Essex Sessions of The Peace 1351, 1377-1379 (4): Occasional Paper

Essex Sessions of The Peace 1351, 1377-1379

Essex Archaeological Society, Occasional Paper No. 3 (1953)

Edited with an introduction by Elizabeth Chaplin Furber

This is one of a short series of extracts taken from this Occasional Paper, no longer available from our storeroom.  Members of the Essex Society for Archaeology and History may receive a digital copy of the book by subscribing to the ESAH Digitisation Project.

Chapter 9

Conclusion

THE survival of the Essex peace rolls may be accounted for by the fact that the king's bench sat at Chelmsford in 1351 and again in 1380. Possibly the earlier move was occasioned by Chief Justice Shareshull's interest in the notorious Fitzwalter affair, or in the financial profits to be obtained from vigorous enforcement of the labour legislation.  Shareshull was largely responsible for this legislation, and his financial success in having it enforced in Essex is vividly attested by the estreat roll and the subsidy roll.  In the later year, possibly some inkling of the deep-seated unrest which was to lead to the Great Revolt may have induced Chief Justice Cavendish to move the bench to Chelmsford. The records of the Essex peace sessions, supplemented by evidence on the results of the indictments and on the identity of persons involved - justices, jurors, minor officials, men indicted and their victims - throw interesting light on many matters, legal, social and economic.

From the legal point of view, nothing absolutely 'new' appears on the Essex peace rolls.  They contain no such full accounts of process, trials and completed business as are found on rolls for other counties.  The earlier Essex roll gives no information on these points; the later roll gives some details on dates and places of sessions, presenting jurors, the process of compelling appearance and fines for labour offences.  These rolls are primarily important in their cumulative effect in adding to the mass of proceedings before the justices of the peace available in print which will further the solution of many problems of fourteenth-century legal history.  The Essex peace rolls give a broad picture of lawlessness and labour unrest during the years between the Black Death and the Great Revolt in a county which was a  leader in that revolt.  All classes of the population are represented from Lord Fitzwalter to the humblest felon who was hanged and left no chattels.  The case of Fitzwalter, who maintained a notorious retinue of criminals long before the general withdrawal of soldiers from the Continent in the 'fifties, is unique and has been strangely overlooked hitherto.  Many of the men indicted, both Fitzwalter's followers and others, obtained pardon because of service abroad, or went off to the wars and thus escaped punishment.  Among the latter appear such men as the parson, William de Blaby (A41), who received thieves.  While members of the clergy are frequently the wealthy victims of felons, others of the clergy are as frequently the worst offenders.  These felonious clerks range all the way from William de Oveseye (A1-A2), clericus conuictus with no goods and chattels, to the archdeacon Roger de Harleston (A42), who obtained numerous benefices through the influence of powerful ecclesiastical kinsmen, and who was finally pardoned through the intercession of Queen Isabel. The laymen indicted were not necessarily landless malefactors, but were on occasion men of substance such as Richard de Bromley or Geoffrey Rolf.

As might be expected, although the rolls mention occasionally wool merchants and cheesemongers, and such commodities as woollens, worsteds and tiles, the emphasis is largely on  agriculture.  Since values of livestock, grain, cloth and other articles are often lumped together in the indictments, only a fragmentary list of prices can be compiled. Brewsters in 1377-79 were receiving 6d. per gallon for ale, a rate considerably higher than the 3d. or 4d. complained of in the inquiry of 1389, and out of all proportion to the customary rate of 1d. Tilers were charging 4s. per 1000 in 1377-79, whereas tiles were delivered for the repair of Hadleigh Castle in the 'sixties at the rate of 3s. per 1000.

Since no wage cases appear on the earlier Essex roll, though the estreat roll gives ample evidence of the 'enforcement of the labour laws in 1351, it is impossible to make a comparison of wages taken in 1351 and in 1377-79.  For a long-range comparison, it is necessary to turn to Miss Kenyon's valuable tables of wages 1340-90, in her study of labour conditions in 1389.

