of the manor has not, however, gained acceptance. The term manerium was used in Domesday interchangeably with the word terra1, and could not therefore have been "an accurate term charged with legal meaning." Again we find estates, described not as manors but as "lands" (terrae), and forming part of a large manor, rated separately to the geld 2; other estates also are described as manors without paying any geld3. These facts are at variance with the view that the manor was a geld house and a fiscal unit. Moreover, we learn from the Geld Inquest of 10844 that the royal collectors sometimes experienced difficulty in gathering the tax because the villeins withheld their contributions, and this again conflicts with the theory that the lord was answerable for them. Hence, while no doubt the lords ultimately came to be held responsible for the taxes of their tenants, yet the repartition and collection of the Danegeld appear to have been originally entrusted to the hundred and the township 5. None the less, if Danegeld does not actually explain Domesday terminology, it still remains true that it was capable of depressing the great mass of the rural population and converting villages of free peasant proprietors into manors of unfree villeins. Indeed, the larger element of freedom to be found in the Danelaw may very well have been due, in part, to the immunity which its inhabitants seem to have enjoyed from fiscal obligations incumbent upon the rest of the kingdom". Nor was Danegeld the only tax that was instrumental in furthering the subjection of the free landowners. The Church claimed tithes as well as other dues, and a demand for a tenth part of the earth's produce was oppressive. Thus the burden of taxation imposed by Church and State was a powerful factor

1 J. H. Round, "The Domesday Manor ", in English Hist. Review, xv. 294; Vict. County Hist. Bedfordshire, i. 209-210.

2 Vinogradoff, English Society, 306.

3 J. Tait in English Hist. Review, xii. 770.

4 Ballard, Domesday Inquest, 134.

5 Vinogradoff, op. cit. 198, 207, 211.

F. M. Stenton, "Types of Manorial Structure in the Northern Danelaw," in Oxford Hist. Studies, ii. (1910), 90.

"

Soulscot, churchscot, etc.: N. Neilson, Customary Rents", in Oxford Hist. Studies, ii. 188 seq.

in the movement that was transforming England into a land of manorial communities and servile tillers of the soil.

Economic influences operated in the same direction. The Economic forces. larger landowners, with land to spare, settled tenants upon it, and so at a stroke created the manorial fabric. The Church adopted the practice of loaning its land, nominally for three lives1. This lænland, as it was called, anticipated in many respects the feudal ideas of a later period, and enabled the Church to establish a lordship which in the case of poorer men might readily assume a manorial aspect and involve the obligation to predial services. In other cases the manorializing process was at work in the village itself, and enabled the lord to tighten his grasp upon land which once lay in the absolute ownership of the villagers. The devastations of the Northmen, the recurrence of bad harvests, the harshness of the criminal code 2, would easily suffice to ruin the peasants and send them borrowing to some wealthier neighbour, to whom they would surrender their land and receive it again as a dependent tenancy.

govern

The economic revolution that from the days of Ine (2) Exigencies of in the seventh century was changing the face of England and covering it with servile communities, was not the ment. work of economic and fiscal forces alone, but was largely the outcome of political agencies. The barbarians who overran the Roman Empire replaced the city state of the ancient world by the national or country state of mediaeval and modern Europe. But the weakness of their political organization rendered the central government unable to cope with its responsibilities, and decentralization followed. Accordingly the Feudal System, defined as the social and political domination of a military and landowning aristocracy, became an indispensable stage in the evolution of modern Europe. England passed through a similar phase of development, and the failure of the state to institute a firm control over every part of the kingdom had its direct consequences in the spread of patronage and manorial lordship. The sources of this political element

1 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 302 et passim.

2 Cf. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law (2nd ed.), ii. 460.

mendation.

