HOW THE PEOPLE LIVED--_continued_
It is likely that some of the Celts, before the coming of the later
invaders, had begun to descend from their hill villages and to occupy
the river valleys and clearings in the woodlands; but we do not know
much of their story, and have to piece it together as best we may
from the signs of their residence which they have left. Both before
the Roman occupation of Britain and also for two or more centuries
afterwards, we do not know at all clearly what went on in our island.
But about the Saxons, nearly from their first coming to England, we
have written evidence to give us information. We know something of
how their village societies were formed, and these societies are
extremely interesting to us, because we can see from them how our
present way of living came about, how the landowner and the tenant,
the squire and the agricultural labourer came to be.
[Sidenote: How people lived]
The villages, then, in these Saxon times, consisted of a group of the
"wattle and daub" houses formed in the manner that you have seen. If
they were built near one of the roads, the houses would be on either
side of the road, forming something like what we call "the village
street" now. If they were not near a road they would often be
arranged in a circle, with a clear space in the middle. In this
clear space, surrounded by the houses, we may see the earliest form
of the modern "village green."
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And then, outside the circle of houses would be the lands which the
villagers held and worked. There would be a certain area of this
land which would be cultivated, with the plough, for crops, and,
further, outside that there would be land which would be grazed by
the villagers' cattle and sheep. It would be what we call "common
land," and any freeman in the village would have the right to turn
out on it a certain fixed number of animals. Besides this there
would be a certain area of ground beyond again, called "the waste,"
where the pigs of the villagers might be turned out to feed in the
woods. This area also was defined by law, so that it should not run
into the area allotted to a neighbouring village.
Now the area of cultivated land held by each of the ceorls (the
churls, or free peasants) in the village was generally fixed at
thirty acres. It was reckoned that thirty acres was the limit that a
team of oxen could plough and keep in order during the year. But a
team was reckoned to consist of eight oxen, and each ceorl was only
allowed one pair of oxen.
You will see what this implies. It implies that they shared their
oxen among them, four of the proprietors coming together, with two
oxen each, to make up a team. Thus there was sharing in the oxen and
in the ploughing work that the oxen did, as well as in the common
grazing land. I want you to notice, as a great feature of the early
village life, this sharing or community, this having many things in
common.
Then there were the cattle and the flocks and the pigs; and these
would all need looking after. But each owner did not look after his
own. On the contrary, a herdsman for the cattle, a shepherd for the
sheep, and a swineherd for the pigs were appointed.
The ceorls were not the only freemen. There was a class of freemen,
too, of less importance than these holders of thirty acres. They had
to do some of the {108} work under the thirty-acre men; and perhaps
it was from their class that the swineherd and the shepherd were
taken. Another man who was employed in the same way, as a servant of
the community, was the miller, the corn-grinder.
Below this lower class of freemen, again, came the serfs, the slaves.
In the earliest known documents that show us what the duties and
rights of the freemen in the villages were, there is no mention at
all of the rights and duties of the serfs, because, as a matter of
fact, they had, in law, no rights, and to their duties there was no
limit. They had to do what they were bid, and their masters had as
much authority over them as over cattle. They were indeed owned as
"chattels," or cattle. But it does not follow that they were
ill-treated, for a wise master would not treat even his cattle or his
sheep ill. He would treat them well, because the stronger and
healthier they were the more work they would do for him or the more
milk or wool they would give him. It was to his interest to be kind
to both the two-legged and the four-legged cattle. The slaves were
members of the conquered race for the most part.
[Sidenote: Eorls and cheorls]
And then, besides the ceorls, and probably at first chosen by them
and from among them, was the eorl. His business was to look after
the community in a general way, to preside at its meetings, to act as
its judge, and as its leader in case of quarrels with the neighbours.
In return, he had portions of land given to him amidst the portion of
the ceorls, and the ceorls had to work the land for him, or to get it
worked for him by their slaves. Generally the law was that they had
to give him so many days' work during the week. That is the way in
which their work was measured. They thus paid him what was really
very like a rent for his land, and as time went on it was more and
more in the light of what we call rent that it was {109} regarded.
