in Domesday Book about _maneria_ is admirably designed for the deception
of modern readers whose heads are full of 'the manorial system.'
Therefore let us look at two Hertfordshire villages. In one of them
there is a _manerium_ which Ralph Basset holds of Robert of Ouilly[573].
It has been rated at 4, but is now rated at 2 hides. There is land for 4
teams. In demesne are 2 teams; and 3-1/2 _villani_ with 2 sokemen of 1
hide and 5 _bordarii_ have 2 teams. There are 1 cottager and 1 serf and
a mill of 10 shillings and meadow for 3 teams. It is now worth £3; in
King Edward's day it was worth £5. Now here, we say, is a pretty little
manor of the common kind. Let us then explore its past history. 'Five
sokemen held this manor.' Yes, we say, before the Conquest this manor
was held in physically undivided shares by five lords. Their shares were
small and they were humble people; but still they had a manor. But let
us read further. 'Two of them were the men of Brihtric and held 1-1/2
hides; other two were the men of Osulf the son of Frane and held 1-1/2
hides; and the fifth was the man of Eadmer Atule and held a hide.' We
will at once finish the story and see how Robert of Ouilly came by this
manor. 'No one of these five sokemen belonged to his _antecessor_ Wigot;
every one of them might sell his land. One of them bought (i.e.
redeemed) his land for nine ounces of gold from King William, so the men
of the hundred say, and afterwards turned for protection to Wigot.' So
Robert's title to this manor is none of the best. But are we sure that
before the Conquest there was anything that we should call a manor?
These five sokemen who have unequal shares, who have three different
lords, who hold in all but 4 team-lands, whose land is worth but £5, do
not look like a set of coparceners to whom a 'manor' has descended. When
Robert of Ouilly has got his manor there are upon it 2 sokemen, 3
villeins, 5 _bordarii_, a cottager and a serf. It was not a splendid
manor for five lords.
[Hertfordshire sokemen.]
We turn over a few pages. Hardouin of Eschalers has a manor rated at
5-1/2 hides[574]. It contains land for 8 teams. In demesne are 2 hides
less 20 acres, and 3 teams; 11 _villani_ with the priest and 5
_bordarii_ have 5 teams. There are 4 cottagers and 6 serfs. It is worth
£9; in the Confessor's day it was worth £10. Who held this manor in the
past? Nine sokemen held it. Rather a large party of joint lords, we say;
but still, families will grow. Howbeit, we must finish the
sentence:--'Of these, one, Sired by name, was the man of Earl Harold and
held 1 hide and 3 virgates for a manor; another, Alfred, a man of Earl
Ælfgar, held 1-1/2 hides for a manor; and the other seven were sokemen
of King Edward and held 2 hides and 1 virgate and they supplied the
sheriff with 9 pence a year or 2-1/4 _averae_ (carrying services).' No,
we have not been reading of the joint holders of a 'manor'; we have been
reading of peasant proprietors. Two of them were substantial folk; each
of the two held a _manerium_ at which geld was paid; the other seven
gelded at one of the king's _maneria_ under the view of his bailiffs.
_Maneria_ there have been everywhere; but 'manors' we see in the making.
Hardouin has made one under our eyes.
[The small _maneria_.]
We hear the objection that, be it never so humble, a manor is a manor.
But is that truism quite true? If all that we want for the constitution
of a manor is a proprietor of some land who has a right to exact from
some other man, or two or three other men, the whole or some part of the
labour that is necessary for the tillage of his soil, we may indeed see
manors everywhere and at all times. Even if we introduce a more
characteristically medieval element and demand that the tillers shall be
neither menial servants nor labourers hired for money, but men who make
their living by cultivating for their own behoof small plots which the
proprietor allows them to occupy, still we shall have the utmost
difficulty if we would go behind manorialism. But suppose for a moment
that we have a village the land of which is being held by nine sokemen,
each of whom has a hide or half-hide scattered about in the open fields,
and each of whom controls the labour of a couple of serfs, shall we not
be misleading the public and ourselves if we speak of nine manors or
even of nine 'embryo manors'? At any rate it is clear enough that if
these estates of the sokemen are 'embryo manors,' then these embryos
were deposited in the common fields. In that case the common fields, the
hides and yard-lands of the village are not the creatures of
manorialism.
[The Danes and freedom.]
We have seen free villages; we have seen a free hundred. We might have
found yet freer hundreds had we gone to Suffolk. We have chosen
Cambridgeshire because Cambridgeshire can not be called a Danish county,
except in a sense in which, notwithstanding the wasted condition of
Yorkshire, about one half of the English nation lived in Danish
counties. When men divide up England between the three laws, they place
Cambridgeshire under the Danelaw; but to that law they subject about one
half of the inhabitants of England. There may have been many men of
Scandinavian race in Cambridgeshire; but we find hundreds not
wapentakes, hides not carucates, while among the names of villages there
are few indeed which betray a Scandinavian origin. The Wetherley hundred
was not many miles away from the classic fields of Hitchin[575].
