Barns, granaries and security: crop storage, processing and investment in medieval England

Abstract

ABSTRACTIncreased storage capacity was an essential part of demesne farming in England, as many surviving barns indicate. Their size facilitated their use also as winter workplaces for threshing grain and pulses. Another use, although undocumented, was probably wool storage. Church estates in particular invested in them, but the later Middle Ages saw many, mostly smaller, barns built by prospering tenant farmers. They therefore had considerable social as well as commercial significance.KEYWORDS: Barnscapacitieslabourexpenditurecommerce AcknowledgementsThe stimulation of attending meetings of the Diet Group has benefited me in many ways, but for this paper I am especially grateful to the editor of this special issue, Christopher Woolgar, for encouragement and references, and to Christopher Dyer who took great trouble to make many useful comments and suggestions.Notes1 M. Gardiner, ‘Vernacular Buildings and the Development of the Later Medieval House Plan in England’, Medieval Archaeology 44 (2000): 159–80 (163–8).2 P.J. Reynolds, ‘Experimental Iron Age Storage Pits: An Interim Statement’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 40 (1974): 118–31.3 Dryers were widespread in the period: M. Allen and others, The Rural Economy of Roman Britain. New Visions of the Roman Countryside volume 2; Britannia Monograph Series 30 (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 30, 2017), 60, 68 and 491; M. Van der Veen, ‘Arable Farming, Horticulture and Food: Expansion, Innovation and Diversity’, in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Archaeology in Britain, eds. M. Millett, L. Revell and A. Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 807–33 (810). They could be used for drying peas and beans as well as grain.4 The process is described by D. Banham and R. Faith, Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 61–3.5 M. Van er Veen, ‘All Change on the Land? Wheat and the Roman to Early Medieval Transition in England’, Medieval Archaeology 66 (2022): 304–42 (323–5).6 See below for further details of these processes.7 C. Sparey Green, Excavations at Poundbury, vol. 1: The Settlements. Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society Monograph Series 7 (Dorchester: Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 1987), 86–9 and 151. Sparey Green speculated that the dryers served a church; an alternative is that they were for the feasts of a chieftain based in the hillfort overlooking the site.8 H. Hamerow, Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 50.9 H. Hamerow, ‘Anglo-Saxon Timber Buildings and Their Social Context’, in The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, eds. H. Hamerow, D.A. Hinton and S. Crawford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 128–55 (150).10 P.A. Rahtz and R. Meeson, An Anglo-Saxon Watermill at Tamworth. Excavations in the Bolebridge Street Area of Tamworth, Staffordshire. Council for British Archaeology Research Reports series 83 (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1992).11 G. Thomas and others, ‘Technology, Ritual and Anglo-Saxon Agriculture; The Biography of a Plough Coulter’, Antiquity 90, no. 351 (2016): 742–58.12 M. McKerracher, Farming Transformed in Anglo-Saxon England. Agriculture in the Long Eighth Century (Oxford: Windgather Press, Oxbow Books, 2018), 75–80; D.A. Hinton and D.P.S. Peacock, Impinging on the Past. A Rescue Excavation at Fladbury, Worcestershire, 1967 (Southampton: Highfield Press, 2020), 11–18 and 64–8. A complex of dryers and other features, also some distance from other buildings, is under investigation at Sedgeford, Norfolk; the status of the estate that it served is not recorded: N. Faulkner and E. Blakelock, ‘The Excavation of a Mid Anglo-Saxon Malthouse in Sedgeford, Norfolk: An Interim Report’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 22 (2020): 68–95.13 Lower case initials are used to avoid confusion over these words having modern ethnic or political significance; they were not used during the Middle Ages.14 McKerracher, Farming Transformed, 74–7; M. Carver, Formative Britain. An Archaeology of Britain, Fifth to Eleventh Century AD (London: Routledge, 2019), 237 and 241.15 J. Blair, Building Anglo-Saxon England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 