or hlaford was the lord of a manor, the ceorl was a serf. And as in the laws of Ethelbert a century older, there is mention of hams or tuns belonging to private individuals or to the king, the manor must already have existed at the end of the sixth century. Now, the Anglo-Saxons, at that time, had scarcely completed the conquest of the island; it is impossible, therefore, that the free village community, conforming to the mark system, can have been introduced by them into England, since the first documents that we have on their social condition prove that this free community did not exist. Therefore either the Saxons brought the system of the manor and the servile community into England, or else they found it already established there, and made no The manor and villeinage of Roman origin. change in it. This second hypothesis is the more probable; the manorial and servile organisation must go back to the period of Roman domination in Britain. It will be objected that the Romans were few in number, that the Britons were Celts, and that, in the countries where Celtic civilization persisted, Wales and Ireland, the manorial organisation did not exist in the Middle Ages. The Celtic tribal community was entirely unacquainted with the fixed and indivisible holding which is one of the essential features of the manor. But, declares Mr. Seebohm, there is nothing to prove that before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the whole of Britain was still under the empire of the customs of pastoral and tribal civilization. The evidence of Cæsar proves that the inhabitants of the south-east had already passed out of this stage. The Romans found subjects accustomed to a settled life. They had no difficulty in establishing in their new province the régime of the 'villa,' the great estate, that is to say, the manor: and the administrative abuses of the Lower Empire hastened the formation of the seignorial authority and the enslavement of the free husbandmen, Germans for the most part, whom the emperors had imported in large numbers to colonise the country. The Romans, for the rest, improved agriculture and introduced the use of the triple rotation of crops; they thus gave to the open field system, which the Britons had only practised until then in its most rudimentary form, its definitive constitution. As for the hypothesis according to which the open field system with triple rotation and lordship with servile, indivisible holdings, was introduced after the fall of the Roman domination, by the Anglo-Saxons, it is not indefensible, but only upon condition that the Anglo-Saxons came from Southern Germany, which had undergone contact with Roman civilization, and not, as is generally thought, from Northern Germany, where the triple rotation of crops was unknown. Mr. Seebohm does not reject this supposition, which, indeed, does not exclude the first hypothesis. Half Romanised Germans may have found in England the system of husbandry with which they were already acquainted on the Continent. In either case the English manor has a Roman origin. Mr. Seebohm's work compels attention by the skill with which the author sets forth his ideas and puts fresh life into the subject. As we shall see, it Objections. has obliged the Germanists to make important concessions. But the theory, taken as a whole, is untenable. We are struck, in reading it, by the viciousness of his general method, by the missing links in The Roman origin is not proved. his chain of proof, by the poverty of many of his arguments. The method of working back adopted by Mr. Seebohm is extremely fallacious; it falsifies the historical perspective, and the} author is inevitably led to reason in most cases by analogy. By such a method, if some day the documents of modern history disappear bodily, a scholar might undertake to connect the trades unions of the nineteenth century with the Roman Collegia. "No amount of analogy between two systems," says Stubbs wisely, can by itself prove the actual derivation of one from the other."1 Mr. Seebohm juggles with texts and centuries very adroitly, but not by any means enough to create the illusion of continuity which he claims to see himself in going back through the course of the ages. There are yawning gaps in his demonstration. The alleged proof drawn from the laws of Ethelbert amounts to nothing; the thesis of a Roman England entirely divided into great estates is an absurd improbability; the same is true of the supposition that the Saxon pirates could have come from the centre of Europe. Even when Mr. Seebohm treads on ground which appears more solid, and quotes his documents, he is unconvincing. In fact, from the time that he arrives, in his backward march, at Domesday Book, he loses hold on realities and allows himself to be duped by his fixed idea. He is the sport of a veritable historical mirage, when he sees the whole of England in the eleventh century, covered with manors like those of the thirteenth and cultivated by serfs. Still more misleading is the illusion by which England presents itself to him. under the same aspect during the Anglo-Saxon period. According to him, the ceorl is a serf; he is the conquered native; the Saxon conquerors are the lords of manors, the successors of great Roman landowners. He takes no account of the texts which prove the freedom of the ceorl, and the existence of the small landholder; he does not explain at all what became of the mass of the German immigrants who had crossed the North Sea in sufficient numbers to impose their language on the Britons. His mistake is as huge as that of Boulainvilliers, who sought the origin of the French nobility and of feudalism in the supremacy of the Frank conquerors and the subjection of the Gallo-Romans. 