Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England
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Title: Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England
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DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND
Three Essays in the Early History of England.
* * * * * *
Cambridge University Press Warehouse,
C. F. Clay, Manager.
=London=: Fetter Lane, E.C.
=Glasgow=: 50, Wellington Street.
[Illustration]
Also
=London=: Stevens and Sons, Ltd., 119 and 120, Chancery Lane.
=Leipzig=: P. A. Brockhaus.
=Bombay and Calcutta=: Macmillan & Co. Ltd.
[All rights reserved.]
* * * * * *
PREFACE.
The greater part of what is in this book was written in order that it
might be included in the _History of English Law before the Time of
Edward I._ which was published by Sir Frederick Pollock and me in the
year 1895. Divers reasons dictated a change of plan. Of one only need I
speak. I knew that Mr Round was on the eve of giving to the world his
_Feudal England_, and that thereby he would teach me and others many new
lessons about the scheme and meaning of Domesday Book. That I was well
advised in waiting will be evident to everyone who has studied his work.
In its light I have suppressed, corrected, added much. The delay has
also enabled me to profit by Dr Meitzen's _Siedelung und Agrarwesen der
Germanen_[1], a book which will assuredly leave a deep mark upon all our
theories of old English history.
The title under which I here collect my three Essays is chosen for the
purpose of indicating that I have followed that retrogressive method
'from the known to the unknown,' of which Mr Seebohm is the apostle.
Domesday Book appears to me, not indeed as the known, but as the
knowable. The Beyond is still very dark: but the way to it lies through
the Norman record. A result is given to us: the problem is to find cause
and process. That in some sort I have been endeavouring to answer Mr
Seebohm, I can not conceal from myself or from others. A hearty
admiration of his _English Village Community_ is one main source of
this book. That the task of disputing his conclusions might have fallen
to stronger hands than mine I well know. I had hoped that by this time
Prof. Vinogradoff's _Villainage in England_ would have had a sequel.
When that sequel comes (and may it come soon) my provisional answer can
be forgotten. One who by a few strokes of his pen has deprived the
English nation of its land, its folk-land, owes us some reparation. I
have been trying to show how we can best bear the loss, and abandon as
little as may be of what we learnt from Dr Konrad von Maurer and Dr
Stubbs.
For my hastily compiled Domesday Statistics I have apologized in the
proper place. Here I will only add that I had but one long vacation to
give to a piece of work that would have been better performed had it
been spread over many years. Mr Corbett, of King's College, has already
shown me how by a little more patience and ingenuity I might have
obtained some rounder and therefore more significant figures. But of
this it is for him to speak.
Among the friends whom I wish to thank for their advice and assistance I
am more especially grateful to Mr Herbert Fisher, of New College, who
has borne the tedious labour of reading all my sheets, and to Mr W. H.
Stevenson, of Exeter College, whose unrivalled knowledge of English
diplomatics has been generously placed at my service.
F. W. M.
_20 January, 1897._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE v
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xiv
ESSAY I.
DOMESDAY BOOK.
Domesday Book and its satellites, 1. Domesday and legal history,
2. Domesday a geld book, 3. The danegeld, 3. The inquest and the geld
system, 5. Importance of the geld, 7. Unstable terminology of the
record, 8. The legal ideas of century xi. 9.
§ 1. _Plan of the Survey_, pp. 9-26.
The geographical basis, 9. The vill as the unit, 10. Modern and
ancient vills, 12. Omission of vills, 13. Fission of vills, 14. The
nucleated village and the vill of scattered steads, 15. Illustration
by maps, 16. Size of the vill, 17. Population of the vill, 19.
Contrasts between east and west, 20. Small vills, 20. Importance of
the east, 21. Manorial and non-manorial vills, 22. Distribution of
free men and serfs, 23. The classification of men, 23. The classes of
men and the geld system, 24. Our course, 25.
§ 2. _The Serfs_, pp. 26-36.
The _servus_ of Domesday, 26. Legal position of the serf, 27.
Degrees of serfdom, 27. Predial element in serfdom, 28. The serf and
criminal law, 29. Serf and villein, 30. The serf of the _Leges_, 30.
Return to the _servus_ of Domesday, 33. Disappearance of _servi_, 35.
§ 3. _The Villeins_, pp. 36-66.
The boors or coliberts, 36. The continental colibert, 37. The
English boor, 37. _Villani_, _bordarii_, _cotarii_, 38. The villein's
tenement, 40. Villeins and cottiers, 41. Freedom and unfreedom of the
_villani_, 41. Meaning of freedom, 42. The villein as free, 43. The
villein as unfree, 45. Anglo-Saxon free-holding, 46. Free-holding
and seignorial rights, 47. The scale of free-holding, 49. Free land
and immunity, 50. Unfreedom of the villein, 50. Right of recapture,
50. Rarity of flight, 51. The villein and seignorial justice, 52. The
villein and national justice, 52. The villein and his land, 53. The
villein's land and the geld, 54. The villein's services, 56. The
villein's rent, 57. The English for _villanus_, 58. Summary of the
villein's position, 60. Depression of the peasants, 61. The Normans
and the rustics, 61. Depression of the sokemen, 63. The peasants on
the royal demesne, 65.
§ 4. _The Sokemen_, pp. 66-79.
_Sochemanni_ and _liberi homines_, 66. Lord and man, 67. Bonds
between lord and man, 67. Commendation, 69. Commendation and
protection, 70. Commendation and warranty, 71. Commendation and
tenure, 71. The lord's interest in commendation, 72. The seignory
over the commended, 74. Commendation and service, 74. Land-loans and
services, 75. The man's _consuetudines_, 76. Nature of
_consuetudines_, 78. Justiciary _consuetudines_, 78.
§ 5. _Sake and Soke_, pp. 80-107.
Sake and soke, 80. Private jurisdiction in the _Leges_, 80. Soke
in the _Leges Henrici_, 81. Kinds of soke in the _Leges_, 82. The
Norman kings and private justice, 83. Sake and soke in Domesday, 84.
Meaning of _soke_, 84. Meaning of _sake_, 84. Soke as jurisdiction,
86. Seignorial justice before the Conquest, 87. Soke as a regality,
89. Soke over villeins, 90. Private soke and hundredal soke, 91.
Hundredal and manorial soke, 92. The seignorial court, 94. Soke and
the earl's third penny, 95. Soke and house-peace, 97. Soke over
houses, 99. Vendible soke, 100. Soke and mund, 100. Justice and
jurisdiction, 102. Soke and commendation, 103. Sokemen and 'free
men,' 104. Holdings of the sokemen, 106.
§ 6. _The Manor_, pp. 107-128.
What is a manor? 107. _Manerium_ a technical term, 107. Manor and
hall, 109. Difference between manor and hall, 110. Size of the
_maneria_, 110. A large manor, 111. Enormous manors--Leominster,
Berkeley, Tewkesbury, Taunton, 112. Large manors in the Midlands,
114. Townhouses and berewicks attached to manors, 114. Manor and
soke, 115. Minute manors in the west, 116. Minute manors in the east,
117. The manor as a peasant's holding, 118. Definition of a manor,
119. The manor and the geld, 120. Classification of men for the geld,
122. Proofs of connexion of the manor with the geld, 122. Land gelds
in a manor, 124. Geld and hall, 124. The lord and the man's taxes,
125. Distinction between villeins and sokemen, 125. The lord's
subsidiary liability, 126. Manors distributed to the Frenchmen, 127.
Summary, 128.
§ 7. _Manor and Vill_, pp. 129-150.
Manorial and non-manorial vills, 129. The vill of Orwell, 129. The
Wetherley hundred of Cambridgeshire, 131. The Wetherley sokemen, 134.
The sokemen and seignorial justice, 135. Changes in the Wetherley
hundred, 135. Manorialism in Cambridgeshire, 136. The sokemen and the
manors, 137. Hertfordshire sokemen, 138. The small _maneria_, 138.
The Danes and freedom, 139. The Danish counties, 139. The contrast
between villeins and sokemen, 140. Free villages, 141. Village
communities, 142. The villagers as co-owners, 142. The waste land of
the vill, 143. Co-ownership of mills and churches, 144. The system of
virgates in a free village, 144. The virgates and inheritance, 145.
The farm of the vill, 146. Round sums raised from the villages, 147.
The township and police law, 147. The free village and Norman
government, 149. Organization of the free village, 149.
§ 8. _The Feudal Superstructure_, pp. 150-172.
The higher ranks of men, 150. Dependent tenure, 151. _Feudum_,
152. _Alodium_, 153. Application of the formula of dependent tenure,
154. Military tenure, 156. The army and the land, 157. Feudalism and
army service, 158. Punishment for default of service, 159. The new
military service, 160. The thegns, 161. Nature of thegnship, 163. The
thegns of Domesday, 165. Greater and lesser thegns, 165. The great
lords, 166. The king as landlord, 166. The ancient demesne, 167. The
comital manors, 168. Private rights and governmental revenues, 168.
The English state, 170.
§ 9. _The Boroughs_, pp. 172-219.
Borough and village, 172. The borough in century xiii., 173. The
number of the boroughs, 173. The aid-paying boroughs of century xii,
174. List of aids, 175. The boroughs in Domesday, 176. The borough as
a county town, 178. The borough on no man's land, 178. Heterogeneous
tenures in the boroughs, 179. Burgages attached to rural manors, 180.
The burgess and the rural manor, 181. Tenure of the borough and
tenure of land within the borough, 181. The king and other landlords,
182.
The oldest burh, 183. The king's burh, 184. The special peace of
the burh, 184. The town and the burh, 185. The building of boroughs,
186. The shire and its borough, 186. Military geography, 187. _The
Burghal Hidage_, 187. The shire's wall-work, 188. Henry the Fowler and
the German burgs, 189. The shire thegns and their borough houses, 189.
The knights in the borough, 190. _Burh-bót_ and castle-guard, 191.
Borough and market, 192. Establishment of markets, 193. Moneyers in
the burh, 195. Burh and port, 195. Military and commercial elements in
the borough, 196. The borough and agriculture, 196. Burgesses as
cultivators, 197. Burgage tenure, 198. Eastern and western boroughs,
199. Common property of the burgesses, 200. The community as
landholders, 200. Rights of common, 202. Absence of communalism in the
borough, 202. The borough community and its lord, 203. The farm of the
borough, 204. The sheriff and the farm of the borough, 205. The
community and the geld, 206. Partition of taxes, 207. No corporation
farming the borough, 208. Borough and county organization, 209.
Government of the boroughs, 209. The borough court, 210. The law-men,
211. Definition of the borough, 212. Mediatized boroughs, 212.
Boroughs on the king's land and other boroughs, 215. Attributes of the
borough, 216. Classification of the boroughs, 217. National element in
the boroughs, 219.
ESSAY II.
ENGLAND BEFORE THE CONQUEST.
Object of this essay, 220. Fundamental controversies over
Anglo-Saxon history, 221. The Romanesque theory unacceptable, 222.
Feudalism as a normal stage, 223. Feudalism as progress and
retrogress, 224. Progress and retrogress in the history of legal
ideas, 224. The contact of barbarism and civilization, 225. Our
materials, 226.
§ 1. _Book-land and the Land-book_, pp. 226-244.
The lands of the churches, 226. How the churches acquired their
lands, 227. The earliest land-books, 229. Exotic character of the
book, 230. The book purports to convey ownership, 230. The book
conveys a superiority, 231. A modern analogy, 232. Conveyance of
superiorities in early times, 233. What had the king to give? 234.
The king's alienable rights, 234. Royal rights in land, 235. The
king's _feorm_, 236. Nature of the _feorm_, 237. Tribute and rent,
239. Mixture of ownership and superiority, 240. Growth of the
seignory, 241. Book-land and church-right, 242. Book-land and
testament, 243.
§ 2. _Book-land and Folk-land_, pp. 244-258.
What is folk-land? 244. Folk-land in the laws, 244. Folk-land in
the charters, 245. Land booked by the king to himself, 246. The
consent of the witan, 247. Consent and witness in the land-books,
247. Attestation of the earliest books, 248, Confirmation and
attestation, 250. Function of the witan, 251. The king and the
people's land, 252. King's land and crown land, 253. Fate of the
king's land on his death, 253. The new king and the old king's heir,
254. Immunity of the ancient demesne, 255. Rights of individuals in
national land, 255. The _alod_, 256. Book-land and privilege, 257.
Kinds of land and kinds of right, 257.
§ 3. _Sake and Soke_, pp. 258-292.
Importance of seignorial justice, 258. Theory of the modern origin
of seignorial justice, 258. Sake and soke in the Norman age, 259. The
Confessor's writs, 259. Cnut's writs, 260. Cnut's law, 261. The book
and the writ, 261. Diplomatics, 262. The Anglo-Saxon writ, 264. Sake
and soke appear when writs appear, 265. Traditional evidence of sake
and soke, 267. _Altitonantis_, 268. Criticism of the earlier books,
269. The clause of immunity, 270. Dissection of the words of
immunity, 272. The _trinoda necessitas_, 273. The _ángild_, 274. The
right to wites and the right to a court, 275. The Taunton book, 276.
The immunists and the wite, 277. Justice and jurisdiction, 277. The
Frankish immunity, 278. Seignorial and ecclesiastical jurisdiction,
279. Criminal justice of the church, 281. Antiquity of seignorial
courts, 282. Justice, vassalage and tenure, 283. The lord and the
accused vassal, 284. The state, the lord and the vassal, 285. The
_landríca_ as immunist, 286. The immunist's rights over free men,
288. Sub-delegation of justiciary rights, 289. Number of the
immunists, 289.
Note: The _Ángild_ Clause, 290.
§ 4. _Book-land and Loan-land_, pp. 293-318.
The book and the gift, 293. Book-land and service, 294. Military
service, 295. Escheat of book-land, 295. Alienation of book-land,
297. The heriot and the testament, 298. The gift and the loan, 299.
The _precarium_, 300. The English land-loan, 301. Loans of church
land to the great, 302. The consideration for the loan, 303. St.
Oswald's loans, 303. Oswald's letter to Edgar, 304. Feudalism in
Oswald's law, 307. Oswald's riding-men, 308. Heritable loans, 309.
Wardship and marriage, 310. Seignorial jurisdiction, 310. Oswald's
law and England at large, 311. Inferences from Oswald's loans, 312.
Economic position of Oswald's tenants, 312. Loan-land and book-land,
313. Book-land in the dooms, 314. Royal and other books, 315. The
gift and the loan, 317. Dependent tenure, 317.
§ 5. _The Growth of Seignorial Power_, pp. 318-340.
Subjection of free men, 318. The royal grantee and the land, 318.
Provender rents and the manorial economy, 319. The church and the
peasants, 320. Growth of the manorial system, 321. Church-scot and
tithes, 321. Jurisdictional rights of the lord, 322. The lord and the
man's taxes, 323. Depression of the free ceorl, 324. The slaves, 325.
Growth of manors from below, 325.
Theories which connect the manor with the Roman villa, 326. The
_Rectitudines_, 327. Discussion of the _Rectitudines_, 328. The
Tidenham case, 329. The Stoke case, 330. Inferences from these cases,
332. The _villa_ and the _vicus_, 333. Manors in the land-books, 334.
The _mansus_ and the _manens_, 335. The hide, 336. The strip-holding
and the villa, 337. The lord and the strips, 338. The ceorl and the
slave, 339. The condition of the Danelaw, 339.
§ 6. _The Village Community_, pp. 340-356.
Free villages, 340. Ownership by communities and ownership by
individuals, 341. Co-ownership and ownership by corporations, 341.
Ownership and governmental power, 342. Ownership and subordinate
governmental power, 343. Evolution of sovereignty and ownership, 343.
Communal ownership as a stage, 344. The theory of normal stages, 345.
Was land owned by village communities? 346. Meadows, pastures and
woods, 348. The bond between neighbours, 349. Feebleness of village
communalism, 349. Absence of organization, 350. The German village on
conquered soil, 351. Development of kingly power, 351. The free
village in England, 352. The village meeting, 353. What might have
become of the free village, 353. Mark communities, 354. Intercommoning
between vills, 355. Last words, 356.
ESSAY III.
THE HIDE.
What was the hide? 357. Importance of the question, 357. Hide and
manse in Bede, 358. Hide and manse in the land-books, 358. The large
hide and the manorial arrangement, 360. Our course, 361.
§ 1. _Measures and Fields_, pp. 362-399.
Permanence and change in agrarian history, 362. Rapidity of change
in old times, 363. Devastation of villages, 363. Village colonies,
365. Change of field systems, 365. Differences between different
shires, 366. New and old villages, 367.
History of land measures, 368. Growth of uniform measures, 369.
Superficial measure, 370. The ancient elements of land measure, 372.
The German acre, 373. English acres, 373. Small and large acres, 374.
Anglo-Saxon rods and acres, 375. Customary acres and forest acres,
376. The acre and the day's work, 377. The real acres in the fields,
379. The _culturae_ or shots, 379. Delimitation of shots, 380. Real
and ideal acres, 381. Irregular length of acres, 383. The _seliones_
or beds, 383. Acres divided lengthwise, 384. The virgate, 385. Yard
and yard-land, 385. The virgate a fraction of the hide, 385. The
yard-land in laws and charters, 386.
The hide as a measure, 387. The hide as a measure of arable, 388.
The hide of 120 acres, 389. Real and fiscal hides, 389. Causes of
divergence of fiscal from real hides, 390. Effects of the divergence,
392. Acreage of the hide in later days, 393. The carucate and bovate,
395. The ox-gang, 396. The fiscal carucate, 396. Acreage tilled by a
plough, 397. Walter of Henley's programme of ploughing, 398.
§ 2. _Domesday Statistics_, pp. 399-490.
_Statistical Tables_, 400-403.
Domesday's three statements, 399. Northern formulas, 404. Southern
formulas, 405. Kentish formulas, 406. Relation between the three
statements, 406. Introduction of statistics, 407. Explanation of
statistics, 407. Acreage, 407. Population, 408. Danegeld, 408. Hides,
carucates, sulungs, 408. Reduced hidage, 410. The teamlands, 410. The
teams, 411. The values, 411. The table of ratios, 411. Imperfection
of statistics, 412. Constancy of ratios, 413.
The team, 413. Variability of the _caruca_, 414. Constancy of the
_caruca_, 414. The villein's teams, 415. The villein's oxen, 416.
Light and heavy ploughs, 417. The team of Domesday and other
documents, 417.
The teamland, 418. Fractional parts of the teamland, 418. Land for
oxen and wood for swine, 419. The teamland no areal unit, 419. The
teamlands of Great and the teams of Little Domesday, 420. The
Leicestershire formulas, 420. Origin of the inquiry touching the
teamlands, 421. Modification of the inquiry, 423. The potential teams,
423. Normal relation between teams and teamlands, 424. The land of
deficient teams, 425. Actual and potential teamlands, 426. The land of
excessive teams, 427. Digression to East Anglia, 429. The teamland no
areal measure, 431. Eyton's theory, 431. Domesday's lineal measure,
432. Measured teamlands, 433.
Amount of arable in England, 435. Decrease of arable, 436. The food
problem, 436. What was the population? 436. What was the field-system?
437. What was the acre's yield? 437. Consumption of beer, 438. The
Englishman's diet, 440. Is the arable superabundant? 441. Amount of
pasturage, 441. Area of the villages, 443. Produce and value, 444.
Varying size of acres, 445. The teamland in Cambridgeshire, 445.
The hides of Domesday, 446. Relation between hides and teamlands,
447. Unhidated estates, 448. Beneficial hidation, 448. Effect of
privilege, 449. Divergence of hide from teamland, 450. Partition of
the geld, 451. Distribution of hides among counties and hundreds, 451.
The hidage of Worcestershire, 451. _The County Hidage_, 455. Its date,
456. The Northamptonshire Geld Roll, 457. Credibility of _The County
Hidage_, 458. Reductions of hidage, 458. The county quotas, 459. The
hundred and the hundred hides, 459. Comparison of Domesday hidage with
Pipe Rolls, 460. Under-rated and over-rated counties, 461. Hidage and
value, 462. One pound, one hide, 465. Equivalence of pound and hide,
465. Cases of under-taxation, 466. Kent, 466. Devon and Cornwall, 467.
Cases of over-taxation, 468. Leicestershire, 468. Yorkshire, 469.
Equity and hidage, 470. Distribution of hides and of teamlands, 471.
Area and value as elements of geldability, 472. The equitable
teamland, 473. Artificial valets, 473. The new assessments of Henry
II., 473.
Acreage of the fiscal hide, 475. Equation between hide and acres,
475. The hide of 120 acres, 476. Evidence from Cambridgeshire, 476.
Evidence from the Isle of Ely, 476. Evidence from Middlesex, 477.
Meaning of the Middlesex entries, 478. Evidence in the Geld Inquests,
478. Result of the evidence, 480. Evidence from Essex, 480. Acreage of
the fiscal carucate, 483. Acreage of the fiscal sulung, 484. Kemble's
theory, 485. The ploughland and the plough, 486. The Yorkshire
carucates, 487. Relation between teamlands and fiscal carucates, 487.
The fiscal hide of 120 acres, 489. Antiquity of the large hide, 489.
§ 3. _Beyond Domesday_, pp, 490-520.
The hide beyond Domesday, 490. Arguments in favour of small hides,
490. Continuity of the hide in the land-books, 491. Examples from
charters of Chertsey, 492. Examples from charters of Malmesbury, 492.