355–72.16 M. Gardiner, ‘Stacks, Barns and Granaries in Early and High Medieval England: Crop Storage and Its Social and Economic Implications’, in Horrea, Silos and Barns. Storage and Incomes in Early Medieval Europe, eds. A. Vigil-Escalera Guirado, G. Bianchi and J.A. Quirόs Castillo (Vitoria: University of the Basque Country, 2016), 23–38 (29–30).17 Banham and Faith, Anglo-Saxon Farms, 63–4; A.J. Frantzen, Food, Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 65; weevils were scarcely known, however, only reappearing later in the Middle Ages: Van der Veen, ‘Arable Farming’, 810.18 Gardiner, ‘Stacks, Barns and Granaries’, 24–5, 32; McKerracher, Agriculture Transformed, 72–6.19 ‘on odene cylne macian ofn 7 aste’: M. Swanton, ed. and trans., Anglo-Saxon Prose (London: Dent, 1975), 26; J. Hines, ‘Gerefa §§15 and 17: A Grammatical Analysis of the Lists of Nouns’, Medieval Archaeology 50 (2006): 268–70.20 Sparey Green, Poundbury, 86–7; Banham and Faith, Anglo-Saxon Farming, 64–5; see further below.21 Swanton, ed. and trans., Anglo-Saxon Prose, 22; the gebur was to sow seed from his own barn for his own acres. Winnowing is discussed further below.22 A. Williams, The World Before Domesday. The English Aristocracy, 900–1066 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), 67; the text continues with the even more degraded people in prison, a phrase that has influenced the Cheddar interpretation above.23 H. Pinto, Treen and Other Wooden Bygones. An Encyclopaedia and Social History (London: G. Bell and Son, 1969), 93; D. Hill, ‘Prelude: Agriculture through the Year’, in The Material Culture of Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World, eds. M. Clegg Hyer and G.R. Owen-Crocker (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2011), 9–22. Both the Old English calendars show long, straight swingles; later illustrations show them as slightly shorter and bulbous, which would bring more of the surface into contact with the heaped ears, e.g. in Matthew Paris’ thirteenth-century chronicle: R. Vaughan, The Illustrated Chronicles of Matthew Paris. Observations of Thirteenth-Century Life (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993), 47; the Luttrell Psalter, London, British Library, Add. MS 42130, f. 74, and the Queen Mary Psalter, BL, MS Royal 2 B VII, f. 165v, both early fourteenth-century and illustrated in E. Impey, D. Miles and R. Lea, The Great Barn of 1425–27 at Harmondsworth, Middlesex (Swindon: Historic England, 2017), 24; see also J. Langdon, ‘Agricultural Equipment’, in The Countryside of Medieval England, eds. G. Astill and A. Grant (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 86–107 (95–7).24 ‘Flailing around’ is because the threshing motion involves ‘whirling and striking’: Hill, ‘Prelude’, 18. The work is not unskilled, and involves couples or teams keeping up a rhythm; Scandinavian and Irish barns included horses’ heads under threshing-floors, to provide acoustics, but none has been found in an English barn: T. Hack and J. Samways, ‘Geophysical Survey Report: Bradford-on-Avon Grange Barn’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 114 (2021): 265–9 (266–7); R. Merrifield, The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic (London: Guild Publishing, 1987), 124–5.25 J. Bond, Monastic Landscapes (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 127.26 Because R. Richmond, ‘Three Records of the Alien Priory of Grove and the Manor of Leighton Buzzard’, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 8 (1924): 15–46 (29), translated tribula as ‘threshing dray’ at Leighton in 1341×2, Baker, La Grava, 348, argued that animals were used to drag an implement over the grain, but the word need not mean more than ‘flail’, and it was used at Grove in an entry for costs including two shovels (vangis) totalling 1s. 6¾d., so was probably only a small implement. Horses can be used to tread down piled sheaves to make more space, but I have found no reference to this practice in the Middle Ages.27 R.H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500. 