The Later Medieval Inquisitions Post Mortem: Mapping the Medieval Countryside and Rural Society

Abstract

Medievalists will know the calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem (IPMs), the surveys by which the EnglishCrown andothers kept track of feudal rights and holdings. The systemwas operative (for the Crown) between c.1236 and the 1640s. Even in calendared form the thousands of IPMs form an almost unmanageable data set, or did until the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded ‘Mapping the Medieval countryside – properties, places and people’ project (http://www.inquisiti onspostmortem.ac.uk/) started to make enhanced versions digitally accessible and interrogable. This multi-author volume is the proceedings of a conference held in 2014 during the main project (work continues still, see http://www.british-history.ac.uk/search/series/inquis-postmortem). It presents new thinking generated from the project, which has revived interest in a class of records principally studied before 1939. Two papers are likely to be of special interest to readers of this journal. The first, by Christopher Dyer, uses IPMs (with a substantive rider setting out their limitations, especially the more abbreviated later ones) to amplify understanding of the character of the various pays – Felden and Arden, Vale and wold – of the three west midlandcounties ofWorcestershire,Warwickshire andGloucestershire.While each regionhaddistinctive characteristics (sometimesnecessitating access todetachedparcels ofmeadoworwoodland, missing on thehomemanor or parish), inmost if not all of them landwas exhausted or falling out of cultivation in the early fourteenth century, perhaps especially that which had been more recently assarted. As is well known, settlement shrinkage and desertion followed in the following century, and in champion areas IPMs of around 1500 record places with large pastures but no tenants. Stephen Mileson’s chapter drills deeper into village life in twelve south Oxfordshire parishes straddling the clay vale and the wood-pasture of the Chiltern Hills. As in Dyer’s chapter, sources other than IPMs provide the main narrative as inhabitants’ bynames such as de Cruce (‘of the cross’) or de la Cumbe (‘of the combe’) and field names are used to suggest how physical and mental geographies were constructed by villagers, and can be reconstructed today. It is a pleasant ramble through the medieval countryside, but again suggests to me that IPMs will add detail to what we already know rather than transform perceptions. Other chapters or sections with a landscape dimension include one which adds substantially to the known list of active and especially minor markets. Another chapter mapsmills of different types noted in IPMs of 1427–37, giving a foretaste of the patterning likely to emerge once further IPMs are digitally available. Alongside these are studies of IPMs in Ireland and the Honour of Clare, parish church customs, monastic engagement in lay society, the wine trade, and what IPMs reveal of the operation of royal government in the further provinces of the country. None fundamentally change our understanding of medieval society, but all bring aspects into greater focus and presumably this will be the more so as the project develops further.