virgate, the quarter of a hide1 became the common type of small freehold. To escape calamity therefore men were obliged to abase themselves before some powerful neighbour. Little by little, for reasons at once economic and political, the bonds of dependence were drawn closer between the "liber pauper " and the thegn, rich, esteemed, endowed by the king with a portion of public authority, and become, as it were, his responsible representative in the district.2 This formation of a military and landed aristocracy is a general phenomenon in the history of the West, which explains, in France as in England, the decay of the small freeholders and the definitive entrance of the seignorial system. Book Domesday Book, drawn up twenty years after the Norman invasion, allows us to form some idea of the state of rural England at the end of the The England of Domesday Anglo-Saxon period. It is a document bristling with difficulties, and of baffling obscurity. But, since the appearance of the 'Constitutional History,' it has been the subject of a number of admirable studies, some of which were known to Stubbs and might have been utilised more by him in the last editions of his work. Mr. Round has elucidated some particularly thorny questions in his Feudal England, and he and other scholars are at present furnishing the editors of the Victoria History of the Counties of England with a detailed examination, county by county, of all the historical information that Domesday Book contains. Mr. Maitland has drawn a masterly picture of AngloSaxon society in the eleventh century in his Domesday Book and Beyond, an at times daring but extremely suggestive synthesis, one of the finest books which 1. On the virgate, see Vinogradoff, Villainage, p. 239; J. Tait, Hides and virgates at Battle Abbey, in English Historical Review, xviii, 1903, pp. 705 sqq. 2. Maitland, Domesday Book, pp. 163 sqq.; Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 216 sqq.; A. G. Little, Gesiths and Thegns, in English Historical Reriew, iv, 1889, pp. 723 sqq. B English scholarship has produced. Finally Mr. Vinogradoff, in his Villainage in England and his quite recent Growth of the Manor [and English Society in the Eleventh Century], has put forth solutions which deserve the most favourable attention. Difficulties of interpretation The very nature of the document, the end King William had in view in commanding this great inquest, are sufficiently mysterious to begin with. For Mr. Round and Mr. Maitland, Domesday is a fiscal document, a "Geld-Book designed to facilitate an equitable imposition of the Danegeld. Mr. Vinogradoff reverts to an older and more comprehensive definition, and believes that the royal commissioners wished not only to prepare the way for the collection of the tax, but also to discriminate the ties which united the subjects of the king to one another, and to know, from one end of England to the other, from whom each piece of land was held; in this way alone the political and administrative responsibilities of the lords in their relation to the king could be fixed.1 We now understand why England, as the commissioners describe it, seems to be already divided into manors. Mr. Seebohm allowed himself to be misled by this appearance.2 In reality the agents of the king spoke of manors where there were none, where there was nothing but a piece of land with a barn, capable of becoming some day a centre of manorial organisation; for it was of importance for the schemes of the Norman monarchy that the seignorial system should be extended everywhere. 1. Growth of the Manor, pp. 292 sqq. 2. Mr. Maitland, on the contrary, puts into sharp relief the contrast which exists between the manor of Domesday Book and the manor of the 13th century. He concludes that the manor of Domesday is not the seignorial estate, but the place at which the geld is received (Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 119 sqq.). This theory is untenable. See J. Tait, in English Historical Review, xii, 1897, pp. 770-772; Round, ibidem, xv, 1900, pp. 293 sqq. Victoria History of Hampshire, i, 443, Victoria History of Bedfordshire, i, 210; Lapsley, Vict. Hist. of Durham, i, 260; Salzmann, Vict. Hist. of Sussex, i. 355; Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 300 sqq. Moreover, the nomenclature used is a source of perplexity and mistakes; the compilers often use Norman terms; the names they choose sometimes change their meaning later, so much so that they have become subject of controversy amongst modern scholars. Social The difficulty, then, of an exact interpretation of Domesday Book is great. And even when the necessary precautions have been taken, it is a complexity peculiarly arduous task to elicit from the document a clear description of Anglo-Saxon society tempore regis Edwardi. Stubbs shows well how extraordinary was its complexity, what variety the ties created by commendation and gifts of land presented, and how diverse the personal and territorial relations were. The small freehold still existed side by side with the great estate; the most populous region, the Danelaw,1 was a country of free husbandmen, of village communities.2 Not only were there lands which belonged neither to thegns nor to churches, but there were, in the England of Edward the Confessor, whole villages, and in large numbers, in which the fiscal and judicial rights of the king had not fallen into private hands, nor did such villages form part of the royal demesne properly so called. But the free husbandmen were for all that involved in the ties of dependence, as, indeed, were their lords, for the thegns were themselves thegns of an ealdorman, or a church, or another thegn, or the queen, or the king.3 Ties of 1. On the extent of the Danelaw or Danish district, see a note of Mr. Hodgkin, in the Political History of England, edited by R. L. Poole and W. Hunt, i, 1906, pp. 315-317 [and Chadwick, Anglo-Saxon Institutions, p. 198]. 