Author: Mark Bailey

Extreme weather and economic crisis in the 1430s in England, and the implications for tenurial change
Over the past two decades, studies of the role of climate change in history have attained new levels of sophistication, driven principally by the generation of reliable palaeoclimatic datasets derived from proxies, such as tree rings, ice-cores and speleothems. This data surge provided the backdrop to Campbell’s magisterial survey of climate, disease and society in the late- medieval world, which presented historians with a fresh research agenda. Campbell conceives of a complex and dynamic socio-ecological system comprised of climate, microbes, humans, society and biology, in which the individual components interact and feedback in unpredictable and chaotic ways. During the second quarter of the fifteenth century, he identifies the rapid onset of a severe environmental downturn, commercial contraction and population decline, a conjuncture which he posits marked the final phase of the ‘Great Transition’ of the medieval world and which in turn was the precursor to the ‘Great Divergence’ between northwest Europe and the rest of the world.

Campbell, Great Transition.

Campbell, Great Transition, pp. 344-73, 386-401.

The onset of this downturn can be traced to the 1430s. There were various elements to the crisis, but climate change was a significant trigger. One recent study describes the 1430s as ‘the coldest decade in north-western and central Europe in the 15th century’ and another sees it as ‘one of the worst climatic shocks in Europe during the past millennium’, leading to famine in some regions and triggering heightened mortality from famine-related diseases. Climatologists have now definitively identified extreme weather conditions in the 1430s across northern and central Europe, whereas historians have yet to explore fully its socio-economic consequences.

Camenisch et al., ‘The 1430s’, p. 2108; Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, p. 1.

Camenisch et al., ‘The 1430s’, p. 2110; Jorg, Teure, Hunger. I am grateful to Philipp Höhn for this reference.

There have been two previous studies of the extreme weather in the 1430s in England. Pribyl has drawn extensively upon chronicle evidence to highlight episodes of famine and plague in this decade, whereas Pollard’s survey of the agrarian crisis of 1438-40 in northeast England is the only study to focus directly on its socio-economic consequences, arguing that it delivered a ‘profound shock to the management of the finances of the greater lords’ with long-lasting consequences in the region. However, he speculated that elsewhere in England its effects were ‘muted…with no apparent lasting consequences’. The limited scholarly interest in the scale and the impact of the crisis of the 1430s contrasts with the attention lavished on the succession of climate-related crises of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. One of the reasons for this is archival, because the survival of manorial accounts—which supply details about grain yields and livestock—becomes patchier and their contents less informative from the early fifteenth century onwards. Another reason is that the theme of climate-induced crisis carries great significance for historians in the early fourteenth century, because the impact of dearth on immiserated, over-populated and calamity-sensitive communities was extensive and potentially epoch-changing. In contrast, the extreme weather of the 1430s struck an oversupplied and under-populated economy, which was ostensibly much better placed to absorb its effects, and therefore the longer-term consequences of the crisis are assumed to have been minor and less worthy of study.

Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’; Pollard, ‘The northeastern economy’, pp. 101, 104.

This article utilises some of the most recent climatic proxy data to deepen our understanding of the extreme weather in the 1430s. It then draws together evidence from published studies and original archival research about the ensuing shortage of food and fodder, the high mortality rates among animals and humans—including those caused by plague—and the disruption of trade in England. Finally, it focuses on tenurial change, which was one key institutional response to the crisis. The extreme conditions in the 1430s precipitated a fall in the market for customary land, which remained acutely depressed for the next three decades, resulting in significant tenurial changes and also the permanent transfer of some demesne arable to the peasant sector. The cumulative impact of these changes prevented any return to the manorial organisation which had dominated a century earlier and cleared the ground for the emergence of copyhold tenure in England.
I EXTREME WEATHER IN THE 1430s
Evidence from proxy scientific data, documentary sources and model simulations indicate that the climate in the northern hemisphere during the first quarter of the fifteenth century was generally stable, but that during the second quarter it changed significantly. The turning point came in the 1430s, when temperatures cooled dramatically. Reconstructions of temperatures from proxy data in the Low Countries and central Europe have identified the winters of 1431/32, 1432/33, 1434/35 and 1436/37 as all being ‘extremely cold’, with widespread and extensive freezing, whilst those of 1433/34 and 1437/38 were ‘very cold’: in contrast, summer temperatures appear to have been normal for most of the decade. Observations in contemporary chronicles support these reconstructions: for example, various Irish Annals comment on frozen lakes and rivers in the winters of 1433-4 and 1434-5, and a London chronicler noted a great frost between November 1434 and February 1435, followed by another hard winter. The extreme weather of the 1430s is the first major event in the Little Ice Age, which lasted for the next two centuries.

Campbell, Great Transition, pp. 344-5; Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, disease and society’, p. 224.

Camenisch et al., ‘The 1430s’, pp. 2110, 2112; Pribyl, Famine, farming and plague, pp. 184-5; Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, pp. 5-6.

Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, disease and society’, p. 224; Gottfried, Epidemic disease, pp. 37-8.

Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, disease and society’, pp. 168-9.

The weather was not only turning colder but also becoming wetter. Incidental references in chronicles describe episodes of heavy flooding throughout Europe and unusually heavy rainfall in England in 1438-9. The proxy data for precipitation in the late 1430s stand out as a high point in reconstructions of summer precipitation from English oak rings over the last millennium. These conditions are striking not just for their severity, but also for the rapidity with which they emerged.

Campbell, Great Transition, figs. 5.3c and pp. 343-4; Pribyl, Famine, farming and plague, p. 180.

Camenisch et al. ‘The 1430s’, pp. 2111-2; Gottfried, Epidemic disease, pp. 38-9, 96; Pollard, ‘Northeastern economy’, p. 93; Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, pp. 11-12, fig. 7.5; Page, ed., Victoria County History of Suffolk, p. 66.

Loader et al., ‘Summer precipitation’, p. 735.

Campbell, Great Transition, p. 345.

FIGURE 1		ABOUT HERE
Figure 1. European climate anomalies for temperature (blue and broken lines) and precipitation (green), annually 1422 to 1500CE (calculated relative to the 1422 to 1800CE climatological mean).
Source: Valler et al., ‘ModE-RA’.
Climate change is captured in Figure 1, which reconstructs the winter (defined as December, January and February (DJF), blue line) and summer (June, July and August (JJA), broken orange line) European temperature anomalies for the period 1422 to 1500, together with summer precipitation. This supplements reconstructions based on earlier proxy data, because it draws on a very recent Data Model Assimilation (2024) blending updated proxy information from a number of locations with model runs to reconstruct winter as well as summer temperatures and precipitation globally between 1422-2008. The data for the 1430s are plotted against the long run means for the period 1422 to 1800. Figure 1 confirms the combination of low winter temperatures yet relatively warm summers. The two coldest winters within this cold spell were 1432-3 and 1435-6. Summer precipitation was higher in the second half of the decade. Figure 2 shows winter temperatures and summer precipitation between the 1420s and 1500 as a smoothed trend using a gaussian filter.

Valler et.al., ‘ModE-RA’.

FIGURE 2		ABOUT HERE
Figure 2. European climate anomalies for temperature (blue) and precipitation (green), annually 1422 to 1500CE, showing annual values and Gaussian-smoothed trends (sigma=1.0)
Source: As in Figure 1.
Increased precipitation with sustained and extremely cold winters may well have resulted in heavy snow lying on the ground for long periods. This would then have caused extensive freshwater flooding in river valleys and freshwater marshes as the snow finally melted.
Certainly, the scale of flooding in this decade across the low-lying reclaimed silt lands of southeast Lincolnshire was significant, being unsurpassed until the 1570s, and heavy freshwater flooding is recorded from the mid-1430s in locations as far apart as the Tees valley and Kent. A royal commission held in January 1439 concluded that a failure to maintain the complex banking and drainage systems of the Cambridgeshire silt fens had contributed to the recent flooding of 12,400 acres of land west of Wisbech, caused by a breach of the freshwater defences. In addition to freshwater flooding, the unsettled weather also contributed to increased storm activity around the coast, which in the late 1430s resulted in severe marine inundations in Cambridgeshire, Kent and Sussex.

