1. Perspectives on serfdom and migration

There is an impressive body of work on servile migration in the late Middle Ages. In the 1960s and 1970s, J.A. Raftis and his students at the University of Toronto pioneered the intensive use of manorial court rolls to track the movements of bond tenants from particularly well-documented manors.Footnote ⁶ This approach was then further developed and refined in important studies by Christopher Dyer, Robert K. Field, and Ernest Jones, among others.Footnote ⁷ Taken together, these studies emphasised that servile migration was extensive, particularly in the fifteenth century, and, like much work on medieval migration more generally, showed that it was usually localised.

This work on servile migration formed part of a wider interpretation of the nature of serfdom in medieval England and the chronology of its decline. This was based on the idea that the radical change in the land to labour ratio resulting from the loss of between thirty and fifty per cent of the population in the Black Death of 1348–1349 did not lead to the immediate dissolution of serfdom in the face of new market conditions. Instead, lords were supposed to have reacted to the challenges thrown up by post-plague labour conditions by vigorously enforcing a concerted ‘seigniorial reaction’ which strengthened the coercive powers they wielded over their villeins. This reaction was bolstered by a new legislative programme targeting the labour market which was enacted by the royal government in the form of the Ordinance and Statute of Labourers (1349 and 1351 respectively) which further increased the coercive capacity of lords over their servile tenants.Footnote ⁸ The 1351 statute, for instance, enabled a landlord to return a flown serf without being obliged to wait until the detainee's personal status had been established in court.Footnote ⁹ With the aid of the crown, landlords were understood to have maintained – or even tightened – the bonds of serfdom, including efforts to restrict movement, until at least the final decades of the fourteenth century when the edifice of serfdom eventually began to crumble in the face of market conditions.Footnote ¹⁰ For Raftis, a seigniorial reaction postponed the onset of high levels of servile migration – and with it, the dissolution of serfdom – until around 1400: it was only then that ‘the trickle of emigration [before c.1400] burst into a veritable tide’.Footnote ¹¹ Jones, meanwhile, emphasised that Spalding Priory (Lincolnshire) was highly efficient in tracking its serfs and in securing chevage payments from those who left the Priory's manors through the middle of the fourteenth century, and concluded that this vigilance only began to wane in the mid-fifteenth century.Footnote ¹²

A corollary of this reading of the chronology of the decline of serfdom is that migrants would have overwhelmingly flocked to towns after 1349 because a serf who resided for a year and a day in either a royal borough or certain seigniorial boroughs could obtain de jure freedom in accordance with the common law.Footnote ¹³ In essence, towns might have offered an escape route for large numbers of servile tenants if serfdom was being upheld rigorously in the countryside. It has accordingly been suggested that urbanisation driven by the flight of servile tenants played an important role in shaping modern economic growth. Economists and economic historians have argued that a flow of migrants helps to explain the ‘Little Divergence’ – the gap in economic performance which opened up between the leading economies of north-western Europe, including England, on one hand and those of southern, central, and eastern Europe on the other.Footnote ¹⁴ This influx of servile migrants, and particularly female servile migrants, to cities in north-western Europe, for example, is supposed to have contributed to an increase in real wages per capita; to the emergence of agrarian capitalism; and to the incentivisation for the later marriage, reduced birth-rates, and intensive capital formation which characterised the European Marriage Pattern.Footnote ¹⁵ Servile migration could, therefore, have played a role in the even broader trajectory of economic change known as the ‘Great Divergence’, which saw the leading European economies grow faster and more sustainably than economies in other areas of the globe over the long run.Footnote ¹⁶

There is no doubt that towns in medieval England depended on an influx of migrants.Footnote ¹⁷ The 1377 poll tax returns suggest – in line with the idea, associated with the European Marriage Pattern, that towns presented a particularly attractive destination for female migrants – that most towns contained a higher ratio of women to men than most rural areas.Footnote ¹⁸ Nonetheless, the extent of this influx must have been more limited than has sometimes been suggested as the proportion of the population living in towns remained at roughly 20 per cent through the fourteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ Furthermore, the assumption that serfdom was restrictive in practice both before and after the Black Death which underpins the conventional picture of servile migration has been challenged strongly by Mark Bailey. In works published in 2014 and 2015, Bailey surveyed serfdom after the Black Death in detail and argued that the idea of a post-1350 seigniorial reaction was, in large part, a myth.Footnote ²⁰ Instead of a retrenchment lasting into the last decades of the century, Bailey suggested that serfdom quickly collapsed after the initial onset of the pestilence and that, while socially stigmatising, serfdom was not particularly disadvantageous to serfs economically or widely weaponised by landlords.Footnote ²¹ This revisionist perspective built on a historiography suggesting that English serfdom was in practice moderated by custom and, in some ways, a weak institutional structure even before the Black Death.Footnote ²² Chris Briggs, for example, suggested that restrictions on servile movement were sporadic and limited even at the height of serfdom c.1300.Footnote ²³

