| The fifteenth century in England has been described as an "Age of Ambition" which offered new opportunities for all ranks of society. A prime example of the social changes occurring during this transitional period between the medieval and early modern worlds was the development of new occupational opportunities in estate administration. The classic manorial system of direct exploitation of the land had disintegrated as a result of the century and a half of drastic and prolonged population decline following the onset of the Black Death. The demographic catastrophe caused lords to farm out their lands for a money rent. At the same time, the low population tended to raise living standards throughout society. Estate administrations responded to these new conditions by altering the nature of the previously low-paying, servile positions held by the peasants who collected the rents and served as officers of the manorial courts.; The account and court rolls of Wymondham Grishagh, a gentry-owned Norfolk manor, provide the major sources for this study. Historians typically have dismissed these later documents as uninformative compared to the records of the classic manorial system, just as they assume late medieval administrative procedures to have been fossilized and inefficient. Nevertheless, the Grishagh records allow us to reconstruct the practices of this manorial administration, particularly because the system of officeholding which prevailed in East Anglia ensured the recording of detailed information concerning the functions of the various offices, hiring practices, and the backgrounds and careers of the officeholders.; Combining the methodologies of the estate study and the reconstitution of peasant villages, this study finds that lower level estate administrators such as the Wymondham haywards could pursue manorial office as an occupation, earning high salaries through employment by several lords. Officeholding constituted one of a number of strategies increasing the social standing of their families in the village. Furthermore, the estate administrators used flexible if conservative methods to extract profits from the manor. This study thus brings to light some of the new options open to peasants, and increases our understanding of the evolution of the manorial system. |