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 109.28 Building S10 in E. Baker, La Grava. The Archaeology and History of a Royal Manor and Alien Priory of Fontevrault. Council for British Archaeology, Research Report 167 (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2013), 63, 65, 81, 331 and 336.29 J.G. Hurst, ‘Rural Building in England and Wales: England’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 2: 1042–1350, ed. H.E. Hallam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 854–932 (891–2); a possibly Norman predecessor of the fifteenth-century Harmondsworth barn measured c.90×24 feet, but its full details were irrecoverable: Impey, Miles and Lea, Great Barn … Harmondsworth, 9.30 P.A. Stamper and R.A. Croft, The South Manor Area. Wharram: A Study of Settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds, vol. 8 (York: University of York, 2000), 201–2 and 38–47.31 R.A. Hall, ‘Burhs and Boroughs: Defended Places, Trade and Towns. Plans, Defences and Civic Features’, in Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, eds. Hamerow, Hinton and Crawford, 600–24 (612–14); J. Schofield, ‘Urban Housing’, in The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain, eds. C.M. Gerrard and A. Gutiérrez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 297–311 (298 and 302–3); Blair, Building, 339–41.32 D. Austin, The Deserted Medieval Village of Thrislington, County Durham. Excavation 1973–1974. Society for Medieval Archaeology, Monograph Series 12 (Lincoln: Society for Medieval Archaeology, 1989), 25–7.33 Including some below towers: M.G. Shapland, Anglo-Saxon Towers of Lordship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 134–7.34 J. Claridge and J. Langdon, ‘Storage in Medieval England: The Evidence from Purveyance Accounts 1295–1349’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 64 (2011): 1242–65 (1258). Gardiner, ‘Stacks, Barns and Granaries’, 32, for pots. Sacks might be leather, at least for transport, which probably kept the contents better than canvas, e.g. ‘un saak de bon quir’: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 24, ff. 62r–v.35 Richmond, ‘Three Records of the Alien Priory of Grove … ’, 16–18.36 An occasional alternative translation of siligine is ‘bran, flour’, unlikely in contexts where heaps and piles are indicated, not barrels or sacks: R.L. Latham, D.R. Howlett and others, eds., Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (London: Oxford University Press, 1975–2013), online at https://logeion.uchicago.edu, s.v. siligo.37 R. Faith, ‘Demesne Resources and Labour Rent on the Manors of St Paul’s Cathedral, 1066–1222’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 47 (1994): 657–78.38 ‘Est autem ibi orreum versus est altitudinis usque ad trabem xiii pedum, et desuper ad festum x pedum et dimid. Latitudo inter postes xix pedum et dimid. Alae huius orrei sunt latitudinis vi pedum et dimid. Altitudo alarum vi pedum et dimid. … Tota longitudo hujus orrei cum culaciis lv ped.’ W.H. Hale, ed., The Domesday of St Paul’s of the Year MCCXXII: Or Registrum de visitatione maneriorum per Robertum Decanum and Various Other Original Documents. Camden Society, Old Series, 69 (London: printed for the Camden Society, 1858), 122–3, and for his helpful translations, xci; culacii was translated by Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v. coleicius 3, as ‘cullis’, compartment at end of building under lean-to roof, so here may mean the spaces below hipped roofs at the barns’ gable ends.39 Hale, ed., Domesday of St Paul’s, 129–30; Gardiner, ‘Stacks, Barns and Granaries’, 30–1, with useful table of measurements. Occasional subsequent records used various terminology: Impey, Miles and Lea, Great Barn … Harmondsworth, 13. The rod, pole and perch of 16½ feet had become widespread.40 The barn at Belchamp St Paul (Essex) was thought to have a surviving earth-fast post in situ dated to the eleventh or twelfth century, but has been shown to be thirteenth-century with reused timbers from an earlier building: I. Tyers and H. Hibberd, ‘List 53: Tree-Ring Dates from Museum of London Archaeology Service’, Vernacular Architecture 24 (1993): 50 and 52.41 N.E. Stacy, eds, Surveys of the Estates of Glastonbury Abbey, c.1135–1201. British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History, new series 33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2001), 185, 158, 194 and 197. The Wrington entry refers to furcas, discussed below. I have not found a translation of hoscas (or of oscas).42 N. Brady, ‘The Gothic Barn of England: Icon of Prestige and Authority’, in Technology and Resource Use in Medieval Europe: Cathedrals, Mills and