Hugh Pincerna holds of the bishop of Winchester 2-1/2 1/2
The king 1/2
Ralph and Robert hold of Hardouin de Eschalers 1 1-1/2
Earl Roger 1
Picot the sheriff 1/2
Alwin Hamelecoc the bedel holds of the king 1/2
_____ _____
5 0
Now in Domesday Book we must look to several different pages to get this
information about the vill of Abington,--to one page for Earl Roger's
land, to another page for Picot's land, and we may easily miss the
important fact that this vill of Abington has been rated as a whole at
the neat, round figure of 5 hides. And then we see that the whole
hundred of Armingford has been rated at the neat, round figure of 100
hides, and has consisted of six vills rated at 10 hides apiece and eight
vills rated at 5 hides apiece[30]. Thus we are brought to look upon the
vill as a unit in a system of assessment. All this is concealed from us
by the form of Domesday Book.
[Stability of the vill.]
When that book mentions the name of a place, when it says that Roger
holds Sutton or that Ralph holds three hides in Norton, we regard that
name as the name of a vill; it may or may not be also the name of a
manor. Speaking very generally we may say that the place so named will
in after times be known as a vill and in our own day will be a civil
parish. No doubt in some parts of the country new vills have been
created since the Conqueror's time. Some names that occur in our record
fail to obtain a permanent place on the roll of English vills, become
the names of hamlets or disappear altogether; on the other hand, new
names come to the front. Of course we dare not say dogmatically that all
the names mentioned in Domesday Book were the names of vills; very
possibly (if this distinction was already known) some of them were the
names of hamlets; nor, again, do we imply that the _villa_ of 1086 had
much organization; but a place that is mentioned in Domesday Book will
probably be recognized as a vill in the thirteenth, a civil parish in
the nineteenth century. Let us take Cambridgeshire by way of example.
Excluding the Isle of Ely, we find that the political geography of the
Conqueror's reign has endured until our own time. The boundaries of the
hundreds lie almost where they lay, the number of vills has hardly been
increased or diminished. The chief changes amount to this:--A small
tract on the east side of the county containing Exning and Bellingham
has been made over to Suffolk; four other names contained in Domesday no
longer stand for parishes, while the names of five of our modern
parishes--one of them is the significant name of Newton--are not found
there[31]. But about a hundred and ten vills that were vills in 1086
are vills or civil parishes at the present day, and in all probability
they then had approximately the same boundaries that they have now.
[Omission of vills.]
This may be a somewhat too favourable example of permanence and
continuity. Of all counties Cambridgeshire is the one whose ancient
geography can be the most easily examined; but wherever we have looked
we have come to the conclusion that the distribution of England into
vills is in the main as old as the Norman conquest[32]. Two causes of
difficulty may be noticed, for they are of some interest. Owing to what
we have called the 'notional movability' of land, we never can be quite
sure that when certain hides or acres are said to be in or lie in a
certain place they are really and physically in that place. They are
really in one village, but they are spoken of as belonging to another
village, because their occupants pay their geld or do their services in
the latter. Manorial and fiscal geography interferes with physical and
villar geography. We have lately seen how land rated at five hides was
comprised, as a matter of fact, in the vill of Abington; but of those
five hides, one virgate 'lay in' Shingay, a half-hide 'lay in'
Litlington while a half-virgate 'lay and had always lain' in Morden[33].
This, if we mistake not, leads in some cases to an omission of the names
of small vills. A great lord has a compact estate, perhaps the whole of
one of the small southern hundreds. He treats it as a whole, and all the
land that he has there will be ascribed to some considerable village in
which he has his hall. We should be rash in supposing that there were no
other villages on this land. For example, in Surrey there is now-a-days
a hundred called Farnham which comprises the parish of Farnham, the
parish of Frensham and some other villages. If we mistake not, all that
Domesday Book has to say of the whole of this territory is that the
Bishop of Winchester holds Farnham, that it has been rated at 60 hides,
that it has been worth the large sum of £65 a year and that there are so
many tenants upon it[34]. We certainly must not draw the inference that
there was but one vill in this tract. If the bishop is tenant in chief
of the whole hundred and has become responsible for all the geld that
is levied therefrom, there is no great reason why the surveyors should
trouble themselves about the vills. Thus the simple _Episcopus tenet
Ferneham_ may dispose of some 25,000 acres of land. So the same bishop
has an estate at Chilcombe in Hampshire; but clearly the name
_Ciltecumbe_ covers a wide territory for there are no less than nine
churches upon it[35]. We never can be very certain about the boundaries
of these large and compact estates.
