Lords, villeins and monks: the history of an ancient manor
ANY history of Halesowen must necessarily start with the Domesday Book. That great work, compiled at the command of ‘The Conqueror’ as the Norman invaders began assessing the wealth and potential of lands they now claimed by right of conquest, is a masterpiece of detailed information and a great boon to those who seek knowledge of bygone days.
The entry concerning Halesowen reads:
In Clent Hundred, Earl Roger holds of the King one manor called Hala. There are 10 hides. In the demesne are 4 ploughs, and there are 36 villeins, and 18 bordars, and 4 radmen, and a Church with 2 priest; and between them all they have 41½ plough teams. There are 8 serfs and 2 bondwomen. Of this land, Roger the Huntsman holds of the Earl 1½ hides, and has there 1 plough, and there are 6 villeins and 5 bordars with 5 ploughs. It is worth 25 shillings. This manor was worth 24 pounds, in the time of King Edward, now 15 pounds.
In the time of King Edward, Olwine held this manor, and had in Droitwich a salt pan worth 4 shillings and a house in Worcester worth 12 pence yearly.
The entry is couched in feudal terms which need considerable explanation. The unit of assessment is ‘the hide’ – a term we meet very early in the history of pre-conquest England. The social organisation of the early English period was clearly dependent on the agricultural holding of the peasant household. The ‘hide’ is a land measure which is never clearly defined but is generally held to encompass 120 acres – considered sufficient land from which one household could make a living. It seems to have varied in size according to local standards of living, soil variations and the amount of land available to the population in a particular area. The ‘hide’ was divided into four quarters, known as ‘virgates’.
The ‘villeins’ were tenants of the lord who held land by servile tenure, and were the backbone of the manorial economy. There was a wide variation in both their property and commitments. Among other duties, they had to do guard and escort duties and carry their lord’s loads, reap and sow on his lands at harvest time and furnish a pig by way of pasture rent. They also had to work on the demesne two days a week, and three at harvest time, with extra duties at Candlemas and Easter. The ‘bordars’ were inferior villeins, little more than squatters on the land, who had been allowed to build their own cottages and given a share in the village fields of not less than five acres. At the lowest end of the social scale were the ‘servi’ or slaves, styled ‘serfs’ in many works. They were mere chattels of their master with a market value of around 20 shillings. This was the only compensation exacted from any man who slew them. The ‘radmen’, or ‘riding men’, were tenant husbandmen, paying a free (non-servile) rent, but subject to the lord of the manor’s court. They were regarded as free men but had to perform riding service – running errands, escort duties, etc. – for their lords. From the ancient writings of the compilers of Domesday, a picture of the manor begins to emerge. There are four plough-teams on the lord’s demesne and 41½ ‘car’s’ in the employment of the tenants, one
Roger de Montgomery fought with such vigour that he was mainly responsible for the Norman victory at Hastings
The abbey was founded for the benefit of the souls of King John, Peter des Roches, and his successors as Bishop of Winchester
hide in the use of Roger the Huntsman and five ‘car’s’ (Carucates – 120 acres of meadow of pasture) in the service of his villein tenants; a rough piece of arithmetic indicates that about 1,200 acres of the manor were under cultivation, the rest comprising of 5,500 acres of woodland, waste, meadow and pastures.
Earl Roger was the famous Roger de Montgomery who led the right wing of the Norman army at the Battle of Hastings. He fought with such vigour that he was mainly responsible for the Norman victory. For this service William the Conqueror advanced him to high honour, making him overlord of many counties and creating him Earl of Shrewsbury. In addition to Shrewsbury and that part of the county now called Montgomeryshire, William gave him the manor of Halesowen, then called Halas.
Halas lay in a fertile valley, its small Saxon church stood on the hill overlooking the River Stour. Roger now owned two counties and a detached manor in a third, so for the sake of convenience he caused the manor of Halas, which was originally in the Clent Hundred and included in Worcestershire, to be annexed to the county of Shropshire and included within the Hundred of Brimstry. It remained in Shropshire until 1844 when, by Act of Parliament, it was reincluded in Worcestershire.
As a result of the earl having taken part in a revolt against Henry I in 1101, the earl’s lands were confiscated. Halesowen seems to have been held directly under the crown and from this period there are references to it as Hales Regis.
There would at that time be a royal bailiff living in the manor house or, as it appears to be termed in one reference, the King’s House. The grant of 1177 of the manors of Ellesmere and Hales by Henry II to his half-sister Emma of Anjou is well recorded along with the fact that she was married to David ap Owen, Prince of Gwynedd, and that they had a son, Owen. It was probably as a result of the association of one of those Owens with Hales that it became known as Halesowen. Emma surrendered Halesowen to Richard I in about 1193 in exchange for a royal pension equal to her Halesowen rentals, and so the manor was back in full royal possession until King John gave it in 1214 to Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, to build a monastery in the manor.
