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Effects on

freeholders.

necessarily involve suit of court. But subsequently every manor had its court. The feudal principle that a lord enjoyed political authority over his tenants took root, and tenure now became a source of jurisdiction. The mere fact1 of being a tenant bound a man to attendance at his lord's court, quite apart from any royal grant conferring more extensive powers. All over England small courts sprang up, and the struggle that ensued between royal and seigniorial jurisdiction occupies an important page in constitutional development.

The substitution of Norman for Saxon lords told heavily upon the free cultivators. For the numerous class of freeholders which existed on the eve of the Conquest, the Norman settlement spelt disaster. In many parts they altogether disappeared; the sokemen of Cambridgeshire, who numbered 900 tempore regis Edwardi, were twenty years later reduced to 2132. The rest had been degraded into villeinage, and the sign of their altered condition lay in the exaction of week - work. In districts where villeinage was unknown in 1086 an unfree element crept in3. We read in Domesday how "in this manor there was at that time a freeman who has now been made one of the villeins"; and from these words we can picture the harshness and oppression of the newcomers. The mailed hand of the Norman lord pressed heavily upon the unarmed tillers of the soil and thrust them down' into servitude. In other cases they continued to retain something of their privileged position, but nevertheless were now in a condition of considerable inferiority. The lawyers of a later generation still retained a tradition that "any one of the subjected race, who holds estates, has obtained it by the favour of the lord or under a contract "5. Increased services were imposed upon them, and the principle nulle terre sans seigneur condemned them to a feudal dependency. Whatever view may be taken of the Norman Conquest, it undoubtedly affected 1 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, i. 585. 2 Maitland, op. cit. 62-63.

3 E.g. Alverton: F. M. Stenton, "Early Manumissions at Staunton ", in English Hist. Review, xxvi. 94. Domesday Book, ii. 1.

Dialogus de Scaccario (Oxford ed., 1902), 1. x.

adversely the economic position of the great mass of the nation. For the English peasantry, the red thread of the Norman Conquest" was distinctly "a catastrophe ".

villeins.

It was hardly likely that influences so injurious to Effects on the freer peasantry should have left untouched the bulk of the villagers, the class of villeins, and there can be scarcely any question that as a rule their position greatly deteriorated. The Domesday villein was to all appearances in a far higher condition than the serf of the thirteenth century, who combined with his unfree tenure a considerable degree of personal servitude. Everything indicates that in status, at any rate, he was a free man. The Rectitudines Singularum Personarum tells us that the gebur and the cottager paid hearth-penny on Holy Thursday, as every freeman ought to do "1. The Leges Henrici Primi, a post-Conquest compilation of Anglo-Saxon customs and dooms, speaks of the villeins as viles et inopes personae, mean and poor, but none the less distinguishes them from the servi, and clearly regards them as freemen. They are grouped with the sokemen and liberi homines as twyhyndmen whose wergild was two hundred shillings, as distinct from the thegn class or twelfhyndmen whom to slay involved a penalty of twelve hundred shillings 2. Domesday Book also bears witness to the distinction in the city

of Chester if a freeman worked upon a festival the bishop
claimed eight shillings, but if a slave did so, he was content
with half the sum3. Again in the manor of Crewkerne every
freeman rendered one bloom of iron to another manor
situated in Somersetshire, but at Crewkerne there were none
above the condition of villeins, who are therefore evidently
regarded as free1. All this points to the conclusion that the
villeins of the eleventh century could assert the rights and
dignity of freemen, nor were they excluded from the national
courts 5. In one sense the villein was admittedly not free.
He did not 'hold freely', he could not sell his land. Still the
freedom thus denied to him was not personal but economic
freedom, in the same way that the modern copyholder is
2 Ibid. i. 563, 587, 593.
5 Ibid. i. 44 b

1 Liebermann, Gesetze, i. 446. 3 Domesday Book, i. 263 a.

4 Ibid. i. 86 a, b.

b.

Increase

of burdens.

personally free, yet cannot at will dispose of his land. Apart from this, however, there seems no trace whatever 1 of the servile incidents of villeinage with which we meet in the thirteenth century, and which proceeded from the unfree condition of the villeins. Thus the peasantry of the eleventh century were "far more law-worthy" than those of a subsequent age, and the development of the servile theory of villeinage took place after the Norman Conquest. One factor facilitated this development: the absorption into the villein stock of servile elements 2-household slaves settled by their lords on the glebe, to whose status the rest were gradually assimilated by the artificial and rigid definitions of an indiscriminating legal system.