Even more recently, Bailey buttressed his argument with a detailed analysis of servile migration between c.1249 and c.1500 as evidenced in manorial court rolls, with the bulk of the evidence discussed by Bailey dating to after 1349.Footnote ²⁴ This tested a number of assumptions by exploring whether serfdom restricted migration either before or after the Black Death; whether towns were the favoured destinations of servile migrants; and whether female migrants disproportionately migrated to towns. Bailey found that around one third of all servile migrants in his sample went to urban destinations, suggesting that, while they were important centres for migration, ‘towns were not as overwhelmingly attractive to servile migrants as postulated in some of the grand theories of social and economic development in late medieval Europe’.Footnote ²⁵ Furthermore, while 59 per cent of female migrants in four Midlands manors travelled to towns as opposed to 34 per cent of male migrants, Bailey found that fewer women from his East Anglian case studies migrated to towns than men: 22 per cent of women to 28 per cent of men from one sample of five manors and 28 per cent of women to 30 per cent of men from another sample of twelve manors.Footnote ²⁶ Nor, to Bailey, does a picture of serfs flying before a reinvigorated, arbitrary, and oppressive seigniorial regime map onto most of the manorial evidence. Serfs can, for example, be shown to have returned voluntarily to their home manor after their initial departure to take up landholdings; sometimes ‘flown’ serfs went to another of their lord's manors; and, if they wanted to leave for good, competition between landlords provided ample opportunities for landholding and waged employment in other rural areas. So, overall, in practice serfdom ‘was not sufficiently onerous or restrictive in economic terms to prompt widespread evasion or a determination to obtain personal freedom’.Footnote ²⁷

This recent work should serve as a prompt for further detailed studies. More research is needed to understand the extent to which lords attempted to impose restrictions on servile migration in the immediate post-plague period, to explore the extent to which migration was actually conditioned by these attempts when they were made and, more generally, to ascertain whether serfdom disintegrated in the 1350s or whether lords were able to enforce some of their rights over their servile tenants into the 1360s. This article takes up this challenge by providing a close analysis of servile migration as evidenced in the manorial court rolls of the manors of Great Waltham and High Easter in central Essex to 1361. The manorial evidence suggests that servile migration from Great Waltham and High Easter usually took place over short distances and that migration was focused to a substantial extent on rural destinations rather than urban centres in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. By focusing on the middle decades of the fourteenth century in particular, this article also engages the vexed question of whether there was a seigniorial reaction in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death and, if so, whether seigniorial efforts were effectively implemented. It finds that migration was monitored to an extent, with a particular focus on male villeins, and that enforcement of the restrictions on the movement of serfs was attempted in the 1350s. It also finds, however, that in practice, this effort was usually unsuccessful and that the seigniorial administration on these estates lacked coercive capacity. This adds to our understanding of the ways in which lords and serfs reacted to the new conditions ushered in by the Black Death and contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of the nature of English serfdom and the chronology of its decline.

2. The manors of Great Waltham and High Easter (Essex)

The manors of Great Waltham and High Easter in central Essex formed the heartlands of the English estates of the Bohun earls of Hereford and Essex, one of the realm's wealthiest and most powerful aristocratic families.Footnote ²⁸ Between the late-thirteenth century and the late-fourteenth century, the earldom was headed by Earl Humphrey II (d. 1298), Earl Humphrey III (d. 1322), Earl John (d. 1336), Earl Humphrey IV (d. 1361), and Earl Humphrey V (d. 1373).

The social and economic characteristics of the region in which the manors of Great Waltham and High Easter were located have been traced by the invaluable work of Lawrence Poos.Footnote ²⁹ Central Essex in the fourteenth century was densely populated and highly commercialised.Footnote ³⁰ It was marked to an unusual extent by the presence of rural industry, particularly cloth working, by a highly active land market, and by a polarised landholding structure which facilitated a relatively large degree of economic and social differentiation. Smallholders were very common: in 1328, 43 per cent of tenants at Waltham and 27 per cent of tenants at High Easter held five acres of land or less, and Poos estimated that over half the population of this region were substantially dependent on waged labour in agriculture or work in industry or trade.Footnote ³¹ Although there was a general predominance of free rents across south-eastern England, unfree tenures were also common. It was, indeed, common for personally unfree people in both Essex and East Anglia to hold free land, which both complicated and diluted the distinction between customary tenure and personal status.Footnote ³² Furthermore, the manors were relatively close to London, a city of at least 70,000 people c.1300 and by far the biggest urban settlement in England throughout the fourteenth century, which offered a viable destination for those wishing to migrate to a genuinely large city.Footnote ³³

