(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. * Vinogradoff, Growth of the 3 Tacitus, Germania, c. 13. comitatus of the later period, as

Manor, 214.

The war band in Caesar differs from the it was formed only for a temporary expedition: De Bello Gallico, vi. c. 23. • Stubbs, Constitutional History, i. 169.

served greatly to enhance their importance. The AngloSaxon 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 produced 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 manor1. 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. 2 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.