Simmons, Fen and Sea, p. 83; Mate, ‘Occupation of the land’, p. 126; Pollard, ‘Northeastern economy’, p. 94.

Darby, Medieval Fenland, p. 194; Gilbert, ‘Wisbech Hundred’, pp. 90, 106-7.

Mate, ‘Occupation of the land’, pp. 126-7; Galloways and Potts, ‘Marine flooding’, fig. 2; Hinman and Popescu, Extraordinary inundations, p. 5; Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, p. 14.

What caused the sudden and sustained shift to a colder and wetter climate? Climatologists have found no evidence for heightened volcanic activity in the 1430s, so the cold and wet seem to have been a function of endogenous change in climate systems. Reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation, which measures pressure differences at sea-level between the pressure systems of the Azores and the Arctic, indicate a sudden weakening from the 1430s, which is associated with cold winters in north-west Europe. Whatever the causes, global temperatures and solar irradiance plummeted in the 1430s and, crucially, remained low for decades: a phenomenon dubbed the ‘Spörer Solar Minimum’. The lowest point was reached in the 1450s, when cold winters were coupled with cooler summer temperatures and rising rainfall following two large volcanic eruptions. The first occurred around 1453 at an unidentified location in the northern hemisphere and the second, in 1458, is widely attributed to the mega eruption (VEI 6 to 7) of the Kuwae volcano in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Thus the 1430s ushered in a period of extremely cold and wet weather which was to last until the late 1460s (Figure 2).

Campbell, Great Transition, fig. 5.4.

Camenisch et al. ‘The 1430s’, pp. 2108-10.

Ballard et al., ‘Eruption of Kuwae’.

Campbell, Great Transition, pp. 344-49; Camenisch et al. ‘The 1430s’, p. 2115; Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, disease and society’, p. 224.

II GRAIN YIELDS, DEARTH AND PRICES IN THE 1430s
The persistence of severe weather conditions throughout the 1430s created some food shortages among both humans and livestock across England. The succession of freezing winters in the first half of the decade shorted growing seasons, causing the yield of winter sown grains to decline and so triggering concerns about grain scarcity in Lynn (Norfolk) and London in 1432-3. In the second half of the decade the combination of cold winters and damp summers resulted in three very poor harvests for all grains in 1437, 1438 and 1439 across most of England. For example, total receipts of grain tithes at Aycliffe (Co. Durham) had averaged 67.25 quarters in the 1420s (four years), but fell to 56 quarters in 1432 (83%), 60 quarters in 1433 (89%), 42 quarters in 1437 (62%) and only 16 quarters in 1438 (24%). This was one of only three back-to-back harvest failures in the Middle Ages where yields fell more than 25% below the long term average, the others being the Great Famine of 1315-17 and the Black Death of 1349-51 (figure 3).

Sharp, Famine and scarcity, pp. 139-40.

Dyer, Standards of living, pp. 267-8; Camenisch et al. ‘The 1430s’, pp. 2116-17 and fig. 8; Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, pp. 11-12.

Dodds, Peasants and production, pp. 98-100, table 12; Dodds, ‘Estimating arable output’, pp. 271-3.

Hatcher, ‘The great slump’, p. 246; Campbell and Ó Gráda, ‘Harvest Shortfalls’, Journal of Economic History, 71:4 (2011), p. 869.

Poor harvests caused grain and foodstuff prices to soar across Europe. In England wheat prices were affected more than those of other grains, rising in 1433 and again in 1437-8, when they were double their normal level, and peaking at three times their normal level in 1438-9, which was the maximum attained in the whole of the fifteenth century (figure 4). Prices of other grains were not as badly affected (figure 4), especially spring sown crops which, of course, were less affected by the cold winters and so yielded solidly during the stable summers of the first half of the decade. However, the price of both barley and oats doubled after the 1438 harvest. Rising food costs in the late 1430s caused standards of living to drop: between 1437 and 1439 estimated GDP per head fell 13% in Holland, whilst in England it was 11% lower than the mean for the 1420s.

Camenisch et al. ‘The 1430s’, pp. 2118 and fig. 8.

Sharp, Famine and scarcity, p. 141; Farmer, ‘Prices and wages’, pp. 434, 504-5, fig. 5.1.

Broadberry et al., British economic growth, pp. 231-2.

FIGURE 3		ABOUT HERE.
Figure 3. Percentage yield of English grains and percentage change in the price of all grains based on the mean of 1230-1479
Source: B.M.S. Campbell, Three centuries of English crops yields, 1211-1491 (2007), Graph 48, https://www.bahs.org.uk/crop-yields-database/ accessed 30/12/2025
The late 1430s is widely regarded as Europe’s worst episode of dearth since the Great Famine. Contemporaries reported severe episodes of famine in parts of Scotland, Flanders and France, although not in Ireland, Holland or England. The difference between dearth and famine depended on the complex local/regional interaction of food production, the distribution of food through charity and markets, and social differentiation. There was certainly dearth in England: for example, the Stow chronicler commented that grain was so scarce in 1439 in the north that the poor made bread out of fern roots. Grain shortages were felt most acutely in towns, forcing the authorities in London to seek supplies from as far away as Lincolnshire, Denmark and Prussia. In 1438 rioters at Ipswich and Southwold (Suffolk) confronted local merchants attempting to supply distant markets with grain. At various times between late 1437 and early 1439 the English Crown banned the export of grain from specific ports and dispatched royal justices across the realm to clamp down on profiteering from the sale of foodstuffs, and especially the staples of bread and ale.

Camenisch et al., ‘The 1430s’, p. 2117; Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, disease and society’, pp. 224-5; Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, pp. 10-13 argues that England did experience famine, especially northern areas.

Farmer, ‘Prices and wages’, p. 439.

Sharp, Famine and scarcity, pp. 142-3.

Lee, ‘Grain shortages’, pp. 74-6; Sharp, Famine and scarcity, pp. 146-7.

Camenisch et al. ‘The 1430s’, p. 2117; Sharp, Famine and scarcity, pp. 143-51.

FIGURE 4		ABOUT HERE
Figure 4. Index of annual grain and livestock prices in England, 1420 to 1450.
Source: Farmer, ‘Prices and wages’, appendices E and F.
Price fluctuations for other key commodities are less clear cut. The cold weather might have disrupted salt production and distribution as in 1439 English salt prices were 70% above their long-term average. The decennial average for the 1430s was, however, only marginally above that of prices in the previous two decades, and was well below the level prevailing in the second half of the fourteenth century. Inclement weather would also have placed a premium on the need for fuel for warmth. The price of firewood reportedly jumped in many parts of Europe, although details of wood and coal production are scarce from mid-fifteenth century England. Despite some chroniclers’ reports of fuel shortages in London and the southeast during the harsh winters of 1434 to 1436, English fuel prices do not appear to have been as sensitive as grain prices. For example, the price of coal purchased by Durham priory in the 1430s was actually marginally lower than in the 1420s and merely 6% up on the fifteenth-century mean. Likewise, the price of faggots did not obviously rise in the 1430s on two Suffolk manors which routinely produced firewood. At Walsham, unworked and uncut underwood sold for 19d. per rood in the 1420s (four accounts) and 15d. per rood in the 1430s (seven accounts), and even in the very cold years between 1433 and 1438 its price only reached 18d. The price of cut and bound faggots at Chevington remained steady at 3s. per 120 across both decades. Volumes were down too at Walsham, because sales in the 1420s averaged 40s. per annum but just 22s. in the 1430s: in contrast, sales of faggots at Chevington rose in both 1437-8 and 1438-9. These local supplies of fuel appear to have been responsive enough to meet any sudden surge in demand caused by the cold weather.

Camenisch et al., ‘The 1430s’, fig.8.

Farmer, ‘Prices and wages’, table 5.7.

Camenisch et al. ‘The 1430s’, p. 2116.