[The Danish counties.]
But in truth we must be careful how we use our Dane. Yorkshire was a
Danish county in a sense in which Cambridgeshire was not Danish; it was
a land of trithings and wapentakes, a land without hides, where many a
village testified by its name to a Scandinavian settlement. And yet to
all appearance it was in the Confessor's day a land where the manors
stood thick[576]. Then we have that wonderful contrast between Yorkshire
and Lincolnshire which Ellis summed up in these figures:--
Sochemanni Villani Bordarii
Lincolnshire 11,503 7,723 4,024
Yorkshire 447 5,079 1,819
Perhaps this contrast would have been less violent if Yorkshire had not
been devastated: but violent it is and must be. It will provoke the
remark that the 'faults' (if any faults there be) in a truly economic
stratification of mankind are not likely to occur just at the boundaries
of the shires, whereas so long as each county has a court from which
there is no appeal to any central tribunal, we may expect to find that
lines which have their origin in fiscal practice will be sharp lines and
will coincide with the metes and bounds of jurisdictional districts.
[The contrast between villeins and sokemen.]
Nor should it escape remark that the names by which a grand distinction
is expressed are in their origin very loose terms and etymologically
ill-fitted to the purpose that they are serving. In English the
_villanus_ is the _túnesman_ or, as we should say, the villager. And yet
to all seeming the sokeman is essentially a villager. What is more the
land where the sokemen and 'free men' lived was a land of true villages,
of big villages, of limitless 'open fields,' whereas the hamleted west
was servile. Then again _sokeman_ is a very odd term. If it signified
that the man to whom it is applied was always the justiciable of the
lord to whom he was commended, we could understand it. Even if this man
were always the justiciable of a court that had passed into private
hands, we could still understand it. But apparently there are plenty of
sokemen whose soke 'is' or 'lies' in those hundred courts that have no
lord but the king. The best guess that we can make as to the manner in
which they have acquired their name is that in an age which is being
persuaded that some 'service' must be done by every one who holds land,
suit of court appears as the only service that is done by all these men.
They may owe other services; but they all owe suit of court. If so we
may see their legal successors in those freeholders of the twelfth
century who are 'acquitting' their lords and their villages by doing
suit at the national courts[577]. But when a new force comes into play
(and the tribute to the pirate was a new and a powerful force) new lines
of demarcation must be drawn, new classes of men must be formed and
words will be borrowed for the purpose with little care for
etymological niceties. One large and widely-spread class may find a name
for itself in a district where the ordinary 'townsmen' or villagers are
no longer treated as taxpayers responsible to the state, while some
practice peculiar to a small part of the country may confer the name of
'sokemen' on those tillers of the soil who are rated to the geld. We are
not arguing that this distinction, even when it first emerged, implied
nothing that concerned the economic position of the villein and the
sokeman. The most dependent peasants would naturally be the people who
could not be directly charged with the geld, and the peasants who could
not pay the geld would naturally become dependent on those who would pay
it for them; still we are not entitled to assume that the fiscal scheme
accurately mirrored the economic facts, or that the varying practice of
different moots and different collectors may not have stamped as the
villeins of one shire those who would have been the sokemen of
another[578].
[Free villages.]
Be this as it may, any theory of English history must face the free, the
lordless, village and must account for it as for one of the normal
phenomena which existed in the year of grace 1066. How common it was we
shall never know until the material contained in Domesday Book has been
geographically rearranged by counties, hundreds and vills. But whether
common or no, it was normal, just as normal as the village which was
completely subject to seignorial power. We have before us villages
which, taken as wholes, have no lords. What is more, it seems obvious
enough that, unless there has been some great catastrophe in the past,
some insurrection of the peasants or the like, the village of
Orwell--and other villages might be named by the dozen--has never had a
lord. Such lordships as exist in it are plainly not the relics of a
dominion which has been split up among divers persons by the action of
gifts and inheritances. The sokemen of Orwell have worshipped every
rising sun. One has commended himself to the ill-fated Harold, another
to the ill-fated Waltheof, a third has chosen the Mercian Ælfgar, a
fourth has placed himself under the aspiring Archbishop; yet all are
free to 'withdraw.' We have here a very free village indeed, for its
members enjoy a freedom of which no freeholder of the thirteenth century
would even dream, and in a certain sense we have here a free village
community. How much communalism is there? Of this most difficult
question only a few words will now be said, for our guesses about remote
ages we will yet a while reserve.
[Village communities.]
