sense of an estate owned by a lord and occupied by a community of dependent serfs, nor was there any economic concentration of labour round a domanial centre. This description of Grantchester is equally applicable to many villages in Cambridgeshire and other counties 1. It would be erroneous to explain these instances of lordless villages by the supposition that they were all Danish settlements. The coming of the Danes admittedly introduced a freer element into England, but Cambridgeshire at all events was not Danish 2, while Yorkshire, which was Danish, contained fifteen times as many serfs as freeholders. We cannot therefore explain the element of freedom in the Domesday structure of society as purely Scandinavian. The free villages were in fact normal 3, not less so than the communities in serfdom, and they accordingly refute the assertion that the manor was the prevailing type of Saxon settlement. Further, Domesday Book shows that a very considerable number of the cultivators of the soil were freeholders. A substantial number of freemen were to all appearance not attached to any manor, but were extra-manorial. They held land of which the title was derived from the Saxon Conquest, and not from the grant of a lord. These lordless villages and unattached freeholders appear to be survivals of a condition of things once general throughout England. The social structure of the thirteenth century is less Survival · of free easily analysed, but its evidence suggests similar conclusions; elements in "there is a stock of freedom in it which speaks of Saxon villeinage. tradition "5. Indications still remained in witness of the time when freedom, instead of servitude, had been the lot of the rural population. In the first place, it is difficult to suppose that all free tenants, when not of Danish or Norman stock, were either emancipated villeins, enfranchised by the commutation of their labour services for rent, or 1 E.g. Hertfordshire: J. H. Round in Vict. County Hist. Herts, i. 266. 2 Maitland, op. cit. 139. The fact that it was part of the Danelaw does For a partial explanation not make its inhabitants men of Danish blood. of their greater freedom, see infra, p. 16. 3 Ibid. 141. Cf. P. Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century (1908), 473; A. Ballard, The Domesday Inquest (1906), 145. • P. Vinogradoff, Villainage in England (1892), 137, 208. holders of new feoffments carved out of the demesne and waste 1. Often their services were too slight to be explained in this way, and the pecuniary rent represents an inadequate equivalent for an original liability to week-work 2. These free virgates must accordingly be regarded, not as originally servile, but as 'ancient and primitive' freeholds which had escaped the general servitude. They appear to be an indication that the manor was superimposed upon the free village as the outcome of a feudal development that was only partially complete. Secondly, the villeins on the Ancient Demesne of the Crown had a peculiar status, being given a legal protection that was denied to those on private estates 3. Apparently the king displayed greater consideration to his tenants than was shown by lesser landlords, and made no attempt to deprive them of rights once shared by all the peasantry. Again the privileged position occupied in later times by the men of Kent, who are entered in Domesday Book as villeins, reveals the existence of an element which for one reason or another had succeeded in achieving recognition of its freedom. Moreover, the villein's right of action even against his lord for the recovery of his plough-team, if it is anything more than simply a belated and humane concession, may have survived from the time when he could assert all the rights of freemen 5. Finally, stress is laid upon the fact that until the Statute of Merton the common law did not allow the lord to enclose the commons without the consent of his free tenants. This conflicts with the feudal theory that the villagers' right of commons proceeded from the grant of the lord, and was therefore resumable at will. It suggests that the rights of the commoners go back to a period, when the lord had no place in the rural community and no voice in the management of the waste. The considerations on which the case for the Roman origin of the manor is based, are open to an interpretation 1 On the post-Domesday sokemen and freemen, see infra, p. 49. 2 Vinogradoff, Villainage, 334 seq. 3 Infra, p. 50. Infra, p. 50. For the hundredors, cf. Vinogradoff, op. cit. 188-196. 5 Infra, p. 41. • Infra, p. 73. manorial examined. widely different from that drawn by the manorial school. Arguments The similarity between the economic systems of mediaeval of the England and the later Roman Empire cannot be disputed, school but it does not prove continuity. The resemblance of the manor to the villa is not conclusive proof of historical connexion in the light of the contrary evidence afforded by language and religion, the nature of the Conquest, and the survival of free elements in the mediaeval community. Moreover, the intimate relations between English and continental monasteries probably led, we may conjecture, to the introduction of many Roman usages to be found in English rural life. Again the documentary evidence is too fragmentary for any general theory of early English society. The Rectitudines Singularum Personarum repeatedly insists that there is no uniformity. This landlaw holds in certain places, but elsewhere, as we have said, it is heavier or lighter, for the institutions of all estates are not alike. Let him who is over the district take care that he knows what the old land-customs are and what are the customs of the people "1. The picture here suggested is one of heterogeneity and irregularity