## Summary Medieval England runs from the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the close of the Middle Ages under the Tudor settlement of 1485. It is the world of the manor, the parish and the crown: a society built on the assumption that everyone had a fixed place, and the long story of that assumption coming apart. ## The Norman settlement William's conquest was a land grab on a total scale: almost the whole Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was dispossessed and replaced by Norman lords holding directly of the king. England became the most tightly governed kingdom in western Europe — Domesday Book (1086) recorded who held what, and therefore what could be taken. Feudal lordship, in its English form, was less a romantic chain of homage than a machine for extracting service and rent from land (see [[Hierarchy]]). ## The manor and villeinage Most English people were villeins: bound to their lord's manor, working his demesne land as a condition of holding their own strips, legally unfree in the eyes of the courts. Custom, not contract, governed their lives — which cut both ways. Custom could be oppressive, but it could also be defended: a right "time out of mind" was a right all the same. The manorial system rested on labour being where it was born. ## Famine and plague The fourteenth century broke the settlement. The Great Famine of 1315-17 showed a population already at the carrying capacity of its land. Then the Black Death of 1348-49 killed somewhere between a third and half of the population — see [[The Black Death]]. The economic consequence was immediate: labour was scarce, wages rose, and the Statute of Labourers (1351) tried to legislate scarcity out of existence. The attempt to freeze a changing world in place, for four decades, produced the most radical popular rising in English history (see [[1381 Peasants' Revolt]]). ## The long close The later Middle Ages saw serfdom quietly dissolve into leasehold and cash rent, the church shaken by plague, schism and Lollardy, and the crown consumed by the Wars of the Roses until Henry VII's victory at Bosworth in 1485. By the Tudor settlement the world of villeinage was a memory — undone less by reform than by death, wages and refusal. Barbara Tuchman's [[A Distant Mirror]], though centred on France, is the classic portrait of this century of collapse and endurance. --- `Related:` [[1381 Peasants' Revolt]] · [[Wat Tyler]] · [[John Ball]] · [[The Black Death]] · [[A Distant Mirror]] `Concepts:` [[Hierarchy]] · [[Social Class]] · [[Feudalism]] `Knowledge Base:` [[The Black Death]] · [[A Distant Mirror]]