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AUSTREY VILLAGERS

Yeomanry

The Austrey Yeomanry - ‘gentlemen in Ore’

By 1700 about one in ten of the Austrey householders were styled yeomen while there were perhaps three or four times as many husbandmen. The exact proportion of yeomen and husbandman at any particular time cannot easily be determined since there was an imprecise line between the two groups Thomas Littleton's (c.1480) definition of a yeoman as a forty-shilling freeholder was obsolete by 1550 owing to inflation and the range of differences in local usage. The yeoman's position in the social order varied in different parts of the country.  While seventeenth-century Kentish wills and inventories suggest that the Kentish yeomanry were a close-knit wealthy group well connected to the gentry, the yeomen of the midlands were poorer, less socially stratified and more closely aligned with the farming population.  The title of yeoman was age-specific - it was rarely attached to a man in his early twenties.  The most familiar observations about the yeomanry in the early 1600s are their growing affluence, their dynastic longevity and their upward mobility.  Next to the gentry they are given most coverage in the records as those most frequently called upon to act as constables, churchwardens and tithingmen within the parish, as jurors in the manorial courts or as witnesses and appraisers to wills and inventories. Almost half of the 84 churchwardens listed for Austrey parish between 1632 and 1682  were yeomen, ten were gentlemen and only two of the remainder can be identified as labourers.  Platitudes like Fuller's definition of a yeoman as 'a gentleman in Ore whom the next age may see refined' show that the term was used as a mark of personal status and worth rather than merely of wealth.  

Austrey’s Elizabethan yeomen families can be identified from probate and land transfer records and from entries in the parish register. The sources do not always agree as to a householder's exact status - generally the register seems to be more generous in awarding the title than other records - but there is no mistaking the remarkable family continuity of some of the yeomen families. Here, as in other local parishes the yeomanry can be roughly divided into two groups: wealthy freeholders and 'lesser' yeomen who leased their holdings. Well established families like Crispe, Cross, Beck and Smart, continued to form the core of the village social order, while ‘lesser yeomen’ such as Mould, Orton and Smart seem to have slipped back into the ranks of the husbandmen by the 1590s.

A closer scrutiny of yeomen's wills and inventories suggests that over the course of the seventeenth century the number of yeomen families was shrinking and some were becoming ‘downwardly mobile’. Of the thirteen families identified as resident in the parish around 1600 only the Becks consolidated and improved their position beyond 1700. Even staunch and relatively prosperous families like the Barwells, Coopers and Spencers reappear in the 1680s and 90s as labourers and craftsmen. Since yeomen derived most of their income from farming, landholdings were of critical importance. The path to social advancement was strewn with obstacles and the same agricultural changes that brought increased prosperity to some yeomen caused others to decline.  The evidence of affluence can be found in the proliferation of rooms and storage facilities in yeomen's houses, in the appearance of luxury goods and in the increasing amounts invested in stocks and bonds. The lease of manorial demesne lands was one path to enrichment which probably accounts for the Smart family’s elevation from a tenants on the demesne to yeomen farmers following the break-up of Sir Walter Aston’s manor in 1630. But the upstart families were not always liked. In 1699 Thomas Moore, the lord of the manor of Little Appleby, used his position to prevent William Smart from purchasing a house in Appleby on the grounds that he and his family were ‘not beloved’ where they were! 

Houses were the most visible symbol of the yeoman's place in the village social order.  Only a few families can be matched to individual houses still standing in the village Austrey's richer inhabitants built their houses along the Street giving access onto the meadow at the Nether End.  The most conspicuous example of farming wealth in that parish is the half-timbered 'Bishop's Hall' which dates from the early Tudor period

And which was probably leased by one of the more substantial Austrey yeomen families by the late 1600s. The hall which dates from the late Tudor stands a quarter of a mile northwest of the church on a site which originally belonged to the Abbot of Burton, coming later into the possession of the Bishop of Ely.  It appears to be fairly typical of the sort of house occupied by a prosperous midland yeoman or minor gentry family before the Civil War. The front of the house facing the street contains two ground-floor rooms (a hall and a parlour, sharing a single chimney stack) with upper chambers reached by a central staircase, while a long range or 'backhouse' extends beyond. One room is decorated with seventeenth-century panelling, an open timbered ceiling and an overmantle with a carved wooden frieze bearing the date 1621.  The 'nether wing' contains the butteries and storage cellars used to store grain and to house processing implements such as the cheese press, vats, churns and sieves, the remnants of which are still visible.

The increasing profits from dairying and other subsidiary activities encouraged yeomen to rebuild their farmhouses and to add additional rooms for storage and food processing.  The period from 1625-42 has been described as the 'second phase' of the 'Great Rebuilding'. A survey of the relative size of yeomen and husbandmen's houses derived from the lists of rooms in their inventories shows an increase in the size of yeomen’s houses in Austrey especially after 1660. This was a result of the increasing profits from dairying and other subsidiary activities

There are several explanations for considerable variations of wealth within the ranks of the yeomanry. The wealthiest among them, men like John Lakin (1630), were worth well in excess of £200 at their death. However a small group of 'impoverished' yeomen recorded assets worth less than a tenth of this amount.

Sources and Notes

In North-East Kent some yeomen were worth £1,000 to £1,500: 'sundry yeomen ... for wealth comparable with many of the gentle sort', W. Lambard (c. 1570) in C.W. Chalklin. Seventeenth Century Kent (London, 1965), 194-5, 233.

W.R.O. Austrey churchwardens’ book, DRB 48/30

L.J.R.O. inventories, Thomas Mould, 1590; John Orton, 1592; Thomas Robinson is described as yeoman in 1571, Edward and Henry Robinson as husbandmen in 1583, 1584 in Austrey parish register.

P.R.O. DL 40/3/14. Register entries from early 1600s describe John Smart as a husbandman, his son William as a yeoman in 1657.

Letter from Moore re William Smart, L.R.O. DE 1642/40.

Housing revolution in M.W. Barley, The English Farmhouse and Cottage (London, 1961), 146-56