Alnham : Population And Land Tenure
The evidence for the population levels and tenurial development of the township has been collated by Dixon (1985, II, 24-8). It is clear that Alnham was a relatively populous village in the medieval period. It was probably at the peak of its prosperity in the late 13th century, before the onset of the Anglo-Scottish wars, the climatic deterioration of the early 14th century, with its attendant failed harvests and livestock diseases, and the Black Death.
Successive 13th - 14th century Inquisitions Post Mortem show there was then a fixed complement of 18 bondage holdings and 16 cottage smallholdings. The bondages each comprised a messuage (building plot) and 24 acres of arable and meadow, the standard size for such holdings in Northumberland. With their viable tenancies, the bondmen formed the core of the township community and the foundation of the manor’s financial productivity. The cottagia would have been much smaller holdings, probably comprising no more than a cottage dwelling within a fenced enclosure garth, and perhaps a few acres of land (figures recorded in other Northumberland townships range from half an acre up to 6 acres, cf. Lomas 1996, 77; Winchester 1987, 66-7).
These cottagers, cotmen or cottars, as they were known, must have formed a pool of additional labour available for work for day wages or performed specialised non-agricultural tasks, since their holdings alone would not have fully supported them. Both bondmen and cotmen, were categories of ‘unfree’ tenants, also known as customary tenants, villeins or tenants in villeinage. In addition there were an unspecified number of freeholders in the vill.
Unfree tenants generally bore a greater weight of rents, labour services and other obligations to their lord, by comparison with free tenants, although it should be noted that even the latter did not ‘own’ their holdings outright, in the modern sense of the term. Most importantly, whilst unfree tenure was determined by the custom of the manor, regulated through the lord’s manorial court, free tenure was governed by common law, with the result that free tenants paid rents fixed in perpetuity, could sell or grant their holdings without seigneurial interference and could sue their lord in the royal courts (Lomas 1996, 76-7; Bailey 2002, 26).
The earliest free or ‘socage’ tenant known to us at Alnham, one Roger Balistarius (‘the Crossbowman’), is named in the feudal return made in 1242, where he is listed as holding three bovates of land at Alnham for an annual rent of seven shillings (Liber Feodorum II, 1127; a bovate being generally equivalent to about 12-15 acres, cf. Bailey 2002, 242). Socage was a form of free peasant tenure whereby land was held in return for performing certain limited services, principally attendance at the baron’s court and support for its operations (an obligation known as ‘suit of court’), and sometimes, as in this case, the payment of a fixed cash rent or a pound of spices (Lomas 1996, 19; Bailey 2002, 27-8).
The warfare and other crises of the 14th century reduced the population significantly. Inquisition held in 1352 recorded that six of the eighteen bondages and eleven of the sixteen cottage smallholdings were unoccupied, i.e. half of the combined total number of tenancies in the township core. Even so, the Poll Tax return of 1377 records sixty adults, one of the highest populations for a vill in Coquetdale Ward.
Although such reductions in the number of tenants obviously presented problems for the manorial landowner, in this case the Percy lords, since their revenue was reduced, for those tenants who managed to survive the difficult conditions of the 14th century, the consequent labour shortages proved beneficial and resulted in a gradual improvement in their tenurial rights.
Thus the Inquisition Post Mortem for Henry de Percy in 1368 indicates that the bondages and cottages were all held by ‘tenants-at-will’. This may imply that the earlier, non-contractual unfree tenancies, which owed substantial and unpopular labour services to their lord, had, presumably under steady pressure from the local peasantry, been converted into or were in the process of evolving into contractual tenancies held ‘at the will of the lord, according to the custom of the manor’, which predominantly owed cash rents.
Although such contractual tenancies theoretically had less security of tenure than the customary bondage or cottage holdings, which were effectively hereditable and alienable, in practice the general shortage of tenants after c. 1350 meant that tenants-at-will enjoyed relative security of occupation as well as less onerous rental terms (cf. Bailey 2002, 35-6).
By the 16th century the tenurial distinctions of bondage and cottage holdings, so carefully recorded in the earlier inquisitions, had largely disappeared. Clarkson’s Survey of the Alnwick barony in 1566/7 records 31 tenants-at-will holding varying proportions of land in the common fields, two free tenants and two demesne tenants.
This picture is largely echoed twenty years later in Stockdale’s survey (29 tenants-at-will, two demesne tenants and three freeholders). Mayson’s survey in 1615 lists 22 tenants-at-will, one cottager, two demesne tenants and three freeholders. This would suggest that the number of tenancies (and presumably therefore the population level?) had largely recovered by the mid-16th century, though they appear to have been declining again by the early 17th century (cf. Dixon 1985, 24-5).