Social Structures in Five East Midland Villages
S ocial and economic historians have long pondered with F. W. Maitland the question of 'how best to garner the great mass of information contained in the manorial rolls'. No less attractive to other disciplines would be Maitland's recommendation for the students of legal history: 'In the first place it would be well to pick out a few selected manors, to select them because they have unusually complete and continuous records, and then to print those records in full.' 1 But the limited resources of the medievalist that precluded this 'first' approach in the late nineteenth century are no more adequate to the task today. A glance through serial publications 2 reveals that the compromise of Maitland, to print selections from these records, has remained the main method of scholarly production. Indeed, over the past generation there has even been a falling off in this regard. In a recent study 3 based upon court rolls the present writer was able to isolate more clearly the hereditary nature of customary tenancy and the 'regular' features of village mobility. While such features of village life are not unknown to the historian, there did emerge the fascinating possibility of organized research into the life of the villager who has hitherto remained the anonymous, voiceless object of studies in medieval society. Once the court roll is approached as more than a haphazard collection of evidence, and rather as an institution that recorded the work now done by a half-dozen social agencies, the court roll becomes potentially the greatest source for information upon medieval social life. For the greater part of this life was lived in villages, and village court rolls for medieval England are extant by the thousands. If the scores of volumes required to print the court rolls from merely one group of manors precludes Maitland's first approach, the vast amount of data in these volumes does attract the methods increasingly employed by the social scientist in the twentieth century. For these data approximate in magnitude resource material now more usual to the social survey. The following study is a survey intended to illustrate the data available in manorial court rolls and at least one method for the extraction of this material. For this survey there has been chosen the very detailed rolls of Ramsey villages for a six-decade period from the time these rolls became