For complaints about fuel shortages, Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, p. 7; Mate, ‘The economy of Kent’, p. 17.

Hatcher, British coal industry, p. 576. The decennial mean price for the fifteenth century was 20.1d. per chauldron, and the priory paid 24d. in the 1420s and 21.25d. in the 1430s.

McLaughlin and Bailey, eds., Manorial account rolls, pp. 119-71. In 1421-2 5% of production at Chevington was sold, 11% in 1424-5, compared with 67% in 1437-8 and 72% in 1438-9, Suffolk Archives (hereafter S/A), E3/15.3/2.30 to 2.35.

Localised evidence indicates some diminution in the quality of pasture due to snow and frost. Revenues for pasture collapsed in places, sometimes blamed on the bad weather: for example, in 1436-7 the auditors at Wykholt (Sussex) noted ‘nothing, because of the great tempest of rain’. In 1437-8 seigniorial revenues for grazing of animals at Lakenheath (Suffolk) generated only 5s., barely one fifth of the usual level. This must have been due to frozen grounds and shortages of winter feed, because the manor also levied an enormous £5 amercement on the townships of Ely, Littleport and Downham (Cambridgeshire) for destroying the sedge growing in the fen through the illegal grazing of beasts over the winter. Chronic shortages of livestock feed are also revealed through the increased volume of transgressions for the illegal cutting of branches of evergreen trees belonging to the lord of the manor of Wakefield (Yorkshire). The number of such amercements did not exceed twenty per annum in a normal year (sample of thirteen years, each containing a good run of court rolls), but rocketed in each of 1434 (144 amercements), 1435 (369), 1436 (331) and 1437 (202), before falling back to none in 1439 and 1441. Most of the presentments are explicit in stating that the greenery was being fed to livestock, and a particular favourite was holly whose older leaves are smooth and therefore edible. Other amercements were for the illicit removal of brushwood for fuel. Their scale and nature are indicative of the severe hardship in the north during the winters of 1435 and 1436.

Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, pp. 9-10.

Mate, ‘Pastoral Farming’, pp. 525, 531.

Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL), EDC 7/15/I/37.

The thirteen years in the sample are 1350, 1351, 1352, 1360, 1361, 1433 to 1440, taken from Habberjam et al., eds., Wakefield Court Rolls 1350-2; Fraser, ed., Wakefield Court Rolls 1433-6; Fraser and Barber, eds., Wakefield Court Roll 1436-37; Watson, ed., Wakefield Court Roll 1360-61; Asquith, ed., Wakefield Court Roll 1439-40.

III MORTALITIES OF HUMANS AND LIVESTOCK IN THE 1430s
The extreme weather in the 1430s correlates with localised evidence for higher death rates among both humans and livestock. There is abundant evidence, mainly derived from testamentary sources, for localised epidemics of unspecified diseases throughout the decade, especially in towns. 1433 and 1434 saw particularly high mortality at St Albans, Norwich, Scarborough, Colchester and London, which three contemporary sources attributed to plague [‘pestilence’]. The extreme severity of the winter of 1435-6 in northern England was followed by high death rates throughout 1436. The most consistent and notable peak in mortalities across England occurred during the summer and autumn of 1438 and 1439, which historians attribute to a national outbreak of plague: the link between widespread dearth followed by a national plague outbreak cannot be coincidental. Its description as ‘national’ means that it was widespread, not that it struck everywhere: for example, in 1433-4 death rates among the monks of Westminster were normal in 1438-9.

Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, pp. 14-15.

Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies, pp. 366-7; Fryde, Peasants and landlords, pp. 141-3.

Gottfried, Epidemic disease, p. 96; Rawcliffe, Urban bodies, p. 366; Harvey, Living and dying, pp. 122-3.

Goldberg, ‘Mortality and economic changes’, pp. 45-6.

Gottfried, Epidemic disease, pp. 96-7, graphs 4.1.1, 4.1.2 and 4.1.3., 107; Goldberg, ‘Mortality and economic changes’, p. 49; Campbell, Great Transition, pp. 349-50; Pribyl, Farming, famine, pp. 202, 2057, 213, 232; Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, disease and society’, pp. 224-5; for dysentery, Pribyl, ‘Climate induced disaster’, p. 15.

Harvey, Living and dying, p. 123, 125.

Manorial court rolls survive in large numbers from the fifteenth century and their recording of the transfer of unfree land following deaths of tenants offers some scope for reconstructing the patterns and scale of mortality in disparate rural communities. They seldom permit, however, anything more than the most basic demographic analysis, for a variety of reasons: for example, the exact season and even the calendar year of death cannot be identified when courts were held annually; the cause of death is never stated; even good series of courts have gaps in the extant record; and the sample can be mute, or unreliably small, from manors where unfree land was relatively unimportant or its registration had become lax. Nevertheless, the record of deaths of unfree tenants in manorial court rolls can be used to identify and compare episodes of higher mortality across rural communities. An analysis of a good series of court rolls surviving from seven manors scattered across the south Midlands and East Anglia reveals considerable local variation in the rural experience of mortality in the 1430s. Staverton and Sutton are located five miles apart to the east of Woodbridge (Suffolk), and their courts are highly consistent in independently pinpointing heightened mortality in the summer and autumn of 1432, and another severe epidemic between August 1438 and February 1439: neither manor experienced another episode of distress during the decade. In contrast, the court of Cratfield (Suffolk), situated 20 miles to the north, records nothing untoward in either 1432 or 1438-9, yet indicates a significant number of deaths in the summer of 1436. Meanwhile, during the whole of the 1430s the court rolls of the small market town of Brandon—over 40 miles to the west— record no abnormal deaths at all.

Slavin, ‘Releasing the Genie’, pp. 232-53.

Suffolk Archives, HB/10/427/4/1 ff. 50, 53-4, 61-2; HD1538/357/5, mm. 58-60.

Cambridge University Library, Vanneck Mss Box 9.

University of Chicago, Bacon Ms. 295.

Table 1 summarizes the years of ‘crisis mortality’ among tenants of unfree land during the first half of the fifteenth century on three geographically dispersed manors, one in Buckinghamshire (Winslow), one in Hertfordshire (Norton) and one in Suffolk (Walsham). The data illustrate four points. First, episodes of high mortality were more frequent in the 1430s than in any of the other decades. Second, the outbreaks in the 1430s were highly variable locally: Walsham suffered repeatedly across the decade, Norton much less. Third, all three manors experienced distress during the phase of extreme cold and a possible epidemic between 1434-6. Finally, none suffered from the ‘famine’ and ‘national’ plague outbreak of 1438-9.
TABLE 1		ABOUT HERE
The succession of hard winters, frozen then boggy ground conditions, and the associated failure of winter pasture was also debilitating to livestock. As figure 3 shows, livestock prices did not rise appreciably between the 1420s and 1430s, indicating that bovines and equines were able to withstand the worst effects of the cold and snow. Other commercially reared livestock, however, fared less well. Sheep murrains are recorded in 1432, 1433, 1437 and 1438 in various regions of England, when the average mortality rate was 32% compared to the longterm mean of 5%. The price of wethers rose by around one third in 1432 and 1434. In 1431-2 28% of lambs and 16% of ewes died at Lakenheath. During the 1430s seigniorial sheep flocks on three Wiltshire manors fell by one third, with even higher losses on two other Wiltshire manors, mainly attributed to disease in 1435, and on various manors in east Sussex. The number of fleeces produced on the bishopric of Winchester’s estate fell by 15% between 1434 and 1435, and by a further 63% between 1435 and 1439, indicative of catastrophic levels of mortality. Restoring flock numbers to their previous levels took many years, because ovines were usually replenished through natural replacement not purchases: the number of fleeces produced on the bishop’s estate in the 1440s was still down 15% on the quantities of the 1420s.

Campbell and Ludlow, ‘Climate, disease and society’, p. 227.

Stephenson, ‘Wool Yields’, p. 384; Camenisch et al., ‘The 1430s’, p. 2117.

Farmer, ‘Statistical supplement’, p. 510.