Yet some comparison of wages taken in 1377-79, and the statutory or customary rates, may be of interest.  The Statute of Labourers of 1351 provided that specified maximum rates per day be paid in certain occupations; that the rates customary in 1342-46 be paid in other occupations; and that men should work by the year and never by the day.  The statute of 1360-61 increased the rates for carpenters and masons.  No new statutory rates were fixed before the sessions of 1377-79.  It was not until the Statute of Cambridge of 1388 that rates were fixed by the year; they ranged from 13s. 4d. per year and clothing once a year for a bailiff of husbandry to 6s. per year for a woman labourer, with a stipulation of less in counties where less was usual, without clothing, courtesie and other reward.

Turning to the rates given or received in the indictments of 1377-79, we find that daily wages show an increase over statutory or customary rates of anything from 1d. upwards; and practically all workers were receiving their food.  More startling were the yearly rates given in the 1370's without any statutory provision.  They ranged from 16s. and food given to a weak and failing servant to 40s. refused by a common labourer.  The harangue of the preacher, who accused the ploughman of taking 20s. or 30s. and gay clothing, was obviously no empty oratory.  The indictments lend support to Miss Kenyon's contention that these yearly wages were being paid not by the old lords, unable to adjust to the high rates demanded by the regular manorial servants as well as by the casual daily labourers, but rather by the new class of leaseholders, able and willing, in a period of rising prices, to take over the land at a fixed monetary rent and to engage annual labour at a high level of wages.  Such a leaseholder was probably John Trumpe, of Steeple Bumpstead, who hired five ploughmen for 20s. a year, food, and a tunic worth 6s. 8d. (B101); Trumpe and one of the ploughmen were described as free tenants in the poll tax returns of 1380, the other four ploughmen as  labourers.  Such leaseholders were probably William Bette of Elmdon (B 100) and John Bolesen, of Newport (B124).

The seriousness of the labour situation is well brought out by a study not only of the indictments of 1377-79, but also of the estreat roll of 1351. Miss Kenyon has remarked that the' joint evidence of wages, prices and increase of the number of leases leads to a tentative conclusion that in Essex the plague of 1360-61 had more disturbing results than the more famous outbreak of 1349'.  Yet it is significant that the justices of the peace in 1351, covering only part of the county, took fines for labour offences from over 7500 persons, or, in other words, from at least one out of every six adults in the county.  In Colchester and its adjacent hamlets alone 319 persons made fine. No less significant is the enormous sum of about 719l. taken for these fines, of which about 675l. was used for the first year of the triennial grant of 25 Edward III, and represented well over half of the 1234l. collected for the subsidy in Essex.  Chief Justice Shareshull undoubtedly had a hand in extracting this huge sum, for the only other county where half the subsidy was made up of labour fines was Buckinghamshire, to which county Shareshull also took the king's bench in 1351.

Such stringent enforcement of the labour laws, if long continued - and in 1377-79 two hundred of the two hundred and eighty extant indictments before the justices of the peace involved labour offences - would amply explain the violence of the insurgents of 1381 against the person or property of John de Cavendish, John de Bampton, Geoffrey de Dersham or the Suttons, all justices of the peace in Essex.  While only one person mentioned on the peace rolls, the juror, William Gildebourne, has been tentatively identified among the Essex rebels hanged, many of those indicted at the Essex peace sessions may well have been among the mob of Essex men who marched on London.  Wat Tyler, at Smithfield, 'demanda que nulle lay deveroit estre fors la lay de Wynchestre'.  That the rebels should have 'thus demanded the abandonment of every measure taken since  1285 for the maintenance of public order and the regulation of labour 'becomes more understandable from a study of the 'success' of  the justices of the peace in Essex in enforcing the labour laws and of their failure in bringing to adequate justice notorious and powerful offenders.