Itself much influenced by Edward Miller's study of the manors of the bishopric of Ely, Sir Michael Postan's celebrated pamphlet has remained for over forty years the only monograph devoted to the famuli, the staff of permanent workers on the medieval manors. Yet, as Postan realised, it was incomplete, terminating rather abruptly about 1300. ‘It would also be desirable’, he wrote, ‘to project the history of [the] thirteenth-century study to the point at which it touches upon the great transformations of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.’ This present essay considers, however inadequately in the space available, the survival and importance of the famuli in the later Middle Ages, in particular during the half-century following the most devastating outbreak of bubonic plague, the Black Death of 1348/9.

Published in an ephemeral format, and long out of print, Postan's arguments are so central to this extension of his study that they must be outlined here. Whatever the earlier function of slaves in Anglo-Saxon society, at the time of the Norman Conquest, he contended, ‘they were manorial servants, permanent agricultural labourers’, primarily responsible for ploughing. A generation later, Domesday Book classed many of them as oxherds (bovarii), bordars or cottars, with the status not of slaves but of serfs, occupying smallholdings probably cut out of the demesne. During the twelfth century this change became general.