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AUSTREY VILLAGERS

Husbandmen

Husbandmen were generally poorer than yeomen and there were more of them. In 1700 they comprised about a quarter of the registered householders in the parish.  Most were probably copyholders holding one or two half-yardlands at a customary rental, rather than leaseholders or freeholders.  Generally they belonged to that economic sub-strata of ‘middling farmers' or small landholders who were most in danger of being squeezed out by dustries was part of a general enclosures and price rises over the course of the seventeenth century.  They were equivalent to the Cambridgeshire smallholders in Orwell and Chippenham who gradually sold off their holdings to more prosperous yeomen in the early 1600s, although there is not much evidence of this process in Austrey. A survey of husbandmen's surnames tends to suggest that they were geographically sedentary despite social mobility upward into the ranks of the yeomanry and downward into the ranks of the labouring poor. The husbandmen's houses recorded in the inventories were probably occupied by the more prosperous husbandmen: few of the poorer sort would have had goods of sufficient value to warrant the drawing up of an inventory.  They typically had two main rooms (the hall and the parlour) with a series of barns, butteries, storerooms and cellars attached for storage of agricultural produce, farm implements and lumber.

The tendency of the wealthier husbandmen to call themselves yeomen probably explains why there is no marked increase in the size of husbandmen's houses over the course of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, but houses were getting larger. The distinction between husbandmen and yeomen was primarily one of wealth with yeomen worth, on average, twice as much as husbandmen at their decease. The gap between the two groups gradually widened over the period but overall gains were not especially great. Although there was no exact division between husbandmen and yeoman, the survival of the two terms and the consistency with which they were applied to individuals marked a genuine social distinction between those identified  as belonging to each of the two groups.

Sources and Notes

'Their greatest danger was that some prosperous yeoman would buy their holding over their heads': W.G. Hoskins, 'Country Parson', loc.cit, 12-13; M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities, 90-1, 118-19.