John the miller grinds small small,
The king of heaven sees all, all.

In the fourteenth century, the village of Codicote, in Hertfordshire, was owned by St.Alban's Abbey. Michael Wood, in a 2008 BBC4 programme, traces the story of one woman, Christina, through the obsessive record-keeping carried out by the abbot's secretaries.

An aside: I'd lost my notes on this programme, and had been desperately trying to find it again. As usual, Google finally came up with the goods, via an image search for 'TV historian'. I remembered his face. Google and the human brain are an amazing combination. All I need are a few key words or a picture - the sort of detail my brain, at least, generally keeps pretty well from any subject whatsover - and the information is rarely very far away. This one took ten months, but google and brain got there together in the end.

There's one particular tale from Michael Wood's grassroots account of medieval life I love - I'll come to that shortly - but the programme is also packed with amazing little keyhole peeks into that world. (Google video version here, 1 hour.) Christina managed to survive through the little ice age: massive crop failure, tenant farmers kicked off for not paying rent (and of course also unable to feed their families), many deaths -

flooded valleys, flatten fields, ruined crops. And in places, the food distribution system simply broke down. Merchants from as far away as Yorkshire were travelling through the home counties desperately trying to buy up the last precious supplies of grain.

Her father, when times were still relatively good, worked about 20 to 30 strips of land on the outer rim of the village - none in the same place. It was not a very rational system, to say the least. Both Chistina and her father were villains - which, it turns out, means "unfree peasants who rented land from their lord and worked his fields too, labouring to feed their betters and then to feed themselves." And then pay tax on it. If this is something they teach in school, I clearly wasn't paying attention.

Small-scale markets were emerging at this time: Christina's father rented a stall. They were brewsters: ale-making was a female dominated profession. It was someone else's role - the ale-tasters - to check it was of an acceptable standard. Fines followed if it wasn't. Not a bad job, that.

The landlord's power was total. St. Alban's Abbey was endowed by king Offa in the 8th century; Codicote itself was given to the Monks in 1002 by Ethelred the Unready. Tax and control was everything: renting property, land strips, fines, levies simply for the privilege of being allowed to erect a fence.

There was a single miller who would grind your grain - taking 10% of it for his trouble. He was always prosperous, and likely universally hated as a result: "What's the boldest thing in the world? A miller's shirt, for every day it clasps a thief by the throat."

But he was only a visible representation of the landlord's control: grain came through the miller, and him only. There were workarounds - hand-querns were used for home production. These were entirely illegal, though: if caught, you could have your grain, your horse or the hand-quern itself taken. As Wood says:

On one famous occasion the abbot sent his bailiff and his men to the villages around, including Codicote, to confiscate quernstones and take them back to St.Alban's, where he used them to pave his new patio.

To pave his new patio. The local patriarch stretching his legs in the morning as he strolls to prayer, literally with the people's liberty to produce for themselves under foot. There are plenty of 21st century parallels but I'll just leave it with that picture. That abbot: a medieval evil genius.