Permanence of the hidation, 493. Gifts of villages, 494. Gifts of
manses in villages, 495. The largest gifts, 496. The Winchester
estate at Chilcombe, 496. The Winchester estates at Downton and
Taunton, 498. Kemble and the Taunton estate, 499. Difficulty of
identifying parcels, 500. The numerous hides in ancient documents,
501. _The Burghal Hidage_, 502. _The Tribal Hidage_, 506. Bede's
hidage, 508. Bede and the land-books, 509. Gradual reduction of
hidage, 510. Over-estimates of hidage, 510. Size of Bede's hide, 511.
Evidence from Iona, 512. Evidence from Selsey, 513. Conclusion in
favour of the large hide, 515. Continental analogies, 515. The German
_Hufe_, 515. The _Königshufe_, 516. The large hide on the continent,
517. The large hide not too large, 518. The large hide and the manor,
519. Last words, 520.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Westgermanen und Ostgermanen, der
Kelten, Römer, Finnen und Slawen, von August Meitzen, Berlin, 1895.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.
B. = Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, London, 1885-7-93.
D. B. = Domesday Book.
E. = Earle, Land Charters, Oxford, 1888.
E. H. R. = English Historical Review.
H. & S. = Haddan and Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical
Documents, vol. iii, Oxford, 1871.
K. = Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici, London, 1839-48.
T. = Thorpe, Diplomatarium Anglicanum, London, 1865.
ADDENDUM.
p. 347, note 794. Instances of the periodic reallotment of the whole
land of a vill, exclusive of houses and crofts, seem to have been not
unknown in the north of England. Here the reallotment is found in
connexion with a husbandry which knows no permanent severance of the
arable from the grass-land, but from time to time ploughs up a tract
and after a while allows it to become grass-land once more. See F. W.
Dendy, The Ancient Farms of Northumberland, Archaeologia Aeliana, Vol.
xvi. I have to thank Mr Edward Bateson for a reference to this paper.
ESSAY I.
DOMESDAY BOOK.
[Domesday Book and its satellites.]
At midwinter in the year 1085 William the Conqueror wore his crown at
Gloucester and there he had deep speech with his wise men. The outcome
of that speech was the mission throughout all England of 'barons,'
'legates' or 'justices' charged with the duty of collecting from the
verdicts of the shires, the hundreds and the vills a _descriptio_ of his
new realm. The outcome of that mission was the _descriptio_ preserved
for us in two manuscript volumes, which within a century after their
making had already acquired the name of Domesday Book. The second of
those volumes, sometimes known as Little Domesday, deals with but three
counties, namely Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, while the first volume
comprehends the rest of England. Along with these we must place certain
other documents that are closely connected with the grand inquest. We
have in the so-called Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiae, a copy, an
imperfect copy, of the verdicts delivered by the Cambridgeshire jurors,
and this, as we shall hereafter see, is a document of the highest value,
even though in some details it is not always very trustworthy[2]. We
have in the so-called Inquisitio Eliensis an account of the estates of
the Abbey of Ely in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and other counties, an
account which has as its ultimate source the verdicts of the juries and
which contains some particulars which were omitted from Domesday
Book[3]. We have in the so-called Exon Domesday an account of Cornwall
and Devonshire and of certain lands in Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire;
this also seems to have been constructed directly or indirectly out of
the verdicts delivered in those counties, and it contains certain
particulars about the amount of stock upon the various estates which are
omitted from what, for distinction's sake, is sometimes called the
Exchequer Domesday[4]. At the beginning of this Exon Domesday we have
certain accounts relating to the payment of a great geld, seemingly the
geld of six shillings on the hide that William levied in the winter of
1083-4, two years before the deep speech at Gloucester[5]. Lastly, in
the Northamptonshire Geld Roll[6] we have some precious information
about fiscal affairs as they stood some few years before the survey[7].
[Domesday and legal history.]
Such in brief are the documents out of which, with some small help from
the Anglo-Saxon dooms and land-books, from the charters of Norman kings
and from the so-called Leges of the Conqueror, the Confessor and Henry
I., some future historian may be able to reconstruct the land-law which
obtained in the conquered England of 1086, and (for our records
frequently speak of the _tempus Regis Edwardi_) the unconquered England
of 1065. The reflection that but for the deep speech at Gloucester, but
for the lucky survival of two or three manuscripts, he would have known
next to nothing of that law, will make him modest and cautious. At the
present moment, though much has been done towards forcing Domesday Book
to yield its meaning, some of the legal problems that are raised by it,
especially those which concern the time of King Edward, have hardly been
stated, much less solved. It is with some hope of stating, with little
hope of solving them that we begin this essay. If only we can ask the
right questions we shall have done something for a good end. If English
history is to be understood, the law of Domesday Book must be mastered.
We have here an absolutely unique account of feudalism in two different
stages of its growth, the more trustworthy, though the more puzzling,
because it gives us particulars and not generalities.
Puzzling enough it certainly is, and this for many reasons. Our task may
be the easier if we state some of those reasons at the outset.
[Domesday a geld book.]
To say that Domesday Book is no collection of laws or treatise on law
would be needless. Very seldom does it state any rule in general terms,
and when it does so we shall usually find cause for believing that this
rule is itself an exception, a local custom, a provincial privilege.
Thus, if we are to come by general rules, we must obtain them
inductively by a comparison of many thousand particular instances. But
further, Domesday Book is no register of title, no register of all those
rights and facts which constitute the system of land-holdership. One
great purpose seems to mould both its form and its substance; it is a
geld-book.
[Danegeld.]
When Duke William became king of the English, he found (so he might well
think) among the most valuable of his newly acquired regalia, a right to
levy a land-tax under the name of geld or danegeld. A detailed history
of that tax cannot be written. It is under the year 991 that our English
chronicle first mentions a tribute paid to the Danes[8]; £10,000 was
then paid to them. In 994 the yet larger sum of £16,000[9] was levied.
In 1002 the tribute had risen to £24,000[10], in 1007 to £30,000[11], in
1009 East Kent paid £3,000[12]; £21,000 was raised in 1014[13]; in 1018
Cnut when newly crowned took £72,000 besides £11,000 paid by the
Londoners[14]; in 1040 Harthacnut took £21,099 besides a sum of £11,048
that was paid for thirty-two ships[15]. With a Dane upon the throne,
this tribute seems to have become an occasional war-tax. How often it
was levied we cannot tell; but that it was levied more than once by the
Confessor is not doubtful[16]. We are told that he abolished it in or
about the year 1051, some eight or nine years after his accession, some
fifteen before his death. No sooner was William crowned than 'he laid on
men a geld exceeding stiff.' In the next year 'he set a mickle geld' on
the people. In the winter of 1083-4 he raised a geld of 72 pence (6
Norman shillings) upon the hide. That this tax was enormously heavy is
plain. Taking one case with another, it would seem that the hide was
frequently supposed to be worth about £1 a year and there were many
hides in England that were worth far less. But grievous as was the tax
which immediately preceded the making of the survey, we are not entitled
to infer that it was of unprecedented severity. It brought William but
£415 or thereabouts from Dorset and £510 or thereabouts from
Somerset[17]. Worcestershire was deemed to contain about 1200 hides and
therefore, even if none of its hides had been exempted, it would have
contributed but £360. If the huge sums mentioned by the chronicler had
really been exacted, and that too within the memory of men who were yet
living, William might well regard the right to levy a geld as the most
precious jewel in his English crown. To secure a due and punctual
payment of it was worth a gigantic effort, a survey such as had never
been made and a record such as had never been penned since the grandest
days of the old Roman Empire. But further, the assessment of the geld
sadly needed reform. Owing to one cause and another, owing to privileges
and immunities that had been capriciously granted, owing also, so we
think, to a radically vicious method of computing the geldable areas of
counties and hundreds, the old assessment was full of anomalies and
iniquities. Some estates were over-rated, others were scandalously
under-rated. That William intended to correct the old assessment, or
rather to sweep it away and put a new assessment in its stead, seems
highly probable, though it has not been proved that either he or his
sons accomplished this feat[18]. For this purpose, however, materials
were to be collected which would enable the royal officers to decide
what changes were necessary in order that all England might be taxed in
accordance with a just and uniform plan. Concerning each estate they
were to know the number of geldable units ('hides' or 'carucates') for
which it had answered in King Edward's day, they were to know the number
of plough oxen that there were upon it, they were to know its true
annual value, they were to know whether that value had been rising or
falling during the past twenty years. Domesday Book has well been called
a rate book, and the task of spelling out a land law from the
particulars that it states is not unlike the task that would lie before
any one who endeavoured to construct our modern law of real property out
of rate books, income tax returns and similar materials. All the lands,
all the land-holders of England may be brought before us, but we are
told only of such facts, such rights, such legal relationships as bear
on the actual or potential payment of geld. True, that some minor
purposes may be achieved by the king's commissioners, though the quest
for geld is their one main object. About the rents and renders due from
his own demesne manors the king may thus obtain some valuable
information. Also he may learn, as it were by the way, whether any of
his barons or other men have presumed to occupy, to 'invade,' lands
which he has reserved for himself. Again, if several persons are in
dispute about a tract of ground, the contest may be appeased by the
testimony of shire and hundred, or may be reserved for the king's
audience; at any rate the existence of an outstanding claim may be
recorded by the royal commissioners. Here and there the peculiar customs
of a shire or a borough will be stated, and incidentally the services
that certain tenants owe to their lords may be noticed. But all this is
done sporadically and unsystematically. Our record is no register of
title, it is no feodary, it is no custumal, it is no rent roll; it is a
tax book, a geld book.
[The survey and the geld system.]
We say this, not by way of vain complaint against its meagreness, but
because in our belief a care for geld and for all that concerns the
assessment and payment of geld colours far more deeply than commentators
have usually supposed the information that is given to us about other
matters. We should not be surprised if definitions and distinctions
which at first sight have little enough to do with fiscal arrangements,
for example the definition of a manor and the distinction between a
villein and a 'free man,' involved references to the apportionment and
the levy of the land-tax. Often enough it happens that legal ideas of a
very general kind are defined by fiscal rules; for example, our modern
English idea of 'occupation' has become so much part and parcel of a
system of assessment that lawyers are always ready to argue that a
certain man must be an 'occupier' because such men as he are rated to
the relief of the poor. It seems then a fair supposition that any line
that Domesday Book draws systematically and sharply, whether it be
between various classes of men or between various classes of tenements,
is somehow or another connected with the main theme of that
book--geldability, actual or potential.
[Weight of the danegeld.]
Since we have mentioned the stories told by the chronicler about the
tribute paid to the Danes, we may make a comment upon them which will
become of importance hereafter. Those stories look true, and they seem
to be accepted by modern historians. Had we been told just once that
some large number of pounds, for example £60,000, was levied, or had the
same round sum been repeated in year after year, we might well have said
that such figures deserved no attention, and that by £60,000 our
annalist merely meant a big sum of money. But, as will have been seen,
he varies his figures from year to year and is not always content with a
round number; he speaks of £21,099 and of £11,048[19]. We can hardly
therefore treat his statements as mere loose talk and are reluctantly
driven to suppose that they are true or near the truth. If this be so,
then, unless some discovery has yet to be made in the history of money,
no word but 'appalling' will adequately describe the taxation of which
he speaks. We know pretty accurately the amount of money that became due
when Henry I. or Henry II. imposed a danegeld of two shillings on the
hide. The following table constructed from the pipe rolls will show the
sum charged against each county. We arrange the shires in the order of
their indebtedness, for a few of the many caprices of the allotment will
thus be visible, and our table may be of use to us in other
contexts[20].
APPROXIMATE CHARGE OF A DANEGELD OF TWO SHILLINGS ON THE HIDE IN THE
MIDDLE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY.
£ £
Wiltshire 389 | Cambridge 114
Norfolk 330 | Derby and Nottingham 110
Somerset 278 | Hertford 110
Lincoln 266 | Bedford 110
Dorset 248 | Kent 105
Oxford 242 | Devon 104
Essex 236 | Worcester 101
Suffolk 235 | Leicester 100
Sussex 210 | Hereford 94
Bucks 205 | Middlesex 85
Berks 202 | Huntingdon 71
Gloucester 190 | Stafford 44
S. Hants 180 | Cornwall 23
Surrey 177 | Rutland 12
York 160 | Northumberland 100
Warwick 129 | Cheshire[21] 0
N. Hants 120 | ----
Salop 118 | Total 5198
[The geld of old times.]
Now be it understood that these figures do not show the amount of money
that Henry I. and Henry II. could obtain by a danegeld. They had to take
much less. When it was last levied, the tax was not bringing in £3500,
so many were the churches and great folk who had obtained temporary or
permanent exemptions from it. We will cite Leicestershire for example.
The total of the geld charged upon it was almost exactly or quite
exactly £100. On the second roll of Henry II.'s reign we find that £25.
7_s._ 6_d._ have been paid into the treasury, that £22. 8_s._ 3_d._ have
been 'pardoned' to magnates and templars, that £51. 8_s._ 2_d._ are
written off in respect of waste, and that 16_s._ 0_d._ are still due. On
the eighth roll the account shows that £62. 12_s._ 7_d._ have been paid
and that £37. 6_s._ 9_d._ have been 'pardoned.' No, what our table
displays is the amount that would be raised if all exemptions were
disregarded and no penny forborne. And now let us turn back to the
chronicle and (not to take an extreme example) read of £30,000 being
raised. Unless we are prepared to bring against the fathers of English
history a charge of repeated, wanton and circumstantial lying, we shall
think of the danegeld of Æthelred's reign and of Cnut's as of an impost
so heavy that it was fully capable of transmuting a whole nation.
Therefore the lines that are drawn by the incidence of this tribute will
be deep and permanent; but still we must remember that primarily they
will be fiscal lines.
[Unstable terminology of the survey.]
Then again, we ought not to look to Domesday Book for a settled and
stable scheme of technical terms. Such a scheme could not be established
in a brief twenty years. About one half of the technical terms that meet
us, about one half of the terms which, as we think, ought to be
precisely defined, are, we may say, English terms. They are ancient
English words, or they are words brought hither by the Danes, or they
are Latin words which have long been in use in England and have acquired
special meanings in relation to English affairs. On the other hand,
about half the technical terms are French. Some of them are old Latin
words which have acquired special meanings in France, some are Romance
words newly coined in France, some are Teutonic words which tell of the
Frankish conquest of Gaul. In the one great class we place _scira_,
_hundredum_, _wapentac_, _hida_, _berewica_, _inland_, _haga_, _soka_,
_saka_, _geldum_, _gablum_, _scotum_, _heregeat_, _gersuma_, _thegnus_,
_sochemannus_, _burus_, _coscet_; in the other _comitatus_, _carucata_,
_virgata_, _bovata_, _arpentum_, _manerium_, _feudum_, _alodium_,
_homagium_, _relevium_, _baro_, _vicecomes_, _vavassor_, _villanus_,
_bordarius_, _colibertus_, _hospes_. It is not in twenty years that a
settled and stable scheme can be formed out of such elements as these.
And often enough it is very difficult for us to give just the right
meaning to some simple Latin word. If we translate _miles_ by _soldier_
or _warrior_, this may be too indefinite; if we translate it by
_knight_, this may be too definite, and yet leave open the question
whether we are comparing the _miles_ of 1086 with the _cniht_ of
unconquered England or with the knight of the thirteenth century. If we
render _vicecomes_ by _sheriff_ we are making our sheriff too little of
a _vicomte_. When _comes_ is before us we have to choose between giving
Britanny an _earl_, giving Chester a _count_, or offending some of our
_comites_ by invidious distinctions. Time will show what these words
shall mean. Some will perish in the struggle for existence; others have
long and adventurous careers before them. At present two sets of terms
are rudely intermixed; the time when they will grow into an organic
whole is but beginning.
[Legal ideas of cent. xi.]
To this we must add that, unless we have mistaken the general drift of
legal history, the law implied in Domesday Book ought to be for us very
difficult law, far more difficult than the law of the thirteenth
century, for the thirteenth century is nearer to us than is the
eleventh. The grown man will find it easier to think the thoughts of the
school-boy than to think the thoughts of the baby. And yet the doctrine
that our remote forefathers being simple folk had simple law dies hard.
Too often we allow ourselves to suppose that, could we but get back to
the beginning, we should find that all was intelligible and should then
be able to watch the process whereby simple ideas were smothered under
subtleties and technicalities. But it is not so. Simplicity is the
outcome of technical subtlety; it is the goal not the starting point. As
we go backwards the familiar outlines become blurred; the ideas become
fluid, and instead of the simple we find the indefinite. But difficult
though our task may be, we must turn to it.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiae, ed. N. E. Hamilton. When, as
sometimes happens, the figures in this record differ from those
given in Domesday Book, the latter seem to be in general the
more correct, for the arithmetic is better. Also it seems plain
that the compilers of Domesday had, even for districts
comprised in the Inquisitio, other materials besides those that
the Inquisitio contains. For example, that document says
nothing of some of the royal manors. [Since this note was
written, Mr Round, Feudal England, pp. 10 ff. has published the
same result after an elaborate investigation.]
[3] This is printed in D. B. vol. iv. and given by Hamilton at the
end of his Inq. Com. Cantab. As to the manner in which it was
compiled see Round, Feudal England, 133 ff.
[4] The Exon Domesday is printed in D. B. vol. iv.
[5] Round, Domesday Studies, i. 91: 'I am tempted to believe that
these geld rolls in the form in which we now have them were
compiled at Winchester after the close of Easter 1084, by the
body which was the germ of the future Exchequer.'
[6] Printed by Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, i. 184.
[7] Round, Feudal England, 147.
[8] Earle, Two Chronicles, 130-1.
[9] Ibid. 132-3.
[10] Ibid. 137.
[11] Ibid. 141.
[12] Ibid. 142.
[13] Ibid. 151.
[14] Ibid. 160-1.
[15] Ibid. 167.
[16] There is a valuable paper on this subject, A Short Account of
Danegeld [by P. C. Webb] published in 1756.
[17] D. B. iv. 26, 489.
[18] In 1194 the tax for Richard's ransom seems, at least in
Wiltshire, to have been distributed in the main according to
the assessment that prevailed in 1084; Rolls of the King's
Court (Pipe Roll Soc.) i. Introduction, p. xxiv.
[19] The statement in Æthelred, II. 7 (Schmid, p. 209) as to a
payment of £22,000 is in a general way corroborative of the
chronicler's large figures.
[20] The figures will be given more accurately on a later page.
[21] Cheshire pays no geld to the king. This loss is compensated by
a sum which is sometimes exacted from Northumberland.
§ 1. _Plan of the Survey._
[The geographical basis.]
England was already mapped out into counties, hundreds or wapentakes and
vills. Trithings or ridings appear in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, lathes
in Kent, rapes in Sussex, while leets appear, at least sporadically, in
Norfolk[22]. These provincial peculiarities we must pass by, nor will we
pause to comment at any length on the changes in the boundaries of
counties and of hundreds that have taken place since the date of the
survey. Though these changes have been many and some few of them have
been large[23], we may still say that as a general rule the political
geography of England was already stereotyped. And we see that already
there are many curious anomalies, 'detached portions' of counties,
discrete hundreds, places that are extra-hundredal[24], places that for
one purpose are in one county and for another purpose in another
county[25]. We see also that proprietary rights have already been making
sport of arrangements which in our eyes should be fixed by public law.
Earls, sheriffs and others have enjoyed a marvellous power of taking a
tract of land out of one district and placing it, or 'making it lie' in
another district[26]. Land is constantly spoken of as though it were the
most portable of things; it can easily be taken from one vill or hundred
and be added to or placed in or caused to lie in another vill or
hundred. This 'notional movability' of land, if we may use such a term,
will become of importance to us when we are studying the formation of
manors.
[The vill as the geographical unit.]
For the present, however, we are concerned with the general truth that
England is divided into counties, hundreds or wapentakes and vills. This
is the geographical basis of the survey. That basis, however, is hidden
from us by the form of our record. The plan adopted by those who
fashioned Domesday Book out of the returns provided for them by the
king's commissioners is a curious, compromising plan. We may say that in
part it is geographical, while in part it is feudal or proprietary. It
takes each county separately and thus far it is geographical; but within
the boundaries of each county it arranges the lands under the names of
the tenants in chief who hold them. Thus all the lands in Cambridgeshire
of which Count Alan is tenant in chief are brought together, no matter
that they lie scattered about in various hundreds. Therefore it is
necessary for us to understand that the original returns reported by the
surveyors did not reach the royal treasury in this form. At least as
regards the county of Cambridge, we can be certain of this. The hundreds
were taken one by one; they were taken in a geographical order, and not
until the justices had learned all that was to be known of Staplehow
hundred did they call upon the jurors of Cheveley hundred for their
verdict. That such was their procedure we might have guessed even had we
not been fortunate enough to have a copy of the Cambridgeshire verdicts;
for, though the commissioners seem to have held but one moot for each
shire, still it is plain that each hundred was represented by a separate
set of jurors[27]. But from these Cambridgeshire verdicts we learn what
otherwise we could hardly have known. Within each hundred the survey was
made by vills[28]. If we suppose the commissioners charging the jurors
we must represent them as saying, not 'Tell us what tenants in chief
have lands in your hundred and how much each of them holds,' but 'Tell
us about each vill in your hundred, who holds land in it.' Thus, for
example, the men of the Armingford hundred are called up. They make a
separate report about each vill in it. They begin by stating that the
vill is rated at a certain number of hides and then they proceed to
distribute those hides among the tenants in chief. Thus, for example,
they say that Abington was rated at 5 hides, and that those 5 hides are
distributed thus[29]:
hides virgates
Hugh Pincerna holds of the bishop of Winchester 2-1/2 1/2
The king 1/2
Ralph and Robert hold of Hardouin de Eschalers 1 1-1/2
Earl Roger 1
Picot the sheriff 1/2
Alwin Hamelecoc the bedel holds of the king 1/2
_____ _____
5 0
Now in Domesday Book we must look to several different pages to get this
information about the vill of Abington,--to one page for Earl Roger's
land, to another page for Picot's land, and we may easily miss the
important fact that this vill of Abington has been rated as a whole at
the neat, round figure of 5 hides. And then we see that the whole
hundred of Armingford has been rated at the neat, round figure of 100
hides, and has consisted of six vills rated at 10 hides apiece and eight
vills rated at 5 hides apiece[30]. Thus we are brought to look upon the
vill as a unit in a system of assessment. All this is concealed from us
by the form of Domesday Book.