1. Stubbs, op. cit. i, p. 227. Mr. Seebohm's Romanist thesis, despite a brilliant success in the book market, has, in short, turned out but a spent shot. Among English historians of mark Mr. Ashley now stands alone, and with many reservations too, as its defender.1 But it has had the merit of stimulating the critical spirit and of inducing the moderate Germanists, such as Green or Mr. Vinogradoff, to make concessions which we think justified. The true method. There is, in fact, no necessity to range oneself in either camp, to be Germanist or "Romanist," to neglect completely, as Stubbs has set the regrettable example of doing, all facts anterior to the Germanic conquest, or to fall, like Coote or Mr. Seebohm, into the opposite extreme. It is not reasonable to seek a single origin for English institutions, and to pretend to explain by one formula a very complex state of things, which was bound to vary not only in time, but also in space. The eclectic method adopted by Mr. Vinogradoff in his recent work on the Origin of the Manor," appears to us a very judicious one, and we believe it alone to be capable of leading to the real solution. 66 To begin with, room must certainly be left for an original element which the uncompromising Germanists The Celtic and Romanists alike have, by common consent, ruled out of the discussion: the element. Celtic element.2 1. The origin of Property in Land, by Fustel de Coulanges, translated by Margaret Ashley, with an introductory chapter on the English Manor, by W. J. Ashley, 1891; 2nd edition, 1892.-An introduction to English Economic History, vol. 1, 3rd edition, 1894, translated by P. Bondois and corrected by the author, under the title of Hist. des doctrines économiques de l'Angleterre, 1900, vol. i, pp. 30 sqq. 2. We do not mean to say that England, before the arrival of the Romans and Germans, was peopled by Celts only. There were preCeltic populations, perhaps more important as regards numbers, but the Celtic civilization predominated. See a very interesting general sketch of the English races in H. J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, 1902, pp. 179 sqq. A summary bibliography of works relative to the Prehistoric and Celtic periods will be found in Gross, Sources and Literature of English History, 1900, pp. 157 sqq. We can get an approximate idea of its character and creative action,-on condition of being content with general conclusions, by consulting the much later and indirect sources which we possess on Celtic tribal civilization the Welsh laws especially, the Irish laws, and the information we have on the Scottish clan, or on the Celts of the Continent.1 Whatever Mr. Seebohm may say, it is allowable to believe that the Britons, as Pytheas or even Cæsar knew them,2 had not passed, from an economic point of view, the stage of tribal and still semi-pastoral civilization. Judging by the general history of the Celts and the data of comparative history, they knew nothing similar to the manor. The inferior class called taeogs dwelt apart, and did not work for the benefit of the free men. There was neither servile tenure nor even private property in the strict sense of the word. Their principal resource was cattle-rearing; Celtic agriculture was an extensive superficial agriculture, which required neither careful work, nor capital for the improvement of the soil. It was little fitted to inspire the feeling of individual proprietorship. On the other hand the method of labour required the spirit of co-operation. The plough was large and heavy; eight oxen were usually yoked to Origin of the it; it was so costly a thing that it could Open Field. only belong to a group of persons, and it is for this reason that, according to the Welsh laws, the land was divided into parcels assigned to the members of each plough-association, one supplying the plough-share, others the oxen, others undertaking to plough and lead the team.3 An understanding between 1. For all that follows, cf. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 3 sqq. 2. For the fragments of the journal of Pytheas, preserved in various ancient authors, and for Cæsar's description, see J. Rhys, Celtic Britain, 2nd edition, 1884, pp. 5 sqq., 53 sqq. 3. Seebohm, English Village Community, pp. 122 sqq. |