Although mortality among wethers, hoggs and rams was normal, and there were no abnormal deaths in 1437-8, CUL, EDC 7/15/I/36 and 37.

Hare, Prospering society, pp. 69-70, 88; Fryde, Peasants and landlords, p. 150; Mate, ‘Pastoral Farming’, p. 526.

Stephenson, ‘Wool yields’ (thesis), p. 236: an average of 17,017 fleeces per annum in the 1420s (7 years), 17,234 between 1430 and 1434 (5 years), 14,625 in 1435, and 5,425 in 1439.

Stephenson, ‘Wool yields’ (thesis), p. 236. 1440s fleece average 14,419 (5 years) compared with 17,017 fleeces per annum in the 1420s (7 years).

We should not think of the impact of disease solely in terms of mortality, of course, because disease also afflicts the survivors. Very cold temperatures between January and March each year are closely linked with poorer quality wool and low lambing rates. Fleece weights on the bishopric of Winchester estate were stable for the first three decades of the fifteenth century but then ‘plummeted’ in the 1430s. The number of fleeces produced annually on the estate remained steady at around 17,200 between 1430 and 1432, but their weight fell by 23% between 1431 and 1432: similarly, the number of fleeces fell by 15% between 1434 and 1435, whereas their weight fell by nearly 30%. Stephenson attributes the weight loss to the extreme weather conditions, and fleece weights remained low for the next two decades. Reproduction rates were badly hit too: only 70% ewes reproduced in the second half of the 1430s compared to the long term average of 90% on three manors on the estate of the bishopric of Winchester.

Stephenson, ‘Wool yields’ (thesis), p. 236; the weight of all the estates fleeces in 1434 was 1,265 stones, but 920 stones in 1435.

Stephenson, ‘Wool yields’, p. 378, 383.

Stephenson, ‘Wool yields’, p. 384; Mate, ‘Pastoral Farming’, p. 526.

Commercial rabbit-rearing suffered grievously. Rabbits were rare beasts in fifteenth-century England and were reared commercially for their meat and fur, but they were also fragile and highly averse to cold and wet weather. As a result, the conditions of the 1430s had a devastating impact on their population. In the winter of 1434-5 most of the stock of Methwold (Norfolk) warren was killed ‘by the great frost and cold’. The winter of 1436-7 virtually wiped out the population of Dunningworth (Suffolk) warren and a local man had to be hired to introduce and care for fresh stock. The process of restocking and replenishing warrens was protracted. No rabbits were culled for sales in 1437-8 at Methwold to preserve the stock and the warrener also newly planted ‘whynnes’ as a means of feeding the rabbits throughout the winter. The rent for Swaffham (Norfolk) warren was still unpaid in 1441, when it was restocked with rabbits, and the rental value of Tunstead (Norfolk) warren fell 40% between 1437 and 1442. In 1431 the Lakenheath warren had been leased for £15 per annum, but the loss of stock in 1437-8 had long term consequences as its value had still not recovered by 1451. The output of Methwold warren halved between the 1420s and 1430s, there were hardly any sales in 1440-1, and even in the 1460s sales had still not recovered to the level of the 1420s. IV ECONOMIC CRISIS IN THE 1430s

‘Per magnum gelum frigus et ninium’, The National Archive (hereafter TNA), DL29/292/4792.

Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, pp. 229-30.

TNA, DL29/292/4796.

Bailey, ‘Rabbit’, p. 9 and table 3.

CUL, EDC 7/15/I/36 to 40, the lease was worth £13 6s. 8d. in 1451.

Bailey, A marginal economy?, p. 252, table 4.16; Bailey, ‘Rabbit’, table 1; p. 9; TNA DL29/292/4807.

These extreme events caused economic distress in rural areas. Pollard noticed the rapid escalation of arrears of rent in the 1430s on various manors in the Tees valley. Likewise, on the estate of Durham priory, arrears doubled between 1433 and 1436, peaking in 1438-40: indeed, arrears, waste and decays amounted to 12% of anticipated income on the estate in 1400-1 and 36% in 1437-8. The income of the bishopric of Durham fell 25% from £2,568 in 1434-5 to £1,914 in 1438-9. In 1435 a widespread evasion of payments of rent and recognition on the estate of the bishopric of Worcester was blamed on the prevailing ‘poverty and pestilence’. In the late 1420s and early 1430s total arrears at Methwold manor were negligible, but escalated to £4 12s. in 1434-5, £7 17s. in 1437-8 to £20 5s. in 1441-2. Similarly, there were no arrears at all each year between 1428 and 1434 at Walsham, but by the end of 1435 they had climbed to £14 15s. and to over £29 by the end of 1436, the equivalent of 28% and 57% of gross revenue respectively. Such a sudden and severe drop in cash flow shook the financial viability of even large monastic houses: in 1435 the monks of Bury St Edmunds abbey (Suffolk) were subject to a swingeing budget to reduce debts and at the same time Durham priory undertook an extensive review of its financial management.

Pollard, ‘Northeastern economy’, p. 95.

Fryde, Peasants and landlords, pp. 152-4; Brown, ‘Surviving the mid-fifteenth-century recession’, pp.
214-6, 224; Brown, Rural society, pp. 34-9, table 1.

Pollard, ‘Northeastern economy’, p. 94.

Fryde, Peasants and landlords, pp. 141-3.

TNA DL 29/291/4789, 4790, 4792; DL29/292/4796, 4798, 4801, 4808.

McLaughlin and Bailey, Manorial account rolls, pp. 140-1.

Dyer, Standards of living, p. 98; Brown, Rural society, p. 43.

Another symptom of rural distress is the behaviour of the unfree (customary) land market, which experienced both volatility and a severe downturn. The volatility is evident in the sudden spike in the volume of land transfers of servile land on many manors. Table 2 confirms that the number of transfers recorded in the 1430s was the highest, or among the highest, for any decade in the fifteenth century on six manors spread across East Anglia, central and southern England. In part, this reflects the deaths of tenants in successive epidemics, and the subsequent transfer of land to heirs, but it also reflects the determination of other tenants to relinquish their landholdings. The falling value of land is apparent in various ways, but especially in the decline of the mean level of entry fines in the 1430s to its lowest point in northeast England and its sharp drop on various manors in the south. The depressed land market is also evident in the abandonment of customary holdings, as at Lighthorne (Warwickshire) in 1437 where nearly half of such holdings were unoccupied; and in the mounting of rent arrears in the 1430s and the willingness of manorial auditors to accept complaints about the inability or unwillingness of some of their tenants to continue husbandry. It was not until the last quarter of the fifteenth century that the land market showed the first signs of revival.

Larson, Rethinking, p. 85; Bailey, Decline of serfdom, tables 7.4, 10.4, 11.1; Fryde, Peasants and landlords, p. 139; Mate, ‘East Sussex land market’, p. 53; Harvey, Westminster abbey, pp. 271-2; Bailey, Serfdom in England, p. 320.

Harvey, Westminster abbey, pp. 269-71; Howell, Land, family, pp. 50-2; C. Dyer, ‘Occupation of the land’, p. 88; Bailey, A marginal economy?, pp. 265-80; Mate, ‘East Sussex land market’, p. 53; Fryde, Peasants and landlords, pp. 139, 143; Whittle, ‘Individualism’, pp. 46-8.

Foden, Norton, p. 249; Dyer, ‘Tenant farmers’, p. 642.

Dyer, ‘Agrarian problem’, pp. 24-6.

TABLE 2		ABOUT HERE
The severe conditions of the 1430s also damaged infrastructure, which was either costly to repair or was left to deteriorate. The breaching of river and sea banks, as documented above, resulted in either expensive repairs or the abandonment of land to the flood waters. Softer stone, such as chalk, would have fissured in the extreme cold, causing damage to buildings and bridges. The buildup of river ice in 1437 caused the collapse of two arches and the Stonegate at the southern end of London bridge, necessitating urgent, expensive, repairs: if this experience was typical of other bridges, and given the severe cold weather of the 1450s and 1460s, the on- going costs of upkeep and repair would have risen sharply and remained high.

