land as the subject-matter of grants and taxes they spoke only of arable
land[1310]. If we are to understand their sayings and doings, we must
think ourselves into an economic arrangement very different from that in
which we are now immersed. We must well-nigh abolish buying and selling.
Every village, perhaps every hide, must be very nearly self-sufficient.
Now when once population has grown so thick that nomadic practices are
forsaken, the strain of supporting mankind falls almost wholly on the
ploughed land. That strain is severe. Many acres feed few people. Thus
the arable becomes prominent. But further, arable implies pasture. This
is not a legal theory; it is a physical fact. A householder can not have
arable land unless he has pasture rights. Arable land is land that is
ploughed; ploughing implies oxen; oxen, pasture. Our householder can not
use a steam-plough; what is more, he can not buy hay. If he keeps
beasts, they must eat. If he does not keep beasts, he has no arable
land. Lastly, as a general rule men do not possess pasture land in
severalty; they turn out their beasts on 'the common of the vill.'
Therefore, in very old schemes of taxation and the like, pasture land is
neglected: not because it is unimportant, but because it is
indispensably necessary. It may be taken for granted. If a man has 120
acres of arable land, he must have adequate pasture rights; there must
be in Domesday's language _pastura sufficens carucis_. And in the
common case there will be not much more than sufficient pasture. If
there were, it would soon be broken up to provide more corn. Every
village must be self-supporting, and therefore an equilibrium of arable
and pasture will be established in every village. Thus if, for fiscal
and governmental purposes, there is to be a typical tenement, it may be
a tenement of _x_ arable acres, and nothing need be said of any other
kind of ground.
[Sidenote: The hide of 120 acres.]
We are going to argue that the Anglo-Saxons give 120 acres, arable
acres, to the hide. Our main argument will be that the equation 1 H. =
120 A. is implied in the fiscal system revealed by Domesday Book. But,
by way of making this equation probable, we may notice that, if we had
no evidence later than the Conquest, all that we should find on the face
of the Anglo-Saxon land-books would be favourable to this equation. In
the first place, on the only occasion on which we hear of the content of
a hide, it is put at 120 acres[1311]. In the second place, when a number
of acres is mentioned, it is commonly one of those numbers, such as 150,
90, 80, 60, 30, which will often occur if hides of 120 acres are being
partitioned[1312]. The force of this last remark may seem to be
diminished if we remember how excellent a dividend is 120. It is neatly
divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12. But then we must reflect that
this very quality recommended it to organizers, more especially as there
were 240 pence in the pound.
[Real and fiscal hides.]
Supposing for a moment that we bring home this equation to the
Anglo-Saxon financiers, there would still remain the question how far it
truthfully represented agrarian facts. To that question no precise
answer can be given: the truth lies somewhere between two extremes. We
must not for one instant believe that England was so neat a chess-board
as a rude fiscal theory paints, where every pawn stands on its square,
every 'family' in the centre of 120 acre-strips of 4 by 40 perches. The
barbarian, for all his materialism, is an idealist. He is, like the
child, a master in the art of make-believe. He sees things not as they
are, but as they might conveniently be. Every householder has a hide;
every hide has 120 acres of arable; every hide is worth one pound a
year; every householder has a team; every team is of eight oxen; every
team is worth one pound. If all this be not so, then it ought to be so
and must be deemed to be so. Then by a Procrustean process he packs the
complex and irregular facts into his scheme. What is worse, he will not
count. He will assume that a large district has a round 1200 hides, and
will then ordain that those hides must be found. We see this on a small
scale if we study manorial 'extents' or village maps. The virgates are
not equal; the acres are far from equal; but they are deemed to be
equal[1313]. Nevertheless, we must stop short of the other extreme or we
shall be over-estimating the power of such government and the
originality of such statesmanship as existed. Theories like those of
which we are speaking are born of facts and in their turn generate new
facts. Our forefathers really lived in a simpler and a more
chess-board-like England than that which we know. There must have been
much equality among the hides and among the villages. When we see that a
'hundred' in Cambridgeshire has exactly 100 hides which are distributed
between six vills of 10 hides apiece and eight vills of 5 hides apiece,
this simple symmetry is in part the unreal outcome of a capricious
method of taxation, but in part it is a real economic fact. There was an
English conquest of England, and, to all seeming, the conquest of
eastern England was singularly thorough. In all probability a great many
villages were formed approximately at one time and on one plan.
Conveniently simple figures could be drawn, for the slate was
clean[1314].
