I'm a XII century english lord of the manor. How much profit and work force am I expected to make from my three villages with 120 inhabitants each?

by OldManMoinen

What taxes and duties are expected from a single farmer? How much silver and produce I collect? By what means I do it? How much land do I need to support my family and all those tenants?

BRIStoneman

Hello, I wrote an answer here about some of the difficulties in trying to put a concrete value on land using the valuations listed in contemporary sources like Domesday Book. As I noted in that answer, the current consensus is that those values listed for property in Domesday Book most likely represent an estimate of the value of the income specifically to the land-holder/tenant-in-chief in terms of rent, rather than an estimate of the total value of the land itself. So if anything, this is more pertinent data for answering your question, as it appertains to the landlord's income. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that those values may well represent the equivalent value in service obligation on manorial land, or goods rendered, as much as they might be actual sums of money.

In following centuries, your tenants would likely be copyholders, but at this point, the terms and obligations of their tenancies would likely be a combination of common law privileges and discrete relationships agreed with each household based on their means and trade. This means that there wasn't necessarily a standard level of rent: an arable farmer may be obliged to work, say, 4 days a month on manorial land, while a sheep farmer may be liable for a certain amount of wool, sheepskin and mutton, or a livestock farmer to supply two calves a year and a certain volume of milk. Where tenants diversified their holdings, a more representative rent might be agreed.

Two further questions arise: how is your population of 120 represented in terms of production, and do these income figures reflect your manorial appurtenances? Appurtenances are all of the various facilities and amenities attached to your manor: mills, apiaries, meadows, pasture, forest, fish stocks and so forth. These could significantly affect your income. For example, villagers who want to use the mill would typically pay a 'multure' fee to do so, most commonly taken in kind as a portion of the flour. Some of this would probably go to the miller as pay, while some may then pass to you as landlord. The multure rate would be at your discretion; in Chester, the multure for nearby farmers to use the city's mills was 15%, and perhaps unsurprisingly there was frequent complaint of farmers under-paying. At Wareham in Dorset, the mill charged a more reasonable multure of 10%.

So let's look at the footprint of your population. Drawing accurate population figures from contemporary sources is always contentious. After all, contemporary records were typically preoccupied with taxable income rather than an accurate census count. Indeed, Domesday counts on the basis of 'households', and has been estimated to have under-counted due to omissions anywhere between 5% and 20% of the population. Indeed, while the consensus for the average size of a 'household' is somewhere around 5 individuals, various estimates count as low as 3 or even as high as 8 people within an 'average' household. 120 people could therefore theoretically represent as many as 40 or as few as 15 households, but let's use the law of averages and say that 120 people is around 25 households. There's a good chance that some of these households would have been omitted from the Domesday count by virtue of not working land; these could include the miller, any herdsmen who tend to communal herds or flocks, day labourers, and carpenters and blacksmiths and other craftsmen. In terms of land-holding tenants, then, let's estimate around 20 households.

Now, if we're in the latter 12th century, you're unlikely to have any slave households, but similarly you're unlikely to have villages inhabited by just villeins or just smallholders. If we use the approximate proportions from Domesday Book, we'll say you've got 12 villeins or 'villagers*, and 8 smallholders, cottagers and bordars. Villeins typically held around a virgate of land, a quarter of a 'hide' or 'ploughland'. Hides were predominantly assessed in terms of productive capacity rather than as discrete geographical units, but can be roughly approximated at about 120 acres. A villager or villein therefore would hold around 30 acres. There were various classes of smallholder but broadly speaking we could estimate them to hold somewhere between 5 and 15 acres, but in a more settled village we'll say 15. A population of 12 villein households and 8 smallholders could therefore roughly be reckoned to be working about 4 hides of land, around some 480 acres.

A very, very, incredibly rough estimation from Domesday is that a ploughland provides about a pound of rental income per annum. If we hold our rough calculation of about 4 ploughlands per village across all three of your villages, therefore, you could expect a rough annuity of about 12 pounds, plus income from manorial lands and appurtenances.