[Stability of the vill.]
When that book mentions the name of a place, when it says that Roger
holds Sutton or that Ralph holds three hides in Norton, we regard that
name as the name of a vill; it may or may not be also the name of a
manor. Speaking very generally we may say that the place so named will
in after times be known as a vill and in our own day will be a civil
parish. No doubt in some parts of the country new vills have been
created since the Conqueror's time. Some names that occur in our record
fail to obtain a permanent place on the roll of English vills, become
the names of hamlets or disappear altogether; on the other hand, new
names come to the front. Of course we dare not say dogmatically that all
the names mentioned in Domesday Book were the names of vills; very
possibly (if this distinction was already known) some of them were the
names of hamlets; nor, again, do we imply that the _villa_ of 1086 had
much organization; but a place that is mentioned in Domesday Book will
probably be recognized as a vill in the thirteenth, a civil parish in
the nineteenth century. Let us take Cambridgeshire by way of example.
Excluding the Isle of Ely, we find that the political geography of the
Conqueror's reign has endured until our own time. The boundaries of the
hundreds lie almost where they lay, the number of vills has hardly been
increased or diminished. The chief changes amount to this:--A small
tract on the east side of the county containing Exning and Bellingham
has been made over to Suffolk; four other names contained in Domesday no
longer stand for parishes, while the names of five of our modern
parishes--one of them is the significant name of Newton--are not found
there[31]. But about a hundred and ten vills that were vills in 1086
are vills or civil parishes at the present day, and in all probability
they then had approximately the same boundaries that they have now.
[Omission of vills.]
This may be a somewhat too favourable example of permanence and
continuity. Of all counties Cambridgeshire is the one whose ancient
geography can be the most easily examined; but wherever we have looked
we have come to the conclusion that the distribution of England into
vills is in the main as old as the Norman conquest[32]. Two causes of
difficulty may be noticed, for they are of some interest. Owing to what
we have called the 'notional movability' of land, we never can be quite
sure that when certain hides or acres are said to be in or lie in a
certain place they are really and physically in that place. They are
really in one village, but they are spoken of as belonging to another
village, because their occupants pay their geld or do their services in
the latter. Manorial and fiscal geography interferes with physical and
villar geography. We have lately seen how land rated at five hides was
comprised, as a matter of fact, in the vill of Abington; but of those
five hides, one virgate 'lay in' Shingay, a half-hide 'lay in'
Litlington while a half-virgate 'lay and had always lain' in Morden[33].
This, if we mistake not, leads in some cases to an omission of the names
of small vills. A great lord has a compact estate, perhaps the whole of
one of the small southern hundreds. He treats it as a whole, and all the
land that he has there will be ascribed to some considerable village in
which he has his hall. We should be rash in supposing that there were no
other villages on this land. For example, in Surrey there is now-a-days
a hundred called Farnham which comprises the parish of Farnham, the
parish of Frensham and some other villages. If we mistake not, all that
Domesday Book has to say of the whole of this territory is that the
Bishop of Winchester holds Farnham, that it has been rated at 60 hides,
that it has been worth the large sum of £65 a year and that there are so
many tenants upon it[34]. We certainly must not draw the inference that
there was but one vill in this tract. If the bishop is tenant in chief
of the whole hundred and has become responsible for all the geld that
is levied therefrom, there is no great reason why the surveyors should
trouble themselves about the vills. Thus the simple _Episcopus tenet
Ferneham_ may dispose of some 25,000 acres of land. So the same bishop
has an estate at Chilcombe in Hampshire; but clearly the name
_Ciltecumbe_ covers a wide territory for there are no less than nine
churches upon it[35]. We never can be very certain about the boundaries
of these large and compact estates.
[Fission of vills.]
A second cause of difficulty lies in the fact that in comparatively
modern times, from the twelfth century onwards, two or three contiguous
villages will often bear the same name and be distinguished only by what
we may call their surnames--thus Guilden Morden and Steeple Morden,
Stratfield Saye, Stratfield Turgis, Stratfield Mortimer, Tolleshunt
Knights, Tolleshunt Major, Tolleshunt Darcy. Such cases are common; in
some districts they are hardly exceptional. Doubtless they point to a
time when a single village by some process of colonization or
subdivision become two villages. Now Domesday Book seldom enables us to
say for certain whether the change has already taken place. In a few
instances it marks off the little village from the great village of the
same name[36]. In some other instances it will speak, for example, of
_Mordune_ and _Mordune Alia_, of _Emingeforde_ and _Emingeforde Alia_,
or the like, thus showing both that the change has taken place, and also
that it is so recent that it is recognized only by very clumsy terms. In
Cambridgeshire, since we have the original verdicts, we can see that the
two Mordens are already distinct; the one is rated at ten hides, the
other at five[37]. On the other hand, we can see that our Great and
Little Shelford are rated as one vill of twenty hides[38], our Castle
Camps and Shudy Camps as one vill of five hides[39]. Elsewhere we are
left to guess whether the fission is complete, and the surnames that
many of our vills ultimately acquire, the names of families which rose
to greatness in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, will often suggest
that the surveyors saw but one vill where we see two[40]. However, the
broad truth stands out that England was divided into vills and that in
general the vill of Domesday Book is still a vill in after days[41].
[The nucleated village and the vill of scattered steads.]
The 'vill' or 'town' of the later middle ages was, like the 'civil
parish' of our own day, a tract of land with some houses on it, and this
tract was a unit in the national system of police and finance[42], But
we are not entitled to make for ourselves any one typical picture of the
English vill. We are learning from the ordnance map (that marvellous
palimpsest, which under Dr Meitzen's guidance we are beginning to
decipher) that in all probability we must keep at least two types before
our minds. On the one hand, there is what we might call the true village
or the nucleated village. In the purest form of this type there is one
and only one cluster of houses. It is a fairly large cluster; it stands
in the midst of its fields, of its territory, and until lately a
considerable part of its territory will probably have consisted of
spacious 'common fields.' In a country in which there are villages of
this type the parish boundaries seem almost to draw themselves[43]. On
the other hand, we may easily find a country in which there are few
villages of this character. The houses which lie within the boundary of
the parish are scattered about in small clusters; here two or three,
there three or four. These clusters often have names of their own, and
it seems a mere chance that the name borne by one of them should be also
the name of the whole parish or vill[44]. We see no traces of very large
fields. On the face of the map there is no reason why a particular group
of cottages should be reckoned to belong to this parish rather than to
the next. As our eyes grow accustomed to the work we may arrive at some
extremely important conclusions such as those which Meitzen has
suggested. The outlines of our nucleated villages may have been drawn
for us by Germanic settlers, whereas in the land of hamlets and
scattered steads old Celtic arrangements may never have been thoroughly
effaced. Towards theories of this kind we are slowly winning our way.
In the meantime let us remember that a _villa_ of Domesday Book may
correspond to one of at least two very different models or may be
intermediate between various types. It may be a fairly large and
agrarianly organic unit, or it may be a group of small agrarian units
which are being held together in one whole merely by an external force,
by police law and fiscal law[45].
[Illustrations by maps.]
Two little fragments of 'the original one inch ordnance map' will be
more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written discourse. The
one pictures a district on the border between Oxfordshire and Berkshire
cut by the Thames and the main line of the Great Western Railway; the
other a district on the border between Devon and Somerset, north of
Collumpton and south of Wiveliscombe. Neither is an extreme example.
True villages we may easily find. Cambridgeshire, for instance, would
have afforded some beautiful specimens, for many of the 'open fields'
were still open when the ordnance map of that county was made. But
throughout large tracts of England, even though there has been an
'inclosure' and there are no longer any open fields, our map often shows
a land of villages. When it does so and the district that it portrays is
a purely agricultural district, we may generally assume without going
far wrong that the villages are ancient, for during at least the last
three centuries the predominant current in our agrarian history has set
against the formation of villages and towards the distribution of
scattered homesteads. To find the purest specimens of a land of hamlets
we ought to go to Wales or to Cornwall or to other parts of 'the Celtic
fringe'; very fair examples might be found throughout the west of
England. Also we may perhaps find hamlets rather than villages wherever
there have been within the historic period large tracts of forest land.
Very often, again, the parish or township looks on our map like a
hybrid. We seem to see a village with satellitic hamlets. Much more
remains to be done before we shall be able to construe the testimony of
our fields and walls and hedges, but at least two types of vill must be
in our eyes when we are reading Domesday Book[46].
[Illustration: A LAND OF VILLAGES
_On the border between Oxfordshire and Berkshire._
[_Between pp._ 16-17]]
[Illustration: A LAND OF HAMLETS
_On the border between Somerset and Devon._]
[Size of the vill.]
To say that the _villa_ of Domesday Book is in general the vill of the
thirteenth century and the civil parish of the nineteenth is to say that
the areal extent of the _villa_ varied widely from case to case. More
important is it for us to observe that the number of inhabitants of the
_villa_ varied widely from case to case. The error into which we are
most likely to fall will be that of making our vill too populous. Some
vills, especially some royal vills, are populous enough; a few contain a
hundred households; but the average township is certainly much smaller
than this[47]. Before we give any figures, it should first be observed
that Domesday Book never enables us to count heads. It states the number
of the tenants of various classes, _sochemanni_, _villani_, _bordarii_,
and the like, and leaves us to suppose that each of these persons is, or
may be, the head of a household. It also states how many _servi_ there
are. Whether we ought to suppose that only the heads of servile
households are reckoned, or whether we ought to think of the _servi_ as
having no households but as living within the lord's gates and being
enumerated, men, women and able-bodied children, by the head--this is a
difficult question. Still we may reach some results which will enable us
to compare township with township. By way of fair sample we may take the
Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire, and all persons who are above the
rank of _servi_ we will include under the term 'the non-servile
population[48].'
ARMINGFORD HUNDRED.
Non-servile
population Servi Total
Abington 19 0 19
Bassingbourn 35 3 38
Clapton 19 0 19
Croydon 29 0 29
Hatley 18 3 21
Litlington 37 6 43
Melbourn 62 1 63
Meldreth 44 7 51
Morden 43 11 54
Morden Alia 50 0 50
Shingay 18 0 18
Tadlow 27 4 31
Wendy 12 4 16
Whaddon 44 6 50
--- --- ---
Total 457 45 502
Here in fourteen vills we have an average of thirty-two non-servile
households for every vill. Now even in our own day a parish with
thirty-two houses, though small, is not extremely small. But we should
form a wrong picture of the England of the eleventh century if we filled
all parts of it with such vills as these. We will take at random
fourteen vills in Staffordshire held by Earl Roger[49].
Non-servile
population Servi Total
Claverlege 45 0 45
Nordlege 9 0 9
Alvidelege 13 0 13
Halas 40 2 42
Chenistelei 11 0 11
Otne 7 1 8
Nortberie 20 1 21
Erlide 8 2 10
Gaitone 16 0 16
Cressvale 8 0 8
Dodintone 3 0 3
Modreshale 5 0 5
Almentone 8 0 8
Metford 7 1 8
--- --- ---
Total 200 7 207
Here for fourteen vills we have an average of but fourteen non-servile
households and the _servi_ are so few that we may neglect them. We will
next look at a page in the survey of Somersetshire which describes
certain vills that have fallen to the lot of the bishop of
Coutances[50].
Non-servile
population Servi Total
Winemeresham 8 3 11
Chetenore 3 1 4
Widicumbe 21 6 27
Harpetrev 10 2 12
Hotune 11 0 11
Lilebere 6 1 7
Wintreth 4 2 6
Aisecome 11 7 18
Clutone 22 1 23
Temesbare 7 3 10
Nortone 16 3 19
Cliveham 15 1 16
Ferenberge 13 6 19
Cliveware 6 0 6
--- --- ---
Total 153 36 189
Here we have on the average but eleven non-servile households for each
village, and even if we suppose each _servus_ to represent a household,
we have not fourteen households. Yet smaller vills will be found in
Devonshire, many vills in which the total number of the persons
mentioned does not exceed ten and near half of these are _servi_. In
Cornwall the townships, if townships we ought to call them, are yet
smaller; often we can attribute no more than five or six families to the
vill even if we include the _servi_.
[Population of the vills.]
[Contrast between east and west.]
Unless our calculations mislead us, the density of the population in the
average vill of a given county varies somewhat directly with the density
of the population in that county; at all events we can not say that
where vills are populous, vills will be few. As regards this matter no
precise results are attainable; our document is full of snares for
arithmeticians. Still if for a moment we have recourse to the crude
method of dividing the number of acres comprised in a modern county by
the number of the persons who are mentioned in the survey of that
county, the outcome of our calculation will be remarkable and will point
to some broad truth[51]. For Suffolk the quotient is 46 or thereabouts;
for Norfolk but little larger[52]; for Essex 61, for Lincoln 67; for
Bedford, Berkshire, Northampton, Leicester, Middlesex, Oxford, Kent and
Somerset it lies between 70 and 80, for Buckingham, Warwick, Sussex,
Wiltshire and Dorset it lies between 80 and 90; Devon, Gloucester,
Worcester, Hereford are thinly peopled, Cornwall, Stafford, Shropshire
very thinly. Some particular results that we should thus attain would be
delusive. Thus we should say that men were sparse in Cambridgeshire, did
we not remember that a large part of our modern Cambridgeshire was then
a sheet of water. Permanent physical causes interfere with the operation
of the general rule. Thus Surrey, with its wide heaths has, as we might
expect, but few men to the square mile. Derbyshire has many vills lying
waste; Yorkshire is so much wasted that it can give us no valuable
result; and again, Yorkshire and Cheshire were larger than they are now,
while Rutland and the adjacent counties had not their present
boundaries. For all this however, we come to a very general rule:--the
density of the population decreases as we pass from east to west. With
this we may connect another rule:--land is much more valuable in the
east than it is in the west. This matter is indeed hedged in by many
thorny questions; still whatever hypothesis we may adopt as to the mode
in which land was valued, one general truth comes out pretty plainly,
namely, that, economic arrangements being what they were, it was far
better to have a team-land in Essex than to have an equal area of arable
land in Devon.
[Small vills.]
Between eastern and western England there were differences visible to
the natural eye. With these were connected unseen and legal differences,
partly as causes, partly as effects. But for the moment let us dwell on
the fact that many an English vill has very few inhabitants. We are to
speak hereafter of village communities. Let us therefore reflect that a
community of some eight or ten householders is not likely to be a highly
organized entity. This is not all, for these eight or ten householders
will often belong to two, three or four different social and economic,
if not legal, classes. Some may be sokemen, some _villani_, _bordarii_,
_cotarii_, and besides them there will be a few _servi_. If a vill
consists, as in Devonshire often enough it will, of some three
_villani_, some four _bordarii_ and some two _servi_, the
'township-moot,' if such a moot there be, will be a queer little
assembly, the manorial court, if such a court there be, will not have
much to do. These men can not have many communal affairs; there will be
no great scope for dooms or for by-laws; they may well take all their
disputes into the hundred court, especially in Devonshire where the
hundreds are small. Thus of the visible vill of the eleventh century and
its material surroundings we may form a wrong notion. Often enough in
the west its common fields (if common fields it had) were not wide
fields; the men who had shares therein were few and belonged to various
classes. Thus of two villages in Gloucestershire, Brookthorpe and
Harescombe, all that we can read is that in Brostrop there were two
teams, one _villanus_, three _bordarii_, four _servi_, while in
Hersecome there were two teams, two _bordarii_ and five _servi_[53].
Many a Devonshire township can produce but two or three teams. Often
enough our 'village community' will be a heterogeneous little group
whose main capital consists of some 300 acres of arable land and some 20
beasts of the plough.
[Importance of the east.]
On the other hand, we must be careful not to omit from our view the
rich and thickly populated shires or to imagine or to speak as though we
imagined that a general theory of English history can neglect the East
of England. If we leave Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk out of account
we are to all appearance leaving out of account not much less than a
quarter of the whole nation[54]. Let us make three groups of counties:
(1) a South-Western group containing Devon, Somerset, Dorset and
Wiltshire: (2) a Mid-Western group containing the shires of Gloucester,
Worcester, Hereford, Salop, Stafford and Warwick: (3) an Eastern group
containing Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. The first of these groups
has the largest; the third the smallest acreage. In Domesday Book,
however, the figures which state their population seem to be
these[55]:--
South-Western Group: 49,155
Mid-Western Group: 33,191
Eastern Group: 72,883
These figures are so emphatic that they may cause us for a moment to
doubt their value, and on details we must lay no stress. But we have
materials which enable us to check the general effect. In 1297 Edward I.
levied a lay subsidy of a ninth[56]. The sums borne by our three groups
of counties were these:--
£
South-Western Group: 4,038
Mid-Western Group: 3,514
Eastern Group: 7,329
There is a curious resemblance between these two sets of figures. Then
in 1377 and 1381 returns were made for a poll-tax[57]. The number of
polls returned in our three groups were these:--
1377 1381
South-Western Group: 183,842 106,086
Mid-Western Group: 158,245 115,679
Eastern Group: 255,498 182,830
No doubt all inferences drawn from medieval statistics are exceedingly
precarious; but, unless a good many figures have conspired to deceive
us, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were at the time of the Conquest
and for three centuries afterwards vastly richer and more populous than
any tract of equal area in the West.
[Manorial and non-manorial vills.]
Another distinction between the eastern counties and the rest of England
is apparent. In many shires we shall find that the name of each vill is
mentioned once and no more. This is so because the land of each vill
belongs in its entirety to some one tenant in chief. We may go further:
we may say, though at present in an untechnical sense, that each vill is
a manor. Such is the general rule, though there will be exceptions to
it. On the other hand, in the eastern counties this rule will become the
exception. For example, of the fourteen vills in the Armingford hundred
of Cambridgeshire there is but one of which it is true that the whole
of its land is held by a single tenant in chief. In this county it is
common to find that three or four Norman lords hold land in the same
vill. This seems true not only of Cambridgeshire but also of Essex,
Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, and some parts of
Yorkshire. Even in other districts of England the rule that each vill
has a single lord is by no means unbroken in the Conqueror's day and we
can see that there were many exceptions to it in the Confessor's. A
careful examination of all England vill by vill would perhaps show that
the contrast which we are noting is neither so sharp nor so ancient as
at first sight it seems to be: nevertheless it exists.
[The distribution of free men and serfs.]
A better known contrast there is. The eastern counties are the home of
liberty[58]. We may divide the tillers of the soil into five great
classes; these in order of dignity and freedom are (1) _liberi homines_,
(2) _sochemanni_, (3) _villani_, (4) _bordarii_, _cotarii_ etc., (5)
_servi_. The two first of these classes are to be found in large numbers
only in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire
and Northamptonshire. We shall hereafter see that Cambridgeshire also
has been full of sokemen, though since the Conquest they have fallen
from their high estate. On the other hand, the number of _servi_
increases pretty steadily as we cross the country from east to west. It
reaches its maximum in Cornwall and Gloucestershire; it is very low in
Norfolk, Suffolk, Derby, Leicester, Middlesex, Sussex; it descends to
zero in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. This descent to zero may fairly warn
us that the terms with which we are dealing may not bear precisely the
same meaning in all parts of England, or that a small class is apt to be
reckoned as forming part of a larger class. But still it is clear enough
that some of these terms are used with care and express real and
important distinctions.
[The classification of men.]
Of this we are assured by a document which seems to reproduce the
wording of the instructions which defined the duty of at least one party
of royal commissioners[59]. We are about to speak of the mode in which
the occupants of the soil are classified by Domesday Book, and therefore
this document deserves our best attention. It runs thus:--The King's
barons inquired by the oath of the sheriff of the shire and of all the
barons and of their Frenchmen and of the whole hundred, the priest,
reeve and six _villani_ of every vill, how the mansion (_mansio_) is
called, who held it in the time of King Edward, who holds it now, how
many hides, how many plough-teams on the demesne, how many plough-teams
of the men, how many _villani_, how many _cotarii_, how many _servi_,
how many _liberi homines_, how many _sochemanni_, how much wood, how
much meadow, how much pasture, how many mills, how many fisheries, how
much has been taken away therefrom, how much added thereto, and how much
there is now, how much each _liber homo_ and _sochemannus_ had and
has:--All this thrice over, to wit as regards the time of King Edward,
the time when King William gave it, and the present time, and whether
more can be had thence than is had now[60].
[Basis of classification.]