Both manors were very large: in 1328, Great Waltham contained 3,187 acres of cultivated land and High Easter contained 2,365 acres.Footnote ³⁴ Both contained sizeable demesnes (areas of land managed directly by the lord's administration) but the majority of cultivated land on both manors was nonetheless held by tenants: 71 per cent of the land was tenanted at Great Waltham and 62 per cent at High Easter. Unfree tenures – full customary tenures and molland (an intermediate tenure with lighter customary services and cash rents) – were more prominent than free tenures: over 50 per cent of tenanted land at Great Waltham was held on unfree terms, as compared to 38 per cent on wholly free terms; and over 60 per cent of landholdings at High Easter were held on unfree terms, as compared to 27 per cent held on wholly free terms.Footnote ³⁵ As was the case in other areas of Essex, though, villein tenants on the Bohun manors often held free land as well as customary holdings.Footnote ³⁶

Villeins on these manors were liable for a range of servile incidents. In addition to chevage, payable for permission to live beyond the manor, these included tallage-at-will (a fine imposed on serfs at the will of the lord), merchet (a marriage fine), millsuit (the obligation to grind grain at the lord's mills and no others), and heriot (a death duty of a best beast payable to the lord).Footnote ³⁷ Furthermore, rentals compiled in 1328 detail the heavy labour services owed by those holding on unfree tenures.Footnote ³⁸ At Great Waltham, a customary virgater (a tenant who held a virgate – reckoned at thirty acres – of land on unfree terms) was obliged to perform five works (instances of obligatory, unwaged work on the lord's land) per week and seven at the peak of the harvest, while tenants holding by molland were still liable for weeding, carriage, and harvest works even though their rent was largely paid in cash. At High Easter, customary virgaters and molmen owed eight, rather than seven, weekly works at harvest time. The customary services attached to these landholdings had not generally been commuted and would not be commuted until decades after the Black Death.Footnote ³⁹ In sum, serfdom at Great Waltham and High Easter was extensive and, in theory, involved heavy obligations.

The manorial courts for both manors were held at Pleshy Castle, the administrative centre of the Bohun estates in Essex, which was situated roughly midway between Great Waltham (around two miles to the east) and High Easter (around two miles to the west). The survival rate of the fourteenth-century rolls is generally good.Footnote ⁴⁰ Manorial court rolls have been criticised as sources for rural migration on the basis that many rolls do not specify the location of a departed serf, instead merely noting that the person in question was residing somewhere ‘beyond the lordship’.Footnote ⁴¹ The court rolls for Great Waltham and High Easter do, however, provide information about the specific locations of departed serfs in both the pre- and post-plague period, although this information is far more abundant after 1349.Footnote ⁴² Although earlier evidence is integrated into the dataset, this article concentrates primarily on the period between January 1336 and October 1361, when the manors were held by Earl Humphrey IV. Court rolls are extant for a total of 228 sessions in this period, although there are gaps in the series for 1338–1339, 1340–1341, and 1355–1356.Footnote ⁴³ The earl himself was an assertive lord; his vigorous management of his familial Marcher lordships, for instance, was noted by Rees Davies.Footnote ⁴⁴ The period in which the earl was the lord of the manors of Great Waltham and High Easter spans the massive mortality inflicted by the Black Death. Earl Humphrey IV was therefore one of the lords who had to react to the fact that market forces in the 1350s were suddenly favouring his tenants and his workers. In theory, the enormous change in the ratio of land and labour should have incentivised more of the earl's serfs to migrate in search of better opportunities and should have encouraged him and his administration to seek to restrict servile migration in order to retain tenants and labour.

3. Patterns of servile migration

A total of 52 people were recorded as servile migrants in the manorial court rolls of Great Waltham and High Easter between 1289 and 1361.Footnote ⁴⁵ While this figure accounts for a small proportion of the hundreds of serfs who must have resided on these manors during this period, the distribution of observations of servile migrants by decade is broadly in line with the number of cases observed in other studies of servile migration in late medieval England.Footnote ⁴⁶ After a concerted but short-lived attempt to track servile absence in 1291, the manorial court convened at Pleshy paid little attention to servile migration between 1327 and 1342. After sporadic interest was displayed in the mid-1340s, the manorial court became more systematically interested in the whereabouts of the lord's villeins in the 1350s when a total of 28 villein migrants were named in the court rolls (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Distribution of instances of chevage and presentment for absence

Source: TNA DL 30/62/766; TNA DL 30/63/796–801; TNA DL 30/63/803; TNA DL 30/64/806–808; TNA DL 30/64/810; TNA DL 30/64/812–817.

