©Bryan Phillips Aug 2024

Take a look at our new page on this website devoted to sheep on the Milton Abbey monastery’s manors.

This is part of our exploration of life as a peasant worker in Milton Abbas when wages were around 1 penny a day and your annual rent 2 shillings and you had to work quite a lot of days for nothing at all on the Abbot’s farm (demesne) or if you were lucky you might get some hay to take home or a loaf of bread. Then you had to look after your own crops and livestock and sell them in the Abbot’s market (for which he probably took a toll too) to make a living for you and your family.

It does seem that Milton Abbey was particularly mean to its tenants when compared with other large Benedictine manors and other manors in general. We get the impression that life was hard for the poor peasant.