Five classes of men are mentioned and they are mentioned in an order
that is extremely curious:--_villani_, _cotarii_, _servi_, _liberi
homines_, _sochemanni_. It descends three steps, then it leaps from the
very bottom of the scale to the very top and thence it descends one
step. A parody of it might speak of the rural population of modern
England as consisting of large farmers, small farmers, cottagers, great
landlords, small landlords. But a little consideration will convince us
that beneath this apparent caprice there lies some legal principle. We
shall observe that these five species of tenants are grouped into two
genera. The king wants to know how much each _liber homo_, how much each
_sochemannus_ holds; he does not want to know how much each _villanus_,
each _cotarius_, each _servus_ holds. Connecting this with the main
object of the whole survey, we shall probably be brought to the guess
that between the sokeman and the villein there is some broad distinction
which concerns the king as the recipient of geld. May it not be
this:--the villein's lord is answerable for the geld due from the land
that the villein holds, the sokeman's lord is not answerable, at least
he is not answerable as principal debtor for the geld due from the land
that the sokeman holds? If this be so, the order in which the five
classes of men are mentioned will not seem unnatural. It proceeds
outwards from the lord and his _mansio_. First it mentions the persons
seated on land for the geld of which he is responsible, and them it
arranges in an 'order of merit.' Then it turns to persons who, though in
some way or another connected with the lord and his _mansio_, are
themselves tax-payers, and concerning them the commissioners are to
inquire how much each of them holds. Of course we can not say that this
theory is proved by the statement that lies before us; but it is
suggested by that statement and may for a while serve us as a working
hypothesis. If this theory be sound, then we have here a distinction of
the utmost importance. For one mighty purpose, the purpose that is
uppermost in King William's mind, the _villanus_ is not a landowner, his
lord is the landowner; on the other hand the _sochemannus_ is a
landowner, and is taxed as such. We are not saying that this is a purely
fiscal distinction. In legal logic the lord's liability for the geld
that is apportioned on the land occupied by his villeins may be rather
an effect than a cause. A lawyer might argue that the lord must pay
because the occupier is his _villanus_, not that the occupier is a
_villanus_ because the lord pays. And yet, as we may often see in legal
history, there will be action and reaction between cause and effect. The
geld is no trifle. Levied at that rate of six shillings on the hide at
which King William has just now levied it, it is a momentous force
capable of depressing and displacing whole classes of men. In 1086 this
tax is so much in everybody's mind that any distinction as to its
incidence will cut deeply into the body of the law.
[Our course.]
Now this classification of men we will take as the starting point for
our enterprise. If we could define the _liber homo_, _sochemannus_,
_villanus_, _cotarius_, _servus_, we should have solved some of the
great legal problems of Domesday Book, for by the way we should have had
to define two other difficult terms, namely _manerium_ and _soca_. It
would then remain that we should say something of the higher strata of
society, of earls and sheriffs, of barons, knights, thegns and their
tenures, of such terms as _alodium_ and _feudum_, of the general theory
of landownership or landholdership. We will begin with the lowest order
of men, with the _servi_, and thence work our way upwards. But our
course can not be straightforward. There are so many terms to be
explained that sometimes we shall be compelled to leave a question but
partially answered while we are endeavouring to find a partial answer
for some yet more difficult question.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] D. B. ii. 109 b: 'Hundret de Grenehou 14 letis.' Ib. 212 b:
'Hundret et Dim. de Clakelosa de 10 leitis.' Round, Feudal
England, 101.
[23] Some of them are mentioned by Ellis, Introduction, i. 34-9.
[24] D. B. i. 184 b: 'Haec terra non geldat nec consuetudinem dat
nec in aliquo hundredo iacet'; i. 157 'Haec terra nunquam
geldavit nec alicui hundredo pertinet nec pertinuit'; i. 357 b
'Hae duae carucatae non sunt in numero alicuius hundredi neque
habent pares in Lincolescyra.'
[25] D. B. i. 207 b: 'Jacet in Bedefordscira set geldum dat in
Huntedonscire'; i. 61 b 'Jacet et appreciata est in Gratentun
quod est in Oxenefordscire et tamen dat scotum in Berchescire';
i. 132 b, the manor of Weston 'lies in' Hitchin which is in
Hertfordshire, but its _wara_ 'lies in' Bedfordshire, i.e. it
pays geld, it 'defends itself' in the latter county; i. 189 b,
the _wara_ of a certain hide 'lies in' Hinxton which is in
Cambridgeshire, but the land belongs to the manor of
Chesterford and therefore is valued in Essex. D. B. i. 178;
five hides 'geld and plead' in Worcestershire, but pay their
farm in Herefordshire.
[26] D. B. i. 157 b: 'Has [terras in Oxenefordscire] coniunxit
terrae suae in Glowecestrescire'; i. 209 b 'foris misit de
hundredo ubi se defendebat T. R. E.'; i. 50 'et misit foras
comitatum et misit in Wiltesire.' See also Ellis, i. 36.
[27] See Round, Feudal England, p. 118. Mr Round seems to think that
the commissioners made a circuit through the hundreds. I doubt
they did more than their successors the justices in eyre were
wont to do, that is, they held in the shire-town a moot which
was attended by (1) the magnates of the shire who spoke for the
shire, (2) a jury from every hundred, (3) a deputation of
_villani_ from every township. See the Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire _Clamores_ (i. 375) where we may find successive
entries beginning with (_a_) _Scyra testatur_, (_b_)
_Westreding testatur_, (_c_) _Testatur wapentac_. Strikingly
similar entries are found on the eyre rolls. As Sir F. Pollock
(Eng. Hist. Rev. xi. 213) remarks, it is misleading to speak of
the Domesday 'survey'; Domesday Inquest would be better.
[28] See Round, Feudal England, p. 44.
[29] Inquis. Com. Cantab. 60.
[30] See the table in Round, Feudal England, p. 50. I had already
selected this beautiful specimen before Mr Round's book
appeared. He has given several others that are quite as neat.
[31] Of course we take no account of urban parishes.
[32] Eyton's laborious studies have made this plain as regards some
counties widely removed from each other; still, _e.g._ in his
book on Somerset, he has now and again to note that names which
appear in D. B. are obsolete.
[33] Inq. Com. Cant. 60-1.
[34] D. B. i. 31.
[35] D. B. i. 41. We shall return to this matter hereafter.
[36] A good many cases will be found in Essex and Suffolk.
[37] Inq. Com. Cantab. 51, 53.
[38] Ibid. 47.
[39] Ibid. 29.
[40] Maitland, Surnames of English Villages, Archaeological Review,
iv. 233.
[41] We do not mean to imply that there were not wide stretches of
waste land which were regarded as being 'extra-villar,' or
common to several vills.
[42] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 547.
[43] This of course would not be true of cases in which the lands of
various villages were intermixed in one large tract of common
field. As to these 'discrete vills,' see Hist. Eng. Law, i.
549.
[44] This name-giving cluster will usually contain the parish church
and so will enjoy a certain preeminence. But we are to speak of
a time when parish churches were novelties.
[45] See Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Germanen, especially
ii. 119 ff.
[46] When the hamlets bear names with such ancient suffixes as
-_ton_, -_ham_, -_by_, _-worth_, _-wick_, _-thorpe_, this of
course is in favour of their antiquity. On the other hand, if
they are known merely by family names such as _Styles's_,
_Nokes's_, _Johnson's_ or the like, this, though not conclusive
evidence of, is compatible with their modernity. Meitzen thinks
that in Kent and along the southern shore the German invaders
founded but few villages. The map does not convince me that
this inference is correct.
[47] When more than five-and-twenty team-lands or thereabouts are
ascribed to a single place, we shall generally find reason to
believe that what is being described is not a single vill. See
above, p. 13.
[48] Inq. Com. Cant. 51 fol. In a few cases our figures will involve
a small element of conjecture.
[49] D. B. i. 248. We have tried to avoid vills in which it is
certain or probable that some other tenant in chief had an
estate.
[50] D. B. i. 88. We have tried to make sure that no tenant in chief
save the bishop had land in any of these vills, and this we
think fairly certain, except as regards Harptree and Norton.
There are now two Harptrees, East and West, and four or more
Nortons.
[51] We take the figures from Ellis, Introduction, ii. 417 ff.
[52] Very possibly this figure is too low. There is reason to think
that some of the free men and sokemen of these counties get
counted twice or thrice over because they hold land under
several different lords. On the other hand Ellis (Introduction,
ii. 491) would argue that the figure is too high. But the words
_Alii ibi tenent_ which occur at the end of numerous entries
mean, we believe, not that there are in this vill other
unenumerated tillers of the soil, but that the vill is divided
between several tenants in chief.
[53] D. B. i. 162 b.
[54] Ellis's figures are: England 283,242: the three counties
72,883.
[55] We take these figures from Ellis.
[56] Lay Subsidy, 25 Edw. I. (Yorkshire Archaeological Society), pp.
xxxi-xxxv. Fractions of a pound are neglected.
[57] Powell, The Rising in East Anglia, 120-3. The great decrease
between 1377 and 1381 in the number of persons taxed, we must
not try to explain.
[58] See the serviceable maps in Seebohm, Village Community, 86. But
they seem to treat Yorkshire unfairly. It has 5·5 per cent. of
sokemen.
[59] This is found at the beginning of the Inquisitio Eliensis; D.
B. iv. 497; Hamilton, Inquisitio, 97. See Round, Feudal
England, 133 ff.
[60] We must not hastily draw the inference that every party of
commissioners received the same set of instructions. Perhaps,
for example, carucates, not hides, were mentioned in the
instructions given to those commissioners who were to visit the
carucated counties. Perhaps the non-appearance of _servi_ in
Yorkshire and Lincolnshire may be due to no deeper cause.
§ 2. _The Serfs._
[The serfs in Domesday Book.]
The existence of some 25,000 serfs is recorded. In the thirteenth
century _servus_ and _villanus_ are, at least among lawyers, equivalent
words. The only unfree man is the 'serf-villein' and the lawyers are
trying to subject him to the curious principle that he is the lord's
chattel but a free man in relation to all but his lord[61]. It is far
otherwise in Domesday Book. In entry after entry and county after county
the _servi_ are kept well apart from the _villani_, _bordarii_,
_cotarii_. Often they are mentioned in quite another context to that in
which the _villani_ are enumerated. As an instance we may take a manor
in Surrey[62]:--'In demesne there are 5 teams and there are 25 _villani_
and 6 _bordarii_ with 14 teams. There is one mill of 2 shillings and one
fishery and one church and 4 acres of meadow, and wood for 150 pannage
pigs, and 2 stone-quarries of 2 shillings and 2 nests of hawks in the
wood and 10 _servi_.' Often enough the _servi_ are placed between two
other sources of wealth, the church and the mill. In some counties they
seem to take precedence over the _villani_; the common formula is 'In
dominio sunt _a_ carucae et _b_ servi et _c_ villani et _d_ bordarii cum
_e_ carucis.' But this is delusive; the formula is bringing the _servi_
into connexion with the demesne teams and separating them from the teams
of the tenants. We must render it thus--'On the demesne there are _a_
teams and _b_ servi; and there are _c_ villani and _d_ bordarii with _e_
teams.' Still we seem to see a gently graduated scale of social classes,
_villani_, _bordarii_, _cotarii_, _servi_, and while the jurors of one
county will arrange them in one fashion, the jurors of another county
may adopt a different scheme. Thus in their classification of mankind
the jurors will sometimes lay great stress on the possession of plough
oxen. In Hertfordshire we read:--'There are 6 teams in demesne and 41
_villani_ and 17 _bordarii_ have 20 teams ... there are 22 _cotarii_ and
12 _servi_[63].'--'The priest, 13 _villani_ and 4 _bordarii_ have 6
teams ... there are two _cotarii_ and 4 _servi_[64].'--'The priest and
24 _villani_ have 13 teams ... there are 12 _bordarii_, 16 _cotarii_ and
11 _servi_[65].' A division is in this instance made between the people
who have oxen and the people who have none; _villani_ have oxen,
_cotarii_ and _servi_ have none; sometimes the _bordarii_ stand above
this line, sometimes below it.
[Legal position of the serf.]
Of the legal position of the _servus_ Domesday Book tells us little or
nothing; but earlier and later documents oblige us to think of him as a
slave, one who in the main has no legal rights. He is the _theów_ of the
Anglo-Saxon dooms, the _servus_ of the ecclesiastical canons. But though
we do right in calling him a slave, still we might well be mistaken were
we to think of the line which divides him from other men as being as
sharp as the line which a mature jurisprudence will draw between thing
and person. We may well doubt whether this principle--'The slave is a
thing, not a person'--can be fully understood by a grossly barbarous
age. It implies the idea of a person, and in the world of sense we find
not persons but men.
[Degrees of serfdom.]
Thus degrees of servility are possible. A class may stand, as it were,
half-way between the class of slaves and the class of free men. The
Kentish law of the seventh century as it appears in the dooms of
Æthelbert[66], like many of its continental sisters, knows a class of
men who perhaps are not free men and yet are not slaves; it knows the
_læt_ as well as the _theów_. From what race the Kentish _læt_ has
sprung, and how, when it comes to details, the law will treat him--these
are obscure questions, and the latter of them can not be answered unless
we apply to him what is written about the _laeti_, _liti_ and _lidi_ of
the continent. He is thus far a person that he has a small wergild but
possibly he is bound to the soil. Only in Æthelbert's dooms do we read
of him. From later days, until Domesday Book breaks the silence, we do
not obtain any definite evidence of the existence of any class of men
who are not slaves but none the less are tied to the land. Of men who
are bound to do heavy labour services for their lords we do hear, but we
do not hear that if they run away they can be captured and brought
back. As we shall see by and by, Domesday Book bears witness to the
existence of a class of _buri_, _burs_, _coliberti_, who seem to be
distinctly superior to the _servi_, but distinctly inferior to the
villeins, bordiers and cottiers. It is by no means impossible that they,
without being slaves, are in a very proper and intelligible sense unfree
men, that they have civil rights which they can assert in courts of law,
but that they are tied to the soil. The gulf between the seventh and the
eleventh centuries is too wide to allow of our connecting them with the
_læt_ of Æthelbert's laws, but still our documents are not exhaustive
enough to justify us in denying that all along there has been a class
(though it can hardly have been a large class) of men who could not quit
their tenements and yet were no slaves. As we shall see hereafter,
liberty was in certain contexts reckoned a matter of degree; even the
_villanus_, even the _sochemannus_ was not for every purpose _liber
homo_. When this is so, the _theów_ or _servus_ is like to appear as the
unfreest of persons rather than as no person but a thing.
[Prædial element in serfage.]
In the second place, we may guess that from a remote time there has been
in the condition of the _theów_ a certain element of praediality. The
slaves have not been worked in gangs nor housed in barracks[67]. The
_servus_ has often been a _servus casatus_, he has had a cottage or even
a manse and yardland which _de facto_ he might call his own. There is
here no legal limitation of his master's power. Some slave trade there
has been; but on the whole it seems probable that the _theów_ has been
usually treated as annexed to a tenement. The duties exacted of him from
year to year have remained constant. The consequence is that a free man
in return for a plot of land may well agree to do all that a _theów_
usually does and see in this no descent into slavery. Thus the slave
gets a chance of acquiring what will be as a matter of fact a
_peculium_. In the seventh century the church tried to turn this matter
of fact into matter of law. 'Non licet homini,' says Theodore's
Penitential, 'a servo tollere pecuniam, quam ipse labore suo
adquesierit[68].' We have no reason for thinking that this effort was
very strenuous or very successful, or that the law of the eleventh
century allowed the _servus_ any proprietary rights; and yet he might
often be the occupier of land and of chattels with which, so long as he
did his customary services, his lord would seldom meddle.
[The serf in criminal law.]
In the third place, we may believe that for some time past police law
and punitive law have been doing something to conceal, if not to
obliterate, the line which separates the slave from other men. A mature
jurisprudence may be able to hold fast the fundamental principle that a
slave is not a person but a thing, while at the same time it both limits
the master's power of abusing his human chattel and guards against those
dangers which may arise from the existence of things which have wills,
and sometimes bad wills, of their own. But an immature jurisprudence is
incapable of this exploit. It begins to play fast and loose with its
elementary notions. It begins to punish the criminous slave without
being quite certain as to how far it is punishing him and how far it is
punishing his master. Confusion is easy, for if the slave be punished by
death or mutilation, his master will suffer, and a pecuniary mulct
exacted from the slave is exacted from his master. Learned writers have
come to the most opposite opinions as to the extent to which the
Anglo-Saxon dooms by their distribution of penalties recognize the
personality of the _theów_. But this is not all. For a long time past
the law has had before it the difficult problem of dealing with crimes
and delicts committed by poor and economically dependent free men, men
who have no land of their own, who are here to-day and gone to-morrow,
'men from whom no right can be had.' It has been endeavouring to make
the lords answerable to a certain extent for the misdeeds of their free
retainers. If a slave is charged with a crime his master is bound to
produce him in court. But the law requires that the lord shall in very
similar fashion produce his free 'loaf eater,' his mainpast, nay, it has
been endeavouring to enforce the rule that every free man who has no
land of his own shall have a lord bound to produce him when he is
accused. Also it has been fostering the growth of private justice. The
lord's duty of producing his men, bond and free, has been becoming the
duty of holding a court in which his men, free and bond, will answer for
themselves. How far this process had gone in the days of the Confessor
is a question to which we shall return[69].
[Serf and villein.]
For all this however, we may say with certainty that in the eleventh
century the _servi_ were marked off from all other men by definite legal
lines. What is more, we may say that every man who was not a _theów_ was
in some definite legal sense a free man. This sharp contrast is put
before us by the laws of Cnut as well as by those of his predecessors.
If a freeman works on a holiday, he pays for it with his _healsfang_; if
a _theówman_ does the like, he pays for it with his hide or his
hide-geld[70]. Equally sharp is the same distinction in the Leges
Henrici, and this too in passages which, so far as we know, are not
borrowed from Anglo-Saxon documents. For many purposes 'aut servus aut
liber homo' is a perfect dilemma. There is no confusion whatever between
the _villani_ and the _servi_. The _villani_ are 'viles et inopes
personae' but clearly enough they are _liberi homines_. So also in the
Quadripartitus, the Latin translation of the ancient dooms made in Henry
I.'s reign, there is no confusion about this matter; the _theówman_
becomes a _servus_, while _villanus_ is the equivalent for _ceorl_. The
Norman writers still tell how according to the old law of the English
the _villanus_ might become a thegn if he acquired five hides of
land[71]; at times they will put before us _villani_ and _thaini_ or
even _villani_ and _barones_ as an exhaustive classification of free
men[72].
[The serf of the Leges.]
Let us learn what may be learnt of the _servus_ from the Leges Henrici.
Every man is either a _liber homo_ or a _servus_[73]. Free men are
either two-hundred-men or twelve-hundred-men; perhaps we ought to add
that there is also a class of six-hundred-men[74]. A serf becomes such
either by birth or by some event, such as a sale into slavery, that
happens in his lifetime[75]. Servile blood is transmitted from father to
child; some lords hold that it is also transmitted by mother to
child[76]. If a slave is to be freed this should be done publicly, in
court, or church or market, and lance and helmet or other the arms of
free men should be given him, while he should give his lord thirty
pence, that is the price of his skin, as a sign that he is henceforth
'worthy of his hide.' On the other hand, when a free man falls into
slavery then also there should be a public ceremony. He should put his
head between his lord's hands and should receive as the arms of slavery
some bill-hook or the like[77]. Public ceremonies are requisite, for the
state is endangered by the uncertain condition of accused criminals; the
lords will assert at one moment that their men are free and at the next
moment that these same men are slaves[78]. The descent of a free man
into slavery is treated as no uncommon event; the slave may well have
free kinsfolk[79]. But, to come to the fundamental rule, the _villanus_,
the meanest of free men, is a two-hundred-man, that is to say, if he be
slain the very substantial wergild of 200 Saxon shillings or £4 must be
paid to his kinsfolk[80], while a man-bót of 30 shillings is paid to his
lord[81]. But if a _servus_ be slain his kinsfolk receive the
comparatively trifling sum of 40 pence while the lord gets the man-bót
of 20 shillings[82]. That the serf's kinsfolk should receive a small sum
need not surprise us. Germanic law has never found it easy to carry the
principle that the slave is a chattel to extreme conclusions; but the
payment seems trifling and half contemptuous; at any rate the life of
the villein is worth the life of twenty-four serfs[83]. Then again, it
is by no means certain that a lord can not kill his serf with impunity.