It would appear, moreover, that the conditions attached to villein tenure were less onerous in the eleventh century than in the thirteenth. The tiller of the soil in Domesday was apparently not annexed to the soil (ascriptitius), as subsequently, and no legal restrictions were imposed upon his movements. Moreover, while feudal law insisted upon the lord's ownership, not only of his own demesne, but also of the land occupied by his tenants, Domesday Book distinguishes between the lord's demesne and the holdings of the villeins 3, though this is not invariably the case. The villeins in fact had rights which the law would defend, and its denial of jurisdiction apparently came later 5. Lastly, though we may naturally suppose that the villeins from the first owed some labour services, the entries in Domesday are too few to enable us to postulate the heavy obligations of the succeeding centuries. We meet with the liability to indefinite services, the legal test of villeinage, in the passage that "the men labour at the king's work as the reeve shall command"". There is also a

1 Ballard, Domesday Inquest, 161.

2 Vinogradoff, English Society, 467.

3 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 54.

4 This was overlooked by Maitland, as it has recently been pointed out. Already in 1086 the term, dominium, could be applied to land in the occupation of villeins, and not merely to the home farm of the lord, a fact which "raises wide issues": Stenton, Types of Manorial Structure, 9.

6

5 Cf. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, 356.

Domesday Book, i. 219.

reference to week-work in Herefordshire, where twelve bordars worked one day a week1. Rents in money were certainly very common 2, and possibly in earlier times the villeins discharged their liabilities largely in money rents3, especially since the lord had slaves to carry on the cultivation of the home farm. But when slavery died out, it would become necessary to exact increased services from the tenants. In any case the Normans were anxious to exploit their position to the utmost, and the villeins could look for little consideration at their hands. On the manors belonging to Ramsey Abbey there are unmistakable signs of steady depression in the condition of the villeins. Their week-work was heavier in the thirteenth century than in the twelfth, while the system of boon-services, absent in the earlier period, was later completely developed. Another example is found on the estates of the Church of Ely, while on the manors of Burton Abbey there are instances, as late as Henry I., of a reversion from rents in money to services in kind 5.

One beneficial change can be placed to the credit of Effects on Norman lords, namely, the disappearance of the class of slaves. landless slaves. In the manor of Leominster (Herefordshire) there were 82 servi et ancillae in the time of Edward and 25 under his successor; in the hundred of Barstable' (Essex) there were 149 slaves in 1066 and only 90 in 1086; and by the time the Hundred Rolls were compiled, slavery in England had become a thing of the past.

1 Vict. County Hist. Herefordshire, i. 291.

2 Vinogradoff, English Society, 390.

3 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 58.

4 N. Neilson, Economic Conditions on the Manors of Ramsey Abbey (1898), 51.

5 English Hist. Review, ix. 418 (n. 3); xx. 277. Vict. County Hist. Herefordshire, i. 290.

? Ballard, Domesday Inquest, 150.

CHAPTER II

THE MANOR AND THE OPEN FIELD SYSTEM

Definition THE manor constituted the rural framework of English

of the

manor.

society and was the prevailing type of social organization
during the Middle Ages. It may be described in general
terms as an estate owned by a lord and occupied by a com-
munity of dependent cultivators. Its underlying concep-
tion was that of a contract involving mutual obligations
on the part of the lord and his tenants, the concession of
land by the former, and the rendering of agricultural services
by the latter. This principle was expressed in the distinc-
tion which manorial custom drew between the different
kinds of lands comprised in the typical mediaeval estate:
the demesne or home farm of the lord, the freehold of the
privileged tenants, and the land held in villeinage by the
dependent serfs. In legal theory the lord always retained
the right to resume at will the occupation of the whole
estate, except only the land belonging to his free tenants.
Feudal common law did not recognize the villein's proprietary
right to his tenement, and regarded the lord as legal owner 1.
In reality, however, the lord's freedom of action was restricted
by practical considerations. The absence of a wage-earning
class 2 rendered him dependent upon the labour of tenants
for the cultivation of the soil, and he was therefore con-
strained to leave a large portion of the estate in their hands
in return for work and rents. Thus the distinction between
the demesne and the villenagium or tributary holdings, while
it had no place in law, was of primary importance in the
1 Infra, p. 35.
a On the class of wage-earners, see infra, p. 45.

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