Postscript: About Those Hens

Those Eternal Hens

Those hens. Paid every Martinmas, year after year, century after century. They appear in the 1349 manorial extent, in the Tudor accounts, in the grants to Richard Duke’s tenants and in the Whitchurch court rolls. Whatever else changed – and a great deal changed – somebody still owed hens.

Those hens weren’t just rent. They were churchscot (cyric-sceat in Old English), one of the oldest forms of ecclesiastical tribute in England.

What was churchscot?

Churchscot was a fixed, compulsory payment levied on land (typically per hide or per household) for the specific purpose of supporting the clergy. Unlike the tithe, which was a proportional tax (one-tenth of your produce), churchscot was a fixed amount regardless of how much you produced. It was paid to your local ‘mother church’ or minster.

The payment was first legally codified in the Laws of Ine of Wessex (reigned c. 688–726 AD).¹F. L. Attenborough (ed. and trans.), The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (Cambridge UP, 1922), pp. 37, 57 (Ine, clauses 4 and 61). King Ine was the same king who founded the see of Sherborne in 705 AD,²Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1943), p. 71. the institution that became Sherborne Abbey. The law establishing the payment and the institution receiving it were created together, as part of the same royal programme to establish Christian infrastructure in Wessex.

Ine’s laws specified that churchscot was to be paid ‘by St Martin’s Mass’ (Martinmas, 11 November) – a date that made sense because it fell after harvest. Later laws clarified that it should be paid ‘according to where a man’s roof and hearth are at midwinter’ as a fixed payment per household.³Attenborough, pp. 37, 57: clause 4 specifies payment at Martinmas; clause 61 specifies payment from the estate where a man resides at midwinter. Stenton, p. 153, confirms churchscot as a payment in kind which could include hens. See also Middle English Dictionary, s.v. ‘chirche-shot’: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED7473

From church tribute to manorial custom

By the time we see the payment recorded in Weston’s 1349 manorial extent, churchscot had been displaced economically by the more lucrative tithe system. But on conservative ecclesiastical estates like those held by Benedictine monasteries, these ancient payments survived, fossilised as manorial customs.

The 1349 extent records 13 hens worth 18½d. By the 1540s accounts, it had become 22 hens paid as part of the manor’s annual income. The clerks recording these probably didn’t know why these specific hens were owed – only that by ancient custom, they were owed from specific tenements to the Abbot of Sherborne.

The hens were the physical ghost of a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon legal system, surviving in medieval and Tudor documents.

When the church connection was severed

When Sherborne Abbey was dissolved in 1539, the legal basis for churchscot was technically destroyed. The whole point of the payment was to support the clergy at the minster. When the new lay lord (Richard Duke) took possession, the payment continued, but it was no longer churchscot in any legal sense. It was just rent. An oddly specific rent involving poultry, but rent nonetheless.

And yet it continued. Through Duke and his daughter’s feuding heirs, through the Thornhulls’ steady management and into the Whitchurches’ tenure, those hens kept being delivered every Martinmas. A payment established by King Ine around 700 AD was still being made in the early 1700s, nearly a thousand years later, to the family of a linen draper in Frome who almost certainly had no idea they were collecting a remnant of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical law.

Why It Matters

The persistence of these hens shows that manorial custom was deeply conservative. Lords changed, monarchs changed, monasteries fell, civil wars came and went – but the customary payments kept flowing because that’s what the manor court roll said, and the manor court roll was the law. The tenants who delivered those hens each November probably didn’t know they were maintaining a tradition older than the Norman Conquest. They just knew it was owed, because it had always been owed.

So, when we joke about ‘those eternal hens’, we’re not (just) being flippant. We’re acknowledging a striking feature of English manorial history: the capacity of ancient customs to survive, forgotten and unexplained, long after anyone could remember why they existed.

We don’t know if they were still being paid when Peter Walter owned the manor – they don’t appear in his valuation, but that only means he didn’t value them (in both senses of the word). But, those eternal hens had surprising staying power, so we wouldn’t be surprised if they were.