Galloway and Potts, ‘Marine flooding’, pp. 375, 377.

Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, pp. 8-9.

Harrison, Bridges of medieval England, pp. 181-2; Dyson and Watson, ‘London Bridge Is Broken Down’, 129–31.

There have been few detailed studies of urban revenues across this decade, but there are unmistakable signs of distress where local studies have delved deeper. Petitions to the Crown in 1439 and 1440 from Richmond (Yorkshire), Wallingford (Oxfordshire) and Winchester (Hampshire) refer to depopulation and financial hardship caused by recent pestilences and epidemics. In 1438 the fair tolls at Barnard Castle (Co. Durham) fell to one third of their normal total. Between 1430 and 1435 an average of 40 market courts were held annually in the borough of Thetford (Norfolk), but this fell to 26 in 1436-7 and 18 in 1443-4. The reduction in the number of Thetford courts almost certainly reflected dwindling trading activity rather than administrative reform, because arrears there had averaged a mere 8s. 5d. throughout the 1420s (eight accounts), but rose tenfold in the 1430s to an average of nearly 87s. (seven accounts), peaking at over £8 in 1439-40. The number of brewers operating in Colchester (Essex) dropped sharply in 1433-4 and again 1439, which Britnell attributes to outbreaks of disease. The 1430s saw a major downturn in the fishing industry at Scarborough.

Rawcliffe, Urban bodies, p. 367.

Pollard, ‘Northeastern economy’, p. 101.

TNA, DL 29/291/4791 to 4806.

TNA, DL29/291/4773 to 4800.

Britnell, Growth and decline, p. 202.

Heath, ‘North Sea fishing’, pp. 65-8.

The poor weather and the disruptions of trade due to the war with France led to dramatic reductions in England’s wool and cloth exports. . For example, the annual volume of wool exported from London almost halved between the 1420s and 1430s, and did not recover the former level until the 1470s. Similarly, cloth exports from Boston (Lincolnshire) halved between the 1420s and 1430s, wool exports fell over 40%, and no wool was exported at all between September 1435 and September 1439: recovery in the 1440s was very slow. The harsh winters probably resulted in river ports such as Boston being ice-bound at regular intervals and therefore inactive: indeed, in 1434-5 chronicles record the freezing of the river Thames east of London bridge. The borough of Grimsby (Lincolnshire) charged boats using its haven for ‘landage and ringage’, which fell by one half between the early 1420s and the early 1440s.

Lloyd, English wool trade, pp. 261-8.

Oldland, English woollen industry, table 12.4.

Based on 17,364 cloths in nine years (1,929 per annum) from October 1420 to November 1429; 9,019 cloths in nine years November 1430 to Michaelmas 1439 (1,002 per annum); and 10,543 cloths in nine years from Michaelmas 1440 to November 1449 (1,171 per annum). Wool exports, based on the same dates and nine years, 20,828 sacks in the 1420s (2,314 per annum), 12,121 (1,346 per annum), 12,291 (1,366 per annum), Rigby and Nash, eds., Overseas Trade of Boston, pp. 30-1, 70-1.

Pribyl, ‘Climate induced crisis’, p. 9.

Landage and ringage averaged 13s. 4d. per annum in 1421-5 (three accounts) and 7s. 1d. in 1441-2; and the common profit averaged 27s. 10d. per annum in the former and 13s. 9d. in 1441-2, Rigby, Medieval Grimsby, pp. 135-7.

The litany of disruption and hardship described above explains the severe downturn in economic activity between 1436 and 1442. Yet these generalisations are subject to three important caveats. The first is that the severity of the weather varied regionally, as did the extent of food shortages and the spread of disease. The winter of 1435-6 appears to have been especially severe in northern England: furthermore, upland areas would have been harshest hit, because temperatures drop up to one degree Celsius with every one hundred metres above sea level. Similarly, the high mortalities recorded in parts of East Anglia in the late 1430s are not a feature of many manors in the west Midlands. The second caveat is that the capacity of communities to cope with the extreme weather also varied. In general, the English economy was better equipped to cope with extreme weather and harvest failures than it had been during the Great Famine of the 1310s. It is telling that fuel prices did not rise appreciably, unlike during the cold snap of the 1350s following the Black Death when the prices of coal and wood were almost double those of the 1340s, which indicates that by the 1430s the supply chain for fuel had become more stable and flexible. Therefore, some communities show few if any signs of distress, either because the worst of the weather and epidemics passed them by or because their buoyant economies were able to ride these afflictions: this was characteristic of certain textile manufacturing towns and their hinterlands, such as Castle Combe (Wiltshire) and Hadleigh (Suffolk). Perhaps these manufacturers even benefited from a surge in demand for warm clothing and blankets during the cold snap.

Broadberry et al., ‘British business cycles’, Figs 3 and 4, Appendix 1.

Camenisch et al., ‘The 1430s’, pp. 2116-18.

Dyer, Standards of living, p. 268.

Hatcher, British coal, p. 576; Bailey, After the Black Death, pp. 76-7.

Britnell, Growth and decline, p. 193; Hare, ‘Lords and their tenants’, p. 27; Woods, Medieval Hadleigh, table 10.20 (p. 265).

V TENURIAL CHANGE 1430s TO 1460s: DEMESNES
The winters of the 1430s were the first severe weather event of the Spörer Solar Minimum and the contraction in economic activity between 1436 and 1441 marked the start of the ‘Great Slump’ of the mid-fifteenth century: ‘one of the deepest, most pervasive and enduring of all depressions’, from which the first clear signs of recovery only appear from the 1470s. The characteristics of the Great Slump are well known: sagging prices, squeezed profits, depressed land market, reduced economic activity, sluggish trade, and bullion famine. Yet two general points merit particular emphasis. The first is that even this extended recession comprised a succession of sub-phases with subtly different characteristics. For example, amid the gloom were bursts of economic recovery in the mid-1440s and the early 1460s, and winter temperatures in the 1440s and 1460s were not as severe as those of the 1430s and 1450s. The second point is that the events of 1430s marked the beginning of the Great Slump, but they were not the direct, single, cause of what followed: the length and nature of the recession was the consequence of a number of contingent and compounding forces, some of them interacting— such as endemic warfare and reduced international trade—and some of them independent, such as the volcanic activity of the 1450s.

Hatcher, ‘Great Slump’, p. 246.

Hatcher, ‘Great slump’, p. 270 (quote); Pollard, ‘Northeastern economy’, pp. 103-4; Fryde, Peasants and landlords, pp. 145-84.

Hatcher, ‘Great Slump’, pp. 240-55; Campbell, Great Transition, pp. 371-3.

Hatcher, ‘Great Slump’, p. 237.

Broadberry et al., ‘Business cycles’, appendix 1.

Campbell, Great Transition, pp. 366-73.

If, as Campbell argues, the depression of the mid fifteenth century marks the end of the Great Transition and presages the Great Divergence, then the individual responses of European societies to the depression were potentially important in shaping their future economic trajectories. Indeed, Campbell is explicit that responses to this ‘extremely testing time, when the brakes were firmly on’, differed across Europe, which he attributes to ‘the character of prevailing property rights and the tenurial balance of power between tenants and lords’. The next two sections develop this theme by exploring how one of the most significant features of the Great Slump, the acute depression in the rural land market, triggered key institutional changes in England. It will be argued that the downturn in the land market which began in the 1430s proved a watershed in both the management of seigniorial demesnes and the transition from the traditional form of customary tenure to copyhold tenure. These changes saw an end to any possibility that landlords could restore the traditional terms of tenure on servile land or return to the heyday of direct demesne exploitation, and they established the preconditions for the emergence of copyhold tenure.

Campbell, Great Transition, pp. 364, 371.