This increase in evidence needs to be set within the challenges faced by the Bohun administration after the plague. The land hunger which characterised much of the country before 1349 was eased and the proportion of the population living below the poverty line – a group characterised by land deficiency – fell from around 40 per cent in 1348 to under 20 per cent.Footnote ⁴⁷ The end of ‘rural congestion’ meant that lords were faced with a sudden scarcity of tenants, declining rents, and diminishing land productivity.Footnote ⁴⁸ The need to find tenants led landlords to convert customary tenures to leaseholds or to grant them to personally free tenants who refused to render the personal incidents due from those unfree by blood.Footnote ⁴⁹ Earl Humphrey IV was no exception to this general rule and, even in Essex with its high population densities and prevalence of smallholders, there are signs that the earl's administration was aware of, and concerned about, the difficulties of finding bond tenants. In May 1349, numerous landholdings were taken into the lord's hand because of a lack of available heirs to fill them. This included a total of 155 acres of customary land.Footnote ⁵⁰ The challenge of finding tenants willing to take up land on the old customary terms continued through the 1350s and plots of land were leased out in the 1350s, sometimes in return for a cash rent rather than performance of labour services.Footnote ⁵¹ The most dramatic indication of the need to fill holdings came in November 1355, when thirteen able-bodied villeins were ordered to take up vacant plots.Footnote ⁵² The information given in Table 1 should therefore be viewed as indicating seigniorial interest in servile migration within the context of the post-1349 alteration in the ratio of land to labour: it is very probable, for instance, that villeins migrated in the 1330s but that this was not recorded because servile migration in the 1330s did not result in empty holdings as it did two decades later.

Before exploring the pattern of migration as revealed in these entries in more detail, the gendered nature of the evidence needs to be discussed. The desirability of gendering the discussion of late medieval migration has been emphasised recently by Maryanne Kowaleski and carried further by Bailey, who discussed instances of female migration in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the context of debate about the emergence of the European Marriage Pattern in England.Footnote ⁵³ Only four of the 52 servile migrants named in the manorial court rolls of Great Waltham and High Easter between 1291 and 1361 were female. This evidence cannot therefore offer quantitative insight into the movement of female serfs or the nature of their employment. What the evidence does demonstrate, however, is that the attempt to monitor servile movement and enforce restrictions on migration at Great Waltham and High Easter was concerned overwhelmingly with male serfs. This probably constitutes a focus on customary tenants: men made up some three-quarters of the tenantry across both manors in 1328 and thus provided the bulk of the incidents associated with customary landholding and the bulk of labour services.Footnote ⁵⁴ This article, then, illustrates how seigniorial efforts were sometimes qualified and partial due to a gendered focus on male serfs in the manorial court.Footnote ⁵⁵ In turn, although it is impossible to substantiate, it is probable that women from servile families at Great Waltham and High Easter, particularly the young, landless women most likely to be employed as servants, could have left the manor without permission knowing that they were less likely than their male counterparts to be subjected to proceedings in the manorial court for doing so.

Thirty-two observations – 61.5 per cent of the total number – specify the whereabouts of the serf in question. Twenty-one observations – 40 per cent of the total number – note that the serf was residing at a specific geographical location, rather than with a person (this latter category is explored below in Section 4). This enables an analysis of the distances and destinations involved in servile migration from the Bohun manors. Many of those who migrated did so over very short distances. For instance, in 1355 John Sigor was noted by the manorial court as living at Takeley, five miles north-west of Great Waltham.Footnote ⁵⁶ Some villeins, of course, chose to move further afield. In 1353, William Short was presented for living over fifty miles away at Cranfield, a Bedfordshire manor held by Ramsey Abbey, while Thomas Wecher was thought to be living in Northamptonshire, the nearest border of which was some seventy miles north-west of central Essex.Footnote ⁵⁷ Such longer-distance migration was, though, atypical. Table 2 presents a breakdown of the data according to the distance divisions utilised by Bailey. This suggests that the examples of William Short and Thomas Wecher are the only cases of servile migrants travelling what might be considered a long way away from the Bohun manors in central Essex recorded in the mid-fourteenth century manorial court rolls. Almost half of recorded servile migrants moved within nine miles of their home manor, and almost three-quarters stayed within twenty miles.

Table 2.

Distances of servile migration

Source: manorial court rolls cited in Table 1.

How do these findings compare with other studies of servile migration? Jones found that a large proportion of servile migrants recorded as leaving the manors of Spalding Priory c.1250–1500 – perhaps 50–60 per cent of them – went further than 20 miles away from their home manor, but noted this tendency towards longer distance migration was unusual and may have been due to the priory's persistent tracking of its servile population.Footnote ⁵⁸ Field concluded that over 60 per cent of the villeins of Hampton Lovett (Worcestershire) recorded as migrating between 1488 and 1526 stayed within 13 miles of their former home.Footnote ⁵⁹ Similarly, Dyer found that around two-thirds of servile migrants who left the estates of the Bishops of Worcester in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries settled within a ten-mile radius of their home manor.Footnote ⁶⁰ More recently, Dyer's study of servile migration in the Midlands counties of Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire between 1400 and 1499 found that almost half of servile migrants remained within a ten-mile radius, 22 per cent moved between 10 and 19 miles, a further 22 per cent went between 20 and 49 miles, and around 7 per cent migrated to destinations over fifty miles away.Footnote ⁶¹ Likewise, Bailey found that just under half of the serfs who migrated from a sample of nine manors either in the southern Midlands or East Anglia between 1350 and 1500 stayed within a ten mile radius of their home manor, while around 25 per cent moved between 11 and 20 miles, and another quarter travelled over twenty miles in search of new places of residence.Footnote ⁶² Overall, the Essex data tabulated in Table 2 therefore corroborates the findings of modern research into patterns of migration in late medieval England. Migration from Great Waltham and High Easter was generally localised: almost half of recorded servile migrants moved within a ten-mile radius of their home manor, and almost three-quarters stayed within twenty miles.

