land testimonies that mention a death or contain the words ‘gave’ or ‘inherit’, that is, land transfer by inheritance. The second percentage column refers to those testimonies that contain the words ‘bought’ or ‘purchased’. The third percentage indicates those containing the words ‘term’ or ‘farm’, that is, a lease.

Source: see Table 1.

The language of acquisition in the testimonies during this period tended to stress the grantor of land rather than the receiver. The typical juror at this date remembered when he acquired land but placed stress in the testimony on the grantor or lord from whom he received it. The ceremony of homage or fealty was often central in the testimony. This formal and public acknowledgement of allegiance to a lord during which the receiver swore to be the lord's man, foregrounded the relative dependency and inferiority of the former to the latter. In only a minority of early fourteenth-century testimonies were their hints of a brisker, even commercial, tone: in these (fewer) cases, the process of homage on entry into a tenancy was mentioned proportionately less often and in briefer terms, and, instead, the typical wording stressed the process of acquisition – ‘took land of’, ‘took land for a term’, ‘held his inheritance’, ‘gained a messuage’ and ‘acquired to himself a tenement’.

The remembrances from around the mid-century onwards saw a sustained departure from early fourteenth-century patterns. The proportion of jurors referring to their inheritance from family members fell, though the actual number doing so almost tripled. But the biggest change was in the number and proportion of jurors who remembered buying land – an increase of more than ten times the number and almost five times the proportion. Crucially, the details mentioned in many testimonies also shifted. In nearly half, for example, jurors now referred to written documentation, which was becoming increasingly common even for small transactions.Footnote ⁴⁷ The typical testimony now tended to place the acting, acquiring, even litigating, individual in the foreground of the record.Footnote ⁴⁸ From the 1330s, the word ‘acquire’ (adipiscor) became a regular feature of land testimony. In that decade, for example, it already appeared in almost a quarter of such testimonies. Homage, when mentioned, became part of a more personal anecdote. As early as the 1330s, for example, on a rare occasion when the process of homage-giving was described most fully, it was as part of the drama of a difficult childbirth – that being the focus of the remembrance, not the homage itself. When Simon de Seyles made ‘his fealty to Peter del Hay for certain lands he held of him’, Peter came out of his house to receive his homage because he ‘dared not enter the house for the cries of the said John's mother in child birth’.Footnote ⁴⁹

More subtly, John Lexnham may have been seeking to assert a vicarious status by placing stress on his association with a man of knightly standing, as well as showing a keen awareness of the power of dated written evidence, when he recalled that ‘Walter Fitzwalter, knight, father of Walter, granted a tenement in Great Tey to Richard Abraham his villein by his charter sealed under his armorial seal, dated that day and shown in evidence’.Footnote ⁵⁰

More details of common procedures come to light. For instance, where land was sold or leased by charter at this time, the number of witnesses named on the document varied from two to four, though more might be called upon if the matter were contentious.Footnote ⁵¹ Jurors employed a range of legal and extra-legal devices in their land dealings. Private arrangements were often meticulously even-handed. In one case, fairness went as far as splitting expenses – one party to the transaction paying the clerk who dictated the agreement and the other rewarding the scribe who wrote it.Footnote ⁵²

Between 1350 and 1380 testimonies mentioned more land changing hands in bigger acreages, and jurors were much more likely to specify how much land was transferred or how much a lease or purchase cost them in cash. The old vocabulary of ‘enfeoffment’ and ‘fealty’ either disappeared almost entirely or was hedged around with written manoeuvring or confirmation. John de Bruera, for example, foregrounded his preparatory letter to get a good deal for his land when he testified that ‘before the birth he did fealty to Sir William de Roos for certain lands in Freston, and at the same time the lady of Huntyngfeld, who was then pregnant, prayed Sir Roger de Huntyngfeld his lord, for a letter to Sir William de Roos, that he might be gracious and favourable to the said John de Bruera in the matter of his relief when receiving his fealty’.Footnote ⁵³ For many jurors, a ‘feoffment’ simply meant their charter,Footnote ⁵⁴ and the terms ‘charter of feoffment’ and ‘charter of acquisition’ were often used interchangeably.

Some testimonies seem to preserve the excitement of the acquisition. William Wormele from Essex in 1369, for example, recalled the manor of Navestock which he ‘newly acquired’ (de novo perquisivit) 21 years previously, that is, in 1348.Footnote ⁵⁵ In some of the testimonies, there was an air of speed and impatience. William Faxceus complained that he was in wardship ‘for a long time’ before he could recover his lands.Footnote ⁵⁶ The use of possessive adjectives became much more pervasive: land or tenement was typically described as ‘his’; land was bought ‘to’ or ‘for himself’.