[Causes of divergence of fiscal from real hides.]
However, at an early time the hide becomes an unit in a system of
assessment. The language of the land-books tells us that this is
so[1315]. Already in Ine's day we hear of the amount of victual that ten
hides must find for the king's support[1316]. About the end of the tenth
century the duty of maintaining burgs is bound up with the possession of
hides[1317]. Before the end of that century heavy sums are being raised
as a tribute for the Danes. For this purpose, as we shall try to show
hereafter, 'hides' are cast upon shires and hundreds by those who,
instead of counting, make pleasantly convenient assumptions about the
capacity of provinces and districts, and in all probability the
assumptions made in the oldest times were the furthest from the truth.
Now and again the assessments of shires and hundreds were corrected in a
manner which, so far as we are concerned, only made matters worse. It
becomes apparent that hides are not of one value or nearly of one value.
This becomes painfully apparent when Cornwall and other far western
lands are brought under contribution. So large sums of hides are struck
off the poorer counties. The fiscal 'hide' becomes a lame compromise
between an unit of area and an unit of value. Then privilege confounds
confusion; the estates of favoured churches and nobles are 'beneficially
hidated.' But this is not all. Probably the real hides, the real old
settlers' tenements, which you could count if you looked at a village
and its fields, are rapidly going to pieces, and the fragments thereof
are entering into new combinations. In the lordless villages economic
forces of an easily imaginable kind will make for this end. Not only may
we suppose some increase of population, especially where Danes swarm in,
and some progress in the art of agriculture, but also the bond of blood
becomes weaker and the _familia_ that lives in one house grows smaller.
So the hides go to pieces. The birth of trade and the establishment of
markets help this process. It is no longer necessary that every tenement
should be self-sufficient; men can buy what they do not grow. The
formation of manors may have tended in some sort to arrest this
movement. A system of equal (theoretically equal) tenements was
convenient to lords who were collecting 'provender rents' and extending
their powers; but under seignorial pressure virgates, rather than
hides, were likely to become the prominent units. We may well believe
that if to make two ears of corn grow where one grew is to benefit
mankind, the lords were public benefactors, and that the husbandry of
the manors was more efficient than was that of the lordless townships.
The clergy were in touch with their fellows on the Continent; also the
church's reeve was a professional agriculturist and might even write a
tract on the management of manors[1318]. There was more cooperation,
more communalism, less waste. A family could live and thrive upon a
virgate[1319].
[Effects of the divergence of fiscal from real hides.]
But, what concerns us at the present moment is the, for us disastrous,
effect of this divergence of the fiscal from the real hide. Even if
finance had not complicated the problem, we should, as we have already
seen, have found many difficulties if we tried to construe medieval
statements of acreage. Already we should have had three different
'acres' to think of. We will imagine that a village has 590 'acre
strips' in its field. In one sense, therefore, it has 590 acres. But the
ideal to which these strips tend and were meant to conform is that of
acres measured by a rod of 15 feet. Measured by that rod there would, we
will suppose, be 550 acres. Then, however, we may use the royal rod and
say that there are 454 acres or thereabouts. But the field was divided
into five tenements that were known as hides, and the general theory is
that a hide (householder's land) contains, or must be supposed to
contain, 120 acres. Therefore there are here 600 acres. And now a
partitionary method of taxation stamps this as a vill of four hides.
Consequently the 'hide' of this village may have as many as 150 or as
few as 90 'acres.' It ought not to be so. It would not be so if men were
always distinguishing between 'acre strips' and measured acres, between
'real' hides (which, to tell truth, are no longer real, since they are
falling to pieces) and 'fiscal' or 'geld' hides. But it will be so. Here
and there we may see an effort to keep up distinctions between the
'carucate for gelding' and the 'carucate for ploughing,' between the
real acre and the acre 'for defence (_acra warae_)[1320]'; but men tire
of these long phrases and argue backwards and forwards between the
rateable and the real. Hence some of the worst puzzles of Domesday
Book[1321].
[Acreage of the hide in later days.]
Such being the causes of perplexity, it is perhaps surprising that in
the thirteenth century when we begin to obtain a large stock of manorial
extents, 'the hide' should still exhibit some uniformity. But, unless we
have been misled by a partial induction, a tendency to reckon 120 rather
than any other number of acres to the hide is plainly perceptible. The
following are the equations that prevailed on the manors of Ramsey
Abbey, which were scattered in the eastern midlands[1322].
