TENURES, TITHES AND THE MANAGEMENT OF A SMALL ECCLESIASTICAL MANOR: KINGSTON (SUFFOLK) IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

Studies of the large and classic manors held by aristocratic or ecclesiastical landlords have formed the bedrock of research into the economic, social and cultural history of medieval England, because of the survival of good quantities of manorial documents, which have been readily accessible in major repositories, from such manors. Yet the most common type of manor was small and held by low status lordship. These lesser manors have left fewer extant sources which were harder for historians to locate before the updating of the online Manorial Documents Register. Kingston was one of those small manors, albeit held by the prior and convent of Ely, from which a handful of court rolls and a good run of compoti (accounts) are extant; furthermore, and unusually, the accounts contain information about the collection of tithes. This article explores how the information contained in these documents can be utilised to reconstruct the management of the manor over the course of the tumultuous fourteenth century, including local responses to the Black Death (1349) and subsequent demographic collapse.