Still the Roman domination lasted for three and a half centuries on the other side of the Channel, and every year English archæologists bring to light some comfortable or luxurious villa, with pavements in mosaic, painted stucco, hypocausts and baths.1

Evidently the Roman officials, like the English in India to-day, knew how to make themselves comfortable; they brought with them industries and arts The Villa. which pleased the higher ranks of the Britons. And this at least must be retained out of the hazardous theories of Mr. Seebohm, that the estate organised on the Italian model, the great landowner living in a fine country house, having the part he had reserved for himself cultivated by slaves, and letting out the rest of his property to coloni, were by no means unknown in Britain. (By the side of the free Britons grouped in communities, there was a landed aristocracy. The disturbance caused by the German conquest, by the wholesale immigration of the Angles and Saxons was no doubt immense. Stubbs is justified Anglo-Saxon in appealing to the philological argument: the fact that the Celtic and Latin languages disappeared before Anglo-Saxon is sufficient to prove how thoroughly England was Germanised. But Stubbs is mistaken in looking upon England at the arrival of the Germans as a tabula rasa. What he calls the 'AngloSaxon system was not built up on ground that was levelled and bare. It was the interest of the conquerors Britain in the Introductory Sketch of Roman Britain, printed at the beginning of the excellent studies which he has written for the Victoria History of the Counties of England; for instance, in the Victoria History of Hampshire, vol. i, 1900. The publication is announced of a general work by that scholar, entitled, The Romanisation of Roman Britain. Cf. on the Roman occupation; Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 37 sqq., and the chapter by Mr. Thomas Hodgkin, in vol. i of the Political History of England, edited by W. Hunt and R. L. Poole, 1906, pp. 52 sqq.

The

element.

1. See Mr. Haverfield's studies: Victoria History of Hampshire, vol. i, 1900; Worcester, vol. i, 1901; Norfolk, vol. i, 1901; Northamptonshire, vol. i, 1902; Warwickshire, vol. i, 1904; Derbyshire, vol. i, 1905, etc.

the earlier agrarian customs.

to utilise the remains of Roman civilization. Nor is it by Persistence of any means proved that where they settled they exterminated the native population.1 They had no aversion to the usages of the open field, and could quickly accustom themselves to live side by side with the British peasants. [The Celtic tribal communities would be absorbed in the village communities formed by the ceorls. At the same time, the very great inequality which prevailed among the Anglo-Saxons, the development of royal dynasties and ealdorman families richly endowed with land, and, lastly, the grants made to the Church, necessarily preserved the great estate, cultivated with the help of theows' or slaves and of coloni.

Tendencies

towards

Nevertheless, for the establishment of the seignorial system in England it was not enough that there were rich men and theows.' The predominance of the small freehold, the existence of numerous ceorls' cultivating their hide 2 and members of independent communities, were incompatible with the general establishment of the manorial system. A new classification of

a new

classification of society.

1. J. Rhys, Celtic Britain, pp. 109–110. See also R. A. Smith in the Victoria History of Hampshire, vol. i, p. 376; he gives the bibliography of the question.

2. The hide has been the subject of numberless controversies. There is a whole literature on the question, and the subject is not exhausted, for the good reason that the term has several meanings, and the hide was not, as a matter of fact, a fixed measure. Stubbs states that the hide of the Norman period was no doubt a hundred and twenty or a hundred acres (Const. Hist., i, p. 79). But he should have drawn a distinction between the fiscal hide, which was a unit of taxation, and the real or field hide. Mr. Round (Feudal England, 1895, pp. 36 sqq.; see also Victoria History of Bedfordshire, 1904, vol. i, pp. 191-193) and Professor Maitland (Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 357 sqq.) have shown the artificial character of the Domesday hide. hide was very generally divided into 120 fractions called acres [for fiscal hides of fewer acres see Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 155], but these appellations did not correspond to any fixed reality, any more than did the "ploughland" (carrucata) and the "sulung or the French "hearths" of the Middle Ages. The hide (or hiwisc, hiwship), in its other sense, the primitive one, which it continued to retain alongside its fiscal sense, denoted the quantity (obviously variable according to locality) of

This

society had to come into existence; some freemen had to descend in the social scale, while others raised themselves. This transformation was inevitable in an age in which the old bonds of tribe and family no longer sufficed to give security to the individual, and in which the royal power was not yet able to ensure it. Throughout Christendom patronage and commendation, along with private appropriation of public powers, paved the way for a new political and social system.

Gifts of land and royal rights to thegns and churches.

The Anglo-Saxon kings, under the pressure of necessities which were not peculiar to them, at an early period bestowed on their thegns and on churches either lands or the rights which they possessed over some village and the community of freemen who dwelt there. Thenceforward such thegns or churches levied on their own account the taxes, dues and supplies hitherto due to the king; for example, the profitable firma unius noctis. Armed with this right the recipient became the lord of the free village, the peasants commended themselves to him,1 and the parcel of land or the house which he possessed in the neighbourhood became a centre of manorial organisation; the lands of the peasants who had commended themselves came ultimately to be considered as in some way held of him. The grant of judicial rights (sac and soc) was also a powerful instrument of subjection. When a church or thegn received a grant of sac and soc in a district the rights

Commendation.

Sac and Soc.

arable land and rights of common necessary for the maintenance of a family. The actual number of acres in the real hide was often 120, but not always. The hide is not therefore an agrarian measure; it is the unit of landed property, the terra familiae, and we must doubtless conclude that the hundred was an aggregation of a hundred of these hides. See Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 141, 151 sqq., 170, 250, Note 33. Stubbs says elsewhere (op. cit. p. 185) that "the hide is the provision of a family." He ought to have adhered to that definition.

1. On Anglo-Saxon commendation, see Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond. p. 69; Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, vol. i, pp. 30, 31.

so conferred were exercised, either in the court of the hundred or in whatever popular court it pleased the grantee to set up; the reeve of the church or thegn presided over the court and received the fines. Stubbs ascribes the beginning of grants of sac and soc to the reign of Canute; but Mr. Maitland makes them go back to the seventh century.1

Results of the struggle against the Danes.

The evolution which was carrying England towards the seignorial régime became a very much speedier process in consequence of the struggles against the Danes in the ninth and tenth centuries. Professional soldiers, expensively armed, were alone capable of arresting this new wave of barbarians, and they necessarily became privileged persons. Military service was henceforth the obligation and attribute of thegns. Most of them had at least five hides, that is to say, landed property five times as large as the old normal family holding, and the revenue of their estates allowed them, with the serjeants whom they maintained (geneats, radknights, drengs) to devote themselves entirely to the profession of arms. A deeply defined division began to show itself between these thegns or twelfhynd-men and the simple ceorls or twyhynd-men, who continued to till the land and lost their old warlike character, that is to say, their best title to the privileges of a freeman. There remained soldiers on the one hand and tillers of the soil on the other. Labour in the fields had been formerly the occupation of every freeman; it was henceforward a sign of inferiority. At the same time the old tradition of the inalienable family holding grew weaker, many of the ceorls no longer had the hide necessary for maintaining a household and the

Military and landed aristocracy.

1. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 80 sqq., 226 sqq., 236 sqq., 258 sqq., 318 sqq.; Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 212 sqq.

2. On the meaning of the terms twelfhynd-men and twyhynd-men, see below, pp. 36 sqq.

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 The England state of rural England at the end of the 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 Review, iv, 1889, pp. 723 sqq.

B