Mines, eds. E.B. Smith and M. Wolfe (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1997), 76–108 (81); E. Roberts, ‘Early Hay Barns in the South of England: A Sixteenth-Century Example’, Vernacular Architecture 42 (2011): 14–21.43 Impey, Miles and Lea, Great Barn … Harmondsworth, 13; D. Oschinsky, ed., Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 475. See further below for furcos.44 Brady, ‘Gothic Barn’, 92.45 Converted from the cubic metre estimate in Impey, Miles and Lea, Great Barn … Harmondsworth, 13.46 W. Horn and E. Born, The Barns of the Abbey of Beaulieu and Its Granges of Great Coxwell and Beaulieu St Leonards (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965), 41; these figures may not make reductions for space in the gables or in the entrances that would normally not have been filled.47 D. Postles, ‘Estimates of Harvest on Oseney Manors’, Oxoniensia 64 (1999): 301–6; B.F. Harvey and C.M. Woolgar, eds., The States of the Manors of Westminster Abbey c. 1300–1422. British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History, new series, 57–8. 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2019), 1: 14.48 W.H. Hart and A.L. Ponsonby, eds., Cartularium monasterii de Rameseia. Rolls Series, 79. 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1884–93), 2: 245. The wheat barn ‘rotunda erat versus orientem’ and ‘ad uncium rotunditatis’, implying a semi-circular east end which could be used for separate measurement; no such feature is known, however, and Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources has no entry for either rotunda or uncium that explain these phrases: the semi-circular annexes attached to post-medieval barns were for horse-engines to work threshing machines: R.W. Brunskill, Traditional Farm Buildings of Britain. New edn. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987), 50–7.49 N.R. Holt, ed., The Pipe Roll of the Bishopric of Winchester, 1210–1211 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964), 53; C. Dyer, ‘Peasant Farming in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Tithe Estimates by Worcester Cathedral Priory’, in Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy. Essays in Honour of Bruce M.S. Campbell, eds. M. Kowaleski, J. Langdon and P.R. Schofield (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 83–109 (86).50 Brady, ‘Gothic Barn’, 81; A. Quiney, The Traditional Buildings of England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 155.51 N.E. Stacy, ed., Charters and Custumals of Shaftesbury Abbey 1089–1212. British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History, new series 39 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2006), 138 and 153: commutation had become more widespread by the time of Survey B, limiting the numbers and amounts of specified tasks (29–30).52 Stacy, ed., Charters and Custumals of Shaftesbury Abbey, 97 and 109.53 Stacy, ed., Charters and Custumals of Shaftesbury Abbey, 145, 148, 167–8, etc.54 E.B. DeWindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needleworth (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1972), 69 and 80.55 Oschinsky, ed., Walter of Henley, 283, 325; although the instruction was to oxherds about byres, the same principle doubtless applied to barns.56 The only English indoor examples cited by Rickett, Drying Kilns, 13, are at Hound Tor (Devon), high on Dartmoor, and a ‘marginal’ site; the ovens there have been cited to support arguments about the dramatic effects of climatic deterioration in the later Middle Ages as they were interpreted as insertions into the barns, desperate attempts to dry sodden crops, but it was more practicable to build them as separate structures rather than to integrate them with structural walls, so they may be coeval. A dryer built into the side of a Welsh hillfort in the fifteenth century was at some distance from a settlement, but laws imply that kilns were usually close to houses and mills: W. Britnell, ‘A 15th-Century Corn-Drying Kiln from Collfryn, Llansantfraid, Deuddr, Powys’, Medieval Archaeology 28 (1984): 190–4; L.A.S. Butler, ‘Domestic Building in Wales and the Evidence of the Welsh Laws’, Medieval Archaeology 31 (1987): 47–58 (53–5); McKerracher, ‘Introduction’, 2. In post-medieval Wales, kilns were observed that were no more than fuel-filled hollows below a layer of straw through which heat