served greatly to enhance their importance. The Anglo-
Saxon militia, the fyrd consisting of peasant cultivators,
proved unequal to the demands made upon it by the
perpetual raids of the Northmen.
A professional force with
leisure to fight, and with the resources for providing
equipment, became indispensable. It was endowed with
land, usually it would seem to the extent of five hides for
each thegn, and rapidly developed into a privileged class.
English society came to be transformed by the permeation
of feudal conceptions. A threefold social division began
to emerge in the soldiers who fought, the clergy who prayed,
and the peasants who toiled. The ceorls, the peasant class,
were degraded and sank to the bottom of the new social
hierarchy. They were no longer called upon to fight, save
on rare occasions, and accordingly their right to a free
status began to be denied. The thegn now appeared
as the full freeman, and to this dignity he added the
prestige and economic independence of a large landowner.
Two results followed from the altered order of things.
The people were expected to bring contributions and offer
their services to their defenders, and it may be conjectured
that by their assistance the large estate of the thegn
was cultivated. Moreover, the distinction of his position
stamped the thegn as the natural delegate of the central
government, and various governmental functions were
assigned to him, such as the maintenance of public order1.
His estate conjointly with the surrounding neighbourhood
served as a unit of law and police, and the combination of
political superiority and economic rights ultimately pro-
duced the manorial system. Thus the differentiation
between the soldier and the tiller of the soil became the
mainspring of feudal development and manorial growth.

The phenomena of economic life can seldom be traced to Summary. the agency of a single factor. The manorial system is no exception, for the elements of which it is composed are too varied to admit of only one explanation. No theory of the manor is tenable which lays stress upon one aspect

1 Cf. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, 216-221; Chadwick, Origin of the English Nation, 303.

Types of eleventhcentury

manors.

to the entire exclusion of the rest. Occasionally the private estates of the pre-Saxon period survived to form the basis of the mediaeval manor 1. In other cases a variety of forces combined to evolve the manorial system. We can no longer hold with Maitland that the manor originated as a unit of financial assessment; but, on the other hand, it was not invariably from the first, whatever it became later, an economic organization with peasant holdings clustered round a capitalist nucleus. As we have seen, it was also the centre of local sovereignty and the basis of feudal sway. The lord, in fact, appears in a dual capacity as the owner of an estate with economic rights over his tenants, and as a ruler invested by royal grant with political authority over his subjects. Accordingly neither an economic nor a feudal interpretation unfolds a complete view of manorial development, and the two streams of social evolution must be treated side by side.

The evidence of Domesday Book lends authority to this conclusion, for it indicates that in its earlier stages manorial life presented the very signs of irregularity that a fortuitous and diverse growth naturally tends to produce. The structure of Domesday manors was not everywhere uniform in character, but exhibited a numerous variety of types.

1 Modern criticism of the orthodox ing theory advanced by Kemble has drawn attention to the existence of a dominant personal element in the Saxon village. Kemble held the view that where the suffix ing entered into the composition of the place-names of English villages, it denoted settlement by a clan, that is, a free community united by real or fictitious ties of kinship. But it is believed that these place-names are really patronymic, personal names. In other words, we are confronted from the first with the presence of a lord in the village community, who was important enough to give his own name to the district. The problem arises what position are we to assign to this eponymous lord? Was he a manorial lord, the first English owner of the village? Or was he simply a local chieftain who developed into a territorial magnate, and round whose estate his followers settled in a free village to which they gave the name of their leader? The latter alternative seems more preferable, but in any case we have henceforth to recognize the probability that from the very outset the Saxon village included an element of lordship to which it would be hard to deny an ascendancy of some kind. Although the existence of this personal element would not be incompatible with the general freedom of the villagers, it would none the less furnish a basis for manorial growth: Stevenson in English Hist. Review, iv. 356; J. H. Round, Commune of London (1899), 20; Stenton, Types of Manorial Structure, 91; G. B. Brown, The Arts in Early England (1903), i. 48 seq.