As we saw, the short-term hardship and distress for ordinary people generated by the severe weather in the 1430s produced a surge in servile land transfers which reached their fifteenthcentury peak on various manors (Table 2). In some ways, the 1430s have much in common with the 1310s, when climatic deterioration, famine and disease had also caused the number of land transfers to soar. The similarities cease there, however. In the 1310s population pressure was exceptionally high and many land transfers were survival sales of slivers of land by impoverished smallholders to acquisitive wealthier peasants. In the 1430s, by contrast, population pressure was low, land was widely available, standards of peasant welfare were close to their medieval high point, and some landholdings were being surrendered into the lord’s hands because there were no willing heirs or replacements. Estimates of GDP per head in these crisis decades capture these differences: from a lowly 49 in 1310-19 to 66 in the 1430s (1700 = 100). Finally, in the 1310s transfers of freehold land also rose sharply through distress sales, whereas in the 1430s there was no observable rise in freehold transfers. Thus, in the 1430s the turbulence in the land market was confined to the customary sector, because this was the least sought-after category of land and therefore most sensitive to tumbling demand. Some tenants in the 1430s had decided that persisting with some servile holdings in such conditions no longer justified the effort or the risk: in contrast, freehold was worth holding because of its social cache and the defensibility of its title in the courts of common law.

For examples of abandonment, see Mate, ‘Economic and social roots’, p. 672; Fryde, Peasants and landlords, pp. 143, 150.

Broadberry, et al. British economic growth, appendix 5.3.

Bell et al., ‘Reappraisal’, figs. 3a, 3b and 5, show that the volume of sales of low value freeholds—i.e. those most likely to represent distress sales—declined in the 1430s.

In the 1430s the level of entry fines fell to their lowest point for both the large, standardised holdings and for cottages in north-east England across the whole of the period from the 1370s to the 1640s, P. Larson, Rethinking, p. 85.

Another important difference between these two decades of crises is their aftermath. In the wake of the 1310s, the weather was highly variable and society remained calamity-sensitive and prone to recurrent subsistence crises, which persisted until the arrival of plague in the late 1340s. Profits from agriculture were variable, yet strong enough to sustain the buoyancy of the land market and to encourage many landlords to continue with the direct exploitation of their demesnes. Societal resilience—the capacity to bounce back from natural disasters—was low. In stark contrast, between the 1430s and 1460s base levels of GDP per head and societal resilience to disaster were much higher. This period was also characterised by very cold weather and a sustained economic depression, in which grain and livestock prices reached a low point in the 1440s and 1450s and did not pick up decisively until the 1480s (figure 5). Consequently, the 1430s proved a tipping point in the management of seigniorial demesnes in England.

Bekar and Reed, ‘Land markets’; Stone, ‘Impact of drought’; Schofield, ‘Peasants and food security’.

Figure 5 about here
Figure 5. Decennial means of grain and livestock prices, 1400 to 1489
Source: as in figure 4.
As is well-known, by the start of the fifteenth century most demesne land was being leased for a term of years, either as a single lease to an individual lessee or in many small parcels to different tenants. A minority of demesnes were still being exploited directly. This situation changed in four main ways in response to the stresses of the 1430s and the ensuing depression. First, from the 1430s the value of demesne leases fell, while defaults on rent payments rose; second, many demesne leases began to lengthen; third, some of those landlords still exploiting their demesnes directly now switched to leasing; and, finally, some lords even ceased leasing demesnes, granting them instead as parcels on heritable money tenures, thereby alienating them permanently. The compound effect was to cement the permanent withdrawal of most English landlords from direct demesne cultivation.
The falling value of demesne leases, the lengthening of leases, mounting debts, and the problems of absconding lessees and finding replacements, are well attested. For example, in 1437-8 only 23 acres of demesne could be leased at Otford and Shoreham (Kent), and thereafter officials had to make strenuous efforts to find tenants. The downward trend was difficult to reverse. In 1450 the value of the single lease for the Methwold demesne was 20% lower than it had been in 1430, and between 1429 and 1446 the value of land leased out in Romney and Walland marshes (Kent) by All Souls College, Oxford, had fallen by 20%. Likewise, demesne lessees struggled to pay their full rents from the 1430s causing mounting arrears and declining cash flows for their landlords. Ecclesiastical lords in Wiltshire who were still exploiting their arable demesnes directly switched to leasing during the course of the 1430s, because the profitability of direct cultivation had reached a tipping point and the unsettled conditions persuaded them to opt for the security of a rental income. The uncertain conditions during the Great Slump also explain some dramatic fluctuations in managerial policy. In the early 1430s the demesne land of the manors of Walsham and High Hall was leased in numerous parcels on short terms—some just for one year—to multiple tenants, but between 1434 and 1436 rent arrears soared and tenants turned over. In response, from September 1437 most of the demesne of Walsham was wrapped into a single lease to one local tenant, which soon brought arrears under control. In 1441 a new lord changed the approach again, this time leasing both manors in their entirety to a single tenant. In 1449 there was another change in policy, when the lord reverted to the previous system of leasing smaller parcels to various tenants, but arrears jumped suddenly, perhaps due to the epidemic which struck the region in 1452-3: as we will see, this prompted yet another change in approach in 1453.

Raftis, Ramsey abbey, pp. 292-4; Harvey, Westminster abbey, pp. 157-8; Dyer, Lords and peasants, pp. 168-70, 180-3, 210-11; Faith, ‘Berkshire’, pp. 166-7; Bailey, Marginal economy?, pp. 284-5; Fryde, Peasants and landlords, pp. 145-54; Whittle, ‘Individualism’, p. 47.

DuBoulay, Lordship of Canterbury, p. 225; Mate, ‘Occupation of the land’, pp. 126-7.

Bailey, Marginal economy, table 5.6; Mate, ‘Occupation of the land’, p. 126; Draper, ‘Farmers’, pp. 11617.

Dyer, Lords and peasants, pp. 180-3.

Hare, Prospering society, pp. 86-7, 96.

McLaughlin and Bailey, eds., Manorial account rolls, pp. 140-5.

McLaughlin and Bailey, eds., Manorial account rolls, pp. 151-81.

McLaughlin and Bailey, eds., Manorial account rolls, pp. 195-202.

One managerial response to the turbulence and downturn in the land market from the 1430s has largely escaped historians’ notice: the decision by some lords to discard their demesne lands through piecemeal grants in various parcels to tenants on heritable money tenures. The alienation of demesnes in this manner is known, but the scale and pace of change between the 1430s and 1460s has not been appreciated. The direct link between this phenomenon and the exceptional conditions of the 1430s is illustrated by the actions of the lord of Wakefield, who between January and April 1436 granted 184 acres of uncultivated demesne, mainly around Holme, but also in Hipperholme and Sowerby (Yorkshire), to over thirty tenants in small parcels on hereditary customary tenures for a fixed cash rent per annum and a nominal entry fine: effectively, a heritable copyhold. This was an exceptional gesture: 18 acres had been granted in 1435 and 12 acres in 1433, but otherwise such grants were very unusual. The winters of 1435 and 1436 were exceptionally hard in these upland settlements, so the grants must have been intended to ease the difficulties faced by the tenants. perhaps these grants were for winter grazing or for spring sowing of grain. Yet granting these parcels on heritable customary tenure, not on fixed-term leases, meant the permanent alienation of this portion of the demesne into the tenant sector.

Dyer, Lords and peasants, p. 293; Whittle, Development of agrarian capitalism, p. 75.

Fraser, ed., Wakefield Court Rolls 1433-6, pp. 152-74.

A surge of demesne alienations from the 1430s is also recorded at Kibworth Harcourt (Leicestershire), where in 1439 Merton College reorganised the structure of the manorial landholdings including granting the entire demesne land to various tenants on customary tenures. Elsewhere, the 1430s marked the starting point of this process. Between the 1430s and 1460s around one hundred acres of the Bredfield demesne, perhaps half of the total, were converted piecemeal to hereditary money tenures (known locally as ‘fee farms’). In the 1440s around one hundred demesne acres at Winslow (Buckinghamshire) were granted to tenants heritably for a fixed money rent. In 1400 Leiston abbey (Suffolk) was pursuing a mixed strategy on its demesne, exploiting some sections directly while leasing other parcels for terms of years to various local tenants. There follows a gap in the court roll series, but when it resumes in the mid-fifteenth century the abbey was granting out many parcels of demesne on hereditary fee farms, and by 1467 at least 200 acres of its Leiston demesne was now held on this form of tenure. The fluctuating management policies at Walsham demesne since the 1430s, noted above, were decisively resolved in October 1453, when Alice Chaucer, as lady of the manor, carved up the entire 387-acre arable demesne into 22 separate parcels to as many tenants, all granted as ‘new rents’ and ‘at fee farm’ for a fixed annual rent. Other manors followed suit. In the 1420s the bulk of the arable demesne of Walsham Church House had been granted in four parcels on fixed terms, three on leases of twenty years and the fourth as a grant for life. However, by the 1450s the demesne was held on hereditary fee farms.

