Manorial court records have become a central source for historians of the medieval countryside. They document the domination of tenants and inhabitants by the lord of a manor, but they also tell us much about peasant society and the inner workings of households and families. More court rolls should be made available in print to enable students and non-specialists to appreciate their variety and richness. A welcome edition of the Winslow (Buckinghamshire) records was recently published, and now the court books and rolls of another manor on the St Albans Abbey estate, Norton, has appeared thanks to Hertfordshire Record Publications. This book begins with a group of local enthusiasts who had explored the archaeology of Norton and excavated part of the medieval village. To find out more about the historical background they enlisted the help of Peter Foden, who translated the court records. He and the Norton Community Archaeology Group have produced this volume together, so the introduction includes the fieldwork, with a number of maps, together with information about the documentary sources and their historical interpretation. The local inhabitants are reminded that Norton, which has been absorbed into the suburban spread of Letchworth Garden City, was once a village of about fifty houses a mile from the market town of Baldock.

Outsiders will gain much from this edition. In the national context the records of 1316–17, the years of the great famine, show a peak in transfers of land as the agrarian crisis stimulated the land market. As would be expected, the mortality of 1349 is reflected in twenty-seven deaths, with a further five in 1361. More unexpected is the apparently routine business of the court held in July 1381, shortly after the great revolt in which St Albans Abbey faced the hostility of its tenants.

In the long term, the records depict advances in the freedom of tenants. Marriage fines were supposed to be paid by unfree tenants and about three occur each year between the 1240s and the 1340s. They were clearly resented, and ceased in the late fourteenth century. Fines for failure to carry out labour services disappear much earlier. Serfdom persists in the records in the repeated but ineffective orders for fugitive serfs to return, well into the fifteenth century. The documentation of serfs, made to help lords maintain discipline, also tell us about peasant society, such as the women who occasionally paid their own marriage fine, suggesting a degree of independence. The reports of fugitives incidentally reveal much about patterns of migration.

The St Albans court books begin unusually early in the thirteenth century, and it is salutary to see in the 1240s complex disputes about the succession to land. Peasants did not emerge from a state of innocent simplicity and then become complicated – they were always enmeshed in a tangle of customary rules. The courts at Norton dealt with more than the usual number of problems arising from the desire of tenants to sublet, and the setting up of wardships for underage heirs. Tenants seem to have encountered difficulties over the maintenance of buildings at an early date, around 1300, though as everywhere these intensified after the Black Death.

These documents rightly are made accessible in English translation and the work has been well done. A few words cause problems, such as ‘corn’, which looks as if it should be ‘wheat’, and ‘room’ is probably better rendered as ‘chamber’, and ‘bowl’ as ‘pan’, assuming that the original text has frumentum, camera, and patella. All doubts could be removed if the possibly ambiguous Latin word were to be printed alongside the English.