rather than of a uniform manorial life. The Tidenham and Stoke cases are of doubtful date and are not regarded as trustworthy 2. In any case, it would be unsafe to regard the manor as the prevailing type of estate from the earliest times, on the ground that some were in existence before the Norman Conquest. Lastly, the equality of the holdings does not necessarily imply a servile origin. The unity of the virgate was largely artificial, and while preserving its primitive and indivisible character where the lord was concerned, often supported more than a single family. Among the villeins of Ashfield Magna in Suffolk there were thirty-five joint-tenements held by groups of tenants, ranging from two to seven in number. On the manor of Gorleston in Suffolk 4 there survived down to the sixteenth century eighteen villein tenements, which still retained a 1 Liebermann, Gesetze, i. 447. * Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 330-331. E. Powell, A Suffolk Hundred in the Year 1283 (1910), 76. The the manor. strict legal unity and sent representatives of the original tenants to the annual court, although one tenement alone was occupied by a score of tenants. The fact that the holding was in the hands of more than one tenant is sometimes openly avowed. The rental of a manor in Kent states that rent is due from the tenant et participes ejus. The fiction of indivisible yardlands served, in fact, its purpose in the eyes of the lord by attaching the responsibility for the services which he claimed to some recognized individual. But, after all, economic forces militated against undue division and worked to preserve the tenements as undivided units, and these considerations also influenced the free tenants. We have now to trace the process by which a nation of growth of free cultivators became gradually transformed into one of dependent serfs. The growth of the manor was nowhere uniform, but we can best consider the means by which the transition from freedom to servitude was accomplished under three heads: fiscal and economic forces, the exigencies of government, and the rise of a military class. (1) Fiscal causes. Chief among the fiscal causes which helped to create the manorial system was Danegeld, a tax on the hide levied originally as a tribute to buy off the Danes, and afterwards retained as a permanent land-tax. Its incidence was extremely heavy, and its sweeping character may be gauged from the amount exacted in 1084, when William laid a geld of six shillings upon every hide 2. If we take the value of the hide as approximating to about twenty shillings a year, and remember that the price of an ox was two shillings, it will be seen that the holder of a hide was burdened with a tax equivalent to three of his oxen and close upon one-third of the annual value of his land. Nor was the geld of 1084 1 Custumals of Battle Abbey (ed. S. R. Scargill-Bird, 1887), 42. Similarly Pembroke Surveys (ed. C. R. Straton, 1909), ii. 549. 2 J. H. Round, " Danegeld and the Finance of Domesday ", in Domesday Studies (ed. P. E. Dove, 1888), i. 87. 'Tributary' Danegeld was the tribute to buy off the Danes; it began on a local scale before 991, the year when it is supposed to have become a national levy. The 'stipendiary' Danegeld began in 1012 for the payment of Danish ships; the Confessor abolished it about 1051, when the ships were paid off: ibid. 79, 81. 3 Or 2s. 6d. Maitland, op. cit. 4, 44. exceptional, for before the coming of William the Danish tribute had risen to more than thirty thousand pounds if we may believe the Chronicler, and other large sums were sufficiently common 1. The imposition of Danegeld was undoubtedly attended by important social consequences. Its pressure set in motion a force powerful enough to ruin the small landowners, and degrade them from a condition of solvency into one of economic dependency. Inability to pay the tax constrained them to borrow without the power to repay. The wealthy benefited by the distress of the weak, and were afforded a hold over the impecunious villagers which the process of time served only to consolidate. In this way the economic independence of the peasants was imperilled, and with its loss went their best title to the rights of freemen. Social divisions began to lose their original firmness of outline. Intermediate classes and new strata of society appeared between those fully free and those completely enslaved. theory. The importance which rightly attaches to Danegeld, as a Maitland's decisive factor in social and economic development, has given rise to a theory that the manor in Domesday had a technical meaning relating to its apportionment and collection: "a manor is a house against which geld is charged "2. According to this doctrine, the manor in its origin was a fiscal institution intended to serve as a unit of assessment. The country was parcelled out into districts for purposes of rating, and in each a particular house was chosen and held accountable for the geld of the district surrounding it. The manor-house is therefore represented as the channel of payment, the centre to which all in the neighbourhood brought their quota for collection by the royal officers. This view is also held to explain the differences between the various classes of men enumerated in Domesday Book3. The lines of demarcation were fiscal lines. The villeins were those for whose geld the lord was directly responsible, while the freemen and the sokemen answered for their own geld. This theory 1 The figures in the A.-S. Chronicle are: (i.) 991, £10,000; (ii.) 994, £16,000; (iii.) 1002, £24,000; (iv.) 1007, £30,000; (v.) 1012, £48,000; (vi.) 1014, £21,000; (vii.) 1018, £82,500 (exacted by Canute). 2 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 120. 3 Ibid. 8, 24, 127, 324. |