In the first place, we can not doubt that the 'open field system' of
agriculture prevails as well in the free villages as in those that are
under the control of a lord. The sokeman's hide or virgate is no
ring-fenced 'close' but is composed of many scattered strips. Again, we
can hardly doubt that the practice of 'co-aration' prevailed. The
sokeman had seldom beasts enough to make up a team. It is well known
that the whole scheme of land-measurements which runs through Domesday
Book is based upon the theory that land is ploughed by teams of eight
oxen. It is perhaps possible that smaller teams were sometimes employed;
but when we read that a certain man 'always ploughed with three
oxen[579],' or 'used to plough with two oxen but now ploughs with half a
team[580],' or 'used to plough with a team but now ploughs with two
oxen[581],' we are reading, not of small teams, but of the number of
oxen that the man in question contributed towards the team of eight that
was made up by him and his neighbours. When of a piece of land in
Bedfordshire it is said that 'one ox ploughs there,' this means that the
land in question supplies but one ox in a team of eight[582]; and here
and not in any monstrous birth do we find the explanation of 'terra est
dimidio bovi et ibi est semibos[583]':--there is a sixteenth part of a
teamland and its tenant along with some other man provides an ox. There
may have been light ploughs as well as heavy ploughs, but the heavy
plough must have been extremely common, since the term 'plough team'
(_caruca_) seems invariably to mean a team of eight.
[The villagers as co-owners.]
Then one notable case meets our eye in which the ownership of land, of
arable land, seems to be attributed to a village community. In
Goldington, a village in Bedfordshire, Walter now holds a hide; there is
land for one team and meadow for half a team. 'The men of the vill held
this land in common and could sell it[584].' Apparently the men of the
vill were Ælfwin Sac a man of the Bishop of Lincoln who held half a
team-land and 'could do what he liked with it,' nine sokemen who held
three team-lands between them, three other sokemen who held three
team-lands, and Ælfmær a man of Asgil who held three team-lands[585].
How it came about that these men, besides holding land in severalty,
held a tract in common, we are left to guess. Nor can we say whether
such a case was usual or unusual. Very often in Little Domesday we meet
an entry which tells how _x_ free men held _y_ acres and had _z_ teams;
for example, how 15 free men held 40 acres and had 2 teams[586]. In
general we may well suppose that each of them held his strips in
severalty, but we dare not say that such a phrase never points to
co-ownership.
[The waste land of the vill.]
Then as to such part of the land as is not arable:--Even in the free
village a few enclosed meadows will probably be found; but the pasture
ground lies open for 'the cattle of the vill.' At the date of the
survey, though several Norman lords have estates in one vill, the common
formula used in connexion with each estate is, not 'there is pasture for
the cattle of this manor, or of this land,' but 'there is pasture for
the cattle of the vill.' Occasionally we read of 'common pasture' in a
context which shows that the pasture is common not to several manorial
lords but to the villeins of one lord[587]. In the hundred of Coleness
in Suffolk there is a pasture which is common to all the men of the
hundred[588]. But, as might be expected, we hear little of the mode in
which pasture rights were allotted or regulated. Such rights were
probably treated as appurtenances of the arable land:--'The canons of
Waltham claim as much wood as belongs to one hide[589].' If the rights
of user are known, no one cares about the bare ownership of pasture land
or wood land:--it is all one whether we say that Earl Edwin is entitled
to one third of a certain wood or to every third oak that grows
therein[590].
[Co-ownership of mills.]
Sometimes the ownership of a mill is divided into so many shares that we
are tempted to think that this mill has been erected at the cost of the
vill. In Suffolk a free man holds a little _manerium_ which is composed
of 24 acres of land, 1-1/2 acres of meadow and 'a fourth part of the
mill in every third year[591]':--he takes his turn with his neighbours
in the enjoyment of the revenue of the mill. We may even be led to
suspect that the parish churches have sometimes been treated as
belonging to the men of the vill who have subscribed to erect or to
endow them. In Suffolk a twelfth part of a church belongs to a petty
_manerium_ which contains 30 acres and is cultivated by two bordiers
with a single team[592]. When a parish church gets its virgate by 'the
charity of the neighbours[593],' when nine free men give it twenty acres
for the good of their souls[594], we may see in this some trace of
communal action.
[The system of virgates in a free village.]
Incidentally we may notice that the system of virgate holdings seems
quite compatible with an absence of seignorial control. In the free
village, for example in Orwell, we shall often find that one man has
twice, thrice or four times as much as another man:--the same is the
case in the manorialized villages of Middlesex, where a villein may have
as much as a hide or as little as a half-virgate; but all the holdings
will bear, at least in theory, some simple relation to each other. Thus
in Orwell the virgates are divided into thirds and quarters, and in
several instances a man has four thirds of a virgate. In Essex and East
Anglia, though we may find many irregular and many very small holdings,
tenements of 60, 45, 40, 30, 20, 15 acres are far commoner than they
would be were it not that a unit of 120 acres will very easily break
into such pieces. Domesday Book takes no notice of family law and its
'vendere potuit' merely excludes the interference of the lord and does
not imply that a man is at liberty to disappoint his expectant heirs.