'If,' says our text, 'a man slay his own serf, his is the sin and his is
the loss':--we may interpret this to mean that he has sinned but sinned
against himself[84]. Then again, for the evil deeds of his slave the
master is in some degree responsible. If my slave be guilty of a petty
theft not worthy of death, I am bound to make restitution; if the crime
be a capital one and he be taken handhaving, then he must 'die like a
free man[85].' If my slave be guilty of homicide, my duty is to set him
free and hand him over to the kindred of the slain, but apparently I may
purchase his life by a sum of 40 shillings, a sum much less than the
_wer_ of the slain man[86]. We must not be too hard on the owners of
delinquent slaves. There are cases, for example, in which, several
slaves having committed a crime, one of them chosen by lot must suffer
for the sins of all[87]. Our author is borrowing from the laws of
several different centuries and does not arrive at any neat result; nor
must we wonder at this, for the problems presented to jurisprudence by
the crimes and delicts of slaves are very intricate. Then again, we have
the rule that if free men and serfs join in a crime, the whole guilt is
to be attributed to the free: he who joins with a slave in a theft has
no companion[88]. On the whole, though the slave is likely to have as a
matter of fact a _peculium_ of his own, a _peculium_ out of which he may
be able to pay for his offences and even perhaps to purchase his
liberty[89], the _servus_ of our Leges seems to be in the main a
rightless being. We look in vain for any trace of that idea of the
relativity of servitude which becomes the core of Bracton's
doctrine[90]. At the same time we observe that many, perhaps most, of
the rules which mark the slavish condition of the serf are ancient rules
and rules that are becoming obsolete. In the twelfth century the old
system of _wer_ and _bót_ is already vanishing, though an antiquarian
lawyer may yet try to revivify it. When it disappears altogether before
the new law, which holds every grave crime to be a felony, and punishes
almost every felony with death[91], many grand differences between the
villein and the serf will have perished. The gallows is a great
leveller.
[Return to the _servus_ of Domesday.]
If now we recur to the days of the Conquest, we cannot doubt that the
law knew a definite class of slaves, and marked them off by many
distinctions from the _villani_ and _cotarii_, and even from the
_coliberti_. Sums that seem high were being paid for men whose freedom
was being purchased[92]. At Lewes the toll paid for the sale of an ox
was a halfpenny; on the sale of a man it was fourpence[93]. In later
documents we may sometimes see a distinction well drawn. Thus in the
Black Book of Peterborough, compiled in 1127 or thereabouts, we may read
how on one of his manors the abbot has eight herdsmen (_bovarii_), how
each of them holds ten acres, has to do labour services and render
loaves and poultry. And then we read that each of them must pay one
penny for his head if he be a free man (_liber homo_), while he pays
nothing if he be a _servus_[94]. This is a well-drawn distinction. Of
two men whose economic position is precisely the same, the one may be
free, the other a slave, and it is the free man, not the slave, who has
to pay a head-penny. Now when the Conqueror's surveyors, or rather the
jurors, call a man a _servus_ they are, so it seems to us, thinking
rather of his legal status than of his position in the economy of a
manor. At any rate we ought to observe that the economic stratification
of society may cut the legal stratification. We are accustomed perhaps
to suppose that while the _villani_ have lands that are in some sense
their own, while they support themselves and their families by tilling
those lands, the _servus_ has no land that is in any sense his own, but
is fed at his lord's board, is housed in his lord's court, and spends
all his time in the cultivation of his lord's demesne lands. Such may
have been the case in those parts of England where we hear of but few
_servi_; those few may have been inmates of the lord's house and have
had no plots of their own. But such can hardly have been the case in the
south-western counties; the _servi_ are too many to be menials. Indeed
it would seem that these _servi_ sometimes had arable plots, and had
oxen, which were to be distinguished from the demesne oxen of their
lords--not indeed as a matter of law, but as a matter of economic
usage[95]. It is plain that the legal and the economic lines may
intersect one another; the menial who is fed by the lord and who must
give his whole time to the lord's work may be a free man; the slave may
have a cottage and oxen and a plot of arable land, and labour for
himself as well labouring for his lord. Hence a perplexed and uncertain
terminology:--the _servus_ who has land and oxen may be casually called
a _villanus_[96], and we cannot be sure that no one whom our record
calls a _servus_ has the wergild of a free man. Nor can we be sure that
the enumeration of the _servi_ is always governed by one consistent
principle. In the shires of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester we read
of numerous _ancillae_--in Worcestershire of 677 _servi_ and 101
_ancillae_[97]--and this may make us think that in this district all the
able-bodied serfs are enumerated, whether or no they have cottages to
themselves[98]. We may strongly suspect that the king's commissioners
were not much interested in the line that separated the _villani_ from
the _servi_, since the lord was as directly answerable for the geld of
any lands that were in the occupation of his villeins as he was for the
geld of those plots that were tilled for him by his slaves. That there
should have been never a _theów_ in all Yorkshire and Lincolnshire is
hardly credible, and yet we hear of no _servi_ in those counties.
[Disappearance of _servi_.]
This being so, we encounter some difficulty if we would put just the
right interpretation on a remarkable fact that is visible in Essex. The
description of that county tells us not only how many _villani_,
_bordarii_ and _servi_ there are now, but also how many there were in
King Edward's day, and thus shows what changes have taken place during
the last twenty years. Now on manor after manor the number of villeins
and bordiers, if of them we make one class, has increased, while the
number of _servi_ has fallen. We take 100 entries (four batches of 25
apiece) and see that the number of _villani_ and _bordarii_ has risen
from 1486 to 1894, while the number of _servi_ has fallen from 423 to
303. We make another experiment with a hundred entries. This gives the
following result:--
1066 1086
Villani 1273 1247
Bordarii 810 1241
Servi 384 312
This decrease in the number of _servi_ seems to be pretty evenly
distributed throughout the county[99]. We shall not readily ascribe the
change to any mildheartedness of the lords. They are Frenchmen, and in
all probability they have got the most they could out of a mass of
peasantry made malleable and manageable by the Conquest. We may rather
be entitled to infer that there has been a considerable change in rural
economy. For the cultivation of his demesne land the lord begins to rely
less and less on the labour of serfs whom he feeds, more and more upon
the labour of tenants who have plots of their own and who feed
themselves. From this again we may perhaps infer that the labour
services of the _villani_ and _bordarii_ are being augmented. But at any
rate it speaks ill of their fate, that under the sway of foreigners, who
may fairly be suspected of some harshness and greed, their inferiors,
the true _servi_, are somewhat rapidly disappearing. However, it is by
no means impossible that with a slavery so complete as that of the
English _theów_ the Normans were not very familiar in their own
country[100].
FOOTNOTES:
[61] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 398.
[62] D. B. i. 34, Limenesfeld.
[63] D. B. i. 132 b, Hiz.
[64] D. B. i. 132 b, Waldenei.
[65] D. B. i. 136, Sandone.
[66] Æthelb. 26.
[67] Tacitus, Germ. c. 25: 'Caeteris servis non in nostrum morem,
descriptis per familiam ministeriis, utuntur. Suam quisque
sedem, suos penates regit. Frumenti modum dominus aut pecoris
aut vestis ut colono iniungit, et servus hactenus paret.'
[68] Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, iii. 202.
[69] See on the one hand Maurer, K. U. i. 410, on the other a
learned essay by Jastrow, Zur strafrechtlichen Stellung der
Sklaven, in Gierke's Untersuchungen zur Deutsche Geschichte,
vol. i. Maurer holds that the Anglo-Saxon slave is in the main
a chattel, that _e.g._ the master must answer for the delicts
of his slave in the same way that the owner answers for damage
done by his beasts, and that this liability can be clearly
marked off from the duty of the lord of free retainers who is
merely bound to produce them in court. Jastrow, on the
contrary, thinks that even at a quite early time the
Anglo-Saxon slave is treated as a person by criminal law; he
has a wergild; he can be fined; his trespasses are never
compared to the trespasses of beasts; the lord's duty, if one
of his men is charged with crime, is much the same whether that
man be free or bond. Any theory involves an explanation of
several passages that are obscure and perhaps corrupt.
[70] Cnut, II. 45-6.
[71] Schmid, Appendix V. (Of Ranks); Pseudoleges Canuti, 60 (Schmid,
p. 431).
[72] Leg. Hen. 76 § 7: 'Differentia tamen weregildi multa est in
Cantia villanorum et baronum.'
[73] Leg. Hen. 76 § 2.
[74] Leg. Hen. 76 § 3.
[75] Ibid. 76 § 3.
[76] Ibid. 77; see Hist. Eng. Law, i. 405.
[77] Ibid. 78 § 2. The difficult _strublum_ we leave untouched.
[78] Ibid. 78 § 2 from Cnut, II. 20. On this see Jastrow's comment,
op. cit. p. 80.
[79] Ibid. 70 § 5.
[80] Ibid. 70 § 1; 76 § 4.
[81] Ibid. 69 § 2.
[82] Ibid. 70 § 4: 'Si liber servum occidat similiter reddat
parentibus 40 den. et duas mufflas et unum pullum [_al._
billum] mutilatum.' The _mufflae_ are thick gloves. Compare
Ancient Laws of Wales, i. 239, 511; the bondman has no
_galanas_ (wergild) but if injured he receives a _saraad_; 'the
saraad of a bondman is twelve pence, six for a coat for him,
three for trousers, one for buskins, one for a hook and one for
a rope, and if he be a woodman let the hook-penny be for an
axe.' If we read _billum_ instead of _pullum_ the English rule
may remind us of the Welsh. His hedger's gloves and bill-hook
are the arms appropriate to the serf, 'servitutis arma'; cf.
Leg. Hen. 78 § 2. As to the _man-bót_ see Liebermann, Leg.
Edwardi, p. 71.
[83] In Leg. Hen. 81 § 3 (a passage which seems to show that by his
master's favour even the _servus_ may sometimes sue for a wrong
done to him) we have this sum:--_villanus_ : _cothsetus_ :
_servus_ :: 30 : 15 : 6.
[84] Ibid. 75 § 4: 'suum peccatum est et dampnum.' See also 70 § 10,
an exceedingly obscure passage.
[85] Ibid. 59 § 23.
[86] Ibid. 70 § 5; but for this our author has to go back as far as
Ine.
[87] Ibid. 59 § 25.
[88] Ibid. 59 § 24; 85 § 4: 'solus furatur qui cum servo furatur.'
[89] Ibid. 78 § 3; 59 § 25.
[90] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 398, 402.
[91] Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 457.
[92] See the Bath manumissions, Kemble, Saxons, i. 507 ff. Sometimes
a pound or a half-pound is paid.
[93] D. B. i. 26.
[94] Chron. Petrob. 163.
[95] D. B. i. 105 b, Devon: 'Rolf tenet de B[alduino] Boslie ...
Terra est 8 carucis. In dominio est 1 caruca et dimidia et 7
servi cum 1 caruca.' D. B. iv. 265: 'Balduinus habet 1
mansionem quae vocatur Bosleia ... hanc possunt arare 8
carrucae et modo tenet eam Roffus de Balduino. Inde habet R. 1
ferdinum et 1 carrucam et dimidiam in dominio et villani tenent
aliam terram et habent ibi 1 carrucam. Ibi habet R. 7 servos.'
In the Exeter record these seven serfs seem to get reckoned as
being both _servi_ and _villani_. So in the account of Rentis,
D. B. iv. 204-5, the lord is said to have one quarter of the
arable in demesne and two oxen, while the _villani_ are said to
have the rest of the arable and one team; but the only
_villani_ are 8 _coliberti_ and 4 _servi_.
[96] See last note.
[97] Ellis, Introduction, ii. 504-6.
[98] See, for example, the following Herefordshire entry, D. B. i.
180 b: 'In dominio sunt 2 carucae et 4 villani et 8 bordarii et
prepositus et bedellus. Inter omnes habent 4 carucas. Ibi 8
inter servos et ancillas et vaccarius et daia.'
[99] Mr Round has drawn attention to the great increase of
_bordarii_: Antiquary (1882) vi. 9. In the second of our two
experiments the cases were taken from the royal demesne and the
lands of the churches. The surveys of Norfolk and Suffolk
profess to enumerate the various classes of peasants T. R. E.;
but commonly each entry reports that there has been no change.
Without saying that we disbelieve these reports, we
nevertheless may say that a verdict which asserts that things
have always (_semper_) been as they now are may easily be the
outcome of nescience.
[100] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 53-4.
§ 3. _The Villeins._
[The boors or coliberts.]
Next above the _servi_ we see the small but interesting class of _buri_,
_burs_ or _coliberti_. Probably it was not mentioned in the writ which
set the commissioners their task, and this may well be the reason why it
appears as but a very small class. It has some 900 members; still it is
represented in fourteen shires: Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset,
Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Buckingham, Oxford, Gloucester, Worcester,
Hereford, Warwick, Shropshire--in short, in the shires of Wessex and
western Mercia. Twice over our record explains--a piece of rare good
fortune--that _buri_ and _coliberti_ are all one[101]. In general they
are presented to us as being akin rather to the _servi_ than to the
_villani_ or _bordarii_, as when we are told, 'In demesne there is one
virgate of land and there are 3 teams and 11 _servi_ and 5 _coliberti_,
and there are 15 _villani_ and 15 _bordarii_ with 8 teams[102].' But
this rule is by no means unbroken; sometimes the _coliberti_ are
separated from the _servi_ and a precedence over the _cotarii_ or even
over the _bordarii_ is given them. Thus of a Wiltshire manor it is
written, 'In demesne there are 8 teams and 20 _servi_ and 41 _villani_
and 30 _bordarii_ and 7 _coliberti_ and 74 _cotarii_ have among them all
27 teams[103].' Again of a Warwickshire manor, 'There is land for 26
teams; in demesne are 3 teams and 4 _servi_ and 43 _villani_ and 6
_coliberti_ and 10 _bordarii_ with 16 teams[104].' A classification
which turns upon legal status is cut by a classification which turns
upon economic condition. The _colibertus_ we take to be an unfreer man
(how there come to be degrees of freedom is a question to be asked by
and by) than the _cotarius_ or the _bordarius_, but on a given manor he
may be a more important person, for he may have plough beasts while the
_cotarius_ has none, he may have two oxen while the _bordarius_ has but
an ox.
[The Continental colibert.]
[The English boor.]
In calling him a _colibertus_ the Norman clerks are giving him a foreign
name, the etymological origin of which is very dark[105]; but this much
seems plain, that in the France of the eleventh century a large class
bearing this name had been formed out of ancient elements, Roman
_coloni_ and Germanic _liti_, a class which was not rightless (for it
could be distinguished from the class of _servi_, and a _colibertus_
might be made a _servus_ by way of punishment for his crimes) but which
yet was unfree, for the _colibertus_ who left his lord might be pursued
and recaptured[106]. As to the Englishman upon whom this name is
bestowed we know him to be a _gebúr_, a boor, and we learn something of
him from that mysterious document entitled 'Rectitudines Singularum
Personarum[107].' His services, we are told, vary from place to place;
in some districts he works for his lord two days a week and during
harvest-time three days a week; he pays gafol in money, barley, sheep
and poultry; also he has ploughing to do besides his week-work; he pays
hearth-penny; he and one of his fellows must between them feed a dog. It
is usual to provide him with an outfit of two oxen, one cow, six sheep,
and seed for seven acres of his yardland, and also to provide him with
household stuff; on his death all these chattels go back to his lord.
Thus the boor is put before us as a tenant with a house and a yardland
or virgate, and two plough oxen. He will therefore play a more important
part in the manorial economy than the cottager who has no beasts. But he
is a very dependent person; his beasts, even the poor furniture of his
house, his pots and crocks, are provided for him by his lord. Probably
it is this that marks him off from the ordinary _villanus_ or
'townsman,' and brings him near the serf. In a sense he may be a free
man. We have seen how the law, whether we look for it to the code of
Cnut or to the Leges Henrici, is holding fast the proposition that every
one who is not a _theówman_ is a free man, that every one is either a
_liber homo_ or a _servus_. We have no warrant for denying to the boor
the full wergild of 200 shillings. He pays the hearth-penny, or Peter's
penny, and the document that tells us this elsewhere mentions this
payment as the mark of a free man[108]. And yet in a very true and
accurate sense he may be unfree, unfree to quit his lord's service. All
that he has belongs to his lord; he must be perpetually in debt to his
lord; he could hardly leave his lord without being guilty of something
very like theft, an abstraction of chattels committed to his charge.
Very probably if he flies, his lord has a right to recapture him. On the
other hand, so dependent a man will be in a very strict sense a tenant
at will. When he dies not only his tenement but his stock will belong to
the lord; like the French _colibert_ he is _mainmortable_. At the same
time, to one familiar with the cartularies of the thirteenth century the
rents and services that this boor has to pay and perform for his virgate
will not appear enormous. If we mistake not, many a _villanus_ of Henry
III.'s day would have thought them light. Of course any such comparison
is beset by difficulties, for at present we know all too little of the
history of wages and prices. Nevertheless the intermediation of this
class of _buri_ or _coliberti_ between the serfs and the villeins of
Domesday Book must tend to raise our estimate both of the legal freedom
and of the economic welfare of that great mass of peasants which is now
to come before us[109].
[Villani, bordarii, cotarii.]
That great mass consists of some 108,500 _villani_, some 82,600
_bordarii_, and some 6,800 _cotarii_ and _coscets_[110]. Though in manor
after manor we may find representatives of each of these three classes,
we can see that for some important purpose they form but one grand
class, and that the term _villanus_ may be used to cover the whole genus
as well as to designate one of its three species. In the Exon Domesday
a common formula, having stated the number of hides in the manor and the
number of teams for which it can find work, proceeds to divide the land
and the existing teams between the demesne and the _villani_--the
_villani_, it will say, have so many hides and so many teams. Then it
will state how many _villani_, _bordarii_, _cotarii_ there are. But it
will sometimes fall out that there are no _villani_ if that term is to
be used in its specific sense, and so, after having been told that the
_villani_ have so much land and so many teams, we learn that the only
_villani_ on this manor are _bordarii_[111]. The lines which divide the
three species are, we may be sure, much rather economic than legal
lines. Of course the law may recognise them upon occasion[112], but we
can not say that the _bordarius_ has a different status from that of the
_villanus_. In the Leges both fall under the term _villani_; indeed, as
hereafter will be seen, that term has sometimes to cover all men who are
not _servi_ but are not noble. Nor must we suppose that the economic
lines are drawn with much precision or according to any one uniform
pattern. Of _villani_ and _bordarii_ we may read in every county;
_cotarii_ or _coscets_ in considerable numbers are found only in Kent,
Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Berkshire,
Hertford and Cambridge, though they are not absolutely unknown in
Buckingham, in Devon, in Hereford, Worcester, Shropshire, Yorkshire. We
can not tell how the English jurors would have expressed the distinction
between _bordarii_ and _cotarii_, for while the _cot_ is English, the
_borde_ is French. If we are entitled to draw any inference from the
distribution of the cottiers, it would be that the smallest of small
tenements were to be found chiefly along the southern shore; but then
there are no _cotarii_ in Hampshire, plenty in Sussex, Surrey, Wiltshire
and Dorset. Again, in the two shires last mentioned some distinction
seems to be taken between the _coscets_ and the _cotarii_, the former
being superior to the latter[113]. Two centuries later we find a similar
distinction among the tenants of Worcester Priory. There are _cotmanni_
whose rents and services are heavier, and whose tenements are
presumably larger than those of the _cotarii_, though the difference is
not very great[114].
[Size of the villain's tenement.]
The vagueness of distinctions such as these is well illustrated by the
failure of the term _bordarius_ (and none is more prominent in Domesday
Book) to take firm root in this country[115]. The successors of the
_bordarii_ seem to become in the later documents either _villani_ with
small or cottiers with large tenements. Distinctions which turn on the
amount of land that is possessed or the amount of service that is done
cannot be accurately formulated and forced upon a whole country. Perhaps
in general we may endow the _villanus_ of Domesday Book with a virgate
or quarter of a hide, while we ascribe to the _bordarius_ a less
quantity and doubt whether the _cotarius_ usually had arable land. But
the survey of Middlesex, which is the main authority touching this
matter, shows that the _villanus_ may on occasion have a whole
hide[116], that is four virgates, and that often he has but half a
virgate; it shows us that the _bordarius_, though often he has but four
or five acres, may have a half virgate, that is as much as many a
_villanus_[117]; it shows us that the _cotarius_ may have five acres,
that is as much as many a _bordarius_[118], though he will often have no
more than a croft[119]. In Essex we hear of _bordarii_ who held no
arable land[120]. Nor dare we lay down any stern rule about the
possession of plough beasts. It would seem as if sometimes the
_bordarius_ had oxen, while sometimes he had none[121]. The _villanus_
might have two oxen, but he might have more or less. We may find that
in Cornwall a single team of eight is forthcoming where there are[122]
3 villani, 4 bordarii, 2 servi
2 " 2 " 3 "
0 " 5 " 2 "
1 " 5 " 1 "
2 " 5 " 4 "
2 " 3 " 1 "
3 " 6 " 3 "
In some Gloucestershire manors every villein seems to have a full plough
team[123]. Merely economic grades are essentially indefinite. Who could
have defined a 'cottage' in the eleventh century? Who can define one
now[124]?
[Villeins and cottiers.]
In truth the vast class of men that we are examining must have been
heterogeneous to a high degree. Not only were some members of it much
wealthier than others, but in all probability some were economically
subject to others. So it was in later days. In the thirteenth century we
may easily find a manor in which the lord is paying hardly any wages. He
gets nearly all his agricultural work done for him by his villeins and
his cottiers. Out of his cottiers however he will get but one day's work
in the week. If then we ask what the cottiers are doing during the rest
of their time, the answer surely must be that they are often working as
hired labourers on the villein's virgates, for a cottier can not have
spent five days in the week over the tillage of his poor little
tenement. It is a remarkable feature of the manorial arrangement that
the meanest of the lord's _nativi_ are but rarely working for him. Thus
if we were to remove the lord in order that the village community might
be revealed, we should still see not only rich and poor, but employers
and employed, villagers and 'undersettles.'
[Freedom and unfreedom of _villani_.]
