Appleby History > Alan Roberts > Early Modern Villagers > Husbandmen
Appleby Families: Villagers in Early Modern Times
Part 4: Husbandmen
by Alan Roberts
Husbandmen were generally poorer than yeomen and there were more of them. In 1700 they comprised about a quarter of the registered householders in each 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 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 little evidence of this process in Appleby. 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 may explain why there is no marked increase in the size of husbandmen's houses over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries while yeomen’s houses increased in size. There was always a wealth distinction between husbandmen and yeomen with yeomen worth, on average, twice as much as husbandmen when they died. Although the gap between the two gradually widened between 1550 and 1700, overall gains over this period were not especially great. There was no exact division between husbandmen and yeoman, but the survival of the two types of farmer and the consistency with which people were identified as one or the other, marked a genuine social distinction.
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.
Surname analysis see tables 3.5 and 3.6: A. Roberts, Farming inhabitants of Appleby and Austrey, (unpublished thesis, LRO) pp.120, 122. Inventory valuations, pp 160-161
©Alan Roberts
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