Similarly, when they brought corn to the mill to be ground, they had
to put a certain portion of the ground corn into a chest especially
kept there for the eorl. And here again, this paying in of the corn
came to convey the idea that the mill belonged to the eorl and that
this was a payment for the privilege of grinding the corn there.
Thus the eorl came more and more into the position of owner of the
land and of all in the village.
Besides the duties that the eorl owed to the ceorls, and the duties
they owed to him, he himself had duties that he owed to the king.
These were chiefly three, to follow the king to war, to maintain the
bridges within the boundaries of the village lands, and to help build
the fortified places, the castles. He also had to see that the
king's taxes were paid, when taxes began to be imposed. And just as,
out of the payments of service and of corn made by the ceorls to the
eorl, the idea grew that these payments were made as a kind of rent
for the land, of which the eorl was the owner, so too, as between the
eorl and the king, the services that the eorl owed and paid began to
be looked on as payments made by the eorl for the land which he held
from the king. Therefore the whole land of the country began to be
regarded as in the king's possession and to be rented, as we should
say, from him by the eorls, by whom it was again in part "sub-let,"
to use our modern term, to the ceorls or peasants.
As we have seen, the area that it was considered right for the ceorl
to hold was thirty acres, but in various ways this might be divided
or added to, so that the original equality did not last long. And as
the population grew, more land had to be taken in, from the waste,
for cultivation, to provide for younger sons.
The eorls had a curious power of forbidding, if they so pleased, the
marriages proposed by the ceorls and their children. Perhaps the
power was originally {110} voted to them by the ceorls themselves as
a means of controlling the population, so that there should not be
more people than the available land could support; but it is a
curious power for any authority to have over men who called and
believed themselves "free." But the fact is that the so-called
freedom of these men became more and more of an illusion; they became
less and less free.
After Christianity was accepted as the religion of England there was
another person, besides those already mentioned, who had a right to
be supported by the community of the village. This was the priest,
and the tenth of some of the produce, which was allotted as his
share, in return for his services as priest, is the origin of those
"tithes" which still are paid to the clergy.
All payments were, for a long time, made "in kind," that is to say,
for instance, in corn, or in wool or milk, or in so many days' work.
Coined metal, as what we call "a medium of exchange," had been known
in England for a very long while, even before the coming of the
Romans, but its use does not seem to have been common. After a
while, however, its use increased, and gradually payment in coin, by
the ceorls to the eorl, began to take the place of payment in kind,
and the eorl might welcome the coin because of its ease of
transmission to the king when the king required money for his wars.
[Sidenote: The chapmen]
At first, as you will see from all this, the villages were very much
what we call self-supporting. They had all they required for food.
They had the wool of their sheep and the hides of their cattle to be
worked up into clothing. They had unlimited firewood from the
forest. So they had little need of money, for exchange. But as they
became more rich than their own needs demanded, in such things as
wool and hides and the foods that did not perish quickly, such as
{111} cheese, then they might begin to exchange these things for
other produce which they could not make for themselves, and which
might be brought in by the travelling merchants, called "chapmen"
(from the word "cheap," to sell, whence we have the London street,
called Cheapside, to-day). These chapmen came on horseback with
their wares and bought and sold in the villages, and then it became
most useful to have coin as a means of exchange. Even the wool was a
bulky stuff to carry; yet it was less inconvenient than some of the
other commodities. The two chief articles of necessity that the
villagers could not supply themselves with were iron implements and
salt.
This wool-selling of the villages, we may be sure, was done in a very
small way at first, but it grew and grew until it became very
important and a source of great riches, as wealth was then estimated,
to England. This was when the carrying of the wool over-Channel, to
the Continent, had been arranged for, and there was a regular trade
going on. That, however, was not to happen until the days when the
Normans were rulers of England and could keep their own kinsmen, the
Scandinavian rovers, from piracy in the narrow sea straits.
At the point of time to which we have now brought down our story, say
800, when Charlemagne was anointed Emperor by the Pope in Rome, the
Danes, from Denmark and perhaps from Norway and Sweden too, were
constantly vexing and harrying all the eastern and southern coasts of
England and the opposite coasts of the Continent. Their way was to
sail up the rivers with their ships, to take everything which they
could easily carry away, to work havoc of every kind, by fire and
sword--then back to their ships and away again.