[Fission of vills.]
A second cause of difficulty lies in the fact that in comparatively
modern times, from the twelfth century onwards, two or three contiguous
villages will often bear the same name and be distinguished only by what
we may call their surnames--thus Guilden Morden and Steeple Morden,
Stratfield Saye, Stratfield Turgis, Stratfield Mortimer, Tolleshunt
Knights, Tolleshunt Major, Tolleshunt Darcy. Such cases are common; in
some districts they are hardly exceptional. Doubtless they point to a
time when a single village by some process of colonization or
subdivision become two villages. Now Domesday Book seldom enables us to
say for certain whether the change has already taken place. In a few
instances it marks off the little village from the great village of the
same name[36]. In some other instances it will speak, for example, of
_Mordune_ and _Mordune Alia_, of _Emingeforde_ and _Emingeforde Alia_,
or the like, thus showing both that the change has taken place, and also
that it is so recent that it is recognized only by very clumsy terms. In
Cambridgeshire, since we have the original verdicts, we can see that the
two Mordens are already distinct; the one is rated at ten hides, the
other at five[37]. On the other hand, we can see that our Great and
Little Shelford are rated as one vill of twenty hides[38], our Castle
Camps and Shudy Camps as one vill of five hides[39]. Elsewhere we are
left to guess whether the fission is complete, and the surnames that
many of our vills ultimately acquire, the names of families which rose
to greatness in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, will often suggest
that the surveyors saw but one vill where we see two[40]. However, the
broad truth stands out that England was divided into vills and that in
general the vill of Domesday Book is still a vill in after days[41].
[The nucleated village and the vill of scattered steads.]
The 'vill' or 'town' of the later middle ages was, like the 'civil
parish' of our own day, a tract of land with some houses on it, and this
tract was a unit in the national system of police and finance[42], But
we are not entitled to make for ourselves any one typical picture of the
English vill. We are learning from the ordnance map (that marvellous
palimpsest, which under Dr Meitzen's guidance we are beginning to
decipher) that in all probability we must keep at least two types before
our minds. On the one hand, there is what we might call the true village
or the nucleated village. In the purest form of this type there is one
and only one cluster of houses. It is a fairly large cluster; it stands
in the midst of its fields, of its territory, and until lately a
considerable part of its territory will probably have consisted of
spacious 'common fields.' In a country in which there are villages of
this type the parish boundaries seem almost to draw themselves[43]. On
the other hand, we may easily find a country in which there are few
villages of this character. The houses which lie within the boundary of
the parish are scattered about in small clusters; here two or three,
there three or four. These clusters often have names of their own, and
it seems a mere chance that the name borne by one of them should be also
the name of the whole parish or vill[44]. We see no traces of very large
fields. On the face of the map there is no reason why a particular group
of cottages should be reckoned to belong to this parish rather than to
the next. As our eyes grow accustomed to the work we may arrive at some
extremely important conclusions such as those which Meitzen has
suggested. The outlines of our nucleated villages may have been drawn
for us by Germanic settlers, whereas in the land of hamlets and
scattered steads old Celtic arrangements may never have been thoroughly
effaced. Towards theories of this kind we are slowly winning our way.
In the meantime let us remember that a _villa_ of Domesday Book may
correspond to one of at least two very different models or may be
intermediate between various types. It may be a fairly large and
agrarianly organic unit, or it may be a group of small agrarian units
which are being held together in one whole merely by an external force,
by police law and fiscal law[45].
[Illustrations by maps.]
Two little fragments of 'the original one inch ordnance map' will be
more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written discourse. The
one pictures a district on the border between Oxfordshire and Berkshire
cut by the Thames and the main line of the Great Western Railway; the
other a district on the border between Devon and Somerset, north of
Collumpton and south of Wiveliscombe. Neither is an extreme example.