(a) Com- in the growth of the manor were twofold: commendation and seigniorial jurisdiction. In the case of commendation, a person bound himself to a lord and became his 'man' or client in return for a promise of protection. Among the primitive Germans the duty of safeguarding the individual had rested with his kindred1, but in England the tie of kinship weakened, and the family group began early to break up and to lose its authority. The state was not yet in a position to assume its functions, and its place was therefore taken by the lord Other reasons favoured the practice of commendation 2. Those who commended themselves to a lord were protected in their life, not only by the ordinary wergild or penalty exacted for homicide, but by a special bot or compensation due to the lord, whose protection or 'peace' the offender had violated. Moreover, if a man were in trouble, his lord was expected to come to his assistance and act as compurgator by swearing on his behalf, and in other ways to exert his personal influence. Lastly, a law of Athelstan insisted that every man should have a lord as his both or surety to answer for his appearance in a court of law whenever summoned. The difficulty of securing malefactors was the fundamental problem of the AngloSaxon police system, and the lordless man, like the 'brotherless' man of Homeric times, was treated as an outlaw. In Anglo-Saxon poetry the man who had lost his lord was depicted as a homeless wanderer: "Thus homeless and often miserable, far from my kinsmen, I have had to bind my heart in fetters ever since the grave closed over my patron—since I wandered away destitute over the sea amid wintry gloom seeking in my grief the dwelling of some prince, if far or near I could meet with one who would have regard to me in his hall or console me in my friendlessness and treat me kindly. He who experiences it knows what a cruel companion anxiety is to one who has no kind guardians. He is confronted not with gold rings but with homeless wanderings, not with the good things of the earth but with his own chilled breast. He calls to mind the men of the court and the treasure he 1 Tacitus, Germania, c. 21.

Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 70.

used to receive, and how in his youth he was continually feasted by his patron. All his happiness has passed away"1. In theory commendation need only have involved the client without implicating his land, and could have a personal and not a territorial significance. We read in Domesday how a freeman at Prested, a manor in Essex, commended himself to a lord while his land remained free, for he "could go with his land whither he would "2. Again at Hanningfield the hundred testified that two men, whose land the abbot of Ely claimed, "held their land freely and were only commended to the abbot". Still what was really essential in those troubled days was security of tenure, and men required protection not so much for themselves as for the title to their belongings. They needed a powerful lord to support them, if a violent neighbour wrested their land from them or in other ways encroached upon their rights. But when a freeholder began to look to his lord for the protection of his tenure, just as another turned to title-deeds (bookland) or the witness of the shire (folkland), the basis was thereby laid for the growth of a manorial lordship. In process of time his title would be regarded by courts of law as proceeding from the lord and dependent upon his will, and once this feudal doctrine was established it was only a single step to the imposition of manorial services.

iorial

The development of seigniorial jurisdiction represents (b) Seignanother most important element in the formation of the jurismanor. The king enjoyed valuable rights over his subjects, diction. and was accustomed to alienate his privileges to the Church and to lay magnates. When the latter acquired by royal grant (bookland) a 'superiority' over a village the claim to many of its dues and services-a feudal lordship was straightway created. The population of the village passed from the control of the public authority to that of private lords, and a manorializing process was set in motion. Of the political rights conceded by the Crown, that of holding a court constituted a direct incentive to the establishment of political authority, and its importance can scarcely be 1 The Wanderer, cit. Chadwick, Origin of the English Nation, 170. 2 Domesday Book, ii. 75. 3 Ibid. ii. 25.

(3) Rise of

class.

exaggerated. Everything points to the conclusion that on the eve of the battle of Hastings the seigniorial court was no new institution1. It is possible that it originated in the desire of the Church to obtain immunity for its estates from "all earthly business" and so from secular justice, though the idea of patrimonial justice would seem to have been familiar from the first 2. But in any case justice was recognized as a valuable source of profit—justitia est magnum emolumentum-for fines were heavy, and whole classes of men were therefore brought under the judicial authority of a lord, to whom they rendered suit of court, Here, again, the way was paved for the development of manorial tendencies. When a man attended a private court instead of a national court, he gradually lost his legal status and lapsed into a rightless condition, for feudal common law refused henceforth to recognize his claims to freedom. The distinction between those admitted to the king's court, and those excluded from it, became subsequently the decisive test that differentiated the free from the unfree. Often the mediaeval serf occupied as a dependent tenant land held by his predecessors as freehold, until they had been deprived of the national warranty. Thus either by a royal grant placing a district under a feudal lordship, or by the submission of individuals, village after village acquired a lord and could no longer boast itself a free village community. Suit of court revealed itself a powerful instrument for the degradation of great masses of the freemen, and readily opened the door to manorial exploitation.

The rise of a military aristocracy constituted the third a military factor in the growth of the manorial system. It appears first in the comitatus described by Tacitus, a war band that formed a bodyguard for the chieftains: in pace decus, in bello praesidium3. In England the eorls, the aristocracy of birth, were replaced by a nobility of service, gesiths and thegns, and the disturbed course of early English history

1 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 258 seq.

2 Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, 214.

3 Tacitus, Germania, c. 13. The war band in Caesar differs from the comitatus of the later period, as it was formed only for a temporary expedition: De Bello Gallico, vi. c. 23. 4 Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 169.