_Huntingdonshire_
Upwood with Raveley 1 H. = 4 V. = 80 A.
Wistow 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A.
Broughton 1 H. = 6-1/2 V. = 208 A.
Warboys 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A.
Holywell 1 H. = 5 V. = 90 A.
Slepe (St Ives) 1 H. = 5 V. = 80 A.
Houghton with Wyton 1 H. = 6 V. = 108 A.
Hemingford 1 H. = 6 V. = 96 A.
Dillington 1 H. = 6 V. = 201 A.
Weston 1 H. = 4 V. = 112 A.
Brington 1 H. = 4 V. = 136 A.
Bythorn 1 H. = 4 V. = 176 A.
Gidding 1 H. = 4 V. = 112 A.
Elton 1 H. = 6 V. = 144 A.
Stukeley 1 H. = 4 V. = 96 A.
Ripton with Remington 1 H. = 4 V. = 62 A.
_Northamptonshire_
Barnwell 1 H. = 7 V. = 252 A.
Hemington 1 H. = 7 V. = 252 A.
_Bedfordshire_
Cranfield 1 H. = 4 V. = 192 A.
Barton 1 H. = 4 V. = 96 A.
Shitlingdon 1 H. = 4 V. = 48 A.
_Hertfordshire_
Therfield 1 H. = 4 V. = 256 A.
_Suffolk_
Lawshall 1 H. = 3 V. = 156 A.
_Norfolk_
Brancaster 1 H. = 4 V. = 160 A.
Ringstead 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A.
_Cambridgeshire_
Elsworth 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A.
Knapwell 1 H. = 4 V. = 160 A.
Graveley Freehold 1 H. = 7 V. = unknown
Villeinage 1 H. = 6-3/4 V. = 135 A.
Over 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A.
Girton 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A.
Burwell 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A.
Here in thirty-one instances what we take to be the normal equation
appears but seven times, but no other equation occurs more than twice.
Moreover, so far as we have observed, the variations in the acreage that
will be ascribed to a hide are not provincial, they are villar
variations: that is to say, though we may see that the average hide of
one county would have more acres than those that are contained in the
average hide of another, we can not affirm that the hide of a certain
county or hundred contains _a_ acres, while that of another has _b_
acres, and, on the other hand, we often see a startling difference
between two contiguous villages. Lastly, where the computation of 120
acres to a hide is forsaken, we see little agreement in favour of any
other equation. In particular, though now and again the hide of a
village will perchance have 240 acres, we can find no trace of any
'double hide' in which ingenuity might see a link between the Roman and
English systems of measurement and taxation[1323]. The only other
general proposition which our evidence suggests is that a land which
habitually displays unusually large virgates will often be a land in
which a given area of arable soil has borne an unusually light weight of
taxation, and this, as we shall hereafter see, will often, though not
always, be a land where a given area of arable soil has been deemed to
bear an unusually small value. But this connexion between many-acred
hides and light taxation is not very strongly marked in our
cartularies[1324].
[The carucate and bovate.]
In the land-books which deal with Kent the _aratrum_ or _sulung_[1325]
is commoner than the hide or manse, and Domesday Book shows us that in
Kent the _solin_ (_sulung_) is the fiscal unit that plays the part that
is elsewhere played by the hide. That same part is played in Suffolk,
Norfolk, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and the counties of Derby, Nottingham
and Leicester by the _carucata_, which has for its eighth part the
_bovata_. These terms seem to be French: that is to say, they apparently
formed no part of the official Latin that had been current in
England[1326]. We may infer, however, that they translated some English,
or rather perhaps some Scandinavian terms, for only in Danish counties
do we find them used to describe the geldable units. It is exceedingly
doubtful whether we ought to treat this method of reckoning as older
than the Danish invasions. Bede, himself a Northumbrian, uses the
'family-land' as his unit, no matter what be the part of England of
which he is speaking, and his translator uses the _híd_ or _hiwisc_ in
the same indiscriminate fashion. Unfortunately the 'carucated' shires
are those which yield us hardly any land-books, and we do not know what
the English jurors said when the Norman clerks wrote _carucata_ and
_bovata_: perhaps _plough-gate_ and _ox-gate_, or _plough-gang_ and
_ox-gang_, or, again, a _plough of land_, for these were the vernacular
words of a later age. On the whole, the little evidence that we have
seems to point to the greater antiquity in England of a reckoning which
takes the 'house-land' rather than the 'plough-land' as its unit[1327].