Section 2 noted that the extent and significance of servile migration to towns has been a focus of previous research. Does the Essex evidence suggest that migrants flocked to urban areas after 1349 to escape the bonds of serfdom and secure personal freedom? Establishing the proportion of migrants with documented locations who moved to a town is methodologically complicated by the difficulty of establishing which settlements should be categorised as towns since neither formal borough status nor the presence of markets and fairs provides a reliable guide to a settlement's level of urbanisation.Footnote ⁶³ Essex did contain some settlements which can be categorised as urban without much ambiguity. The borough of Colchester probably had a population of around 3,000 in 1300 and (after an unusual period of post-plague expansion) around 8,000 by 1400.Footnote ⁶⁴ Beyond Colchester, Poos noted Thaxted, Braintree, Rayne, and Bocking as unambiguously urban locations.Footnote ⁶⁵ Dyer, meanwhile, suggested that Essex contained some fifteen ‘small’ towns of fewer than two thousand inhabitants c.1300.Footnote ⁶⁶ In order to overestimate rather than underestimate the proportion of migrants who relocated to towns, a broad understanding of a town has been followed here and, where there is doubt about a settlement's urban character, it has been classified as a town.Footnote ⁶⁷

Ten of the thirty-two migrants (31 per cent) whose locations are recoverable were recorded as residing in towns. As Table 3 shows, most of these towns were within Essex itself and all were in the south-east of England. Information on the occupations of these individuals in their new homes is generally lacking. It was, however, noted in 1353 that two flown serfs in Braintree were working as smiths, while others in Writtle were working as tanners.Footnote ⁶⁸

Table 3.

Destinations of rural to urban migrants

Source: manorial court rolls cited in Table 1.

How do these findings compare with the recent studies of Dyer and Bailey on levels of rural to urban migration? Dyer found that 38 per cent of servile migrants in his three West Midlands counties in the fifteenth century were reported as living in towns.Footnote ⁶⁹ Bailey found a slightly lower rate of migration to urban centres of around 33 per cent in his study of nine manors in the southern Midlands and East Anglia.Footnote ⁷⁰ Notably, though, this figure was higher for the southern Midlands manors (39 per cent) than for East Anglian manors (29 per cent). Both Bailey's East Anglian figures and the evidence for Essex migration offered here suggests that between a quarter and a third of servile migrants in the wider south-eastern region spanning Essex and East Anglia moved to towns.

Although it is impossible fully to recover the motivations behind migration, it may be that these villeins moved from the Bohun manors to urbanised areas because they were aware that residence in certain towns for a year and a day could confer personal freedom. Yet, while it is certainly possible that those who headed to urban areas did so with thoughts of freedom from Bohun-enforced servitude in their minds, perhaps the most obvious point to make is that a substantial majority of these migrants do not seem to have headed to urban areas, let alone urban areas where prolonged residence could confer personal freedom. Thus the most striking thing about the findings recorded in Table 3 is that only one servile migrant is recorded as having moved from the Bohun lands to London, the flow of migration often assumed to have been common for Essex migrants.Footnote ⁷¹ Almost as striking is the fact that none are recorded as migrating to Colchester, the closest genuinely substantial town, even though both High Easter (ten miles away) and Great Waltham (five miles away) were located within Colchester's primary catchment area for migration.Footnote ⁷²

Institutional factors must have influenced the apparent differences between regions in the proportion of rural to urban migration. Unlike in many areas of the West Midlands, peasants in much of Essex and East Anglia had often in practice been permitted to hold free land. This not only complicated the distinction between personal and tenurial serfdom before 1349 but offered a wider spectrum of opportunities for serfs who wished to take up land in rural areas of Essex after the pestilence. Similarly, smallholdings were very common in both Essex and East Anglia and the sheer availability of numerous small plots of land may have provided more rural options for landholding on both free and unfree terms than in the West Midlands. Essex also had particularly plentiful options for waged labour in agriculture and employment in rural industries such as cloth-making and was therefore characterised by a local occupational framework which provided servile migrants with ample opportunities to stay in rural areas if they wished to find work.Footnote ⁷³

It has traditionally been assumed that the bulk of flown serfs migrated to urban centres to escape a vigorous and widespread seigniorial reaction and take advantages of opportunities for employment available in towns. A substantial minority of servile migrants did relocate to towns. They thus formed part of the more general influx of migrants which kept the proportion of the population residing in urban areas at roughly 20 per cent between 1300 and 1400. It is, though, significant that the Great Waltham and High Easter evidence indicates that around two-thirds of documented servile migrants seemingly chose to remain in rural areas, something paralleled by Bailey's study of other manors in the region. The evidence of manorial court rolls suggests that towns were far from overwhelmingly attractive to servile migrants in the decades following the Black Death even in the south-east of England. Theories of economic growth which presume a flood of migrants heading from the countryside to towns in order to escape the constraints of serfdom therefore need to be refined and revised in light of the evidence of servile migration on the ground.