filtered.57 M. Robinson, ‘Excavations at Copt Hay, Tetsworth, Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensia 38 (1973): 41–115 (57–8, 74) cited as still a good example by Gardiner, ‘Stacks, Barns and Granaries’, 32.58 N. Alcock, ed., ‘Radiocarbon Date-List 1, 2009’, Vernacular Architecture 40 (2009): 103–4, for problems of reconciliation.59 R. Berger, ‘The Potential and Limitations of Radiocarbon Dating in the Middle Ages: The Radiochronologist’s View’, in Scientific Methods in Medieval Archaeology, ed. R. Berger (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), 89–140 (120–1), discussed by W Horn, ‘The Potential and Limitations of Radiocarbon Dating in the Middle Ages: The Art Historian’s View’, in Scientific Methods, ed. Berger, 23–88 (23–7).60 Tyers and Hibberd, ‘List 53’, 50–1; date ranges make allowance for sapwood and bark if it is not present on the measured timber.61 The numbers in these tables are an impressive tribute to various specialists in the last 20 years; when Niall Brady published his 1997 paper, only 12 barns had been dated by dendrochronology: ‘Gothic Barn’, 82, n. 19.62 The origin of crucks has sparked considerable debate, e.g. N. Hill, ‘New Ideas Revisited’, Vernacular Architecture 38 (2007): 8–11; N. Alcock, ‘A Rejoinder’, Vernacular Architecture 38 (2007): 11–14. One issue concerns whether furca was always, or later became, a synonym for ‘cruck’, and a phrase in the 1180s Glastonbury Abbey survey of the barn at Wrington has been prominent in discussion: ‘unam tas avene durans ad furcas in longum, in altitudine durans ad trabem furcarum’: Stacy, ed., Surveys of the Estates of Glastonbury Abbey, 185; ‘a pile of oats reaching to the forks in length, in height reaching to the beam of the forks’ suggests a meaning of aisle-posts with forked tops holding a tie-beam, not crucks at that early date. The Gloucester Abbey mention of furcos, above, is later in date and in the West Midlands, so probably did indicate crucks.63 D. Miles, M. Bridge and D. Clark, ‘List 266: Oxford Dendrochronological Project – Phase Ten’, Vernacular Architecture 45 (2014): 121–5 (123).64 J.W.S. Lee, ‘Grain Shortages in Late Medieval Towns’, in Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Late Middle Ages. Essys in Honour of Richard Britnell, eds. B. Dodds and C. Liddy (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 63–80 (71). It is a disadvantage of barns that big open units facilitate the spread of grain beetles: Van der Veen, ‘Arable Farming’, 810.65 Brady, ‘Gothic Barn’, 93–4.66 Quiney, Traditional Buildings, 155.67 Base-crucks pairs are linked by collar-beams and at apexes.68 F.W.B. Charles, C. Dyer and M. Charles, The Great Barn of Bredon: Its Fire and Rebuilding (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1997).69 Impey, Miles and Lea, Great Barn … Harmondsworth, 52–3.70 C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200–1520. 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136.71 Dyer, Standards of Living, 136.72 R.A. Brown, H.M. Colvin and A.J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works: The Middle Ages. 2 vols. (London: H.M.S.O. 1963), 2: 665.73 P.A. Rahtz and L. Watts, The North Manor House and the North-West Enclosure. Wharram: A Study of Settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds, vol. 9 (York: University of York, 2004), 295; M.W. Beresford and J.G. Hurst, Wharram Percy, Deserted Medieval Village (London: Batsford, 1990), 132, and 120 for reconstruction.74 C. Dyer, ‘The Late Medieval Village of Wharram Percy: Farming the Land’, in A History of Wharram Percy and its Neighbours, ed. S. Wrathmell. Wharram: A Study of Settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds, 13; York University Archaeological Publications 15 (York: University of York, 2012), 312–27 (314).75 Gardiner, ‘Vernacular Buildings’, 163.76 Dyer, ‘Wharram Percy: Farming’, 315.77 S. Wrathmell, ‘Northern England: Exploring the Character of Medieval Rural Settlements’, in Medieval Rural Settlement. Britain and Ireland, A.D. 800–1600, eds. N. Christie and P. Stamper (Oxford: Windgather Press, 2012), 249–69 (252–3).78 G. Beresford, The Medieval Clay-Land Village. Excavations at Goltho and Barton Blount. Society for Medieval Archaeology, Monograph Series 6 (London: Society for Medieval Archaeology, 1975), 37. For a review of peasant farm buildings in the West Midlands, see