In the early fourteenth century, tensions between villagers from Darnhall and Over, Cheshire, and their feudal lord, the Abbot of Vale Royal Abbey, erupted into violence over whether they had villein—that is, servile—status. The villagers argued not, while the Abbey believed it was due the villagers' feudal service.
Founded by Edward I in 1274, the Cistercian Abbey had been unpopular with locals from the start. This was primarily because it had been granted, in its endowment, exclusive forest rights which surrounding villages saw as theirs by custom, and other feudal dues they did not believe they had to pay. Moreover, the rigorous enforcement of these rights by successive abbots was felt to be excessively harsh. The villagers resented being treated as serfs and made repeated attempts to reject the Abbey's feudal overlordship.
The villagers' efforts ranged from appeals to the Abbot, the King's Chief Justice in Cheshire and even to the King and Queen; the latter, at least, appears to have been somewhat sympathetic to their cause. On each occasion, though, the villagers were unsuccessful and were unable to secure release from their villeinhood. The abbots, for their part, may have had significant financial pressures on them. Their house had commenced major building works in 1277, but then lost much of its early royal funding following Edward I's invasion of Wales the same year, which diverted both his money and masons from them. This may have accounted for the strict enforcement of their rights. Their tenants' struggle turned increasingly violent from 1326.
The dispute was mainly led by the villagers of Darnhall, in conjunction with their neighbours, particularly those from the nearby village of Over. On several occasions they suffered imprisonment when their appeals failed, and they were also often fined. On one occasion, in an attempt to appeal to Abbot Peter, the villagers of Darnhall and Over followed him to King's Cliffe Hunting Lodge, where the Abbot was meeting the King. Peter was himself appealing for royal assistance against his recalcitrant tenantry. The villagers met him in Rutland on his return journey; an affray broke out, the Abbot's groom was killed, and Peter and his entourage were captured. The King soon intervened and released him; the Abbot then promptly had the villagers imprisoned again. Abbot Peter did not confine himself to confronting his serfs. He also engaged in feuds with the local gentry, and either at their hands or those of his erstwhile tenants, he was murdered in 1339. Nothing is known of any resolution to the dispute, but serfdom was in decline nationally and Peter's successor may have had other local troubles occupying his attention.
Background The Cistercian Abbey of Vale Royal, in the Weaver Valley, was originally founded by the Lord Edward — later King Edward I — in 1274, in gratitude for his safe passage through a storm on the return from crusade. Originally intended to be a grand, cathedral-style structure with a complement of 100 monks, building started in 1277 under the King's chief architect, Walter of Hereford. It soon fell victim to the financing of Edward I's Welsh wars. The King's lengthy campaigns meant that both money and stonemasons were diverted from the construction of the Abbey, to the construction of new castles in Wales. This made not only its future expansion, but its very existence, precarious.
Vale Royal's abbots were not just local religious leaders; they were also feudal lords and as such not necessarily sympathetic landlords. When their tenants appeared before the manorial court, for example, they were not appearing before an abbot, but before a judge, and common law applied. Historians Christopher Harper-Bill and Carole Rawcliffe have highlighted the ruthlessness of religious landlords in the Middle Ages, noting their skill in "exploiting every source of income" and the unpopularity this brought on them. As the medievalists Gwilym Dodd and Alison McHardy have emphasised, "a religious house, like any other landlord, depended on the income from its estates as the main source of its economic wellbeing", and from the late twelfth century, monastic institutions were "particularly assiduous in... seeking to tighten the legal definition of servile status and tenure" for its tenantry.
Disputes between religious houses and their tenants were not uncommon. To the south of London, one such feud between the tenants of Tooting and Bec Abbey (the French Abbey had been given possessions in Tooting Bec) had also gone from litigation to outright violence and law-breaking, and it lasted many years. Likewise, Bec Abbey's tenants in Ogbourne St George, Wiltshire, launched a well-organised peasant's revolt in 1309, which also found some support amongst local gentry. In East Anglia, the tenants of Bury St Edmunds Abbey revolted against the Abbot in 1327 in a struggle similar to that of the villagers of Darnhall and Over. That Abbey's chronicler, Jocelin of Brakelond, railed against all tenants who rose up against their lords, claiming that they "waxed fat" compared to their masters. The revolt of Darnhall and Over was thus one of many small-scale temporary villein uprisings before the Peasants' Revolt of June 1381.
Origins and early years of the dispute
The new Abbey was unpopular locally, as locals claimed that both the grants of land its creation required and those for its day-to-day requirements impinged on villagers' customary liberties. Darnhall, previously a royal manor held by the earls of Chester, had been granted to the Abbey in perpetuity, along with its forestry rights and free warren. Villagers were also bound for duties such as —payment, or "redemption", to a lord on the marriage of a daughter—and services ranging from feeding the abbot's puppies and keeping his bees to paying massive death duties. For its part, Over lost its annual fair and weekly market to the Abbey in 1280.