Howell, Land, family and inheritance, pp. 18-19, 50-1, 63-4.

Bailey, ‘Relative weakness’, pp. 51-2.

Bailey, Serfdom in England, pp. 325-6, adding to the 240 acres which had also been converted to hereditary monetary tenure in the 1340s.

CUL, Vanneck Ms., Box 9, courts held December 1396 to August 1398, including court held January 1398 when, for example, a 50-acre demesne enclosure in Buxlowe was leased for seven years. No fee farms were granted in the many extant manorial courts of Richard II’s reign.

CUL, Vanneck Ms., Box 17, 1467 survey, f. 91: in 1399 the same parcel had been leased for a term of years. See also ff. 37, 48, 71, 79, 86. For demesne grants of fee farm in extant court rolls, CUL Vanneck Ms., Box 9, courts held December 1448, January 1449 and July 1452.

Grants for at least 322 acres are recorded, but other grants include illegible or unstated acreages, S/A, HA504/1/13.18.

S/A HA504/1/21A.4; McLaughlin and Bailey, eds., Manorial account rolls, pp. xxii-xxiii.

S/A HA504/1/21A.5, courts held January 1446, January 1447, June 1452, and HA504/1/21B.1, court held January 1463.

Why did some landlords permanently alienate part or all their demesnes on hereditary money tenures rather than continuing with leasing? One reason was administrative: leasing parcels of demesne on short-term leases to different tenants was time-consuming to manage and the benefits of doing so diminished in the 1430s when rents were declining, arrears were rising, leases were being relinquished early, and tenants were harder to find. Another reason was risk aversion. Landlords must have feared that swathes of land would remain unoccupied or, at best, leased to unreliable and unsuitable tenants. Their best options were thus either to secure a long-term lease for the whole demesne with a reliable lessee or to grant individual parcels of demesne land permanently to various local tenants. Both options reduced seigniorial prospects of future windfalls and rent hikes, but they did offer better prospects for a more stable revenue stream and spread the financial risks across a wider base of tenants who, unlike short-term lessees, had a vested interest in riding the economic downturn.

Britnell, ‘Pastons’, pp. 132-44.

VI TENURIAL CHANGE 1430s TO 1460s: CUSTOMARY LAND
Demesne lands held as heritable money tenures were prototype copyholds, in the sense that they possessed the common attributes of what came to be known as copyhold tenure: i.e. one held heritably for an annual cash head rent fixed at the time of the initial grant and owing an entry fine and suit of court, and which was held at the will of the lord according to the custom of the manor. Yet copyhold as a recognisable and technical form of legal tenure did not exist in the mid-fifteenth century, and only began to emerge as an identifiable legal concept from the 1480s when it appeared increasingly in disputes over titles to land brought to the court of Common Pleas. The gradual evolution of the traditional tenure in villeinage held for labour services— which in c.1300 had dominated customary landholdings—into the copyhold tenure of c.1500 is a complex, prolonged, and obscure process, not least because of a pervasive vagueness in the contemporary record of tenurial forms and wide variations in local conditions. Yet copyhold as a legal tenure could only emerge when two key preconditions had reached a critical mass across England: the practice of issuing ‘copies’ of the court roll entry of the transfer of customary land (which gave the tenure its name), and the conversion of customary land to a fixed annual money rent—i.e. not for the labour services and uncertain servile dues characteristic of service tenancies—for life or heritably. It is highly likely that the trends set in motion in the 1430s and consolidated in the ensuing depression provided the final and decisive push to achieving that critical mass.

Harvey, ‘Conclusion’, p. 338; Garnett-Goodyear, ‘Common law’; Currie, ‘Tenants’ copies’, pp. 3-4.

Harvey, ‘Conclusion’, pp. 328-30; Hoyle, Land market’, pp. 2-6; Bailey, ‘Customary tenures’; Currie, ‘Tenants’ copies’, pp. 3-5.

It is not possible to quantify accurately just how common were copies and heritable and life money tenures at a given moment in time, so measuring the impact of the Great Slump is inexact. We can confidently state, however, that copies of customary land were known in 1350; that they became more popular in the second half of the fourteenth century; that by 1400 they were still not found everywhere and their use may not have been routine even where they were found; and that by the sixteenth century their use and distribution was widespread. These early copies provided tenants with written proof of the terms of their tenure as a matter of convenience and local practice, but they had no wider technical or legal significance. In a parallel development, during the fourteenth century more and more customary land was formally converted from the old service tenancies to a fixed annual money rent held heritably (fee farms) or for lives owing an entry fine, suit of court and perhaps a heriot. By one estimate, in the early fifteenth century perhaps 30% of customary land in England was now held on these money tenancies and 25% on fixed-term leases, with the remaining 45% still being held on some form of service tenancy. Yet, by the start of the sixteenth century, money rent held heritably or for lives was the dominant form of tenure on customary land.

Currie, ‘Tenants’ copies’, pp. 4-5, 13-14, 18, fig. 2, appendices 1 to 3.

Harvey, ‘Conclusion’, pp. 337-8; Bailey, ‘Customary tenures’, pp. 213, 220.

The estimates are from Bailey, After the Black Death, fn.107, p. 321. For the description of tenancies on customary land in the early fifteenth century, see Schofield, ‘Tenurial developments’, pp. 255-60; Bailey, ‘Transformation of customary tenures’, pp. 210-30; Bailey, Decline of serfdom, pp. 105-7, 128-9, 135-8, 156-9, 169-73, 186-88, 199-201, 213-14, 220-2, 241-54; Bailey, After the Black Death, pp. 301-7.

There is a strong case for identifying the decades from the 1430s to the 1470s as the crucial period when the spread of copies and money tenures became the dominant and pervasive practice. Jane Whittle has already identified the first half of that period as a decisive ‘new phase’ in the customary land market, one characterised by a peak in the proportion of land transferred outside the family and in the proportion of land granted directly to a tenant from the lord, rather than being transferred directly from one tenant to another through sale, gift or inheritance: grants directly from the lord peaked at one third of all grants, having seldom exceeded 10% of all grants over the long term. For example, seigniorial grants peaked in the 1430s at around one half of all transfers on the bishop of Worcester’s manors of Hanbury, Kempsey and Whitstones (Worcestershire). Grants directly from the lord comprised land which was either abandoned and unoccupied or which had no willing heir, both of which surged in the 1430s and remained commonplace during the Great Slump.

Whittle, ‘Individualism’, p. 47 and tables 1; Jones, ‘Bedfordshire’, pp. 200-21.

Whittle, ‘Individualism’, p. 47 and table and 6.

Dyer, Lords and peasants, pp. 302-3.

The trauma in the customary land market and its effects are illustrated at Totton (Hants., table 3). In the 1430s the total number of transfers were as high as in any decade of the fifteenth century, while the number of abandoned holdings (seven) and of vacant holdings granted by the lord (nine) were also at their peak. Conversely, the number of inter-tenant transfers was lowest.
TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE
Thus, from the 1430s heirs and existing tenants seem increasingly reluctant to hold customary land in a depressed land market, forcing landlords to find new tenants who were often outsiders. The implications for tenurial change were significant. First, there was a tendency from the 1430s for greater precision in the recording of tenurial terms in manorial court rolls, including wider use of the phrase ‘by copy’, presumably because the newcomers sought greater clarification of their terms. Second, money tenures held heritably or for lives surged in popularity from the 1430s, displacing the existing short-term leases and residual service tenancies, especially in south-east England. In the 1430s references to grants at ‘fee farm’ (heritable money tenures) first appear on some East Anglian manors where hitherto customary land had been overwhelmingly held on short-term leases, and they became increasingly common over the next three decades. For example, in the 1420s every grant of customary land from the lord at Chevington was a fixed-term lease; the first seigniorial grant of a fee farm occurred there in 1439; and by the 1470s 60% of all seigniorial grants were fee farms and only 40% were leases.