4. Dynamics of servile migration

This section investigates, where possible, the dynamics lying behind patterns of migration in greater detail. The evidence relating to servile migration from Great Waltham and High Easter dating to the 1340s allows the mechanisms regulating servile migration in the decade before ‘outside options’ became much more abundant to be investigated. At times, the regulation of servile mobility appears to have worked efficiently from the lord's point of view, as appears from two instances in 1343. On 30 May, Roger Goodman was amerced (subjected to a financial penalty) in a court session of the manor of High Easter for residing beyond the manor without the lord's permission.Footnote ⁷⁴ His whereabouts were not stated but he was unlikely to be dwelling far away, as he appeared in the very next session of the court and rendered one capon (a type of fowl) to the lord as chevage.Footnote ⁷⁵ Presentment for absence, therefore, resulted in a chevage payment being made within a matter of weeks. In a meeting of the court of High Easter held in November 1343, Geoffrey Eve was similarly charged with unlicenced absence.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the next meeting of the manorial court, in January 1344, Geoffrey acknowledged his failure to render a yearly capon to the lord as chevage and made a heavy fine of 20s. along with a pledge to render his chevage annually in the future.Footnote ⁷⁷ It is probable this fine was, in effect, a bond for paying chevage in future rather than a sum which was actually levied in 1344. In both of these cases, of course, servile migration had not been stopped but had rather been licenced by a swift undertaking to render chevage. This may have suited both lord and serf during the 1340s. From the lord's point of view, tenants were abundant and the legal underpinnings of his lordship over his bond tenants had been satisfied. From the tenant's point of view, they could live beyond the manor without the threat and uncertainty of retrieval by the lord's officers inherent in unlicenced absence and the risk that any chattels remaining on their home manors would be confiscated.

Paying chevage could be particularly beneficial for villeins who desired to maintain tenurial ties with their home manor which were legally legitimate in the eyes of the lord's officials.Footnote ⁷⁸ This may well explain the choices of two men who appeared at Pleshy before the manorial court in 1346. First, Stephen Cavel transferred two acres of land held in his own right to Salkmus King, for which Salkmus paid an entry fine of 2s. to the lord.Footnote ⁷⁹ Then – within the same entry on the court roll – Cavel agreed to give the lord the customary annual capon as chevage in addition to a one-off fine of 6s. 8d. Family ties and landed interests remained in Great Waltham even after Cavel's departure: a presumably related John Cavel was involved in litigation in the manorial court in 1348 and an Alice Cavel held seven and a half acres of bond land on her death in 1349.Footnote ⁸⁰ William Poleyn also agreed to render a yearly capon to the lord for permission to migrate and rendered a one-off fine of 10s. for the privilege.Footnote ⁸¹ The Poleyns were a prominent family of customary tenants at High Easter, and remained so for the rest of Earl Humphrey IV's lifetime.Footnote ⁸² Such chevage payments meant that people like Cavel and Poleyn could move away from the manor while retaining legally valid interests in holdings which might descend to them according to manorial custom. Beyond this, rendering chevage safeguarded the security of family members remaining on the manor who might be at risk of distraint (a temporary confiscation of land or goods or both authorised by the manor court) if migration was undertaken without permission.

An interest in land in their home manor seems to explain why two other men, Richard Pondeluyt and Richard Coch, decided to pay chevage. They were both charged with leaving the lordship without permission in the manorial court of Great Waltham in 1343.Footnote ⁸³ After several repeated orders for their arrest, Coch appeared on 19 November 1343 and acknowledged his obligation to render an annual capon to the lord for permission to live beyond the manor and Pondeluyt followed suit on 20 May 1344.Footnote ⁸⁴ Obtaining the lord's permission to live beyond the manor allowed both men to retain landed interests in Great Waltham. Thus, when Pondeluyt died in June 1349 he held half a virgate of customary land and seven acres of molland within the manor which, after falling into the lord's hand, were then leased to Roger Wether for a term of nine years on payment of a substantial entry fine of 13s. 4d.Footnote ⁸⁵ In August 1349, meanwhile, Richard Coch surrendered a quarter virgate of customary land in an ad opus transfer to William Packing.Footnote ⁸⁶ It appears this represented only part of his holding: in 1357, and presumably after Coch's death, his wife, Florence, transferred another quarter virgate of customary land to a family member, John.Footnote ⁸⁷

Nonetheless, there were numerous instances where serfs departed without leave and did not return to pay chevage quickly, or at all. In 1291, it was found that fifteen servile tenants were dwelling beyond the lordship without permission and yet none of these was subsequently recorded as returning and paying chevage.Footnote ⁸⁸ Difficulties with the imposition of chevage on those who were reluctant to pay it grew after the Black Death: the increase in the quantity of evidence for villein migration after 1349 was driven by an increase in the number of people recorded as being absent without the lord's leave rather than an increase in the number of serfs paying chevage.