Consequently, relations between the Abbey and its tenantry had been fraught since the monks' arrival. Only a year after the Abbey's foundation, tenants of Darnhall tried to refuse the Abbot the customs and services he demanded, and they maintained their position—with increasing vigour—for the next fifty years. Soon after the Abbey's founding, they complained directly to King Edward I, and brought with them their iron ploughshares to demonstrate their status as freemen. The King refused to countenance their arguments, telling them that "as villeins you have come, and as villeins you shall return". They petitioned again in 1307, but with no more success; a commission held by the Justiciar of Chester merely re-confirmed their status. Argument appears to have escalated into violence in 1320, during the abbacy of Richard of Evesham. One of his monks was attacked while collecting tithes in Darnhall, while an Abbey servant, John of Budworth, was killed and his head used as a football by his attackers.
Although the villeins of Vale Royal's estate owed no labour service for their land, the villagers of Darnhall and those who joined them remained unhappy with their situation. Paul Booth writes: "they were the victims of the transfer of ownership of their manorial estates from the crown to a desperately under-endowed religious corporation". Villagers from nearby Middlewich also complained that the Abbey owed them restitution for the loss of two salt pits which had been part of the Abbey's endowment.
The dispute
1327–1336
In 1327 the Abbot drew up a custumal for the villages of Darnhall and Over, clearly with the intention of reinforcing and codifying the Abbey's claims. This custumal, suggests historian Richard Hilton, "reveals a harshness of exploitation unparalleled even on the old-established Benedictine houses of the south", and he suggests that by now the villagers "appear to have been fighting against a real social degradation". The monks may have been forced to take harsh measures as landlords—if the Abbey was as poor as it claimed—to ensure a steady income. Ultimately it is impossible to establish whether the Abbey was as tyrannous as the villagers claimed. It is possible that the earls of Chester had been lax in their enforcement of the villagers' serfdom, and that they had therefore become accustomed to a high degree of freedom. It is also possible that it was the monks who had grown lax in their enforcement, and that the villagers of Darnhall and surrounding areas saw an opportunity to take advantage of them. There were at least four occasions of emancipatory manumission (without payment, unusually) in the Vale Royal records between 1329 and 1340, and one scholar, Herbert Hewitt, has noted "an element of irony in the fact that the one corporate body which is known to have liberated any native is also the most distinguished for its rigid insistence on its legal rights over bondmen". It would certainly appear the case that the monks approached their landlord duties with zeal, but also that when manumission did occur, it was insufficient to quell the villagers' ire.
Either way, the two villages must have conspired together—and pooled mutual resources, for their campaign would not have been cheap. Both travel and litigation cost money, from the writing of the petition by clerks to their advisement on it by lawyers, let alone the cost of a delegation's upkeep. There was no such thing, says Edward Powell, "as cheap litigation", although there was plenty of it; Richard Firth Green has commented that "what strikes one... is not the lawlessness of the Abbey's tenants but their touching faith in the legal process".
By 1328 the tenants' methods of resistance included refusing to grind flour at the abbey's mill, continuing efforts to prevent restrictions from the Abbot on the leasing of their land, and demanding the concomitant right to lease it out themselves, for up to ten years. This incurred multiple punishments—meted out by the Abbot—in the form of fines and imprisonment, which resulted in their eventual submission. The Ledger Book of Vale Royal Abbey records how the following year—as the monks saw it—the rebellious tenantry "plotted maliciously" against the Abbey's "liberty", refusing to accept the abbot's right to punish them "for any offence, except by the assessment of their neighbours"; in other words, they demanded the right to trial by jury. This was denied, they took up arms, but were once again imprisoned.
The next outbreak of violence took place in 1336. The Darnhall villagers approached the Cheshire Justiciar, claiming to have been granted their freedom by an "aforetime" royal charter. Although the legal response is now unknown, it was presumably unsuccessful as, on their return to the village, they were again thrown in gaol by the Abbot until they swore an oath to cease their complaints. Firth-Green suggests that this oath was extracted under duress, for on their release they sent a delegation to King Edward III, who was at this time "in the north parts". It is unknown whether the party ever reached him; all that is known is that the group ended up in a Nottingham prison, where they were almost hanged as thieves. This was only avoided by payment of a fine. Another petition to the King, at the Westminster parliament, followed. This time another justiciar was despatched to Cheshire to assess their claims. Before he pronounced on them, however, he was intercepted by the Abbot with Vale Royal's charters. These the justiciar read, and seems to have been immediately persuaded by; as a result, several villagers were again returned to the Abbot for punishment.
Attack on Abbot Peter