True villages we may easily find. Cambridgeshire, for instance, would
have afforded some beautiful specimens, for many of the 'open fields'
were still open when the ordnance map of that county was made. But
throughout large tracts of England, even though there has been an
'inclosure' and there are no longer any open fields, our map often shows
a land of villages. When it does so and the district that it portrays is
a purely agricultural district, we may generally assume without going
far wrong that the villages are ancient, for during at least the last
three centuries the predominant current in our agrarian history has set
against the formation of villages and towards the distribution of
scattered homesteads. To find the purest specimens of a land of hamlets
we ought to go to Wales or to Cornwall or to other parts of 'the Celtic
fringe'; very fair examples might be found throughout the west of
England. Also we may perhaps find hamlets rather than villages wherever
there have been within the historic period large tracts of forest land.
Very often, again, the parish or township looks on our map like a
hybrid. We seem to see a village with satellitic hamlets. Much more
remains to be done before we shall be able to construe the testimony of
our fields and walls and hedges, but at least two types of vill must be
in our eyes when we are reading Domesday Book[46].
[Illustration: A LAND OF VILLAGES
_On the border between Oxfordshire and Berkshire._
[_Between pp._ 16-17]]
[Illustration: A LAND OF HAMLETS
_On the border between Somerset and Devon._]
[Size of the vill.]
To say that the _villa_ of Domesday Book is in general the vill of the
thirteenth century and the civil parish of the nineteenth is to say that
the areal extent of the _villa_ varied widely from case to case. More
important is it for us to observe that the number of inhabitants of the
_villa_ varied widely from case to case. The error into which we are
most likely to fall will be that of making our vill too populous. Some
vills, especially some royal vills, are populous enough; a few contain a
hundred households; but the average township is certainly much smaller
than this[47]. Before we give any figures, it should first be observed
that Domesday Book never enables us to count heads. It states the number
of the tenants of various classes, _sochemanni_, _villani_, _bordarii_,
and the like, and leaves us to suppose that each of these persons is, or
may be, the head of a household. It also states how many _servi_ there
are. Whether we ought to suppose that only the heads of servile
households are reckoned, or whether we ought to think of the _servi_ as
having no households but as living within the lord's gates and being
enumerated, men, women and able-bodied children, by the head--this is a
difficult question. Still we may reach some results which will enable us
to compare township with township. By way of fair sample we may take the
Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire, and all persons who are above the
rank of _servi_ we will include under the term 'the non-servile
population[48].'
ARMINGFORD HUNDRED.
Non-servile
population Servi Total
Abington 19 0 19
Bassingbourn 35 3 38
Clapton 19 0 19
Croydon 29 0 29
Hatley 18 3 21
Litlington 37 6 43
Melbourn 62 1 63
Meldreth 44 7 51
Morden 43 11 54
Morden Alia 50 0 50
Shingay 18 0 18
Tadlow 27 4 31
Wendy 12 4 16
Whaddon 44 6 50
--- --- ---
Total 457 45 502
Here in fourteen vills we have an average of thirty-two non-servile
households for every vill. Now even in our own day a parish with
thirty-two houses, though small, is not extremely small. But we should
form a wrong picture of the England of the eleventh century if we filled
all parts of it with such vills as these. We will take at random
fourteen vills in Staffordshire held by Earl Roger[49].
Non-servile
population Servi Total
Claverlege 45 0 45
Nordlege 9 0 9
Alvidelege 13 0 13
Halas 40 2 42
Chenistelei 11 0 11
Otne 7 1 8
Nortberie 20 1 21
Erlide 8 2 10
Gaitone 16 0 16
Cressvale 8 0 8
Dodintone 3 0 3
Modreshale 5 0 5
Almentone 8 0 8
Metford 7 1 8
--- --- ---
Total 200 7 207
Here for fourteen vills we have an average of but fourteen non-servile
households and the _servi_ are so few that we may neglect them. We will
next look at a page in the survey of Somersetshire which describes
certain vills that have fallen to the lot of the bishop of
Coutances[50].