After 1349, most of those who left without seeking the lord's permission do not appear to have been found by the lord's officials and forced to return to the manor court, even when their absence was repeatedly noted. For example, twelve serfs were named in 1353 as absent without the lord's permission. Of these, only two are recorded as appearing to pay chevage. Geoffrey Coch, who had fled with three family members, returned to court to pay chevage four years after the initial presentment against him; and Geoffrey Wete, who retained familial links with Great Waltham, returned to do so after seven years.Footnote ⁸⁹ An inquiry into the occupation of bond landholding at High Easter in October 1356 found that John and Richard Marhatch had abandoned the manor after the death of their father, Geoffrey, and so they were ordered to be attached (brought before the court to answer charges).Footnote ⁹⁰ At the next court, it was found that the two men had been accompanied in their flight by John and William, sons of Henry Marhatch (presumably cousins), and it was ordered that all four should be detained and all their goods and chattels on their lands should be seized into the lord's hand in accordance with custom and with the law of villeinage.Footnote ⁹¹ This was – seemingly – to no avail and so the enforcement process was restated in 1357 and in 1360, again without producing any of the four Marhatches before court.Footnote ⁹² Nor was seigniorial knowledge of a serf's actual location any guarantee that the serf in question would be returned. In 1355, John Sigor was named as living at Takeley five miles away from Great Waltham, as noted above.Footnote ⁹³ Repeated orders to attach him over the next two years were ineffective despite his known proximity to the heartlands of Bohun power.

In Poos's words, there is an ‘almost whimsical quality to these repeated orders to return escaped serfs’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Many entries might represent a tendency towards bureaucratic record keeping rather than an active effort to retrieve departed serfs.Footnote ⁹⁵ Perhaps the most telling instances of the limits of coercion, when coercion was attempted, are John Gibelot and William Russell, who were two of the thirteen villeins ordered to take up vacant plots of customary land in November 1355, an act which indicates how serfdom could be arbitrary, oppressive, and coercive.Footnote ⁹⁶ The actual limits of coercive power, however, are also evident in the manorial court rolls. In 1359, it was recorded that Gibelot was absent without permission and that Russell had moved to Felsted, where he was working as a carpenter.Footnote ⁹⁷ Their reactions to the challenge presented by Bohun attempts to use their servile status to compel them to take up land regardless of their own preferences was to leave and take advantage of outside opportunities and in practice there was nothing to prevent them from doing so.

The situation on Earl Humphrey IV's Essex manors was paralleled on the nearby manor of Aldham in southern Suffolk (35 miles north-east of Pleshy), which was held by John de Vere, earl of Oxford, the brother-in-law of Earl Humphrey IV's younger brother William, earl of Northampton. Bailey found that sixteen Aldham serfs were identified as being absent without permission from the manor between 1350 and 1361.Footnote ⁹⁸ A significant amount of care was taken by the earl of Oxford's administration to track servile migration through the manorial court. Yet, as was the case at Great Waltham and High Easter, this compilation of knowledge did not often translate into effective enforcement of the lord's rights and only one of the sixteen servile absentees was recorded as paying chevage to the earl of Oxford after being presented for flight from the manor.

A serf's withdrawal from their home manor, whether with or without permission, was not necessarily permanent. Some serfs did return to the heartlands of Bohun landholding in Essex. Recent work has cautioned against the assumption that such instances represent serfs being compelled to return to their home manor by the twin powers of lordship and legislation. Instead, some instances of return adhere to a pattern of circular migration. Attention has been drawn to the possibilities open to young migrants, and particularly young female migrants, who left their homes to try to find domestic work as servants in their adolescence and then returned home to marry and take up more flexible casual work, such as brewing.Footnote ⁹⁹ This life-cycle pattern may explain the movements of Alice Mon, who had left Great Waltham for Good Easter (some five miles away) by 1355.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ She stayed there for over a year before returning to the manorial court of Great Waltham and swearing an oath to her servile status.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It seems, though, that coercion did not wholly explain her return, for she also made a fine to the lord for the right to marry whomever she wished. Initially levied at 6s. 8d., this was reduced to 3s. 4d. after the ‘trustworthy tenants’ at court testified to her poverty.Footnote ¹⁰² Alice thus returned to the manor, apparently poor and far from the beneficiary of a new economic ‘golden age’ in female work, to secure freedom to make her own marriage.Footnote ¹⁰³ This suggests that she saw residence and the possibility of landholding on the Bohun manors as being preferable to continued absence, something which may have been influenced by her residence in a region where enforcement of the recent labour legislation was unusually vigorous.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The swearing of an oath testifying to her villein status may have been the price she had to pay to return without rendering a fine for her previous unauthorised withdrawal.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The manorial focus on servile tenants means there is more evidence regarding the apparently voluntary return of male serfs to Great Waltham. John Stobat was one of the tanners accused of living in Writtle without the lord's permission in 1353.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Stobat had, though, returned to Great Waltham – without any record of attachment or payment of a fine – within a few years. He appears to have employed wage labour himself, being sued by Ivo of Stanhurst in 1356 for 40d. of Ivo's salary, and was active in the land market in 1357, when John Haldane transferred a quarter virgate of customary land to him upon payment of an entry fine of 2s. to Earl Humphrey IV.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Stobat thus appears to have been able to take advantage of employment opportunities in Writtle before returning to his home manor and employing labour and holding land. Thomas Sawyne, part of a prominent servile family on the manor, is another who falls into this pattern. He was the subject of a presentment for unlicenced absence in 1355.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Unlike the examples of Richard Pondeluyt and others explored above, Sawyne was not recorded as returning to pay chevage. He had, however, returned by 1360, when he transferred one and three-quarter acres of customary land in the manorial court.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This was not the full extent of his holding and, when he died in 1370, Sawyne held a messuage (a small plot of land with a house) and a quarter virgate of customary land, and was survived by his wife Matilda and their young daughter, Cristina.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Such examples of circular migration are less colourful than, but perhaps analogous to, that of William Merre of Merrow (Surrey), who elected to be confirmed as a serf rather than be compelled to work as a servant under the terms of the Statute of Labourers.Footnote ¹¹¹ It would seem that, for Stobat, Sawyne and perhaps Mon, serfdom at Great Waltham and High Easter was not so off-putting as to be avoided at any cost.