Very possibly there has been among the small folk but little giving or
selling of land.
[The virgates and inheritance.]
Nor is a law which gives the dead man's land to all his sons as co-heirs
a sufficient force to destroy the system of hides and virgates when once
it is established by some original allotment. In the higher ranks of
society we see large groups of thegns holding land in common, holding as
the Normans say 'in parage.' We can hardly doubt that they are co-heirs
holding an inheritance that has not been physically partitioned[595].
Sometimes it is said of a single man that he holds in parage[596]. This
gives us a valuable hint. Holding in parage implies that one of the
'pares,' one of the parceners,--as a general rule he would be the eldest
of them--is answerable to king and lord for the services due from the
land, while his fellows are bound only to him; they must help him to
discharge duties for which he is primarily responsible[597]. This seems
the import of such passages as the following--'Five thegns held two
bovates; one of them was the _senior_ (the elder, and we may almost
say the lord) of the others[598]'--'Eight thegns held this manor;
one of them Alli, a man of King Edward, was the _senior_ of the
others[599]'--'Godric and his brothers held three carucates; two of
them served the third[600]'--'Chetel and Turver were brothers and
after the death of their father they divided the land, but so that
Chetel in doing the king's service should have help from Turver his
brother[601]'--'Siwate, Alnod, Fenchel and Aschil divided the land of
their father equally, and they held in such wise that if there were need
for attendance in the king's host and Siwate could go, his brothers were
to aid him [with money and provisions]; and on the next occasion another
brother was to go and Siwate like the rest was to help him; and so on
down the list; but Siwate was the king's man[602].' No doubt similar
arrangements were made by co-heirs of lowlier station[603]. The
integrity of the tenement is maintained though several men have an
interest in it. In relation to the lord and the state one of them
represents his fellows. When the shares become very small, some of the
claimants might be bought out by the others[604].
[The farm.]
But, to return to the village, we must once more notice that the Canons
of St Paul's have let their manor of Willesden to the villeins[605].
This leads us to speculate as to the incidence and collection of those
great provender rents of which we read when royal manors are described.
In King Edward's day a royal manor is often charged with the whole or
some aliquot share of a 'one night's farm,' that is one day's victual
for the king's household. Definite amounts of bread, cheese, malt, meat,
beer, honey, wool have to be supplied; thus, for example, Cheltenham
must furnish three thousand loaves for the king's dogs and King's Barton
must do the like[606]. Then too Edward the sheriff receives as the
profits of the shrievalty of Wiltshire, 130 pigs, 32 bacons, certain
quantities of wheat, malt, oats, and honey, 400 chicken, 1600 eggs, 100
cheeses, 100 lambs, 52 fleeces[607]. Between the king and the men of the
manor, no doubt there stands a farmer, either the sheriff or some other
person, who is bound to supply the due quantity of provender; but to say
that this is so does not solve the problem that is before us. We have
still to ask how this due quantity is obtained from the men of the
village. It is a quantity which can be expressed by round figures; it is
3000 dog-cakes, or the like. We do not arrive at these pretty results by
adding up the rents due from individuals. Again, just in the counties
which are the homes of freedom we hear much of sums of money that are
paid to a lord by way of free will offering[608]. In Norfolk and Suffolk
the villagers will give a yearly _gersuma_, in Lincoln they will pay a
yearly _tailla_, and this will be a neat round sum; very often it is 20
shillings, or 40 or 10.
[Round sums raised from the villages.]
In this particular we seem to see an increase of something that may be
called communalism, as we go backwards. Of course in the cartularies of
a later age we may discover round sums of money which, under the names
of 'tallage' or 'aid' are imposed upon the vill as a whole; but in
general we may accept the rule that tributes to be paid by the vill as a
whole, in money or in kind, are not of recent origin. They are more
prominent in the oldest than in other documents. As examples, we may
notice the 'cornage' of the Boldon Book--one vill renders 20 shillings,
another 30 shillings for cornage[609]; also the contributions of sheep,
poultry, bread and cloth which the vills of Peterborough Abbey bring to
the monks on the festival of their patron saint--one vill supplying ten
rams and twenty ells of cloth, another four rams, five ells of cloth,
ten chicken and three hundred loaves[610]. But then we have to notice
that a village which has to pay a provender rent or even a _tailla_ or
_gersuma_ is not altogether a free village. Its communal action is
called out by seignorial pressure.
[The township and police law.]