C. Dyer, Peasants Making History. Living in an English Region 1200–1540 (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2022), 175–8.79 M. Tompkins, ‘Counting Houses: Using the Housing Structure of a Late Medieval Manor to Illuminate Population, Landholding and Occupational Structure’, in Life in Medieval Landscapes. People and Places in the Middle Ages, eds. S. Turner and B. Silvester (Oxford: Windgather Press, 2012), 225–38 (231).80 C. Briggs, ‘Manorial Court Roll Inventories as Evidence of English Peasant Consumption and Living Standards, c.1270– c.1360’, in Pantas de consumo y niveles de vida en el mundo rural medieval, eds. A. Furiό and F. Garcia-Oliver (University of Valencia Press, forthcoming), no. 1.81 W.P. Baildon, ed., Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, vol. 1: 1274 to 1297. Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 29 (Leeds: printed for the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1900), 274; H.E.J. Le Patourel, ‘Rural Building in England and Wales’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 3: 1348–1500, ed. E. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 820–93 (871).82 R. Lock, ed., The Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows 1303–1350. Suffolk Records Society 41 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Suffolk Records Society, 1998), 109, 198, 208.83 Brown, Colvin and Taylor, History of the King’s Works, 2: 665, 977, 994 and 1020; see Table 1 for other examples of re-use. Although none of the twelfth-century St Paul’s barns survive, Belchamp’s incorporates posts that are likely to have come from one of them: Tyers and Hibberd, ‘List 53’: 50 and 52. Ashwell: Harvey and Woolgar, eds., States of Westminster, 2: 383.84 C. Dyer, ‘Evidence for Helms in Gloucestershire’, Vernacular Architecture 15 (1984): 42–4; Roberts, ‘Hay Barns’, 20.85 Gardiner, ‘Stacks, Barns and Granaries’, 32.86 P.M. Slocombe and I. Slocombe, The Buildings of Barton Farm, Bradford-on-Avon (Bradford-on-Avon: Ex Libris Press, in association with Bradford-on-Avon Museum, 2016), 40–2 and 123. The granary has outside stone steps, as had one excavated at Burton Dassett Southend (Warwickshire): Dyer, Peasants Making History, 177. Mushroom-like staddle stones were probably not used until the thirteenth or fourteenth century: Dyer, ‘Helms’, 43–4.87 I. Kershaw and D.M. Smith, eds., The Bolton Priory Compotus 1286–1325, Together with a Priory Account Roll for 1377–78. Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 154 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 499; Brady, ‘Gothic Barn’, 77, for other examples. A granary is shown in the outer court of Canterbury Cathedral on the map of 1153×61, close to the bakehouse and brewhouse, and obviously for their immediate supply, with flour brought from the ‘barton’ half a mile away; heavy vertical lines may indicate that it had strong timber posts, though a raised floor is not indicated: R.A. Skelton and P.D.A. Harvey, Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 44 and 53–4.88 J. Hare, A Prospering Society. Wiltshire in the Later Middle Ages. Studies in Regional and Local History 10, (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011), 77–8; also Harvey and Woolgar, eds., States of Westminster, 1: 14.89 M.K. Dale, ed., Court Rolls of Chalgrave Manor 1278–1313. Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 28 (Streatley: Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 1950), xxxi. The granarium moved at Ashwell (above) was probably a barn, as moving a small granary would not have cost £3: Harvey and Woolgar, eds., States of Westminster, 2: 383.90 P.D.A. Harvey, ed., Manorial Records of Cuxham, Oxfordshire, c.1200–1329. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Joint Publications series 23 (London: Her Majety’s Stationery Office, 1976), 724–5, 727.91 R.K. Field, ed., Court Rolls of Elmley Castle, Worcestershire 1347–1564. Worcestershire Historical Society, new series 20 (Worcester: Worcestershire Historical Society, 2004), xviii.92 Claridge and Langdon, ‘Storage’, 1244, who cited it as exceptional; most of their records of granaries relate to storage buildings in ports and towns, 1246–7 and 1259.93 Lock, ed., Walsham le Willows, 135; ‘house’ or domus was often used of agricultural buildings: Claridge and Langdon, ‘Storage’, 1252; P.M. Slocombe, ‘To Beg a Tree and