The role of Thomas Sawyne as an employer illustrates how competition for labour hindered the attempts of lords to enforce a seigniorial reaction in the 1350s. The long-established presence of extensive regional factor land and labour markets, with employers drawn from large sections of the population, including the likes of Sawyne, meant that ‘outside options’ for waged employment or landholding were widely available.Footnote ¹¹² As a result, as Henry Knighton lamented in a well-known passage, after 1349 even great landlords were unable to turn back time and re-establish pre-plague conditions – they were forced, he wrote, to relax labour services and reduce rents ‘lest their tenements should fall into utter and irredeemable decay, and the land everywhere lie wholly unworked’.Footnote ¹¹³ In practice, although they might cover it up, seigniorial administrations themselves sometimes offered terms in excess of the statutory wage limits. At the manor of Gussage (Dorset) held by Earl Humphrey V in the 1360s, accounting fictions formally hid the fact that the reeve had repeatedly paid harvest workers a daily wage of 7d. rather than the pre-plague rate of 4d.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The scarcity of tenants prompted competition between landlords, something facilitated by the fact that there was no legal obligation for landlords, before or after 1351, to return the flown serfs of other lords who had migrated to their manor. The ultimate failure of the extraordinary and novel legislative measures enacted by the crown after the Black Death owed much to the fact that, rather than presenting a united front to the lower orders, lords themselves encouraged migration by offering relatively favourable terms, whether in wages (in cash or kind), conditions, or tenurial terms in order to attract tenants and workers.Footnote ¹¹⁵

An indication of the problems faced by lords is provided by those occasions when the manorial court rolls name a flown serf as staying with a third party. This usually indicates that the serf in question was being employed in the service of someone of superior status.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The first instance comes in 1291, when a serf was named as staying with John Burdon.Footnote ¹¹⁷ It is possible, although not certain, this was Sir John Burdon, a Nottinghamshire knight who was appointed keeper of Berwick Castle in 1298.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The next example can be established with greater certainty. Thomas Sawyne was named as residing with John Berners while he was absent without leave in 1355.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This was Sir John Berners (d. 1361) who, in addition to manors in Surrey, Suffolk, and Middlesex, held the Essex manors of Berneston, Berners Roding, and Beaumont, all of which were under ten miles from Great Waltham.Footnote ¹²⁰ Four years later, according to the manorial court of Great Waltham, John Gibelot was in the service of Thomas of Walmesford.Footnote ¹²¹ Walmesford owned the only surviving copy of Geoffrey Baker's chronicle.Footnote ¹²² More significantly here, Walmesford enjoyed close relationships with both Earl John Bohun and Earl Humphrey IV. He had been appointed as rector of Great Leighs (Essex) by the former and was both a beneficiary (for the sum of £40) and an executor of the latter's will.Footnote ¹²³ Presumably, he was not aware that he was directly weakening the bonds of serfdom exercised by his own lord and patron by employing Gibelot. Lastly, Alice Welough was named as staying with the ‘Lady of Camoys’ in 1359.Footnote ¹²⁴ This was presumably Margaret, who had married Sir Thomas Camoys (d. 1372) and who made her will in 1386.Footnote ¹²⁵ The Great Waltham evidence thus suggests that competition between landlords offered serfs on the Bohun manors feasible options if they wished to migrate, especially in the 1350s. In turn, this both reduced the incentive for lords to attempt to enforce a seigniorial reaction and blunted these attempts when they were made.