Underlying many transfers after the first outbreak of the plague was a concern for the security of title or payment. When four Northamptonshire jurors bought a grange from the abbot of ‘James without Northampton’, he ‘for security made them a writing obligatory sealed with the common seal of his house’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Sometimes that security was ensured by recourse to the legal profession, as when a juror bought a ‘messuage and garden’ for which ‘seisin was delivered to him by letter of attorney’.Footnote ⁵⁸ But mostly jurors relied on witnesses for their transactions – the period 1350–1380 saw 73 per cent of the total number of witness references for the whole of the period, reflecting that heightened concern. Similarly, 40 per cent of the references to legal dealings during land transfer occurred in the same 30-year period. Occasionally, there was a glimpse of a less orderly world beneath due process: for instance, in the hearing of Phillipa Percy (nee Strabolgi), William Clerc recalled ‘that on the day of her birth Walter Cachow seized a plot in Gaynesburgh [Gainsborough] called “Chanonplace”, and fled therefrom for fear’.Footnote ⁵⁹

From the mid-century, jurors were anxious to emphasize their contractual rights; they continued to buy and sell land, often in groups; and the note of personal acquisition was maintained. A new phrase entered the record during the 1380s. In the testimonies of several jurors, family land ‘descended to him (the juror) by hereditary right’, a wording not found in the first half of the century. It stresses legal, personal ownership in a manner not emphasized in the earlier period. This is not to say, however, that old ways of expression and practice did not persist in some places. When three Welsh jurors took a manor to the farm from the prior of Chirbury for £10 a year in 1382, for example, they did so ‘by common assent’, which seemingly foregrounds community approval rather than any written contract – if any such existed.Footnote ⁶⁰ During the whole of the 1380s, only two jurors expressed themselves in traditional style and ‘did homage’ or ‘fealty’ for their land; instead, the majority chose to foreground their charter and their acquisition, not their service.

Around the start of the fifteenth century, many jurors’ testimonies reverted to a more balanced style. Where testimonies referred to an acquisition, sellers or grantors were mentioned more frequently alongside buyers and the active voice of acquisition was moderated by a passive one of reception. Thus, the word ‘grant’ or ‘granted’ was used in eight testimonies in the first decade of the new century (15 per cent) compared with its use from 1350 to 1380 in less than 1 per cent of the total land testimony. In each case, it is noted that the seller ‘grants’ the buyer or lessee the rights to the land as opposed to the expression of the same transaction as the buyer ‘taking’ or ‘acquiring’ the land.Footnote ⁶¹ Only three jurors specified the sums paid for land acquisition or lease and only one of these was an outright purchase.Footnote ⁶² This more traditional usage continued into the second and third decades of the fifteenth century. Buyers continued to be reticent about sums paid: only a single case of the specified purchase price was recorded between 1410 and 1419.Footnote ⁶³ The amount of land purchased was typically in small plots, one acre being the most frequently mentioned area.

The last full decade of our period, 1420–1430, saw an upturn in remembered land transfers and with it an increase in recalled purchases. Half of the purchasers now detailed the sums paid, but amounts were perhaps stereotypical: two jurors from Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, for example, were recorded as buying ‘three messuages’ each for £20 in 1428 and 1429; four jurors purchased woods at 40 shillings an acre in testimonies between 1427 and 1429, all from ecclesiastical proprietors accompanied ‘by an indenture sealed with the common seal of the house’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Altogether, after the immediate demographic shocks, the record hints at the partial recovery of some traditional aspects of land transfer. Inheritance returned to its early fourteenth-century dominance in the record as the key method of land transfer – in the 1420s, nearly 40 per cent of land memories specifically mentioned inheritance. Even the old vocabulary of ‘doing homage’ or ‘fealty’ made a slight comeback after a complete absence in the middle of the century. In the remembrances of the 1420s, these terms were repeated five times, though on most occasions their use was accompanied by reference to ‘a letter of homage’, the acquisition of which served as a document of title. The same applies to the terms ‘enfeoff’ or ‘feoff’: of the 64 testimonies, in which it was employed, 48 referred to accompanying written documentation. In these cases, the old vocabulary was being pressed to new requirements and sensibilities.

