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Life within the manor was centred on the individual villages, each forming a distinct community of family and neighbours. It was within the village that people spent most of their time and had most of their contacts. Houses were, in the main, grouped closely together, and villagers spent much of their time working alongside one another in the open fields. This close association fostered mutual help and support and the borrowing and lending of goods, money, equipment and draught animals. It could also lead, as the manor court rolls reveal, to disagreements, disputes and physical attacks.
Although villagers formed a close community and virtually all were involved in agriculture, there were varying degrees of wealth and status amongst them. The status distinction in the medieval period between free and servile tenants was not always clear (there were borderline cases), nor did the distinction necessarily indicate an individual's relative wealth. The reduction in population resulting from the mid-fourteenth century plagues gave rise to an improvement in economic conditions for a time, but these conditions also allowed an increasing differential to develop between rich and poor, whether free or servile. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the amount of land an individual villager held largely determined his wealth. This in turn depended fundamentally on inheritance: the amount of land held by one's father, the claims on the estate in the form of debts and the number of heirs. Although in most parts of the country the eldest son inherited his father's lands, some provision would be expected for younger sons and for daughters' dowries. Land could also be inherited from childless relatives.
The differential in inheritance could then be compounded by the opportunities to increase holdings for those with more to start with. A man with a larger holding would be likely to attract a wife with a larger dowry, adding to the household wealth. If she had no brothers, the dowry was likely to be in the form of land. An increasing land market allowed wealthier villagers to acquire additional holdings. Those with enough land to produce a surplus could take advantage of higher grain prices in years of dearth. Poor villagers, on the other hand, might be forced to sell land to pay debts or to buy grain when their own crop was insufficient. Even the middling villagers, those holding about 15 acres of land, were liable to suffer in a year of poor harvests. Crop yields in the medieval period were low, about 3-4:1, and approximately one-third of land lay fallow each year. Furthermore, not all of the grain produced went to feed the household: seed had to be saved for the next year, one-tenth of the crop went to the church in tithes, and rents and taxes had to be paid.
Those whose landholdings were too small to support their households, or those who had no land at all, had to use additional means to provide for themselves and their families. One of these was labouring. Some labouring opportunities arose when the lord of the manor needed work doing that was not covered by customary labour services due by tenants to the lord. Wealthier villagers also hired labourers to help on their lands, especially at harvest, or to perform some of the labour services they owed to the lord. Labourers were hired by the day, when needed, for particular tasks. Labouring opportunities were unpredictable and likely to be reduced in years of poor harvests. Those dependent on labouring were therefore particularly vulnerable in these years. Both wages and prices were calculated in money terms. Consequently, whether wages were paid in coin or in corn, the price of corn at the time would determine the amount of corn received for a day's work; when the harvest was poor, grain prices would rise. While labouring was intermittent, steady employment was provided for servants, living in the households of their masters and mistresses. Servants, however, were unable to marry while they were in service.
Another way of supplementing the household income was through by-employments. Some of these appear in the manor court rolls as descriptions of individuals, as leases or rights granted to carry out the work, or because of infringements resulting in amercements. Brewing was clearly a popular by-employment; as individuals were regularly amerced for this but continued brewing for sale, it appears to have been profitable. Other activities included baking, butchering, grinding corn, fishing, weaving, tanning, smithing, coopering, carpentry, shoemaking, rope and harness making, and wheel and cart making. Women as well as men were engaged in by-employments, often extensions of their normal activities, to produce a surplus for sale: brewing, baking, spinning, weaving, and cheese and butter making. Bee keeping produced honey and wax for candles for sale to the wealthy and the church. Women could be paid for services as midwives, and both men and women might be paid as healers. All of these occupations were followed along with farming, and farming produced most of the raw materials for these activities. Scribes employed by the lord of the manor could also be granted lands to farm, and parish priests might rent out their glebe land or farm it themselves.
While most village production, especially in the medieval period, was for local consumption, some wider marketing opportunities, both for buying and selling, were available. Transporting goods over a distance was expensive and time-consuming, but carting labour for the lord of the manor could take villagers, on occasion, to more distant markets. Peddlars and chapmen passed through at times with cheap items for sale. When a more integrated national market began to emerge in the seventeenth century, wealthier villagers were again in a favourable position. (These were the men who were termed "yeomen" by the Tudor period, and some of these families were eventually able to gain gentry status.) Those with larger landholdings were able to invest in improved equipment and new techniques and grow crops for specific markets. Their wider network of contacts enabled them to get loans and credit from their suppliers and find buyers from further afield who could be trusted to pay for goods. Others with less land also had increased opportunities to market any surplus. Most villagers, however, the smallholders and landless, continued to concentrate on subsistence farming, supplemented by labouring, by-employments producing goods for local consumption, and the resources of the commons.
In any period, the wealth, as well as personal qualities, of the individual were important in establishing his or her position in the village community. Wealthier villagers were more likely to hold positions of authority in the manor and in the village, serving as graves, churchwardens, overseeing poor relief. More informally, their authority was often called upon to settle disputes. Within the community of the village, relative wealth and authority carried with it community obligations. Charity, lending to those unlikely to be able to repay, and extending credit in hard times were expected of those who were better off, and community pressure could be exerted to mediate the most severe hardships or the difficulties of those who seen as suffering through no fault of their own. But the principal obligations were towards the immediate family and heirs, ensuring that the village community continued to vary in wealth and in the means to increase it.