Peter des Roches was a Poitevin clerk who had thrown in his lot with the fortunes of King John and had been rewarded with the great Bishopric of Winchester, and had just succeeded Geoffrey fitz Peter as John’s justicar. Although he was never accepted by the Anglo-norman aristocracy, and professed to despise the English baronage, he became the founder of three English monasteries and a Dominican friary. As a Poitevin and a cleric, he had no territorial roots in England but one of the benefices which he had resigned on his appointment to Winchester in 1205 was the “prebend of the church of Hales”, and he had, therefore some previous connection with the place, even if it was mainly a financial one.
Unfortunately, the Halesowen Cartulary has been lost, and the historian delving into the past of the abbey is obliged to rely on royal charters for the history of the foundation. Peter’s deed of foundation has, however, been preserved in a later inspeximus of Adam of Orleton, Bishop of Worcester. By it, he concedes to Almighty God the manor and church of Hales with its chapels for the foundation thereon of a Premonstratensian abbey for the benefit of the souls of King John, himself, and his predecessors and successors as bishops of Winchester to whom the right of patronage is to belong.
Welbeck was the abbey from which the new abbot and convent were sent, and according to Bishop Redman’s visitation register, they came to Hales on April 26, 1218.
In 1274 the local jurors told the commissioners of Edward I that King John had given the manor of Hales to Peter des Roches to build a house of religion, and added that his son, Henry III, “first built the present abbey.” Their statement was confirmed by the pipe rolls which show that from 1218 onwards, the king was granting the bishop £17 6s 8d a year towards the building of the abbey. This payment did not cease on Peter’s death but was still being paid to his successor in 1241-42. Nor was this the only way in which royal munificence contributed towards the building of Halesowen Abbey, for in 1223 the Bishop of Worcester had a grant of 60 tie-beams and other timber from the forest of Kinver, “towards the work of his church of Hales”, and in 1233 the king gave the abbot 15 oaks to make stalls for the choir. The bishop’s own pipe rolls give references which show that work was still in progress on the abbey as late as 1231-32 and 10½d was paid “towards the expenses of the abbot of Hales and Brother Richard, master of the works at Hales.”
The manor of Halesowen, with its members of Romsley and Oldbury, remained the abbey’s principal endowment until the Dissolution, when it was contributing £133 18s 7¼d to the abbey’s gross income of £337 15s 6½d. Within its bounds was the town of Halesowen, of whose prosperity in the 12th and 13th centuries some evidence has been given in the Victoria County History. In 1220 the abbot and convent obtained a licence to hold a weekly market and an annual fair of two days at the feast of St Denis, changed three years later to the feast of St Kenelm. It was probably soon afterwards that they were authorised to create a borough and although in the later Middle Ages Halesowen appears to have scarcely justified its urban status, the abbot as lord of the borough derived further income from the borough courts, from burgage rents and fron licences to trade.
The original endowment of the abbey included the advowson of the church of St John the Baptist. The rectory was appropriated in or before 1270, when a vicarage was ordained by the Bishop of Worcester, and in 1291 it was taxed at £26 13s 4d. It was thus one of the most valuable as well as structurally one of the largest parish churches in the patronage on an English Premonstratensian abbey. Its chapel of St Kenelm at Romsley, which was erected on the spot where St Kenelm was said to have been murdered in 819, was of considerable repute as a place of pilgrimage and, therefore, a valuable source of income to the abbot and convent. There was also another chapelry belonging to Halesowen at Frankley, two miles south-east of the town.
The grant of the church of Walsall in Staffordshire by William Rous, knight, probably took place at or soon after the foundation of the abbey, for the charter is witnessed by Peter des Roches, William, Bishop of Coventry (1215-23) and Richard, abbot of Welbeck. The manor of Walsall was part of the royal demesne and William Rous held it from the crown at fee farm. His gift to the church therefore required royal confirmation, which was obtained in 1223 and in 1245 the kind in his own name was authorised by Bishop Weseham of Coventry. Nevertheless, in 1298 the abbot had some difficulty in proving his title to the church and its chapels of Rushall and Wednesbury before a commission of Quo Warranto. The jury found that the chapel of Wednesbury had been the mother-church before Henry III’S grant, and it was not until 1301 that the abbot and convent recovered the advowson of Wednesbury on payment of a fine of 10 marks. ■ Continues next week.