Now all these people are in a sense unfree, while yet in some other
sense they are free. Let us then spend a short while in discussing the
various meanings that freedom may have in a legal classification of the
sorts and conditions of men. When we have put out of account the
rightless slave, who is a thing, it still remains possible to say that
some men are unfree, while others are free, and even that freedom is a
matter of degree. But we may use various standards for the measurement
of liberty.
[Meaning of freedom.]
Perhaps in the first place we shall think of what German writers call
_Freizügigkeit_, the power to leave the master whom one has been
serving. This power our ancestors would perhaps have called
'fare-worthiness[125].' If the master has the right to recapture the
servant who leaves his service, or even if he has the right to call upon
the officers of the state to pursue him and bring him back to his work,
then we may account this servant an unfree man, albeit the relation
between him and his master has been created by free contract. Such
unfreedom is very distinct from rightlessness. As a freak of
jurisprudence we might imagine a modern nobleman entitled to reduce by
force and arms his fugitive butler to well-paid and easy duties, while
all the same that butler had rights against all the world including his
master, had access to all courts, and could even sue for his wages if
they were not punctually paid. If we call him unfree, then freedom will
look like a matter of degree, for the master's power to get back his
fugitive may be defined by law in divers manners. May he go in pursuit
and use force? Must he send a constable or sheriff's officer? Must he
first go to court and obtain a judgment, 'a decree for specific
performance' of the contract of service? The right of recapture seems to
shade off gradually into a right to insist that a breach of the contract
of service is a criminal offence to be punished by fine or imprisonment.
Then, again, there may seem to us to be more of unfreedom in the case of
one who was born a servant than in the case of one who has contracted to
serve, though we should note that one may be born to serve without being
born rightless.
More to the point than these obvious reflections will be the remark that
in the thirteenth century we learn to think of various spheres or planes
of justice. A right good in one sphere may have no existence in
another. The rights of the villeins in their tenements are sanctioned by
manorial justice; they are ignored by the king's courts. Here, again,
the ideas of freedom and unfreedom find a part to play. True that in the
order of legal logic freedom may precede royal protection; a tenure is
protected because it is free; still men are soon arguing that it is free
because it is protected, and this probably discloses an idea which lies
deep[126]:--the king's courts, the national courts, are open to the
free; we approach the rightlessness of the slave if our rights are
recognized only in a court of which our lord is the president.
The thirteenth century will also supply us with the notion that
continuous agricultural service, service in which there is a
considerable element of uncertainty, is unfree service. Where from day
to day the lord's will counts for much in determining the work that his
tenants must do, such tenants, even if they be free men, are not holding
freely. But uncertainty is a matter of degree, and therefore unfreedom
may easily be regarded as a matter of degree[127].
Then, again, in the law books of the Norman age we see distinct traces
of a usage which would make _liber_ or _liberalis_ an equivalent for our
_noble_, or at least for our _gentle_. The common man with the wergild
of 200 shillings, though indubitably he is no _servus_, is not
_liberalis homo_[128].
Lastly, in our thirteenth century we learn that privileges and
exceptional immunities are 'liberties' and 'franchises.' What is our
definition of a liberty, a franchise? A portion of royal power in the
hands of a subject. In Henry III.'s day we do not say that the Earl of
Chester is a freer man, more of a _liber homo_, than is the Earl of
Gloucester, but we do say that he has more, greater, higher liberties.
Therefore we shall not be surprised if in Domesday Book what we read of
freedom, of free men, of free land is sadly obscure. Let us then observe
that the _villanus_ both is and is not a free man.
[The villein as free.]
According to the usual terminology of the Leges, everyone who is above
the rank of a _servus_, but below the rank of a thegn, is a _villanus_.
The _villanus_ is the non-noble _liber homo_. All those numerous
sokemen of the eastern counties whom Domesday ranks above the _villani_,
all those numerous _liberi homines_ whom it ranks above the sokemen,
are, according to this scheme, _villani_ if they be not thegns. And this
scheme is still of great importance, for it is the scheme of _bót_ and
_wer_. By what have been the most vital of all the rules of law, all
these men have been massed together; each of them has a _wer_ of two
hundred shillings[129]. This, we may remark in passing, is no trivial
sum, though the shillings are the small Saxon shillings of four pence or
five pence. There seems to be a good deal of evidence that for a long
time past the ox had been valued at 30 pence, the sheep at 5 pence[130].
At this rate the ceorl's death must be paid for by the price of some
twenty-four or thirty oxen. The sons of a _villanus_ who had but two
oxen must have been under some temptation to wish that their father
would get himself killed by a solvent thegn. Very rarely indeed do the
Leges notice the sokeman or mention _liberi homines_ so as to exclude
the _villani_ from the scope of that term[131]. Domesday Book also on
occasion can divide mankind into slaves and free men. It does so when it
tells us that on a Gloucestershire manor there were twelve _servi_ whom
the lord had made free[132]. It does so again when it tells us that in
the city of Chester the bishop had eight shillings if a free man, four
shillings if a serf, did work upon a festival[133]. So in a description
of the manor of South Perrott in Somerset we read that a certain custom
is due to it from the manor of 'Cruche' (Crewkerne), namely, that every
free man must render one bloom of iron. We look for these free men at
'Cruche' and see no one on the manor but _villani_, _bordarii_,
_coliberti_ and _servi_[134]. Of the Count of Mortain's manor of
Bickenhall it is written that every free man renders a bloom of iron at
the king's manor of Curry; but at Bickenhall there is no one above the
condition of a _villanus_[135]. Other passages will suggest that the
_villanus_ sometimes is and sometimes is not _liber homo_. On a Norfolk
manor we find free villeins, _liberi villani_[136].
[The villein as unfree.]
For all this, however, there must be some very important sense in which
the _villanus_ is not free. In the survey of the eastern counties he is
separated from the _liberi homines_ by the whole class of _sochemanni_.
'In this manor,' we are told, 'there was at that time a free man with
half a hide who has now been made one of the villeins[137].' At times
the word _francus_ is introduced so as to suggest for a moment that,
though the villein may be _liber homo_, he is not _francus_[138]. But
this suggestion, even if it be made, is not maintained, and there are
hundreds of passages which implicitly deny that the villein is _liber
homo_. But then these passages draw the line between freedom and
unfreedom at a point high in the legal scale, a point far above the
heads of the _villani_. At least for the main purposes of Domesday Book
the free man is a man who holds land freely. Let us observe what is said
of the men who have been holding manors. The formula will vary somewhat
from county to county, but we shall often find four phrases used as
equivalent, '_X_ tenuit et liber homo fuit,' '_X_ tenuit ut liber homo,'
'_X_ tenuit et cum terra sua liber fuit,' '_X_ tenuit libere[139].' But
this freeholding implies a high degree of freedom, freedom of a kind
that would have shocked the lawyers of a later age.
[Anglo-Saxon 'freeholding.']
With some regrets we must leave the peasants for a while in order that
we may glance at the higher strata of society. We may take it as certain
that, at least in the eyes of William's ministers, the ordinary holder
of a manor in the time of the Confessor had been holding it under
(_sub_) some lord, if not of (_de_) some lord. But then the closeness of
the connexion between him and his lord, the character of the relation
between lord, man and land, had varied much from case to case. Now these
matters are often expressed in terms of a calculus of personal freedom.
But let us begin with some phrases which seem intelligible enough. The
man can, or he can not, 'sell or give his land'; he can, or he can not,
'sell or give it without the licence of his lord'; he can sell it if he
has first offered it to his lord[140]; he can sell it on paying his lord
two shillings[141]. This seems very simple:--the lord can, or (as the
case may be) can not, prevent his tenant from alienating the land; he
has a right of preemption or he has a right to exact a fine when there
is a change of tenants. But then come phrases that are less in harmony
with our idea of feudal tenure. The man can not sell his land 'away
from' his lord[142], he can not give or sell it 'outside' a certain
manor belonging to his lord[143], or, being the tenant of some church,
he can not 'separate' his land from the church[144], or give or sell it
outside the church[145].
[Freeholding and the lord's rights.]
We have perhaps taken for granted under the influence of later law that
an alienation will not impair the lord's rights, and will but give him a
new instead of an old tenant. But it is not of any mere substitution
such as this that these men of the eleventh century are thinking. They
have it in their minds that the man may wish, may be able, utterly to
withdraw his land from the sphere of his lord's rights. Therefore in
many cases they note with some care that the man, though he can give or
sell his land, can not altogether put an end to such relation as has
existed between this land and his lord. He can sell, but some of the
lord's rights will 'remain,' in particular the lord's 'soke' over the
land (for the present let us say his jurisdiction over the land) will
remain[146]. The purchaser will not of necessity become the 'man' of
this lord, will not of necessity owe him any _servitium_ or
_consuetudo_, but will come under his jurisdiction[147]. Interchanging
however with these phrases[148], we have others which seem to point to
the same set of distinctions, but to express them in terms of personal
freedom. The man can, or else he can not, withdraw from his lord, go
away from his lord, withdraw from his lord's manor; he can or he can not
withdraw with his land; he can or can not go to another lord, or go
wherever he pleases[149]. Some of these phrases will, if taken
literally, seem to say that the persons of whom they are used are tied
to the soil; they can not leave the land, or the manor, or the soke.
Probably in some of these cases the bond between man and lord is a
perpetual bond of homage and fealty, and if the man breaks that bond by
refusing the due obedience or putting himself under another lord, he is
guilty of a wrong[150]. But of pursuing him and capturing him and
reducing him to servitude there can be no talk. Many of these persons
who 'can not recede' are men of wealth and rank, of high rank that is
recognized by law, they are king's thegns or the thegns of the churches,
they are 'twelve-hundred men[151].' However, it is not the man's power
to leave his lord so much as the power to leave his lord and take his
land with him, that these phrases bring to our notice; or rather the
assumption is made that no one will want to leave his lord if he must
also leave his land behind him. And then this power of taking land from
this lord and bringing it under another lord is conceived as an index of
personal freedom. Thus we read: 'These men were so free that they could
go where they pleased[152],' and again, 'Four sokemen held this land,
of whom three were free, while the fourth held one hide but could not
give or sell it[153].' Not that no one is called a _liber homo_ unless
he has this power of 'receding' from his lord; far from it; all is a
matter of degree; but the free man is freer if he can 'go to what lord
he pleases,' and often enough the phrases 'X tenuit et liber homo fuit,'
'X tenuit libere,' 'X tenuit ut liber homo' seem to have no other
meaning than this, that the occupant of the land enjoyed the liberty of
taking it with him whithersoever he would. Therefore there is no
tautology in saying that the holder of the land was a thegn and a free
man, though of course there is a sense, there are many senses, in which
every thegn is free[154]. All this talk of the freedom that consists in
choosing a lord and subjecting land to him may well puzzle us, for it
puzzled the men of the twelfth century. The chronicler of Abingdon abbey
had to explain that in the old days a free man could do strange
things[155].
[The scale of freeholding.]
Comparisons may be instituted between the freedom of one free man and
that of another:--'Five thegns held this land of Earl Edwin and could go
with their land whither they would, and below them they had four
soldiers, who were as free as themselves[156].' A high degree of liberty
is marked when we are told that, 'The said men were so free that they
could sell their land with soke and sake wherever they would[157].' But
there are yet higher degrees of liberty. Of Worcestershire it is
written, 'When the king goes upon a military expedition, if anyone who
is summoned stays at home, then if he is so free a man that he has his
sake and soke and can go whither he pleases with his land, he with all
his land shall be in the king's mercy[158].' The free man is the freer
if he has soke and sake, if he has jurisdiction over other men.
Exceptional privileges, immunities from common burdens, are already
regarded as 'liberties.' This is no new thing; often enough when the
Anglo-Saxon land books speak of freedom they mean privilege.
[Free land.]
The idea of freedom is equally vague and elastic if, instead of applying
it to men, we apply it to land or the tenure of land. Two _bordarii_ are
now holding a small plot; 'they themselves held it freely in King
Edward's day[159].' Here no doubt there has been a fall; but how deep a
fall we can not be sure. To say that a man's land is free may imply far
more freedom than freehold tenure implies in later times; it may imply
that the bond between him and his lord, if indeed he has a lord, is of a
purely personal character and hardly gives the lord any hold over the
land[160]. But this is not all. Perfect freedom is not attained so long
as the land owes any single duty to the state. Often enough--but exactly
how often it were no easy task to tell--the _libera terra_ of our record
is land that has been exempted even from the danegeld; it is highly
privileged land[161]. Let us remember that at the present day, though
the definition of free land or freehold land has long ago been fixed, we
still speak as though free land might become freer if it were 'free of
land-tax and tithe rent-charge.'
[The unfreedom of the villein.]
If now we return to the _villanus_ and deny that he is _liber homo_ and
deny also that he is holding freely, we shall be saying little and using
the laxest of terms. There are half-a-dozen questions that we would fain
ask about him, and there will be no harm in asking them, though Domesday
Book is taciturn.
[Can the villein be pursued?]
Is he free to quit his lord and his land, or can he be pursued and
captured? No one word can be obtained in answer to this question. We can
only say that in Henry II.'s day the ordinary peasant was regarded by
the royal officials as _ascriptitius_; the land that he occupied was
said to be part of his lord's demesne; his chattels were his
lord's[162]. But then this was conceived to be, at least in some degree,
the result of the Norman Conquest and subsequent rebellions of the
peasantry[163]. To this we may add that in one of our sets of Leges, the
French Leis of William the Conqueror, there are certain clauses which
would be of great importance could we suppose that they had an
authoritative origin, and which in any case are remarkable enough. The
_nativus_ who flies from the land on which he is born, let none retain
him or his chattels; if the lords will not send back these men to their
land the king's officers are to do it[164]. On the other hand, the
tillers of the soil are not to be worked beyond their proper rent; their
lord may not remove them from their land so long as they perform their
right services[165]. Whether or no we suppose that in the writer's
opinion the ordinary peasant was a _nativus_ (of _nativi_ Domesday Book
has nothing to say) we still have law more favourable to the peasant
than was the common law of Bracton's age:--a tiller who does his
accustomed service is not to be ejected; he is no tenant at will.
[Rarity of flight.]
Hereafter we shall show that the English peasants did suffer by the
substitution of French for English lords. But the question that we have
asked, so urgent, so fundamental, as it may seem to us, is really one
which, as the history of the Roman _coloni_ might prove, can long remain
unanswered. Men may become economically so dependent on their lords, on
wealthy masters and creditors, that the legal question whether they can
quit their service has no interest. Who wishes to leave his all and go
forth a beggar into the world? On the whole we can find no evidence
whatever that the men of the Confessor's day who were retrospectively
called _villani_ were tied to the soil. Certainly in Norman times the
tradition was held that according to the old law the _villanus_ might
acquire five hides of land and so 'thrive to thegn-right[166].'
[The villein and seignorial justice.]
Our next question should be whether he was subject to seignorial
justice. This is part of a much wider question that we must face
hereafter, for seignorial justice should be treated as a whole. We must
here anticipate a conclusion, the proof of which will come by and by,
namely, that the _villanus_ sometimes was and sometimes was not the
justiciable of a court in which his lord or his lord's steward presided.
All depended on the answer to the question whether his lord had 'sake
and soke.' His lord might have justiciary rights over all his tenants,
or merely over his _villani_, or he might have no justiciary rights, for
as yet 'sake and soke' were in the king's gift, and the mere fact that a
lord had 'men' or tenants did not give him a jurisdiction over them.
[The villein and national justice.]
With this question is connected another, namely, whether the _villani_
had a _locus standi_ in the national courts. We have seen six _villani_
together with the priest (undoubtedly a free man) and the reeve of each
vill summoned to swear in the great inquest[167]. One of the most famous
scenes recorded by our book is that in which William of Chernet claimed
a Hampshire manor on behalf of Hugh de Port and produced his witnesses
from among the best and eldest men of the county; but Picot, the sheriff
of Cambridgeshire, who was in possession, replied with the testimony of
villeins and mean folk and reeves, who were willing to support his case
by oath or by ordeal[168]. Again, in Norfolk, Roger the sheriff claimed
a hundred acres and five _villani_ and a mill as belonging to the royal
manor of Branfort, and five _villani_ of the said manor testified in his
favour and offered to make whatever proof anyone might adjudge to them,
but the half-hundred of Ipswich testified that the land belonged to a
certain church of St. Peter that Wihtgar held, and he offered to
deraign this[169]. Certainly this does not look as if _villani_ were
excluded from the national moots. But a rule which valued the oath of a
single thegn as highly as the oath of six ceorls would make the ceorl
but a poor witness and tend to keep him out of court[170]. The men who
are active in the communal courts, who make the judgments there, are
usually men of thegnly rank; but to go to court as a doomsman is one
thing, to go as a litigant is another[171].
[The villein and his land.]
We may now approach the question whether, and if so in what sense, the
land that the _villanus_ occupies is his land. Throughout Domesday Book
a distinction is sedulously maintained between the land of the villeins
(_terra villanorum_) and the land that the lord has _in dominio_. Let us
notice this phrase. Only the demesne land does the lord hold _in
dominio_, in ownership. The delicate shade of difference that Bracton
would see between _dominicum_ and _dominium_ is not as yet marked. In
later times it became strictly correct to say that the lord held in
demesne (_in dominico suo_) not only the lands which he occupied by
himself or his servants, but also the lands held of him by villein
tenure[172]. This usage appears very plainly in the Dialogue on the
Exchequer. 'You shall know,' says the writer, 'that we give the name
demesnes (_dominica_) to those lands that a man cultivates at his own
cost or by his own labour, and also to those which are possessed in his
name by his _ascriptitii_; for by the law of this kingdom not only can
these _ascriptitii_ be removed by their lords from the lands that they
now possess and transferred to other places, but they may be sold and
dispersed at will; so that rightly are both they and the lands which
they cultivate for the behalf of their lords accounted to be
_dominia_[173].' Far other is the normal, if not invariable, usage of
Domesday Book. The _terrae villanorum_, the _silvae villanorum_, the
_piscariae villanorum_, the _molini villanorum_--for the villeins have
woods and fisheries and mills--these the lord does not hold _in
dominio_[174]. Then again the oxen of the villeins are carefully
distinguished from the oxen of the demesne, while often enough they are
not distinguished from the oxen of those who in every sense are free
tenants[175]. Now as regards both the land and the oxen we seem put to
the dilemma that either they belong to the lord or else they belong to
the villeins. We cannot avoid this dilemma, as we can in later days, by
saying that according to the common law the ownership of these things is
with the lord, while according to the custom of the manor it is with the
villeins, for we believe that a hall-moot, a manorial court, is still a
somewhat exceptional institution.
On the whole we can hardly doubt that both in their land and in their
oxen the villeins have had rights protected by law. Let us glance once
more at the scheme of _bót_ and _wer_ that has been in force. A villein
is slain; the _manbót_ payable to his lord is marked off from the much
heavier _wergild_ that is payable to his kindred. If all that a villein
could have belonged to his lord such a distinction would be idle.
[The villein's land and the geld.]
Still we take it that for one most important purpose the villein's land
is the lord's land:--the lord must answer for the geld that is due from
it. Not that the burden falls ultimately on the lord. On the contrary,
it is not unlikely that he makes his villeins pay the geld that is due
from his demesne land; it is one of their services that they must
'defend their lord's inland' against the geld. But over against the
state the lord represents as well the land of his villeins as his own
demesne land. From the great levy of 1084 the demesne lands of the
barons had been exempted[176], but no doubt they had been responsible
for the tax assessed on the lands held by their _villani_. We much doubt
whether the collectors of the geld went round to the cottages of the
villeins and demanded here six pence and there four pence; they
presented themselves at the lord's hall and asked for a large sum. Nay,
we believe that very often a perfectly free tenant paid his geld to his
lord, or through his lord[177]. Hence arrangements by which some hides
were made to acquit other hides; such, for example, was the arrangement
at Tewkesbury; there were fifty hides which had to acquit the whole
ninety-five hides from all geld and royal service[178]. And then it
might be that the lord, enjoying a special privilege, was entitled to
take the geld from his tenants and yet paid no geld to the king; thus
did the canons of St. Petroc in Cornwall[179] and the monks of St.
Edmund in Suffolk[180]. But as regards lands occupied by villeins, the
king, so it seems to us, looks for his geld to the lord and he does not
look behind the lord. This is no detail of a fiscal system. A potent
force has thus been set in motion. He who pays for land,--it is but fair
that he should be considered the owner of that land. We have a hint of
this principle in a law of Cnut:--'He who has "defended" land with the
witness of the shire, is to enjoy it without question during his life
and on his death may give or sell it to whom he pleases[181].' We have
another hint of this principle in a story told by Heming, the monk of
Worcester:--in Cnut's time but four days of grace were given to the
landowner for the payment of the geld; when these had elapsed, anyone
who paid the geld might have the land[182]. It is a principle which, if
it is applied to the case of lord and villein, will attribute the
ownership of the land to the lord and not to the villein.
[The villein's services.]
