New Thesis Argues Serfdom Collapsed Quickly After the Black Death in the West Midlands

A PhD thesis from the University of East Anglia challenges the idea that English lords tightened their grip on the peasantry after the plague. Joshua Baylis's Quantifying the Decline of Serfdom in the West Midlands 1300 to 1400 examines nine manors, seven of them held by Worcester Cathedral Priory, and concludes that serfdom in the region began to unravel soon after the Black Death of 1348 to 1349. The thesis was submitted in February 2026 and can be read in full through the UEA eprints repository.

The argument runs against the long-standing Birmingham School view, associated with Rodney Hilton and Christopher Dyer, that lords mounted a "seigneurial reaction" to reimpose servile obligations. Baylis applies the quantitative method associated with Mark Bailey to the West Midlands and finds something different. Lords were struggling to find tenants through the 1350s and 1360s and were offering substantial concessions to attract them, even on an estate as conservative as the priory's.

His abstract sums up the pattern. He identifies "a major swing from the old villein tenure to money tenures soon after 1349 and the attendant decline of tallage, labour services mill suit and entry fines." In other words, the obligations that defined unfree tenure were replaced by cash rents within a generation of the plague.

The thesis also draws on Paul Hargreaves' earlier study of the priory's estates. The entry fine for a yardland, a standard peasant holding, falls from £7 16s 7d in the 1340s to 2s 10d plus 1.4 capons in the 1380s. Hargreaves also recorded 346 runaways from the priory's estates between 1350 and 1390. Of these, 101 were women, including 37 unmarried women, and 26% made for towns such as Worcester and Coventry.

The priory's records still show anxiety about unrest. In 1379 a general order went out to seize the goods and chattels of servile tenants on every manor, although the thesis notes there is no evidence it was ever carried out. In July 1381 the prior excused himself from the Great Chapter at Northampton because, as the records put it, "both free and servile were withholding services and preparing for insurrection."

The manors studied include Elmley Castle, alongside Cleeve Prior, Harvington, Cropthorne with Charlton, Netherton, Sedgeberrow, Overbury and Teddington, and Romsley. For the wider story, see our articles on the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

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