permission to alter the course of the river in order to give Rievaulx Abbey more land. The Abbot of Byland also agreed to allow the Rievaulx monks to erect a pontem laqueatum the forerunner of Bow Bridge over the Rye and the right to have a road from the bridge through the wood and field of Beghland as far the land extended towards Hestelceit [Hesketh Grange].
Although the peasants of Byland on the Moor were now under the control of a religious order their working conditions are not likely to have improved as there is evidence that the Byland abbots continued to exercise strict feudal control over their villanes. A record from 12 September 1252 shows that ‘Ralph of Arumdeil and Avice his wife admit that Roger and Thomas of Kirkeby with all their families and chattels are villanes of the Abbot of Bella Landa’. Roger and Thomas and their families had obviously fled from one of the abbot’s demesnes and he sought to maintain his feudal rights over them. The abbots jealously guarded their rights to their land and had several disputes with the abbots of Rievaulx and with Nicholas de Boltby with whom they also a legal dispute at the King’s Court in York in 1246 about his impounding abbey cattle.
The abbiots of Byland quickly realised that wool sold to foreign merchants would be a major source of income and as this meant rearing large flocks of sheep the strips of peasant holdings were changed to huge enclosures where thousands of sheep could be grazed. The names of Wethercote, Gimmercote and Ewecote are survivals of areas where wethers, gimmers and ewes would have been gathered and tended by peasants who were employed as shepherds by the Byland abbots.
The next hundred years were the highpoints of the abbey’s economy as the size of the flocks and the sales of wool increased but the last quarter of the 13th century saw a dramatic downturn in the abbey fortunes as the ‘great murrain’ which first appeared in 1274 had a devastating effect of flocks of sheep, bringing much hardship to the village community who continued to face hard times as there were many human deaths from heat and drought in 1285 and general famine and great mortality from fever in 1315-16. Six years later the Scots ransacked the abbeys of Rievaulx and Byland and it is unlikely that the villagers would have escaped the attentions of the marauders but these earlier misfortunes were as nothing compared with the scourge of the Black Death in 1348-9 which is reckoned to have killed up to a third of the national population and created a drastic shortage of labour that caused crops to wither in the fields and animals to be left unattended. The prices of necessities increased by four times their previous levels and the second half of the 14th century saw the beginnings of changes that would lead to the establishment of the first farming tenancies being granted by the Byland abbots.
The problems created by the shortage of labour brought about the enactment of a Statute in 1351 which ruled that men and women who were too idle or unwilling to take up employment after the recent pestilence except for outrageous wages should be obliged to work for the wages accustomed to be paid in the twentieth year of the king’s reign [1346] and to face imprisonment if they failed to do so.