And then we would ask: What services do the villeins render? A deep
silence answers us, and as will hereafter be shown, there are many
reasons why we should not import the information given us by the
monastic cartularies, even such early cartularies as the Black Book of
Peterborough, into the days of the Confessor. No doubt the villeins
usually do some labour upon the lord's demesne lands. In particular they
help to plough it. A manor, we can see, is generally so arranged that
the ratio borne by the demesne oxen to the demesne land will be smaller
than that borne by the villeins' oxen to the villeins' land. Thus, to
give one example out of a hundred, in a Somersetshire manor the lord has
four hides and three teams, the villeins have two hides and three
teams[183]. But then the lord gets some help in his agriculture from
those who are undoubtedly free tenants. The teams of the free tenants
are often covered by the same phrase that covers the teams of the
villeins[184]. Radknights who are _liberi homines_ plough and harrow at
the lord's court[185]. The very few entries which tell us of the labour
of the villeins are quite insufficient to condemn the whole class to
unlimited, or even to very heavy work. On a manor in Herefordshire there
are twelve bordiers who work one day in the week[186]. On the enormous
manor of Leominster there are 238 _villani_ and 85 _bordarii_. The
_villani_ plough and sow with their own seed 140 acres of their lord's
land and they pay 11 pounds and 52 pence[187]. On the manor of Marcle,
which also is in Herefordshire, there are 36 _villani_ and 10 _bordarii_
with 40 teams. These _villani_ plough and sow with their own seed 80
acres of wheat and 71 of oats[188]. At Kingston, yet another manor in
the same county, 'the _villani_ who dwelt there in King Edward's day
carried venison to Hereford and did no other service, so says the
shire[189].' On one Worcestershire manor of Westminster Abbey 10
villeins and 10 bordiers with 6 teams plough 6 acres and sow them with
their own seed; on another 8 villeins and 6 bordiers with 6 teams do the
like by 4 acres[190]. This is light work. Casually we are told of
burgesses living at Tamworth who have to work like the other villeins of
the manor of Drayton to which they are attached[191], and we are told of
men on a royal manor who do such works for the king as the reeve may
command[192]; but, curiously enough, it is not of any villeins but of
the Bishop of Worcester's riding men (_radmanni_) that it is written
'they do whatever is commanded them[193].'
[Money rents paid by villeins.]
With our thirteenth century cartularies before us, we might easily
underrate the amount of money that was already being paid as the rent of
land at the date of the Conquest. In several counties we come across
small groups of _censarii_, _censores_, _gablatores_ who pay for their
land in money, of _cervisarii_ and _mellitarii_ who bring beer and
honey. Renders in kind, in herrings, eels, salmon are not uncommon, and
sometimes they are 'appreciated,' valued in terms of money. The pannage
pig or the grass swine, which the villeins give in return for mast and
herbage, is often mentioned. Throughout Sussex it seems to be the custom
that the lord should have 'for herbage' one pig from every villein who
has seven pigs[194]. But money will be taken instead of swine, oxen or
fish[195]. The _gersuma_, the _tailla_, the theoretically free gifts of
the tenants, are sums of money. But often enough the _villanus_ is
paying a substantial money rent. We have seen how at Leominster villeins
plough and sow 140 acres for their lord and pay a rent of more than
£11[196]. At Lewisham in Kent the Abbot of Gand has a manor valued at
£30; of this £2 is due to the profits of the port while two mills with
'the gafol of the rustics' bring in £8. 12_s._[197] Such entries as the
following are not uncommon--there is one villein rendering
30_d._[198]--there is one villein rendering 10_s._[199]--46 _cotarii_
with one hide render 30 shillings a year[200]--the villeins give 13_s._
4_d._ by way of _consuetudo_[201]. No doubt it would be somewhat rare to
find a villein discharging all his dues in money--this is suggested when
we are told how on the land of St. Augustin one Wadard holds a large
piece 'de terra villanorum' and yet renders no service to the abbot save
30_s._ a year[202]. At least in one instance the villeins seem to be
holding the manor in farm, that is to say, they are farming the demesne
land and paying a rent in money or in provender[203]. We dare not
represent the stream of economic history as flowing uninterruptedly from
a system of labour services to a system of rents. We must remember that
in the Conqueror's reign the lord very often had numerous serfs whose
whole time was given to the cultivation of his demesne. In the
south-western counties he will often have two, three or more serfs for
every team that he has on his demesne, and, while this is so, we can not
safely say that his husbandry requires that the villeins should be
labouring on his land for three or four days in every week.
[The English for _villanus_.]
As a last question we may ask: What was the English for _villanus_? It
is a foreign word, one of those words which came in with the Conqueror.
Surely, we may argue, there must have been some English equivalent for
it. Yet we have the greatest difficulty in finding the proper term. True
that in the Quadripartitus and the Leges _villanus_ generally represents
_ceorl_; _ceorl_ when it is not rendered by _villanus_ is left
untranslated in some such form as _cyrliscus homo_. But then _ceorl_
must be a wider word than the _villanus_ of Domesday Book, for it has
to cover all the non-noble free men; it must comprehend the numerous
_sochemanni_ and _liberi homines_ of northern and eastern England. This
in itself is not a little remarkable; it makes us suspect that some of
the lines drawn by Domesday Book are by no means very old; they can not
be drawn by any of those terms that have been current in the Anglo-Saxon
dooms or which still are current in the text-books that lawyers are
compiling. To suppose that _villanus_ is equivalent to _gebúr_ is
impossible; we have the best warrant for saying that the Latin for
_gebúr_ is not _villanus_ but _colibertus_[204]. Nor can we hold that
the _villanus_ is a _geneat_. In the last days of the old English
kingdom the _geneat_, the 'companion,' the 'fellow,' appears as a
horseman who rides on his lord's errands; we must seek him among the
_radmanni_ and _rachenistres_ and _drengi_ of Domesday Book[205]. We
shall venture the guess that when the Norman clerks wrote down
_villanus_, the English jurors had said _túnesman_. As a matter of
etymology the two words answer to each other well enough; the _villa_ is
the _tún_, and the men of the _villa_ are the men of the _tún_. In the
enlarged Latin version of the laws of Cnut, known as Instituta Cnuti,
there is an important remark:--tithes are to be paid both from the lands
of the thegn and from the lands of the villeins--'tam de dominio
liberalis hominis, id est þegenes, quam de terra villanorum, id est
tuumannes (_corr._ tunmannes)[206].' Then in a collection of dooms known
as the Northumbrian Priests' Law there is a clause which orders the
payment of Peter's pence. If a king's thegn or landlord (_landrica_)
withholds his penny, he must pay ten half-marks, half to Christ, half to
the king; but if a _túnesman_ withholds it, then let the landlord pay it
and take an ox from the man[207]. A very valuable passage this is. It
shows us how the lord is becoming responsible for the man's taxes: if
the tenant will not pay them, the lord must. It is then in connexion
with this responsibility of the lord that the term _townsman_ meets us,
and, if we mistake not, it is the lord's responsibility for geld that is
the chief agent in the definition of the class of _villani_. The
pressure of taxation, civil and ecclesiastical, has been forming new
social strata, and a new word, in itself a vague word, is making its way
into the vocabulary of the law[208].
[Summary.]
The class of villeins may well be heterogeneous. It may well contain (so
we think) men who, or whose ancestors, have owned the land under a
political supremacy, not easily to be distinguished from landlordship,
that belongs to the king; and, on the other hand, it may well contain
those who have never in themselves or their predecessors been other than
the tenants of another man's soil. In some counties on the Welsh march
there are groups of _hospites_ who in fact or theory are colonists whom
the lord has invited onto his land[209]; but this word, very common in
France, is not common in England. Our record is not concerned to
describe the nature or the origin of the villein's tenure; it is in
quest of geld and of the persons who ought to be charged with geld, and
so it matters not whether the lord has let land to the villein or has
acquired rights over land of which the villein was once the owner.
Therefore we lay down no broad principle about the rights of the
villein, but we have suggested that taken in the mass the _villani_ of
the Confessor's reign were far more 'law-worthy' than were the _villani_
of the thirteenth century. We can not treat either the legal or the
economic history of our peasantry as a continuous whole; it is divided
into two parts by the red thread of the Norman Conquest. That is a
catastrophe. William might do his best to make it as little of a
catastrophe as was possible, to insist that each French lord should have
precisely the same rights that had been enjoyed by his English
_antecessor_; it may even be that he endeavoured to assure to those who
were becoming _villani_ the rights that they had enjoyed under King
Edward[210]. Such a task, if attempted, was impossible. We hear indeed
that the English 'redeemed their lands,' but probably this refers only
to those English lords, those thegns or the like, who were fortunate
enough to find that a ransom would be accepted[211]. We have no warrant
for thinking that the peasants, the common 'townsmen,' obtained from
the king any covenanted mercies. They were handed over to new lords, who
were very free in fact, if not in theory, to get out of them all that
could be got without gross cruelty.
[Depression of the villeins.]
We are not left to speculate about this matter. In after days those who
were likely to hold a true tradition, the great financier of the
twelfth, the great lawyer of the thirteenth century, believed that there
had been a catastrophe. As a result of the Conquest, the peasants, at
all events some of the peasants, had fallen from their free estate; free
men, holding freely, they had been compelled to do unfree services[212].
But if we need not rely upon speculation, neither need we rely upon
tradition. Domesday Book is full of evidence that the tillers of the
soil are being depressed.
[The Normans and the peasants.]
Here we may read of a free man with half a hide who has now been made
one of the villeins[213], there of the holder of a small manor who now
cultivates it as the farmer of a French lord _graviter et
miserabiliter_[214], and there of a sokeman who has lost his land for
not paying geld, though none was due[215]; while the great Richard of
Tonbridge has condescended to abstract a virgate from a villein or a
villein from a virgate[216]. But, again, it is not on a few cases in
which our record states that some man has suffered an injustice that we
would rely. Rather we notice what it treats as a quite common event.
Free men are being 'added to' manors to which they did not belong. Thus
in Suffolk a number of free men have been added to the manor of
Montfort; they pay no 'custom' to it before the Conquest, but now they
pay £15; Ælfric who was reeve under Roger Bigot set them this
custom[217]. Hard by them were men who used to pay 20 shillings, but
this same Ælfric raised their rent to 100 shillings[218]. 'A free man
held this land and could sell it, but Waleran father of John has added
him to this manor[219]':--Entries of this kind are common. The utmost
rents are being exacted from the farmers:--this manor was let for three
years at a rent of £12 and a yearly gift of an ounce of gold, but all
the farmers who took it were ruined[220]--that manor was let for £3.
15_s_. but the men were thereby ruined and now it is valued at only
45_s._[221] About these matters French and English can not agree:--this
manor renders £70 by weight, but the English value it at only £60 by
tale[222]--the English fix the value at £80, but the French at
£100[223]--Frenchmen and Englishmen agree that it is worth £50, but
Richard let it to an Englishman for £60, who thereby lost £10 a year, at
the very least[224]. 'It can not pay,' 'it can hardly pay,' 'it could
not stand' the rent, such are the phrases that we hear. If the lord gets
the most out of the farmer to whom he has leased the manor, we may be
sure that the farmer is making the most out of the villeins.
[Depression of the sokemen.]
But the most convincing proof of the depression of the peasantry comes
to us from Cambridgeshire. The rural population of that county as it
existed in 1086 has been classified thus[225]:--
sochemanni 213
villani 1902
bordarii 1428
cotarii 736
servi 548
But we also learn that the Cambridgeshire of the Confessor's day had
contained at the very least 900 instead of 200 sokemen[226]. This is an
enormous and a significant change. Let us look at a single village. In
Meldreth there is a manor; it is now a manor of the most ordinary kind;
it is rated at 3 hides and 1 virgate, but contains 5 team-lands; in
demesne are half a hide and one team, and 15 _bordarii_ and 3 _cotarii_
have 4 teams, and there is one _servus_. But before the Conquest this
land was held by 15 sokemen; 10 of them were under the soke of the Abbey
of Ely and held 2 hides and half a virgate; the other 5 held 1 hide and
half a virgate and were the men of Earl Ælfgar[227]. What has become of
these fifteen sokemen? They are now represented by fifteen bordiers and
five cottiers; and the demesne land of the manor is a new thing. The
sokemen have fallen, and their fall has brought with it the
consolidation of manorial husbandry and seignorial power. At Orwell Earl
Roger has now a small estate; a third of it is in demesne, while the
residue is held by 2 villeins and 3 bordiers, and there is a serf there.
This land had belonged to six sokemen, and those six had been under no
less than five different lords; two belonged to Edith the Fair, one to
Archbishop Stigand, one to Robert Wimarc's son, one to the king, and one
to Earl Ælfgar[228]. Displacements such as this we may see in village
after village. No one can read the survey of Cambridgeshire without
seeing that the freer sorts of the peasantry have been thrust out, or
rather thrust down.
[Further illustrations of depression.]
Evidence so cogent as this we shall hardly find in any part of the
record save that which relates to Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire. But
great movements of the kind that we are examining will hardly confine
themselves within the boundaries of a county. A little variation in the
formula which tells us who held the land in 1066 may hide from us the
true state of the case. We can not expect that men will be very accurate
in stating the legal relationships that existed twenty years ago. Since
the day when King Edward was alive and dead many things have happened,
many new words and new forms of thought have become familiar. But taking
the verdicts as we find them, there is still no lack of evidence. In
Essex we may see the _liberi homines_ disappearing[229]. But we need not
look only to the eastern counties. At Bromley, in Surrey, Bishop Odo has
a manor of 32 hides, 4 of which had belonged to 'free men' who could go
where they pleased, but now there are only villeins, cottiers, and
serfs[230]. We turn the page and find Odo holding 10 hides which had
belonged to 'the alodiaries of the vill[231].' In Kent Hugh de Port is
holding land that was held by 6 free men who could go whither they
would; there are now 6 villeins and 14 bordiers there, with one team
between them[232]. Students of Domesday were too apt to treat the
_antecessores_ of the Norman lords as being in all cases lords of
manors. Lords of manors, or rather holders of manors, they often were,
but as we shall see more fully hereafter, when we are examining the term
_manerium_, such phrases are likely to deceive us. Often enough they
were very small people with very little land. For example these six free
men whom Hugh de Port represents had only two and a half team-lands. We
pass by a few pages and find Hugh de Montfort with a holding which
comprises but one team-land and a half; he has 4 villeins and 2 bordiers
there. His _antecessores_ were three free men, who could go whither they
would[233]. They had need for but 12 oxen; they had no more land than
they could easily till, at all events with the help of two or three
cottagers or slaves. To all appearance they were no better than
peasants. They or their sons may still be tilling the land as Hugh's
villeins. When we look for such instances we very easily find them. The
case is not altered by the fact that the term 'manor' is given to the
holdings of these _antecessores_. In Sussex an under-tenant of Earl
Roger has an estate with four villeins upon it. His _antecessores_ were
two free men who held the land as two manors. And how much land was
there to be divided between the two? There was one team-land. Such
holders of _maneria_ were tillers of the soil, peasants, at best
yeomen[234]. If they were of thegnly rank, this again does not alter the
case. When in the survey of Dorset we read how four thegns held two
team-lands, how six thegns held two team-lands, eight thegns two
team-lands, nine thegns four team-lands, eleven thegns four
team-lands[235], we can not of course be certain that each of these
groups of co-tenants had but one holding; but thegnly rank is inherited,
and if a thegn will have nine or ten sons there will soon be tillers of
the soil with the wergild of twelve hundred shillings. Now if these
things are being done in the middling strata of society, if the sokemen
are being suppressed or depressed in Cambridgeshire, the alodiaries in
Sussex, what is likely to be the fate of the poor? They will have to
till their lord's demesne _graviter et miserabiliter_. He can afford to
dispense with serfs, for he has villeins.
[The peasants on the royal demesne.]
A last argument must be added. What we see in the thirteenth century of
the ancient demesne of the crown[236] might lead us to expect that in
Domesday Book 'the manors of St. Edward' would stand out in bold
relief. Instead of a population mainly consisting of villeins shall we
not find upon them large numbers of sokemen, the ancestors of the men
who in after days will be protected by the little writ of right and the
_Monstraverunt_? Nothing of the kind. The royal manor differs in no such
mode as this from any other manor. If it lies in a county in which other
manors have sokemen, then it may or may not have sokemen. If it lies in
a county in which other manors have no sokemen, it will have none.
Cambridgeshire is a county in which there are some, and have been many,
sokemen; there is hardly a sokeman upon the ancient demesne. In after
days the men of Chesterton, for example, will have all the peculiar
rights attributed by lawyers to the sokemen of St. Edward. But St.
Edward, if we trust Domesday Book, had never a sokeman there; he had two
villeins and a number of bordiers and cottiers[237]. It seems fairly
clear that from an early time, if not from the first days of the
Conquest onwards, the king was the best of landlords. The tenants of
those manors that were conceived as annexed to the crown, those tenants
one and all, save the class of slaves which was disappearing, got a
better, a more regular justice than that which the villeins of other
lords could hope for. It was the king's justice, and therefore--for
the king's public and private capacities were hardly to be distinguished
--it was public justice, and so became formal justice, defined by writs,
administered in the last resort by the highest court, the ablest
lawyers. And so sokemen disappear from private manors. Some of them as
tenants in free socage may maintain their position; many fall down into
the class of tenants in villeinage. On the ancient demesne the sokemen
multiply; they appear where Domesday knew them not; for those who are
protected by royal justice can hardly (now that villeinage implies a
precarious tenure) be called villeins, they must be 'villein sokemen' at
the least. Whether or no we trust the tradition which ascribes to the
Conqueror a law in favour of the tillers of the soil, we can hardly
doubt that the _villani_ and _bordarii_ whom Domesday Book shows us on
the royal manors are treated as having legal rights in their holdings.
And if this be true of them, it should be true of their peers upon other
manors. Yes, it should be true; the manorial courts that are arising
should do impartial justice even between lord and villeins; but who is
to make it true?
FOOTNOTES:
[101] D. B. i. 38, Coseham: '8 burs i. coliberti.' Ib. 38 b Dene:
'et coliberti [vel bures _interlined_].'
[102] D. B. i. 65, Wintreburne.
[103] D. B. i. 75, Bridetone et Bere.
[104] D. B. i. 239 b, Etone.
[105] Guérard, Cartulaire de L'Abbaye de S. Père de Chartres, vol.
i. p. xlii.
[106] The position of the _coliberti_ is discussed by Guérard, _loc.
cit._., and by Lamprecht, Geschichte des Französischen
Wirthschaftslebens (in Schmoller's Forschungen, Bd i.), p. 81.
Guérard says, 'Les coliberts peuvent se placer à peu près
indifferemment ou au dernier des hommes libres, ou à la tête
des hommes engagés dans les liens de la servitude.'
[107] Schmid, App. III. C. 4.
[108] Rectitudines, c. 3.
[109] Occasionally the _coliberti_ of D. B. are put before us as
paying rents in money or in kind. Thus D. B. i. 38, Hants: 'In
Coseham sunt 4 hidae quae pertinent huic manerio ubi T. R. E.
erant 8 burs i. coliberti cum 4 carucis reddentes 50 sol. 8
den. minus.' D. B. i. 179 b, Heref.: 'Villani dant de
consuetudine 13 sol. et 4 den. et [sex] coliberti reddunt 3
sextarios frumenti et ordei et 2 oves et dimidiam cum agnis et
2 den. et unum obolum.' D. B. i. 165: 'et in Glouucestre 1
burgensis reddens 5 den. et 2 coliberti reddentes 34 den.' In
a charter coming from Bishop Denewulf (K. 1079) we read of
three wite-theówmen who were boor-born and three who were
theów-born.
[110] Ellis, Introduction, ii. 511-14.
[111] For examples see D. B. iv. 211 and the following pages.
[112] Leg. Hen. 81, § 3: 'Quidam villani qui sunt eiusmodi
leierwitam et blodwitam et huiusmodi minora forisfacta emerunt
a dominis suis, vel quomodo meruerunt de suis et in suos,
quorum fletgefoth vel overseunessa est 30 den.; cothseti 15
den.; servi 6 den.'
[113] D. B. i. 71, Haseberie: '5 villani et 13 coscez et 2 cotarii.'
Ibid. 80 b: Chinestanestone: '18 villani et 14 coscez et 4
cotarii.'
[114] Worcester Register, 59 b (Sedgebarrow): four _cotmanni_, each
of whom pays 20_d._ or works one day a week and two in autumn;
two _cottarii_, each of whom pays 12_d._ or works one day a
week. Ibid. 69 b (Shipston): two _cotmanni_, each of whom pays
3_s._ or works like a virgater; two _cottarii_, each of whom
pays 13_d._ Ibid. 76 a (Cropthorn): two _cotmanni_, each of
whom pays 2_s._ or works like a _cottarius_; two _cottarii_,
each of whom pays 18_d._ or works one day a week.
[115] Vinogradoff, Villainage, 149, gives a few instances of its
occurrence; but it seems to be very rare.
[116] D. B. i. 127 b, Fuleham: 'Ibi 5 villani quisque 1 hidam.'
There are a good many other instances.
[117] D. B. i. 130, Hamntone; 'et 4 bordarii quisque de dimidia
virga.'
[118] D. B. i. 127, Herges: 'et 2 cotarii de 13 acris.'
[119] D. B. i. 127 b, Fuleham: 'et 22 cotarii de dimidia hida et 8
cotarii de suis hortis.'
[120] D. B. ii. 75 b: 'et 5 bordarii super aquam qui non tenent
terram.'
[121] D. B. i. 163 b, Turneberie: 'et 42 villani et 18 radchenistre
cum 21 carucis et 23 bordarii et 15 servi et 4 coliberti.'
Ibid. 164, Hechanestede: 'et 5 villani et 8 bordarii cum 6
carucis; ibi 6 servi.'
[122] D. B. iv. 215-223; on p. 223 there are two _villani_ with one
ox.