8. Prices and acreage

Unfortunately for the historian, proof records are often tantalisingly indefinite about the amount of land involved in any particular land transaction, or about the price paid for a purchase or lease.Footnote ⁶⁵ This may be because the recorder did not feel it necessary for his record or that fellow jurors would know the land mentioned without being told. The records are equally vague about the types of land transferred.Footnote ⁶⁶ As for the size of land transactions, 124 jurors (15 per cent of all ‘land’ testimony) specified the acreage that they remembered changing hands.Footnote ⁶⁷ The figures are presented in Table 4 where it will be seen that only in the peak decades of the 1350s and 1420s was the proportion of jurors mentioning acreage over 20 per cent of all land testimonies. Even so, it is clear that throughout the fourteenth century, many land transfers recalled by jurors were certainly below 10 acres and very often below five.

Table 4. Acreage mentioned in land transactions

Note: ‘Years’ refer to the dates of hearings, not recalled transactions.

Source: See Table 1.

Beginning at the end of the 1340s, these types of transactions were joined in the remembrances of jurors by a minority of bigger transactions of up to 100 acres, recalling acquisitions which took place uniquely in the three decades from 1330 to 1360. After 1380, the largest remembered transfer was 60 acres of which there was only one – in 1382 from Surrey, referring to a transaction in 1361. The typical early fifteenth-century memory, as in the previous century, involved lease or purchase of land of 5 acres or less. Almost half were 3 acres or below, a lower average than at any other time in the fourteenth century. Only in remembrances of the 1420s did average acreages mentioned begin to climb. Whether these changes reflected a changing status of men serving on proof juries or whether they point to real changes in the land market, it is not possible to determine.

Even fewer jurors’ testimonies recorded the price paid for a lease or purchase and it was not until the fifteenth century that such a detail became more common.Footnote ⁶⁸ Again, it is not possible to establish whether this shift in the detail recorded marked a change in jurors’ willingness to mention cash, or was simply a change in the recording convention – or a mixture of both. Whatever the case, only 12 jurors between 1409 and 1431 remembered the sums paid for land, too few for statistical significance.Footnote ⁶⁹ They were slightly more forthcoming about the price paid for leases – 20 mentioned the sum involved – but again too few for meaningful analysis.Footnote ⁷⁰ Several jurors remembered buying a named sum in yearly rent for a single purchase price, but either the land or property generating the rent or the sum necessary to buy it was left unspecified in the records. A sort of advance on land security, it was the single most commonly mentioned rental transaction. Not only land was involved: Richard Bakester in 1376 remembered holding a 20-year lease on an oven for 40 shillings annually.Footnote ⁷¹

9. The role of writing

If jurors’ records are reticent about the sums involved in land transactions, some of the processes involved are much more easily understood, notably the place of writing in the transfer process. Four hundred and fifty (53 per cent) jurors mentioning land transfer also referred to written documentation of some kind. The number and proportion of ‘land’ jurors making mention of writing over time are given in Table 5. For the period before 1300 and the first 80 years of the fourteenth century, the growth in the reference to writing can be seen with gratifying clarity: both the number and proportion of references to writing steadily, and sometimes sharply, increased decade by decade. After that, references to writing eased back to numbers more commonly seen in the early part of the century. Small numbers mean large fluctuations, but it is not to be supposed that the drop in writing references after that time indicates a retreat from the written word. It is surely more likely that the use of writing in land transactions became so commonplace as to pass unremarked in many fifteenth-century jurors’ memories.Footnote ⁷²

Table 5. References to writing in land transactions

Source: See Table 1.

What is clear is that by the time of the first proof-of-age records in the late thirteenth century, the use of writing in order to document land transactions was a familiar feature of the process in all parts of the country. Even in the far northern counties, where reference to writing was rare or virtually non-existent, the few instances that do occur show familiarity with the usual literate processes seen elsewhere. Cumberland, for example, had only two land/writing references, but the first was from a testimony of 1314 and mentioned a ‘chirograph’ recording a lease, and the second ‘a writ for mort d'ancestour’ again from the early years of the century.Footnote ⁷³ Northumberland recorded a lease for a ‘chamber’ in Newcastle and an indenture for ‘certain parcels of land’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Initially, the vocabulary used to describe such documents was unspecific in nature: in the earliest example, from Dorset in 1291, the term used was certum scriptum (‘certain writing’). An instance from Westminster six years later expanded this somewhat: a lease was described as scriptum de eadem firma (‘writing of the said farm’).Footnote ⁷⁵ In remembrances of the first ten years of the fourteenth century, the wording became more specialised, with the introduction of carta feoffamenti (charter of enfeoffment) and serographum (chirograph), as well as more widespread, with examples from Cambridge, Derby, Suffolk and York.Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet, despite this common usage, the process was occasionally accompanied by some hesitancy, especially in the early years of the century. Nicholas Gamyl, for example, had to ‘seek advice’ about ‘the form of the charter of feoffment’ even though the transaction was between him and his father,Footnote ⁷⁷ while Wymund de la Grave sought aural confirmation of his charter by having it read out in church.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such documents were often dated, which is why they were so useful in proof hearings.Footnote ⁷⁹ They were sometimes written in the form of indentures, both parties keeping one half.Footnote ⁸⁰

