Quarrel with the King by Adam Nicolson

like a coral reef, a world of such intense internal competitiveness that its struggles and rivalries had been frozen into a set of symbiotic duties and obligations, the rivals in a clinch, by which life alone was sustainable.
    Those obligations were all-pervading. Women and children were set to weeding the arable crops in the early summer. Husbands and fathers lived under a fearsome burden of communal work, or work done for the good of the lord of the manor. At the height of the Middle Ages, every year the villager had to thresh a bushel each (seventy or eighty pounds in weight) of wheat, rye, barley, beans, peas, and two bushels of oats; mow two swathes of a meadow; and reap, bind, and carry half an acre of it. Agreement after agreement specified the amount of dung each man had to carry from his own yard to the arable fields, the number of hurdles he had to make for the fold (a practiced man could make two and a half hurdles a day), and the regular amounts of money he had to contribute to the lord of the manor in return for his right to farm the land: nutsilver at the time of nuts, a rental penny at Easter, lardersilver at one or twopence a head, the substantial tax of tallage at six shillings, eightpence each, the threepence per head for the compulsory and customary drinking sessions called “scotales,” and the cock and three hens at Martinmas, in November.
    This system of obligation and dominance, even as early as the twelfth century, had started to evolve. The work duties of the villeins had often been changed into money payments, threepence or sixpence for “all autumn work.” These villages were not designed to be self-sufficient but to produce, in the grain, a crop that could be sold for cash. Cash played a part in a complex picture of partly “customary” labor—the obligations entered into in the far distant past—and wage-based labor. Some men were paid particular rates for particular jobs; others were taken on for a year or half a year; some simply had rent-free holdings in return for work.
    The Black Death in 1348 and 1349, which killed between a third and a half of the population of England, changed the balance of this world. Entire villages died. In some, lone men were found still alive among houses full of the dead. The relationship between lord and villein shifted. Too much land and a shortage of labor meant vacant holdings, decayed tenements, and collapsing rental values. The bargainon which the ancient communities had worked—land in return for duties—was no longer worth making. After 1350, those with labor to offer found themselves in a suppliers’ market, and the age of compulsory labor on the lord’s land was largely, although not entirely, over. From then onward, people occupied their houses and lands by what became known as “copyhold”—literally a written copy of what they had agreed with the lord, or in fact with his steward, as written down in the manor records. Until the end of the seventeenth century, this was the dominant form of tenure on the Wilton estate.
    The copyhold manor sounds such a dry and legalistic term, but is in fact the label for an intriguing social experiment, lasting two hundred years or so, in the villages of rural England. It occupies a middle ground, which we would hardly recognize today, between the tight and oppressive lordly control of the early Middle Ages, which came to an end with the Black Death, and the almost equally oppressive regime of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, against which Cobbett and others would rail, where the sheer financial dominance of the landlords had erased any rights of the ordinary people. The sense of mutuality in community relationships, which was the dominant note in the copyhold manor, was never stronger than from about 1450 to about 1650. It is at least an interesting coincidence that the second half of that period was almost precisely the time when the fashion for the