At this time you will note that the bigger towns were all in the
river valleys, as we have seen already, {112} and also that most of
them were not very far inland. In Britain the Romans had fixed their
capital city in the north, at York, but after they went away the
important part of England was the south. It was the part near the
Continent, where all civilisation and religion and good things came
from--also, where the conquerors of England were apt to come from.
The narrowest sea between the two was what we now call the Straits of
Dover. All these circumstances led to the establishment or to the
growth of Canterbury as one of the great cities of England.
I write of England as of one country, but you will remember that it
still was a disunited, a divided England. It remained so disunited,
and vexed by constant wars between the rival kingdoms, until brought
under one rule in 827, by the power and wisdom of the great King
Egbert, who had come to the throne of Wessex in A.D. 800, the very
year of Charlemagne's consecration at Rome, and held authority over
all England from 827 till his death in 836. I write this vague and
indefinite phrase "held authority" on purpose, because it certainly
was not a very definite rule that he held over the whole country, and
it must have differed in different parts. He even conquered Wales
and all the Celtic part of Britain except Cumbria--our modern
Cumberland. It was towards the end of his reign that his more or
less united kingdom began to be seriously harassed by the Danish
sea-rovers attacking the eastern and southern coasts.
[Sidenote: The sites of the cities]
We have noticed already that the principal towns grew naturally on
the banks of the rivers. There is a further fact about their
situation which we may observe, and that is that the chief and
largest of them were placed just so far up the rivers that they might
get best advantage from the tide. In days long before steam was used
to drive ships, and when they could {113} sail only with the wind
very much in their favour, you can easily understand how valuable the
help of the tide would be, both for coming up and going down a river.
Then, if the town were placed just above the point up to which the
saltish sea-water came, the fresh water coming down could be used for
drinking and for such processes as brewing and tanning hides which
were very early industries; and there would be a constant flow of
water to work the corn-grinding mills. Considerations of that kind
probably influenced the Anglo-Saxons in choosing sites for their
towns such as Canterbury, and Winchester, and London, which became
the capital after the Norman conquest. From the Continent people
could cross the Straits of Dover and find themselves very soon in the
sheltered waters of the Thames estuary or of the Stour which went
past Canterbury. The land about the mouth of the Stour has risen a
good deal since those days, and the passage of ships up the river was
more open and wide then than it is now.
The advantage of Winchester, as a site for a large town, was that
from the mouth of the Seine, which came down past Rouen, a very short
sea-passage would bring the mariner into the sheltered water behind
the Isle of Wight. He could enter that shelter from the east or from
the west, as the wind served best, and he would be out of sight of
land, either French land or English land, for only a very short
distance in the mid-crossing. This was a matter of much importance
to the sailors of those days; they did not at all like to go out of
sight of their landmarks. Then, once in the Solent, as we call it,
the shipman would take advantage of the tide to carry him up
Southampton Water, and very likely some way up the Itchen river,
towards Winchester, before he need run his ship aground and disembark.
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As a further advantage you may see that both Canterbury and
Winchester had high ground close about them on which a fortified camp
could be made for the protection of the town. And we know, in fact,
that such camps were made in the vicinity of both towns. The ground
bears signs of them to this day. The beginnings of London are
thought to have been a British hill fort on the hill where St. Paul's
Cathedral now stands. Of other cities we know that Manchester was a
British settlement and a place where the Druids worshipped, and later
a Roman city. We hear of Birmingham as a village of the Saxon
Beormingas. Liverpool was a fishing village in Saxon times, but not
of sufficient importance to be named in Domesday Book.
This brief account may, I hope, give you some little idea of the
manner in which those people lived, and so laid the foundations of
our life to-day. They were without a great many things which we look
on as absolute necessities. They had, at first, no cotton and no
linen for their clothes. They had no tea or coffee to drink; no
tobacco to smoke. They had beer, which they brewed and sometimes
sweetened with honey, for they understood bee-keeping. The honey was
important for them, for they had no sugar. Neither had they
potatoes; and they grew no root crops for their cattle to eat in
winter.