Charters were the most common form of transaction record mentioned by jurors – between 1270 and 1430, 109 jurors recalled an heir's birth by reference to a land charter (and a further 27 mentioned an indenture). This is not to say that the process of land transfer was ever completely written. As well as public reading, the actual writing of a charter or indenture was often a witnessed affair, calling, especially from the mid-century, for professional support. In a Somerset testimony from 1347, for example, the parties called in two specialists to compose the document – ‘the said Peter dictated the indenture and the said Walter wrote it’.Footnote ⁸¹ For run-of-the-mill transactions, the parish clerk more commonly did the actual writing.Footnote ⁸² As well as being witnessed in the writing, the finished document was often sealed in a public place, commonly the local church.Footnote ⁸³

Not content with merely referring to documentation, progressively more jurors were recorded as bringing their paperwork to the proof hearing itself to reinforce their memories. John Budel, for example, was accompanied by no fewer than six witnesses to his purchase of a ‘messuage and a carucate of land’, but he also brought his charter ‘which John showed to the escheator’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The public nature of the process was reinforced by the face-to-face nature of land transfer itself. Seisin itself was, of course, a physical process. When Walter Saleman received a ‘messuage and 10 acres’ from his father, he was not untypical in bringing ‘several others’ along with him when he took seisin.Footnote ⁸⁵ However freely land was bought and sold, the approval of the lord was always necessary and often explicitly sought. When Roger Alfer bought a messuage and carucate of land from Walter Foliet they went ‘on the same day’ to Elias de Godele who ‘indited [i.e. composed] a charter of enfeoffment of the said land’; it is not suggested that either the purchaser or buyer sought Elias's permission for the sale, but both wanted his involvement.Footnote ⁸⁶ By the 1420s, this procedure was usually accompanied by a written record in the form of ‘a letter of homage’.Footnote ⁸⁷

10. The law

Finally, on the involvement of the law in land transfer at this level, 64 jurors explicitly referred to legal procedures undertaken with regard to their land transactions. Of these, a small minority (eight) had recourse to the King's Bench in Westminster.Footnote ⁸⁸ Three jurors remembered losing land as a result of legal action,Footnote ⁸⁹ and another was obviously remembering a dispute the outcome of which is unclear.Footnote ⁹⁰ Most of the others seemed to have used a court to register, for a fee, an already agreed transaction, sometimes within the family.Footnote ⁹¹ Eight jurors remembered the use of writs in their land dealings: seven specify the writ of novel disseisin and one mort d'ancestor. The use of such writs was mentioned much more widely than attendance at the King's Bench; instances came from Cumberland, York, Stafford and Dorset, as well as the Home Counties. Among jurors who gave such testimonies, knowledge of the use of particular writs was common, and several distinguished, for example, between a writ of entry and a writ of right.Footnote ⁹²

However, while some jurors used legal procedure, more settled their transfers by agreement and public record. As a sort of half-way house, some used the opportunity of a ‘love-day’ (dies amoris) to settle disputes.Footnote ⁹³ ‘Love days’ where quarrels would be publicly resolved, were a popular institution: they were mentioned three times as frequently in land transfer disputes as the most commonly mentioned legal action, novel disseisin. They seemed to have been especially useful when the dispute involved a comparatively small amount of money or land.Footnote ⁹⁴ Others took advantage of a happy occasion like a baptism or purification to come to a friendly settlement. Many showed considerable forethought in their land dealings: a father might transfer land to a son in return for a yearly rent to maintain him.Footnote ⁹⁵ A landholder going on a potentially perilous journey might demise his land to the local chaplain for the use of his family.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet another might, towards the end of his life, transfer land to a wife or son.Footnote ⁹⁷ Depending on the size and sophistication of such arrangements, a juror might testify to them having been ratified by a witnessed and possibly publicly read charter; they might in addition be recorded in a seigniorial court or by the witness of the local lord or his steward as well as neighbours.Footnote ⁹⁸ Although a small minority of all land transfer testimonies (about 8 per cent of the whole), these legally aware records depict a scene of considerable legal and quasi-legal sophistication and confidence.