SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



at about the time of the revolt. At Warding the exact obligations of several 

 tenants in villeinage were enrolled upon the court roll in 1330. 1M In 1374 

 Robert Brok was admitted to a messuage and 4 acres in bondage and had 

 entry by the rod, 137 and in 1381 Stephen Elphege received a shop in 

 Warding market with 4 acres of land, to hold to him and his heirs by rod 

 and roll of court, and two other tenants were put in seisin on a similar tenure. 1S8 

 Enrolments of services occur in Wivelsfield in 1396, 139 apparently rather 

 as a means of safeguarding the rights of the lord than in order to assure the 

 tenure of the tenants, yet, even here, showing the first tendency towards the 

 introduction of copyhold. In Laughton there is mention of a case of 

 enrolment taking place as early as 1359, uo but upon this manor the growth 

 of a class of customary rent-paying tenants may be partly due to the influence 

 of the assart holdings, which seem as a rule to have been held at will for a 

 money rent. The first specific mention of copy of court roll here also is in 

 : 3 8i. ul 



All evidence would seem to point in the direction of a general breakdown 

 about this time of the old communal organization, a breakdown neither acceler- 

 ated nor retarded by the peasants' attempt to give the coup de gr&ce to the old 

 order. Nor was the collapse confined to the agricultural and tenurial system ; 

 there can be little doubt that the frankpledge and the hundred court, regarded 

 as instruments of police and trade regulations, were no longer efficient. U2 

 The two conclusions to which the documents seem to testify are in the first 

 place the loss of the sense of joint responsibility by the community, and 

 secondly the overstraining and consequent breakdown of the system of trade 

 regulation in a society which had outgrown such tutelage. Complaints that 

 watch and ward have not been kept according to the Statute of Winchester 

 are frequent ; at Lullington in 1374 the capital pledge and tithing were fined 

 for concealing the shedding of blood, and because they would not decide in a 

 certain case whether the hue and cry had been justly raised, 143 nor agree over the 

 election of a new tithingman. u * Bakers and butchers, tanners and tailors 

 carried on trade outside the markets, and exacted unlawful prices ; millers took 

 excessive tolls and used false measures ; bakers and brewers refused to sell 

 outside their own houses ; presentments of regrating are not infrequent ; nor 

 did the fact of being presented and fined once have any apparent influence 

 upon offenders in these respects. U6 



The general disintegration was not, indeed, confined to the manorial 

 system, the towns also were suffering considerable decay at the close of the 

 fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. From the Conquest to 

 the end of the reign of Edward III had perhaps been the most prosperous 

 period in the urban life of the county. The extent to which Chichester, 

 Arundel, Lewes, Steyning, and Pevensey increased in wealth in the few years 

 which intervened between 1066 and the Domesday Survey has been noticed 



1M Add. Ct. R. 32630. '" Ibid. 32686. IM Ibid. 32691. 



189 Add. MS. 33182, fol. 18. '"Add. Ct. R. 31902. '"Ibid. 31901. 



41 There is, of course, no evidence that they had worked efficiently in previous centuries, but it seems a 

 fair inference that a system which had its origin before the reign of Edgar, and had been developed by such 

 legislators as Henry II and Edward I throughout the country, must originally have been succeisfnl. 



'"Add. Ct. R. 32408, 32414, 31243, 31248 &c. "'Ibid. 31243. 



145 Ibid. 32399-410, 31529 &c. 31258, 31243, 32025 and Duchy of Lanes. Ct. R. bdle. 126, 

 No. 1870. 



187 



