A Comment on Rural Tenants and Their Buildings in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

This contribution reinforces Currie’s article in Vernacular Architecture 49 to demonstrate that tenants of all kinds, free and customary, usually arranged for the building of the dwellings and subsidiary buildings on their holdings. Lords built only in special circumstances, and tenants normally organised construction by obtaining materials and hiring carpenters. The expectation that tenants were responsible for buildings was often expressed in manorial courts in the period 1360–1520, but neglect of buildings also caused some concern in the period before 1349. This rather technical argument is placed in a more general context of the reappraisal of peasant capacities and agency.