Non-servile
population Servi Total
Winemeresham 8 3 11
Chetenore 3 1 4
Widicumbe 21 6 27
Harpetrev 10 2 12
Hotune 11 0 11
Lilebere 6 1 7
Wintreth 4 2 6
Aisecome 11 7 18
Clutone 22 1 23
Temesbare 7 3 10
Nortone 16 3 19
Cliveham 15 1 16
Ferenberge 13 6 19
Cliveware 6 0 6
--- --- ---
Total 153 36 189
Here we have on the average but eleven non-servile households for each
village, and even if we suppose each _servus_ to represent a household,
we have not fourteen households. Yet smaller vills will be found in
Devonshire, many vills in which the total number of the persons
mentioned does not exceed ten and near half of these are _servi_. In
Cornwall the townships, if townships we ought to call them, are yet
smaller; often we can attribute no more than five or six families to the
vill even if we include the _servi_.
[Population of the vills.]
[Contrast between east and west.]
Unless our calculations mislead us, the density of the population in the
average vill of a given county varies somewhat directly with the density
of the population in that county; at all events we can not say that
where vills are populous, vills will be few. As regards this matter no
precise results are attainable; our document is full of snares for
arithmeticians. Still if for a moment we have recourse to the crude
method of dividing the number of acres comprised in a modern county by
the number of the persons who are mentioned in the survey of that
county, the outcome of our calculation will be remarkable and will point
to some broad truth[51]. For Suffolk the quotient is 46 or thereabouts;
for Norfolk but little larger[52]; for Essex 61, for Lincoln 67; for
Bedford, Berkshire, Northampton, Leicester, Middlesex, Oxford, Kent and
Somerset it lies between 70 and 80, for Buckingham, Warwick, Sussex,
Wiltshire and Dorset it lies between 80 and 90; Devon, Gloucester,
Worcester, Hereford are thinly peopled, Cornwall, Stafford, Shropshire
very thinly. Some particular results that we should thus attain would be
delusive. Thus we should say that men were sparse in Cambridgeshire, did
we not remember that a large part of our modern Cambridgeshire was then
a sheet of water. Permanent physical causes interfere with the operation
of the general rule. Thus Surrey, with its wide heaths has, as we might
expect, but few men to the square mile. Derbyshire has many vills lying
waste; Yorkshire is so much wasted that it can give us no valuable
result; and again, Yorkshire and Cheshire were larger than they are now,
while Rutland and the adjacent counties had not their present
boundaries. For all this however, we come to a very general rule:--the
density of the population decreases as we pass from east to west. With
this we may connect another rule:--land is much more valuable in the
east than it is in the west. This matter is indeed hedged in by many
thorny questions; still whatever hypothesis we may adopt as to the mode
in which land was valued, one general truth comes out pretty plainly,
namely, that, economic arrangements being what they were, it was far
better to have a team-land in Essex than to have an equal area of arable
land in Devon.
[Small vills.]
Between eastern and western England there were differences visible to
the natural eye. With these were connected unseen and legal differences,
partly as causes, partly as effects. But for the moment let us dwell on
the fact that many an English vill has very few inhabitants. We are to
speak hereafter of village communities. Let us therefore reflect that a
community of some eight or ten householders is not likely to be a highly
organized entity. This is not all, for these eight or ten householders
will often belong to two, three or four different social and economic,
if not legal, classes. Some may be sokemen, some _villani_, _bordarii_,
_cotarii_, and besides them there will be a few _servi_. If a vill
consists, as in Devonshire often enough it will, of some three
_villani_, some four _bordarii_ and some two _servi_, the
'township-moot,' if such a moot there be, will be a queer little
assembly, the manorial court, if such a court there be, will not have
much to do. These men can not have many communal affairs; there will be
no great scope for dooms or for by-laws; they may well take all their
disputes into the hundred court, especially in Devonshire where the
hundreds are small. Thus of the visible vill of the eleventh century and
its material surroundings we may form a wrong notion. Often enough in
the west its common fields (if common fields it had) were not wide
fields; the men who had shares therein were few and belonged to various
classes. Thus of two villages in Gloucestershire, Brookthorpe and
Harescombe, all that we can read is that in Brostrop there were two
teams, one _villanus_, three _bordarii_, four _servi_, while in
Hersecome there were two teams, two _bordarii_ and five _servi_[53].