That fact that they had no root crops was important in their lives,
for it meant that all they had to keep their cattle and sheep alive
on in the winter was such hay as they could make and store. It would
not support a very large stock all through the winter, and the
consequence was that they killed down all their stock, except what
was wanted for breeding purposes, at the beginning of each winter.
Now you may remember I said that one of the chief necessities that
the villagers would have to buy, {115} because they could not produce
it for themselves, was salt. Seeing how many of what we call
necessities, such as sugar and the like, they could do without, you
may wonder that salt should be so necessary. But now that you know
about this killing off of so much of the stock at the beginning of
winter you may begin to see the necessity of the salt. Unless all
this good food was to go bad it must be salted, in order to preserve
it for eating as required. So, in the winter months, they might have
meat sometimes; but it would be salted meat, not fresh.
[Sidenote: Importance of hunting]
But of course that would not apply to any game that they might kill
by hunting in "the waste"--the woodland--nor does it appear that
freemen were forbidden, in Anglo-Saxon times, to hunt. They had
bows, which they made of yew or other wood, and spear shafts and
arrows of ash, and the English very early were famous for their
archery. They were famous too for their breed of hunting dogs, which
were sometimes exported to the Continent, so highly were they valued.
So they had this resource--free hunting in woods which probably were
well stocked with game in comparison with the small human population.
Make a note in your mind of this importance of the game, due to the
fact that they could get no fresh meat from their domestic stock in
winter. It is an importance which partly explains the reason of the
fearfully severe game laws--laws to protect the game--which were
passed a little later.
That is the picture, as well as I have been able to draw it for you,
of the life of those people, our ancestors. You may take it, too, as
something like a picture of the life of the people over a large
part--say, all except the southern parts--of Charlemagne's wide
empire. The feudal system came, to change the conditions, in that
Frankish Empire earlier than it came to England; but even in England
the {116} conditions were such as would pass easily into feudal
arrangements. In theory the ceorls were free, not the vassals of a
lord, but their freedom was becoming more and more of an illusion.
The eorl was there, getting an increasing authority and an increasing
possession of the land, and so making everything ready for the feudal
baron to step into his place. But the state of England did not
render it so necessary for the ceorl to seek protection under his
eorl, as we saw that it became a necessity in France. In England the
king, whether in a divided or a united England, could still protect
the people and exercise his authority over them and see justice done.
When we come to the tenth century we find that the title of eorl, or
earl, for the head man of the village, was no longer in use, but a
person exercising almost exactly the same power, and having the same
privileges as the earl, was now called the "thane." His powers and
privileges were perhaps no greater than those of the earl, but there
was this difference in his position, that there was no longer any
illusion of his being appointed by, and being one of, the villagers.
He was appointed by the king. Generally he had been one of the
king's soldiers, and the lordship of a village seems often to have
been granted him as a reward for good military service. This would
be particularly likely to happen with villages in conquered
districts; and in many districts, with the perpetual warfare going
on, villages must have been conquered and reconquered again and again.
[Sidenote: "Hundreds" and "shires"]
The title of earl, however, did not die out in England, as it did on
the Continent. Either during or before the tenth century, the
villages began to be grouped into what were called "hundreds."
Probably the name arose from the idea that each "hundred" was a
grouping of ten villages, each represented by its ten thirty-acre
men, as we have called them. It is {117} scarcely likely that many
hundreds kept these figures long, or even that many ever had them
precisely exact.
Then a grouping was made of some of the hundreds, and this group of
hundreds was then called a "shire." The title of earl came to be
given to the lord, no longer of a single village, but of a shire--a
much more important post. The earl of the shire was appointed, like
the thane, by the king. There were "hundred courts," as we noticed
before, which the freemen, so-called, of the village could attend and
vote in. And there were also "shire courts," held less often, which
also the freemen might attend, and wherein also they might vote. The
president of the shire court was the earl.
We may compare the earl and his shire, in England, with the comte, or
count, in France, with his comté or county.
Thus, or somewhat thus, went the story of the people's lives in
Europe throughout the time of the rule of the Danish kings in Britain
and up to its conquest by William of Normandy in 1066.
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