[The ox-gang.]
As to the bovate or ox-gang, it seems to be an unit only in the same
sense as that in which the virgate or yard-land is an unit; the one is
the eighth, the other is the fourth of an unit. That, in days when eight
oxen are yoked to a plough, the eighth of a plough-gang should be called
an ox-gang will not surprise us, though, as a matter of fact, an ox
never 'goes' or ploughs in solitude[1328]. In our Latin documents a
third part of a knight's fee will be, not _tertia pars feodi unius
militis_, but far more commonly, _feodum tertiae partis unius militis_.
We do not infer from this that fractions of knights, or fractions of
knight's fees are older than integral knights and integral fees. The
bovate seems to have been much less widely known than the carucate, for
apparently it had no place in the computation that was generally used in
East Anglia, where men reckoned by carucates, half-carucates and acres
and where the virgate was not absolutely unknown[1329].
[The fiscal carucate.] In the financial system, as we have
said, the carucate plays for some counties the part that is played for
others by the hide. Fiscally they seem to be equivalent: that is to say,
when every hide of Wessex is to pay two shillings, every carucate of
Lincolnshire will pay that sum. We think also and shall try to show that
the Exchequer reckons 120 acres to the carucate, or, in other words,
that if a tenement taxed as a carucate were divided into six equal
shares, each share would at the Exchequer be called 20 acres. The same
forces, however, which have made the fiscal hide diverge widely from the
'real' hide have played upon the plough-gangs of the Danelaw. In the
Boldon Book we read of many bovates with 15 acres apiece, though the
figures 20, 13-1/2, 12-1/2, 12 and 8 are also represented, and, when we
come to the extents of the thirteenth century, we seem to see in the
north but a feeble tendency to any uniformity among the equations that
connect carucates with acres. The numbers of the acres in a bovate given
by a series of Yorkshire inquests is 7, 7, 8, 15, 12, 6, 12, 15, 15, 6,
5, 9, 10, 10, 12, 24, 4, 16, 12, 18, 8, 6, 10, 24, 32[1330]. With a
bovate of 4 acres, our carucate would have no more than 32. But then, in
the north we may find very long rods and very large acres[1331], and,
where Danes have settled, we have the best reason to expect those
complications which would arise from the superimposition of a new set of
measures upon a territory that had been arranged to suit another
set[1332].
[Acreage tilled by a plough.]
Having been led into speaking of plough-gangs, we may end these
discursive remarks by a gentle protest against the use that is sometimes
made of the statements that are found in the book called Fleta. It is a
second-rate legal treatise of Edward I.'s day. It seems to have fallen
dead from its author's pen and it hardly deserved a better fate. For the
more part it is a poor abstract of Bracton's work. When it ceases to
pillage Bracton, it pillages other authors, and what it says of
ploughing appears to be derived at second hand from Walter of
Henley[1333]. Now Walter of Henley's successful and popular treatise on
Husbandry is a good and important book; but we must be careful before we
treat it as an exponent of the traditional mode of agriculture, for
evidently Walter was an enlightened reformer. We might even call him the
Arthur Young of his time. Now, it is sometimes said that according to
Fleta 'the carucate' would have 160 acres in 'a two course manor' and
180 in 'a three course manor.' A reference to Walter of Henley will show
him endeavouring to convince the men of his time that such amounts as
these really can be ploughed, if they work hard. 'Some men will tell you
that a plough can not till eight score or nine score acres by the year,
but I will show you that it can.' His calculation is worth repeating. It
is as follows:
The year has 52 weeks. Deduct 8 for holy-days and other hindrances.
There remain 44 weeks or 264 days, Sundays excluded.
_Two course._ Plough 40 acres for winter
seed, 40 for spring seed and 80 for fallow
(total 160) at 7/8ths of an acre per day = 182-6/7 days
Also plough by way of second fallowing 80
acres at an acre per day = 80 days
--------
Total 262-6/7 days[1334].
[Walter of Henley's scheme.]