Tarry His Pleasure to Assign It to Me’, Vernacular Architecture 49 (2018): 32–7 (34); C. Dyer, ‘The Housing of Peasant Livestock in England 1200–1520’, Agricultural History Review 67 (2019): 29–50 (33–4).94 S.F. Hockey, Quarr Abbey and Its Lands (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1970), 108–10.95 Faith, ‘St Paul’s’, 658.96 Britnell, Commercialisation, 109.97 E. Martin, ‘“Where Most Inclosures Be”: The Making of the East Anglian Landscape’, in Medieval Landscapes, eds. M. Gardiner and S. Rippon (Macclesfield: Windgather Press, 2007), 122–38 (129).98 Oschinsky, ed., Walter of Henley, 397.99 D. Stone, Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 49–50.100 Kershaw and Smith, eds., Bolton Priory Compotus, 8.101 Transcript in J.Z. Titow, English Rural Society 1200–1350 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), 203–4.102 J. Langdon, J. Walker and J. R. Falconer, ‘Boom and Bust: Building Investment on the Bishop of Winchester’s Estate in the Early Fourteenth Century’, in The Winchester Pipe Rolls and English Medieval Society, ed. R. Britnell (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 139–55 (146). Inflation and deflation make figures not directly comparable.103 E. Roberts, ‘Overton Court Farm and the Late Medieval Farmhouses of Demesne Lessees in Hampshire’, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society 51 (1996): 89–106 (93–4); this may have been to attract a good tenant, but there is a distinct possibility of nepotism, as the farmer had the same surname as the bishop.104 Impey, Miles and Lea, Great Barn … Harmondsworth, 16–17, for discussion.105 Brady, ‘Gothic Barn’, 82–95; the savings to the owning community of having their own food supply are inestimable.106 Impey, Miles and Lea, Great Barn … Harmondsworth, 13–14.107 M. Page, ed., The Pipe Roll of the Bishopric of Winchester 1301–2. Hampshire Record Series, 14 (Winchester: Hampshire County Council, 1996), 153.108 B. Sharp, Famine and Scarcity. Grain Marketing 1256–1631 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 14 for summary.109 Page, ed., Pipe Roll 1301–2, 161.110 A. Arnold, ‘Harrow, Headstone Manor, Tithe Barn’, Vernacular Architecture 33 (2002): 23.111 M. Bond, ‘Great Tomkyns Barn, Upminster, and the Sequence of Timber-Framed Aisled Barns’, Vernacular Architecture 24 (1993): 32–9.112 I. Tyers and C. Grove, ‘List 114: Tree-Ring Dates from the University of Sheffield Dendrochronology Laboratory’, Vernacular Architecture 31 (2000): 118–28.113 D.H. Miles and M.J. Worthington, ‘List 92: Hampshire Dendrochronology Project – Phase Four’, Vernacular Architecture 29 (1998): 117–21 (119).114 M. Samuel, ‘The Fifteenth-Century Garner at Leadenhall, London’, Antiquaries Journal 69 (1989): 119–53; D.J. Keene, ‘Crisis Management in London’s Food Supply, 1250–1500’, in Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle Ages, eds. Dodds and Liddy, 45–62 (60–1).115 R.K. Field, ‘Worcestershire Peasant Buildings, Household Goods and Farming Equipment in the Later Middle Ages’, Medieval Archaeology 9 (1965): 105–45 (133–6). Three bays was the most usual size recorded in the West Midlands generally: Dyer, Peasants Making History, 175–6.116 N. Alcock, ‘Building a Cob House in Devon’, Vernacular Architecture 51 (2020): 23–9.117 C.R.J. Currie, ‘Why Historians Believe that Customary Tenants normally Paid for Their Own Buildings’, Vernacular Architecture 49 (2018): 38–43.118 Field, ‘Peasant Buildings’, 119; the costs in cash were not directly recorded.119 Field, ed., Elmley Castle, xviii, 193, 195, 201, 212, 226, 230, 235. Dyer, Peasants Making History, 219–20, found 152 instances of barn repairs in the West Midlands.120 Lock, ed., Walsham le Willows, 99 and 101.121 Excavations of rural sites are another source of information: see above for identification problems, however. As many townspeople had farming interests, urban storage buildings were probably also commonplace: R. Britnell, ‘The Economy of British Towns 600–1300’, 105–26 (117–8); J. Schofield and G. Stell, ‘The Built Environment 1300–1540’, 371–94 (372); and C. Dyer, ‘Small Towns 1270–1540’, 505–39 (511–2); all in The Cambridge Urban History, vol. 1: 600–1540, ed. D. Palliser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).122 The manuals’ silence on storage, despite all the instructions about sheep flocks, was noted by Oschinsky, ed., Walter of Henley