Many a Devonshire township can produce but two or three teams. Often
enough our 'village community' will be a heterogeneous little group
whose main capital consists of some 300 acres of arable land and some 20
beasts of the plough.
[Importance of the east.]
On the other hand, we must be careful not to omit from our view the
rich and thickly populated shires or to imagine or to speak as though we
imagined that a general theory of English history can neglect the East
of England. If we leave Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk out of account
we are to all appearance leaving out of account not much less than a
quarter of the whole nation[54]. Let us make three groups of counties:
(1) a South-Western group containing Devon, Somerset, Dorset and
Wiltshire: (2) a Mid-Western group containing the shires of Gloucester,
Worcester, Hereford, Salop, Stafford and Warwick: (3) an Eastern group
containing Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. The first of these groups
has the largest; the third the smallest acreage. In Domesday Book,
however, the figures which state their population seem to be
these[55]:--
South-Western Group: 49,155
Mid-Western Group: 33,191
Eastern Group: 72,883
These figures are so emphatic that they may cause us for a moment to
doubt their value, and on details we must lay no stress. But we have
materials which enable us to check the general effect. In 1297 Edward I.
levied a lay subsidy of a ninth[56]. The sums borne by our three groups
of counties were these:--
£
South-Western Group: 4,038
Mid-Western Group: 3,514
Eastern Group: 7,329
There is a curious resemblance between these two sets of figures. Then
in 1377 and 1381 returns were made for a poll-tax[57]. The number of
polls returned in our three groups were these:--
1377 1381
South-Western Group: 183,842 106,086
Mid-Western Group: 158,245 115,679
Eastern Group: 255,498 182,830
No doubt all inferences drawn from medieval statistics are exceedingly
precarious; but, unless a good many figures have conspired to deceive
us, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were at the time of the Conquest
and for three centuries afterwards vastly richer and more populous than
any tract of equal area in the West.
[Manorial and non-manorial vills.]
Another distinction between the eastern counties and the rest of England
is apparent. In many shires we shall find that the name of each vill is
mentioned once and no more. This is so because the land of each vill
belongs in its entirety to some one tenant in chief. We may go further:
we may say, though at present in an untechnical sense, that each vill is
a manor. Such is the general rule, though there will be exceptions to
it. On the other hand, in the eastern counties this rule will become the
exception. For example, of the fourteen vills in the Armingford hundred
of Cambridgeshire there is but one of which it is true that the whole
of its land is held by a single tenant in chief. In this county it is
common to find that three or four Norman lords hold land in the same
vill. This seems true not only of Cambridgeshire but also of Essex,
Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, and some parts of
Yorkshire. Even in other districts of England the rule that each vill
has a single lord is by no means unbroken in the Conqueror's day and we
can see that there were many exceptions to it in the Confessor's. A
careful examination of all England vill by vill would perhaps show that
the contrast which we are noting is neither so sharp nor so ancient as
at first sight it seems to be: nevertheless it exists.
[The distribution of free men and serfs.]
A better known contrast there is. The eastern counties are the home of
liberty[58]. We may divide the tillers of the soil into five great
classes; these in order of dignity and freedom are (1) _liberi homines_,
(2) _sochemanni_, (3) _villani_, (4) _bordarii_, _cotarii_ etc., (5)
_servi_. The two first of these classes are to be found in large numbers
only in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire
and Northamptonshire. We shall hereafter see that Cambridgeshire also
has been full of sokemen, though since the Conquest they have fallen
from their high estate. On the other hand, the number of _servi_
increases pretty steadily as we cross the country from east to west. It
reaches its maximum in Cornwall and Gloucestershire; it is very low in
Norfolk, Suffolk, Derby, Leicester, Middlesex, Sussex; it descends to
zero in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. This descent to zero may fairly warn
us that the terms with which we are dealing may not bear precisely the
same meaning in all parts of England, or that a small class is apt to be
reckoned as forming part of a larger class. But still it is clear enough
that some of these terms are used with care and express real and
important distinctions.
[The classification of men.]