A Note on the Farming Out of Manors
I N accepting the editors' invitation to reply to Dr Bridbury's article I am breaking a long-established rule. Throughout his writing career Dr Bridbury has devotedly and single-mindedly pursued me and the views he imputes to me. On my part I hitherto refused to react. I did so in the knowledge that the field over which I was being hunted-the later centuries of the Middle Ages -was well worked by historians capable of assessing Dr Bridbury's notions at their true worth. In this respect Dr Bridbury's latest sally differs from his previous ones. It is largely confined to the twelfth century: a period of English economic history badly served by sources and rather neglected by economic historians. I have therefore had to consider the possibility that in this case Dr Bridbury's views might be taken seriously. Hence my decision to respond. Fortunately much of Dr Bridbury's text calls for no reply. It is largely devoted to a piecemeal refutation of the facts I cited in my essay on the 'Chronology of Labour Services'. It appears to me that for all the intemperance of its tone the refutation does not establish a substantive case to answer. As I shall have to emphasize presently, the "true" version of the facts Dr Bridbury reads into the evidence varies not from the "wrong" facts offered by me but from his own distorted view of my facts. I propose to discuss the pretended disagreement later and to disregard Dr Bridbury's tone as yet another manifestation of an idiosyncraticfafon de parler. I must therefore begin my response with a personal disclaimer. I cannot recognize myself or any other historian sharing my views in the animal Dr Bridbury is determined to hunt. Never and nowhere have I, or any historian known to me, presented the twelfth century as a whole as the time when ruin "afflicted the very foundations of society", or when manors-all or most of them-"disintegrated". In dealing with the manorial estates in the second half of the twelfth century I have repeatedly and approvingly drawn attention to the tendency of the surveys to hark back to "the time of Henry I" as a time of paradise lost.' In discussing the twelfth-century surveys of Glastonbury I may have noted the slight contraction of manorial values and the somewhat larger contraction of manorial herds in the first half of the century. But I have suggested elsewhere that the contraction was compatible with an increase in the period immediately following the post-Conquest rundown.2 In common with most historians I have invariably assumed that the century was a time of expanding population and settlement. This assumption is explicit in my treatment of medieval trends and also underlies my firm view of thirteenth-century colonization as the tail end of a process