It is a strenuous and sanguine, if not an impossible, programme. When
harvest time and the holy weeks are omitted, the plough is to 'go' every
week-day throughout the year, despite frost and tempest. Obviously it is
a programme that can only enter the head of an enthusiastic lord who has
supernumerary oxen, and will know how to fill the place of a ploughman
who is ill. We have little warrant for believing that what Walter hopes
to do is being commonly done in his day, less for importing his projects
into an earlier age. In order that he may keep his beasts up to their
arduous toil, he proposes to feed them with oats during half the
year[1335]. If we inferred that the Saxon invaders of England treated
their oxen thus, we might be guilty of an anachronism differing only in
degree from that which would furnish them with steam-ploughs. But, to
come to much later days, the Domesday of St. Paul's enables us to say
with some certainty that the ordinary team of eight beasts accomplished
no such feats as those of which Walter speaks. For example, at Thorpe in
Essex the canons have about 180 acres of arable land in demesne. These,
it is estimated, can be tilled by one team of ten heads together with
the ploughing service that is due from the tenants, and these tenants
have to plough at least 80 acres, to wit, 40 in winter and 40 in
Lent[1336]. We must observe that to till even 120 acres according to
Walter's two-course plan would mean that a plough must 'go' 180 acres in
every year, and that, even if it does its acre every day, more than half
the week-days in the year must be devoted to ploughing. We may, however,
seriously doubt whether a scheme which would plough the land thrice
between every two crops had been generally prevalent[1337]. Nay, we may
even doubt whether the practice of fallowing had been universal[1338].
Not unfrequently in our cartularies the villein is required to plough
between Michaelmas and Christmas and again between Christmas and Lady
Day, while nothing is said of his ploughing in the summer[1339]. We are
only beginning to learn a little about medieval agriculture.
However, we have now said all that we had to say by way of preface to
what we fear will be a dreary and inconclusive discussion of some of
those abundant figures that Domesday Book supplies. A few we have
endeavoured to collect in the tables which will meet the reader's eye
when he turns this page, and which will be explained on later pages.
FOOTNOTES:
[1217] D. B. ii. 47 b.
[1218] Ibid. 61.
[1219] Ibid. 64.
[1220] Ibid. 65.
[1221] Ibid. 69 b.
[1222] See above, p. 35.
[1223] For this reason I do not feel sure that Mr F. Baring (Eng.
Hist. Rev. xi. 98) has conclusively proved his case when he
accuses D. B. of omitting to notice the free tenants on the
estates of the Abbey of Burton.
[1224] The antiquity and universality of the balk must not be taken
for granted; see Meitzen, op. cit. i. 86; iii. 319. However,
in recent times balks did occur within the shots (this
Meitzen seems to doubt) as may be seen to-day at Upton St.
Leonards, Co. Gloucester. Mr Seebohm, op. cit. 4, 382, claims
the word _balk_ for the Welsh; but see New Eng. Dict. and
Skeat, Etymol. Dict. In this, as in many another case, the
Welsh claim to an English word has broken down.
[1225] A.-S. Chron. ad ann. 1043. Henry of Huntingdon, p. 192, took
the sestar of this passage to be a horse-load. Even if we
accept his version, the price would be high when compared
with the prices recorded on the Pipe Rolls of Henry II.; for
which see Hall, Court Life, 219, 220. But, though the point
can not be argued here, we may strongly suspect that the
chronicler meant something that is almost infinitely worse,
and that his sestar was at the very least as small as our
bushel. We know of no English document which suggests a
_sextarius_ that would be comparable with a horse-load.
[1226] Geatfled's will, K. 925 (iv. 263).
[1227] See above, p. 14.
[1228] Observe the clumsy nomenclature illustrated by K. 816 (iv.
164), a deed forged for the Confessor:--'Middletun et oðer
Middletun ... Horningdun et oðer Horningdun ... Fifehyda et
oðer Fifehyda.'
[1229] See in this context the interesting letter of Bp. Denewulf to
Edward the Elder, K. 1089 (v. 166). An estate of 72 hides, a
very large estate, came to the bishop almost waste. He prides
himself on having now tilled 90 acres!
[1230] A good programme of this system is given by Cunningham,
Growth of English Industry, i. 71.
[1231] Rectitudines, 4, § 3; Seebohm, Village Community, 141. Mr
Seebohm's inference is ingenious and plausible. See also
Andrews, Old English Manor, 218.
[1232] K. 259 (ii. 26), A.D. 845: Gift of 19 acres near the city of
Canterbury, 6 acres in one place, 6 in another, 7 in a third.
[1233] K. 241 (ii. 1), A.D. 839: Gift of 24 acres, 10 in one place,
14 in another.--K. 339 (ii. 149), A.D. 904: Gift of 60 acres
of arable to the south and 60 to the north of a certain
stream.--K. 586 (iii. 118): 'and 30 æcra on ðæm twæm feldan
dallandes.'