Of course the most general and widely diffused type comes within the compass of economic analysis, and displays all the appearance of a fully developed manor. It was a large estate occupied by a community of dependent tenants, who were grouped round a domanial centre and obliged to perform labour services on the home farm1. The monastic houses were the innovators in this direction, and the material conditions lay at hand in the alienation of Crown lands, or in the integration of small freeholds whose original owners had been reduced to economic dependency 2. In other manors the intimate relation between the husbandry of the demesne and that of the rustic holdings was absent or completely subordinate, and here the judicial aspect predominated. The manor-house appeared as the centre of jurisdiction and political authority, and not of an estate organized for purposes of tillage, and the service of those attached to it was primarily suit of court. This type of manor was simply a portion of the hundred3, which had passed from the public authority into the hands of private individuals. The right to hold a court for all included within the lord's soke was its primary feature, and the court itself served as a focus to which the more remote districts readily gravitated. We have already seen how grants of sake and soke contributed to the spread of manorialism, and how the compulsion to attendance at a private court was a powerful lever in the degradation of the peasantry. The third type of manor was the administrative or tributary organization, and consisted of scattered settlements, each in itself a unit of husbandry, but controlled from a single centre where their tribute was paid 5. We remark again the absence of any economic concentration of labour and capital within a well-defined and homogeneous sphere, and the substitution of administrative concentration in its stead. The manorial hall served to unite the various districts attached to it, and formed a convenient spot for the collection of dues. The manor here was simply a network of tributary 1 Infra, p. 32. a Supra, p. 17. 4 Ibid. 316.

Vinogradoff, English Society, 322. For a late example of food-rents, see Charter Rolls, i. 274, where Englefield (Flint) was released in 1242 from food-rents paid to Llewelyn.

Importance of the

Norman

rights extended over a number of districts, upon which the obligation had been imposed to furnish contributions for the warrior and his household. Lastly we meet with other manors, maneriola 1, which were neither agrarian units, nor administrative centres, nor jurisdictional franchises, but merely small farms supporting a single household and cultivated in person by the freemen to whom they belonged. From these various types of eleventh-century manors we may draw two conclusions. In the first place they indicate that the Open Field System with its compulsion to joint husbandry can exist apart from the manorial system, and cannot therefore be taken as a proof of the servile origin of the mediaeval village. Not only in economic manors, where labour arrangements were directed from a domanial centre, but also in villages which were free to control their own economic destiny without the intervention of a superior power, we find the system of scattered strips and organized cultivation at work, and all the processes of agrarian life in operation. Hence the common fields and the virgate system, with its indivisible bundle of strips, cannot be regarded as fruits of manorial growth, or as maintained only by the force of seigniorial pressure. In the second place they accentuate the fact that the manor was a varied and heterogeneous growth, which cannot be explained by any single hypothesis of social development.

The work of consolidation and the creation of a uniform manorial life proceeded from the Normans, and the history Conquest. of the manor would therefore be incomplete without some attempt to estimate the extent of their influence upon English society. The consequences that attended William's invasion of England were the more far-reaching, because the Norman Conquest was not merely a dramatic but short-lived episode in English history. It was a decisive turning-point in national development, and its permanence was largely due to the fact that it was accompanied by a redistribution of the conquered soil, though Saxon lethargy and lack of organizing capacity were factors which told in the same direction. The Anglo-Saxon lords 1 Vinogradoff, op. cit. 332.

of the soil were supplanted by an alien aristocracy and only retained an inconsiderable portion of their land. The Normans were thus afforded an opportunity to put into practice continental ideas with which they had long been familiar, and at the same time satisfy their own passion for order and system. With the coming of the Normans an age, first of construction and organization, and then of definition, succeeded an age of social chaos and crossrelationships, while the door was opened to foreign influences on an unprecedented scale. Accordingly the changes effected by the Conquest in the manorial system merit considerable attention.

tion.

There was an important movement in the direction of Consolidauniformity and consolidation. Before 1066 there were many free villages which, taken as a whole, had no lord, although individual villagers might acknowledge the authority of different magnates. But though some villages refused to be kneaded into a manorial shape, the practice of the Normans was to turn the vill into a manor by imposing upon it a single lord, who carved out a demesne and erected a hall where his Saxon predecessors had gone without. Besides the general disappearance of free villages, there was a universal assimilation of existing manors to a uniform type. The new lord of the administrative or jurisdictional manor consolidated his hold over the population under his control, and by imposing labour services completed the final stages toward manorialism. At the same time the cross-relationships of the Anglo-Saxon period, when a man might be commended to one lord, under the jurisdiction of a second, the tenant of a third, and responsible for various dues to a fourth, were replaced by a single relationship based on land. Service henceforth sprang from and was associated with tenure, and purely personal bonds were swept away.

manorial

court.

In the day of Edward the Confessor, the right to hold a The court for manorial tenants was a privilege extended by royal favour to churches and individual landowners. The manorial hall-moot was still rare1, and villeinage did not

1 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 52, 54.