SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



arrived late,^ and their behaviour in the presence of the steward would not 

 have been tolerated in earlier times.^ Is it fanciful to see in this volubility 

 and abuse of the jury an unusual excitableness due to a feeling that of late 

 years the peasants had become more important ? Certainly in the decade 

 before the prior's rolls finally ceased both sets of tenants calmed down some- 

 what in their behaviour, and if, as seems probable, the halmote became more 

 and more formal the change is easily intelligible. 



Before the Black Death the communal life of the village had been 

 necessary to the peasant, but after it his whole attitude changed. In many 

 cases population was small, and some of the old arrangements were now 

 burdensome if not actually superfluous. We can understand, therefore, that 

 the vill no longer cared about keeping a common fold or hiring a village 

 shepherd. It is not surprising to find that a common ' messor ' or hayward 

 was dispensed with, but the most unaccountable point is the attitude of 

 the villagers to the immemorial custom of meeting together under the 

 presidency of the reeve or messor to take counsel upon the affairs of the 

 village. The bishop's rolls do not refer to the matter, but again and again 

 we find in the prior's rolls the same order couched in some such terms as 

 these: 'AH tenants are ordered to come to treat of the common affairs of the 

 vill when summoned by the reeve and messor.' * At Aycliffe a novel experi- 

 ment was begun in 1369. Six men were elected, apparently at the halmote 

 court, ' for the ordering of the village, viz. for laying down by-laws and 

 ordinances for the community of the vill, and to report to the court at the 

 next meeting.'* We learn from a later entry in 1379 that both the free and 

 the bond tenants took part in the election of this select vestry or parish 

 council,^ and a similar appointment was made in 1383^ just before the prior's 

 rolls cease. Whether the Aycliffe system was copied elsewhere or not we are 

 not told, but it is perhaps possible to see some connexion between it and the 

 village committee which in the fifteenth century leases meadows, &c., from 

 the lord 'in the name of all the tenants of the village.'^ At any rate, it 

 forms a link between the halmote jury and the overseers and churchwardens 

 of the sixteenth-century vestry.* 



However, even in the prior's vills the communal system had not wholly 

 died out as late as the eighteenth * century, but the machinery was beginning 

 to creak soon after the Black Death. Men refused to be jurors or collectors, 

 and in one case the collector declined to teach his successor his duties.^" 

 When elected, the officials often made the merest pretence of performing 

 their duties, and the presentments by the jury in the fifteenth century rolls 

 are neither numerous nor important. The unruly vill of Stanhope chose as 

 collector a man who was almost blind, ' in derision of the court,'" while the 

 men of Blackwell chose as their reeve the village simpleton, whom the roll 

 calls 'sharp Tommy' (Thomas Acris^**). Both the bishop and the prior had 



' Dur. Curs. No. 12, fol. 161 d. ; Dur. Halmote R. (Surtees Soc. Ixxxii), 70. 

 ' Dur. Curs. No. 12, fol. 43 d. 144, 243 d. 



' Dur. Halmote R. (Surtees Soc. Ixxxii), 93, 94, 123, 138, 142, 161, &c. 



• Ibid. 82. ' Ibid. 155. * Ibid. 180. ' e.g. Dur. Curs. No. 12, fol. 223 </. 



' Churchwardens are referred to in Langley's Survey at Hamsterley in 141 8, fol. 33. 

 ' See the rolls (in the Durham Treasury) of the composite court held by the dean and chapter in the 

 leventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. 



'» Dur. Curs. No. 1 2, fol. 143 d. " Ibid. " Ibid. fol. 129 d. 



223 



