A HISTORY OF STAFFORDSHIRE 



before them, held their tenements in villeinage, and gave merchetum for 

 marrying their daughters, and every year they gave ' stud ' (tallage), some- 

 times more and sometimes less, at the will of the abbot, and that they owed 

 all villein services. 28 



The monks, it may be noticed, showed a good deal of pious indignation 

 at the presumption of their tenants, and complacently contrasted the pride of 

 the latter with their own humility, illustrating and concluding their homily 

 by the text, ' God resists the proud and gives His grace to the humble.' 24 



It is to be feared that the relations of the abbots and their tenants were 

 never of the friendliest, for when in the early years of the fourteenth century 

 the abbot was prosecuted in the hundred of Pirehill for ' fraudulently con- 

 cealing and disposing of the goods and chattels of Thomas earl of Lancaster,' 

 the jury gave the verdict against him, and the abbot, who denied the whole 

 story to the king, maintained that the jury was a packed one, consisting of 

 men evilly disposed towards him. 26 Indeed, many instances might be given 

 of the somewhat truculent behaviour of the abbots, not only towards their 

 tenants but in their relations with the neighbouring landowners, with whom 

 they were frequently in conflict. 



From an old survey of Tutbury, made in Elizabeth's reign, we know 

 that the services of the villeins here were not commuted for rents till the reign 

 of Henry V (fifteenth century), and reference is made to the heaviness of 

 these services as they were enforced by the founder of Tutbury Priory in 1080: 



Part of the lands of the priory (says the survey) were granted to his bondmen, for no 

 freemen would take land with such villainous customs as were found in an ancient record at 

 Tutbury (called the Cowcher, and made in the time of Henry V), viz. to mow the grass in 

 the meadows, make the hay and carry it into the castle, and the arable land to plow it, sow 

 it, harrow it and reap it, and carry it either to the lord's manor house, or to the said castle, 

 at their own costs and charges. 



They were also bound to divers customs, services, and carriages which 

 at the making of the old Coucher were reduced to annual rents. 26 



From the available records we see that in the latter part of the thirteenth 

 century the process of commutation was going on gradually all over the 

 county, if not very rapidly. From a number of ' extents of manors ' of the 

 time of Edward I " we see that the services were always appraised in terms of 

 money, and it may be concluded that it was sometimes convenient to accept 

 money payment rather than labour, whilst the next step to a general substitu- 

 tion of money rents is not difficult. For instance, the ' works ' of the cus- 

 tomary tenants at Swinford are valued at 5^. each. Again, in the manor of 

 Sedgeley we hear of a great many services which the customary tenants ought 

 to perform, such as mowing, reaping, carrying hay and wood, gathering nuts, 

 and so on, but in each case they are valued in terms of money, and it is more 

 than likely that the word ' ought,' which occurs in this and other records, 

 points to an ideal of duty once regarded, but now repudiated. This conjecture 

 is the more likely to be true in the case of Sedgeley, inasmuch as it was, even 

 at that date, a place of some industrial and commercial importance for the 

 same record speaks of four coal-pits, worth yearly 4, and of sixteen small 

 shops. Still the peasants of Sedgeley were as yet only struggling to be free, 



a The Will. Salt Arch. Soc. Coll. pt. i, v, 64-5. " Ibid. 65. " Ibid. 4-5. 



" Stebbing Shaw, Hut. of Staff. (1801), i, 45. " The mil. Salt Arch. Soc. Coll. pt. ii, ix, 26-29. 



280 