Raftis, Tenure and mobility, pp. 199-202; Harvey, ‘Conclusion’, p. 334; Fryde, Peasants and landlords, pp. 230-3; Bailey, ‘Customary tenures’, pp 223-6.

Britnell, ‘Tenant farming’, pp. 615-16; Mate, ‘East Sussex land market’, p. 61; Bailey, ‘Transformation of customary tenures’, p. 225; Bailey, Decline of serfdom, pp. 137-8, 199-201, 232-3, 244, 248-9.

For example at Brandon, University of Chicago, Bacon Ms. 295, mm. 26, 32, 33; and at Staverton, S/A HD1538/357/5, mm. 35, 58, 62.

S/A E3/15.3/1.33 to 1.40b, fee farm in court held June 1439.

Thus, in the 1430s hereditary money tenures gained a toehold on some manors where customary land had previously been principally granted on leases, and the swing then accelerated through the Great Sump. In a parallel development, from the 1430s some tenants holding customary land on the traditional service tenancy on other manors sought to convert them to money tenures through either collective or individual agreements with the lord. For example, in the 1420s every transfer of customary land from one tenant to another at Winslow was a service tenure, but by the 1450s the proportion had fallen to 59% and the remainder were on a heritable money tenure. The rapid change was due to a spate of individual agreements in the 1430s and 1440s, whereby a succession of tenants surrendered their holdings voluntarily and paid an entry fine for immediate readmittance on heritable money tenure. A similar swing from service to hereditary money tenures from the 1430s is evident at Norton and Bredfield. The uptake of these devices in response to the severe conditions of the 1430s struck a chord which resonated over subsequent decades.

Bailey, ‘Customary tenures’, pp. 227-8.

Bailey, Serfdom in England, pp. 324-5.

Bailey, Serfdom in England, pp. 362-3; Bailey, ‘Relative weakness’, p. 50.

The most likely explanation for this change is a desire on the part of the tenants for greater tenurial clarity and security, because the service tenancy remained theoretically vulnerable to some future reimposition of both labour services—currently commuted for cash each year— and to uncertain incidents such as tallage and mill suit, which had generally lapsed informally. Conversion to a money tenure formally removed the possibility that a lord could unilaterally reimpose these servile incidents. While this change benefited tenants and reflected their bargaining power in the depressed land market, it also bestowed some benefit on the landlords. A tenant on a money tenure with a hereditary or life interest was preferable to no tenant at all in an era of anxiety about falling rents, mounting arrears, the constant churn of short-term leases, unreliable tenants, and economic uncertainty.
VII CONCLUSION
As we have seen, the crisis of the 1430s has attracted little attention from historians, especially when compared to the crisis of the 1310s. Yet the events of the 1430s are well worth closer analysis, providing opportunities for inter-disciplinary research to unravel the causal linkages between extreme weather, food and fodder shortages, epidemics and epizootics. Having established a more secure understanding of what happened, historians can explore with greater confidence the complex conjuncture of adverse biological economic, political, and environmental factors between the 1430s and 1470s.
The broader social, economic, political, cultural, and institutional reverberations of the 1430s and the ensuing recession are worth revisiting. For example, the 1430s introduced a state of economic and climatic uncertainty, which might help to explain some of the contemporary political instability, stretching from Cade’s Rebellion in 1450 to the Wars of the Roses. There may be parallels here with events in northwest Ireland where, according to Farrell, ‘it seems likely that the climatic dislocation and probable consequent decline in agricultural revenues pushed the leading Ó Domhnaill magnates into a more competitive state’ and triggered civil war. The potential for re-evaluating this period has been illustrated by this exploration of the impact of the Great Slump on the evolution of customary tenures in England, thereby offering one perspective on the institutional response to the recession among European societies.

Mate, ‘Economic and social roots’, pp. 661-676;Watts, Wars of the Roses, pp. 92-117; see also Dyer, ‘Agrarian problem, 1440–1520’, p. 22.

Farrell, ‘Land, lineage and power’, p. XX.

The events of the 1430s caused a hiatus in the customary land market and a sharp fall in land values, an increase in rent arrears, the abandonment of some holdings, and difficulties for landlords finding tenants. Landlords leasing their demesnes also faced escalating rent arrears and lapsed tenancies. These challenging conditions endured for the next three decades. The tenurial devices adopted in response to them in the 1430s were neither new nor, initially at least, implemented on a vast scale, but they did prove effective in attracting or retaining tenants and so gained traction over the next three decades as the land market remained stubbornly depressed. Lords now either abandoned direct management of their demesnes or leased them for longer terms or even converted some or all of them to heritable customary money tenures. The proportion of customary land held on heritable and life money tenures soared at the expense of short-term leases and lapsed service tenures. These tenurial changes are likely to have been driven by the preferences of tenants, because this was unquestionably a buyer’s market, although the changes also benefited lords in securing tenants for land which otherwise would lay vacant and who now had a long-term interest in the tenancy. Many of these new tenants were non-kin and outsiders, who were more likely to seek greater precision and clarity about the terms of their tenancy, and reassurances about its security: hence a surge in the provision of copies.
The initial steps taken in these directions in the 1430s became a heavier footfall over the next three decades. Consequently, the door was now permanently closed to any return to the manorial system in its pre-Black Death form, i.e. based on the direct exploitation of demesnes and customary land held for labour services, renders in kind and uncertain servile incidents. Furthermore, the essential preconditions had now been established for the emergence from the 1480s of copyhold as a form of legal tenure: the widespread use of copies and the majority of customary land being held on money tenure.
These trends cannot explain all the chronologies and nuances of contemporary tenurial development, such as why copyholds for lives came to dominate in western England or copyholds of inheritance around London and East Anglia. Likewise, more research is required to understand how these tenurial developments created the framework for the major restructuring which occurred in English agriculture between 1440 and 1520: the engrossment of holdings into economically viable units, their reorganisation into more compact farms, investment in piecemeal enclosures and the building up of livestock herds. We can be certain, though, that tenurial change between the 1430s and 1460s had transformed the institutional and legal framework within which landlords and tenants operated once the land market picked up again from the 1480s. Thereafter, customary land was the subject of litigation in the royal courts, its title became more secure and attractive to enterprising tenants, townsfolk and gentry, and it became harder to acquire. Herein lies the complex explanation for the emergence of large, commercial farms in early modern England.

Bailey, ‘Customary tenures’, pp. 225-6.

Miller, Agrarian History; Hoyle, ‘Land market’, pp. 2-3; Whittle, ‘Individualism’; Dyer, ‘Agrarian problem’, pp. 30-4; Bailey, After the Black Death, pp. 301-7.

Dyer, ‘Agrarian problem’, pp. 24-6.

Whittle, ‘Individualism’, tables 1 and 6, and pp. 32-41; Garrett-Goodyear, ‘Common Law’, pp. 35-51.

Aston and Philpin, eds., Brenner Debate; Hoyle, ‘Land market’; Mate, ‘East Sussex land market’; Whittle, Development of agrarian capitalism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I became aware of the events of the 1430s as a young researcher, but it took an invitation from Christian Liddy to the Fifteenth Century Conference at Durham in 2025 to address the subject directly. Mark Peaple produced figures 1 and 2. Jordan Claridge answered various queries and Steve Rigby improved a draft of the article. The two anonymous referees exemplified the benefits to any scholar of a robust peer review system.
ORCID Mark Bailey https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8957-2405
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