2. Mr. Maitland remarks on the need of guarding against the temptation that assails those who have read Domesday Book, to see great estates everywhere at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period (Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 64, 168 sqq.). 3. Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 162. by the Church to the thegns, see ibidem, Upon the láen-lands granted pp. 301 sqq. The same personal or territorial ties which attached the members of the military aristocracy to one another established infinitely varied relations between them and the rest of the free population. The liberi homines commendatione tantum could leave their lord when they wished, for they had not subjected their land to him, and they had the right to "recedere cum terra sua absque licentia domini sui." Sometimes, on the other hand, the commendatio attached the land to the lord, and if the land was sold, it remained under the commendation of the same lord. In certain cases the land belongs to a soc, and he who buys it has to recognise the judicial rights of the lord. Finally, the freeman may hold a terra consuetudinaria and owe dues or agricultural services; such are the sochemanni cum omni consuetudine 2 in the eastern counties, counties, whom the compilers of Domesday Book would have called villani in another part of England.3 The villeins Book This last expression has been the source of mistaken theories which Messrs. Maitland and Vinogradoff have fully succeeded in clearing out of the way. of Domesday In the eyes of Mr. Seebohm especially all the villani of Domesday Book were villeins in the sense which the word acquired later on in England, that is, peasants subject to personal servitude.1 In reality, the term has no legal sense here; villanus is the translation of tunesman, man of the village; he is, according to Mr. Vinogradoff, a member of the village community, who possesses the normal share in the open field. He has the same wergild as the sochemannus 1. See the numerous passages quoted by Round, Feudal England, pp. 24 sqq. 2. Ibidem, pp. 31 sqq. 3. On the sokemen of Domesday Book, see Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 66, 104 sqq.; Vinogradoff, Manor, p. 341; [English Society, pp. 124, 431.] 4. English Village Community, pp. 89-104. In his Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law, 1902, p. 504, Mr. Seebohm begs that this servitude may not be confounded with slavery. and, like him, owes only agricultural services fixed by custom and very light; by the side of the land he holds from a lord he may have an independent holding. In a general way at least, the villein of Domesday is a free man, a descendant of the ceorl, the twyhynd-man.1 The Norman element This social state, further complicated by the persistence of slavery, was the natural product of very remote antecedents, the fruit of the development and friction of several superimposed races, the spontaneous and varied result of the necessities of daily life and local historic forces, in a country where the pressure of the central power was extremely feeble. Neither the adventurers who followed William the Bastard in order to obtain a fine guerdon,' nor the servants of the Norman monarchy were disposed to respect this composite and bizarre edifice on which so many centuries had left their mark. They left standing only what was useful to them or did not inconvenience them. The Norman Conquest, begun by brutal soldiers and completed by jurists of orderly and logical mind, was to have for its effect the systematizing of the social grouping and its simplification at the expense of the weakest. In fact and in law, the most original features of AngloSaxon society disappeared. In fact, during the hard Result of the years which followed the landing of William conquest for the natives who were not massacred or rural classes expelled from their dwellings 2 had to the native 1. Maitland, op. cit. pp. 38 sqq.; Vinogradoff, Manor, pp. 339 sqq. Mr. Maitland remarks also, with reason, that the conception of personal liberty is extremely difficult to fix in this period and throughout the whole of the Middle Ages; cf. the remarks of Stubbs (Const. Hist., i, 83). See also Seebohm, Tribal Custom, p. 430. 2. Here is an example of the expulsion of a humble peasant: "Ricardus de Tonebrige tenet de hoc manerio unam virgatam cum silva unde abstulit rusticum qui ibi manebat" (Domesday, quoted by Maitland, op. cit. p. 61, note 5). The difficulty is to know if these cases, which cannot all have been mentioned in Domesday, were numerous. Stubbs has preferred to discuss this difficult question of the spoliation of the AngloSaxon proprietors, and the transfer of their lands to the companions of the Conqueror, only incidentally and without dwelling upon it. To what |