[123] D. B. i. 164, Tedeneham: 'Ibi erant 38 villani habentes 38
carucas.' Ibid. 164 b, Nortune, '15 villani cum 15 carucis;
Stanwelle, 5 villani cum 5 carucis.'
[124] Malden, Domesday Survey of Surrey (Domesday Studies, ii.) 469,
says that in Surrey '_bordarii_ and _cotarii_ only occur once
together upon the same manor, and very seldom in the same
hundred.... There are three hundreds, Godalming, Wallington
and Elmbridge, where the _cotarii_ are nearly universal to the
exclusion of _bordarii_. In the others the _bordarii_ are
nearly or quite universal, to the exclusion of the _cotarii_.'
[125] Thorpe, Diplomatarium, 623. King Eadwig declares that a
certain church-ward of Exeter is 'free and fare-worthy.'
[126] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 341 ff.
[127] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 354-8.
[128] Liebermann, Instituta Cnuti, Transact. Roy. Hist. Soc. vii.
93.
[129] Leg. Will. Conq. I. 8: 'La were del thein 20 lib. in
Merchenelahe, 25 lib. in Westsexenelahe. La were del vilain
100 sol. en Merchenelahe e ensement en Westsexene.' Leg. Henr.
70, § 1: 'In Westsexa quae caput regni est et legum, twyhindi,
i.e. villani, wera est 4 lib.; twelfhindi, i.e. thaini, 25
lib.' Ibid. 76, § 2: 'Omnis autem wera liberorum est aut
servorum ... liberi alii twyhindi, alii syxhindi, alii
twelfhindi'; § 6, twihindus = cyrliscus = villanus. As to the
100 shillings in the first of these passages, see Schmid, p.
676. There is some other evidence that the equation, 1 Norman
shilling = 2 English shillings, was occasionally treated as
correct enough. As to the six-hynde man, see Schmid, p. 653;
we may doubt whether he existed in the eleventh century, but
according to the Instituta Cnuti the _radchenistres_ of the
west may have been six-hynde. We must not draw from Alfred's
treaty with the Danes (Schmid, p. 107) the inference that the
normal ceorl was seated on _gafol-land_. This international
instrument is settling an exceptionally high tariff for the
maintenance of the peace. Every man, whatever his rank, is to
enjoy the handsome wergild of 8 half-marks of pure gold,
except the Danish lysing and the English ceorl who is seated
on gafol-land; these are to have but the common wer of 200
shillings. The parallel passage in Æthelred's treaty (Schmid,
p. 207) sets £30 on every free man if he is killed by a man of
the other race. See Schmid, p. 676.
[130] Ine, 55: a sheep with a lamb until a fortnight after Easter is
worth 1 shilling. Æthelstan, VI. 6: a horse 120 pence, an ox
30 pence, a cow 20, a sheep 1 shilling (5 pence). Ibid. 8, §
5: an ox 30 pence. Schmid, App. I. c. 7: a horse 30 shillings,
a mare 20 shillings, an ox 30 pence, a cow 24 pence, a swine 8
pence, a sheep 1 shilling, a goat 2 pence, a man (i.e. a
slave) 1 pound. Schmid, App. iii. c. 9: a sheep or 3 pence. D.
B. i. 117 b: an ox or 30 pence. D. B. i. 26: Tolls at Lewes;
for a man 4 pence, an ox a halfpenny. This preserves the
equation that we have already seen, namely, 1 slave = 8 oxen.
Thus the full team is worth one pound. On the twelfth century
Pipe Rolls the ox often costs 3 shillings (= 36 pence) or even
more.
[131] In Leg. Will. Conq. I. 16, we hear of the _forisfacturae_
(probably the 'insult fines') due to archbishops, bishops,
counts, barons and sokemen; the baron has 10 shillings, the
sokeman 40 pence. In the same document, c. 20, § 2, we read of
the reliefs of counts, barons, vavassors and villeins. Leg.
Edw. Conf. 12, § 4, speaks of the _manbót_ due in the Danelaw;
on the death of a _villanus_ or a _socheman_ 12 ores are paid,
on the death of a _liber homo_ 3 marks.
[132] D. B. i. 167 b, Heile: 'ibi erant 12 servi quos Willelmus
liberos fecit.'
[133] D. B. i. 263: 'Si quis liber homo facit opera in die feriato
inde episcopus habet 8 solidos. De servo autem vel ancilla
feriatum diem infringente, habet episcopus 4 solidos.' Compare
Cnut, II. 45.
[134] D. B. i. 86: 'Huic manerio reddebatur T. R. E. de Cruche per
annum consuetudo, hoc est 6 oves cum agnis totidem, et quisque
liber homo i. blomam ferri.' South Perrott had belonged to the
Confessor, Crewkerne to Edith, probably 'the rich and fair.'
For the description of Cruche see D. B. i. 86 b. As to the
'bloom' of iron see Ellis, Introduction, i. 136.
[135] D. B. i. 92. See also p. 87 b, the account of Seveberge.
[136] D. B. ii. 145.
[137] D. B. ii. 1: 'In hoc manerio erat tunc temporis quidam liber
homo de dimidia hida qui modo effectus est unus de villanis.'
[138] Thus D. B. i. 127, Mid.: 'inter francos et villanos 45
carucae'; Ibid. 70, Wilts: '4 villani et 3 bordarii et unus
francus cum 2 carucis'; Ibid. 241, Warw.: 'Ibi sunt 3
francones homines cum 4 villanis et 3 bordariis.' Sometimes
_francus_ may be an equivalent for _francigena_; e.g. i. 254
b, where in one entry we have _unus francigena_ and in the
next _unus francus homo_. But an Englishman may be _francus_;
ii. 54 b 'accepit 15 acras de uno franco teigno et misit cum
terra sua.' However, it is not an insignificant fact that the
very name of Frenchman (_francigena_) must have suggested free
birth.
[139] For examples see the surveys of Warwick, Stafford and
Shropshire.
[140] D. B. ii. 260: 'et 7 homines qui possent vendere terram suam
si eam prius obtulissent domino suo.'
[141] D. B. ii. 278 b: 'si vellent recedere daret quisque 2
solidos.' Ibid. 207: 'et possent recedere si darent 2
solidos.'
[142] D. B. ii. 435: 'Et super Vlnoht habuit commendationem
antecessor R. Malet, teste hundredo, et non potuit vendere nec
dare _de eo_ terram suam.' Ibid. 397: 'viderunt eum iurare
quod non poterat dare [vel] vendere terram suam _ab_
antecessore Ricardi.'
[143] D. B. i. 145: 'Hoc manerium tenuit Aluuinus homo Estan, non
potuit dare nec vendere extra Brichelle manerium Estani.'
[144] D. B. i. 133: 'Hanc terram tenuit Aluric Blac 2 hidas de
Abbate Westmonasterii T. R. E.: non poterat separare ab
aecclesia.'
[145] D. B. ii. 216 b: 'Ita est in monasterio quod nec vendere nec
forisfacere potest extra ecclesia.'
[146] For example, D. B. i. 201: 'terram suam vendere potuerunt,
soca vero remansit Abbati.' D. B. ii. 78: 'et poterant vendere
terram set soca et saca remanebat antecessori Alberici.' Ibid.
ii. 92 b: 'unus sochemannus fuit in hac terra de 15 acris quas
poterat vendere, set soca iacebat in Warleia terra S. Pauli.'
[147] But the _consuetudo_, rent or the like, may 'remain': D. B.
ii. 181 b: 'et possent vendere terram suam set consuetudo
remanebat in manerio.' And so the _commendatio_ may 'remain';
ii. 357 b: 'Hi poterant dare et vendere terram, set saca et
soca et commendatio remanebant Sancto [Eadmundo].'
[148] For example, D. B. i. 201: 'Homines Abbatis de Ely fuerunt et
4 terram suam _vendere potuerunt_, soca vero remansit Abbati,
et quartus 1 virgam et dimidiam habuit et _recedere non
potuit_.' See the important evidence produced by Round, Feudal
England, 24, as to the equivalence of these phrases.
[149] One of the commonest terms is _recedere_--'potuit
recedere'--'non potuit recedere'; i. 41, 'non potuit cum terra
_recedere ad alium dominum_'; i. 56 b, '10 liberi homines T.
R. E. tenebant 12 hidas et dimidiam de terra eiusdem manerii
sed _inde recedere_ non poterant'; ii. 19 b, 'non poterant
_recedere a terra_ sine licentia Abbatis'; ii. 57 b, 'non
poterant recedere _ab illo manerio_'; ii. 66, 'non poterant
_removere_ ab illo manerio'; ii. 41, 'non poterant _recedere a
soca_ Wisgari'; ii. 41 b, 'nec poterant _abire_ sine iussu
domini'; i. 66 b, 'qui tenuit T. R. E. non poterat ab
aecclesia diverti [separari]'; ii. 116, 'unus [burgensis] erat
ita dominicus ut non posset _recedere nec homagium facere_
sine licentia [Stigandi]'; ii. 119, 'de istis hominibus erant
36 ita dominice Regis Edwardi ut non possent _esse homines
cuiuslibet_ sed semper tamen consuetudo regis remanebat preter
herigete.' A remarkable form is, ii. 57 b, 'non potuit istam
terram mittere in aliquo loco nisi in abbatia.' Then 'potuit
ire quo voluit,' 'non potuit ire quolibet' are common enough.
[150] Ine, c. 39: He who leaves his lord without permission pays
sixty shillings to his lord.
[151] For example, D. B. i. 41: 'Tres taini tenuerunt de episcopo et
non potuerunt ire quolibet.'
[152] D. B. i. 35 b, Tornecrosta.
[153] D. B. i. 212 b, Stanford.
[154] D. B. i. 249 b: 'Tres taini tenuerunt et liberi homines
fuerunt'; 256, 'Ipsi taini liberi erant'; 259 b, 'Quatuor
taini tenuerunt ante eum et liberi fuerunt.'
[155] Chron. Abingd. i. 490: 'Nam quidam dives, Turkillus nomine,
sub Haroldi comitis testimonio et consultu, de se cum sua
terra quae Kingestun dicitur, ecclesiae Abbendonensi et abbati
Ordrico homagium fecit; licitum quippe libero cuique, illo in
tempore, sic agere erat.'
[156] D. B. i. 180 b: 'et poterant ire cum terra quo volebant, et
habebant sub se 4 milites, ita liberos ut ipsi erant.'
[157] D. B. ii. 59.
[158] D. B. i. 172: 'si ita liber homo est ut habeat socam suam et
sacam et cum terra sua possit ire quo voluerit.'
[159] D. B. i. 84 b.
[160] D. B. ii. 213: 'Hanc terram calumpniatur esse liberam Vlchitel
homo Hermeri, quocunque modo iudicetur, vel bello vel iudicio,
et alius est praesto probare eo modo quod iacuit ad ecclesiam
[S. Adeldredae] die quo rex Edwardus obiit. Set totus
hundretus testatur eam fuisse T. R. E. ad S. Adeldredam.'
[161] See in particular the survey of Gloucestershire; D. B. i. 165
b: 'Hoc manerium quietum est a geldo et ab omni forensi
servitio praeter aecclesiae'; Ibid. 'Haec terra libera fuit et
quieta ab omni geldo et regali servitio'; 170, 'Una hida et
dimidia libera a geldo.' When after reading these passages we
come upon the following (167 b), 'Isdem W. tenet Tatinton:
Ulgar tenuit de rege Edwardo: haec terra libera est,' and when
we observe that the land is not hidated, we shall probably
infer that 'This land is free' means 'This land is exempt from
geld, and (perhaps) from all other royal service.'
[162] Dialogus, i. c. 11; ii. c. 14.
[163] Dialogus, i. c. 10.
[164] Will. Conq. I. 30, 31: 'Si les seignurages ne facent altri
gainurs venir a lour terre, la justise le facet.' The Latin
version is ridiculous: 'Si domini terrarum non procurent
_idoneos_ cultores ad terras suas colendas, iustitiarii hoc
faciant.' The translator seems to have been puzzled by the
word _altri_ or _autrui_.
[165] Ibid. 29.
[166] Schmid, App. v.; vii., 2, §§ 9-11; Pseudoleges Canuti, 60-1
(Schmid, p. 431).
[167] D. B. iv. 497.
[168] D. B. i. 44 b: 'Istam terram calumpniatur Willelmus de
Chernet, dicens pertinere ad manerium de Cerneford feudum
Hugonis de Port per hereditatem sui antecessoris et de hoc
suum testimonium adduxit de melioribus et antiquis hominibus
totius comitatus et hundredi; et Picot contraduxit suum
testimonium de villanis et vili plebe et de prepositis, qui
volunt defendere per sacramentum vel dei iudicium, quod ille
qui tenuit terram liber homo fuit et potuit ire cum terra sua
quo voluit. Sed testes Willelmi nolunt accipere legem nisi
regis Edwardi usque dum diffiniatur per regem.' It seems
possible that William's witnesses wished to insist on the
ancient rule that the oath of one thegn would countervail the
oaths of six ceorls. This was the old English law (_lex
Edwardi_) on which they relied.
[169] D. B. ii. 393: 'et 5 villani de eodem manerio testantur ei et
offerunt legem qualem quis iudicaverit; set dimidium hundret
de Gepeswiz testantur quod hoc iacebat ad ecclesiam T. R. E.
et Wisgarus tenebat et offert derationari.'
[170] Schmid, App. vi.; Leg. Hen. 61 § 2: 'thaini iusiurandum
contravalet iusiurandum sex villanorum.'
[171] Leg. Hen. 29, § 1.
[172] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 344.
[173] Dialogus, i. c. 11.
[174] D. B. i. 67 b: 'De terra villanorum dedit abbatissa uni militi
3 hidas et dimidiam.' Ibid. 89: 'tenet Johannes de episcopo 2
hidas de terra villanorum.' Ibid. i. 169: 'unus francigena
tenet terram unius villani.' Ibid. 164: 'In Sauerna 11
piscariae in dominio et 42 piscariae villanorum.' Ibid. 230:
'Silva dominica 1 leu. long. et dim. leu. lat. Silva
villanorum 4 quarent. long. et 3 quarent. lat.' Ibid. 7 b: '5
molini villanorum.' We have not seen _dominicum_ used as a
substantive; but in the Exon. D. B. iv. 75 we have
_dominicatus Regis_, for the king's demesne. There is already
a slight ambiguity about the term _dominium_. We may say that
a church has a manor _in dominio_, meaning thereby that the
manor as a whole is held by the church itself and is not held
of it by any tenant; and then we may go on to say that only
one half of the land comprised in this manor is held by the
church _in dominio_. Cf. Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 126.
[175] For example, D. B. i. 159: 'Nunc in dominio 3 carucae et 6
servi, et 26 villani cum 3 bordariis et 15 liberi homines
habent 30 carucas.' Ibid. 165: 'In dominio 2 carucae et 9
villani et 6 bordarii et presbyter et unus rachenistre cum 10
carucis.' Ibid. 258 b: 'et 3 villani et 2 bordarii et 2
francigenae cum 2 carucis.' But such entries are common
enough.
[176] Round, Domesday Studies, i. 97.
[177] D. B. i. 28: 'Ipse Willelmus de Braiose tenet Wasingetune....
De hac terra tenet Gislebertus dim. hidam, Radulfus 1 hidam,
Willelmus 3 virgas, Leuuinus dim. hidam qui potuit recedere
cum terra sua et dedit geldum domino suo et dominus suus
nichil dedit.'
[178] D. B. i. 163, 163 b.
[179] D. B. i. 121: 'Omnes superius descriptas terras tenebant T. R.
E. S. Petrocus; huius sancti terrae nunquam reddiderunt geldum
nisi ipsi aecclesiae.' D. B. iv. 187: 'Terrae S. Petrochi
nunquam reddiderunt gildum nisi sancto.'
[180] D. B. ii. 372: 'Et quando in hundreto solvitur ad geldum 1
libra tunc inde exeunt 60 denarii ad victum monachorum.'
[181] Cnut, II. 79: 'And se þe land gewerod hæbbe be scire
gewitnisse....' The A.-S. _werian_ is just the Latin
_defendere_.
[182] Heming, Cartulary, i. 278; Round, Domesday Studies, i. 89.
Compare the story in D. B. i. 216 b: Osbern or Osbert the
fisherman claims certain land as having belonged to his
'antecessor'; 'sed postquam rex Willelmus in Angliam venit,
ille gablum de hac terra dare noluit et Radulfus Taillgebosc
gablum dedit et pro forisfacto ipsam terram sumpsit et cuidam
suo militi tribuit.'
[183] D. B. iv. 245, Cruca.
[184] See above p. 54, note 175.
[185] D. B. i. 163: 'Ibi erant villani 21 et 9 rachenistres habentes
26 carucas et 5 coliberti et unus bordarius cum 5 carucis. Hi
rachenistres arabant et herciabant ad curiam domini.' Ibid.
'Ibi 19 liberi homines rachenistres habentes 48 carucas cum
suis hominibus.' Ibid. 166: 'De terra huius manerii tenebant
radchenistres, id est liberi homines, T. R. E., qui tamen
omnes ad opus domini arabant et herciabant et falcabant et
metebant.'
[186] D. B. i. 186, Ewias.
[187] D. B. i. 180.
[188] D. B. i. 179 b.
[189] D. B. i. 179 b.
[190] D. B. i. 174 b.
[191] D. B. i. 246 b. So the burgesses of Steyning (i. 17) 'ad
curiam operabantur sicut villani T. R. E.'
[192] D. B. i. 219.
[193] D. B. i. 174 b: 'Ipsi radmans secabant una die in anno et omne
servitium quod eis iubebatur faciebant.' The position of these
tenants will be discussed hereafter in connexion with St.
Oswald's charters.
[194] D. B. i. 16 b: 'De herbagio, unus porcus de unoquoque villano
qui habet septem porcos.' In the margin stands 'Similiter per
totum Sussex.'
[195] D. B. i. 12 b: 'Ibi tantum silvae unde exeunt de pasnagio 40
porci aut 54 denarii et unus obolus.' Ibid. 191 b: 'De
presentacione piscium 12 solidi et 9 denarii.' Ibid. 117 b:
'aut unum bovem aut 30 denarios.'
[196] See above p. 56.
[197] D. B. i. 12 b.
[198] D. B. i. 11 b, Hamestede.
[199] D. B. i. 117 b, Colun.
[200] D. B. i. 127, Stibenhede.
[201] D. B. i. 179 b, Lene.
[202] D. B. i. 12 b, Norborne.
[203] D. B. i. 127 b: 'Wellesdone tenent canonici S. Pauli.... Hoc
manerium tenent villani ad firmam canonicorum. In dominio nil
habetur.'
[204] See above p. 36.
[205] This matter will be discussed when we deal with St. Oswald's
charters.
[205] Schmid, p. 263 (note). This document is Dr Liebermann's
Instituta Cnuti (Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc. vii. 77).
[207] Schmid, App. II. 57-9.
[208] For the rest, the word _túnesman_ appears in Edgar IV. 8, 13,
in connexion with provisions against the theft of cattle.
[209] D. B. i. 259, 259 b.
[210] Leg. Will. I. 29.
[211] D. B. ii. 360 b: 'Hanc terram habet Abbas in vadimonio pro
duabus marcis auri concessu Engelrici quando redimebant
Anglici terras suas.' Sometimes the Englishman gets back his
land as a bedesman: i. 218, 'Hanc terram tenuit pater huius
hominis et vendere poterit T. R. E. Hanc rex Willelmus in
elemosina eidem concessit'; i. 211, 'Hanc terram tenuit Avigi
et potuit dare cui voluit T. R. E. Hanc ei postea rex
Willelmus concessit et per breve R. Tallebosc commendavit ut
eum servaret'; i. 218 b, a similar case.
[212] Dialogus, i. c. 10; Bracton, f. 7. On both passages see
Vinogradoff, Villainage, p. 121.
[213] D. B. ii. 1: 'In hoc manerio erat tunc temporis quidam liber
homo ... qui modo effectus est unus de villanis.'
[214] D. B. i. 148 b: 'In Merse tenet Ailric de Willelmo 4 hidas pro
uno manerio.... Istemet tenuit T. R. E. sed modo tenet ad
firmam de Willelmo graviter et miserabiliter.'
[215] D. B. i. 141: 'Hanc terram sumpsit Petrus vicecomes de isto
sochemanno Regis Willelmi in manu eiusdem Regis pro
forisfactura de gildo Regis se non reddidisse ut homines sui
dicunt. Sed homines de scira non portant vicecomiti
testimonium, quia semper fuit quieta de gildo et de aliis erga
Regem quamdiu tenuit, testante hundret.'
[216] D. B. i. 30: 'Ricardus de Tonebrige tenet de hoc manerio unam
virgatam cum silva unde abstulit rusticum qui ibi manebat.'
[217] D. B. ii. 282 b: 'et istam consuetudinem constituit illis
Aluricus prepositus in tempore R. Bigot.'
[218] D. B. ii. 284 b.
[219] D. B. ii. 84 b.
[220] D. B. ii. 353 b: 'omnes fuerunt confusi.'
[221] D. B. ii. 440 b: 'sed homines inde fuerunt confusi.'
[222] D. B. i. 65, Aldeborne.
[223] D. B. ii. 18, Berdringas.
[224] D. B. ii. 88 b, Tachesteda.
[225] Ellis, Introduction, ii. 428. We give Ellis's figures, but
think th
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