undoubted fact that with the Norman Conquest the English church passes
at once from a period of stagnation to a period of exuberant activity.
In the conduct of the religious life, in learning and architecture, in
all that followed from intimate association with the culture and
spiritual ideals of the continent, the reign of the Conqueror and the
primacy of Lanfranc fittingly inaugurate the splendid history of the
medieval church of England. And it is only fair for us to attribute the
credit for this result in large measure to King William himself. Let it
be granted that the actual work of reform was done by the bishops and
abbots of England under the guidance of Lanfranc; there will still
remain the fact that the Conqueror chose as his spiritual associates men
who were both willing and able to carry the work of reform into effect.
Nothing would have been easier than for King William, coming in as he
did by conquest, to treat the English church as the lawful spoils of
war. Its degradation under the rule of feudal prelates of the type of
Geoffrey of Coutances would have made for, rather than against, his
secular autocracy. Had he reduced the church to impotence he would have
spared his successors many an evil day. But, confident that he himself
would always be supreme in church as well as state, he was content to
entrust its guidance to the best and strongest men of whom he knew, and
if he foresaw the dangers of the future he left their avoidance to those
who came after him.
No detailed account can be given here of the prelates whom the Conqueror
appointed to ecclesiastical office in England. In point of origin they
were a very heterogeneous class of men. Some of them were monks from the
great abbeys of Normandy; Gundulf of Rochester came from Caen, Remigius
of Dorchester from Fécamp; others, such as Robert of Hereford, were of
Lotharingian extraction. Under the Conqueror, as under his successors,
service at the royal court was a ready road to ecclesiastical promotion;
nor were the clerks of the king’s chapel the least worthy of the new
prelates. Osmund of Salisbury, who attained to ultimate canonisation,
had been chancellor from 1072 to 1077. But a question immediately
presents itself as to the relations which existed between these foreign
lords of the church and the Englishmen, clerk and lay, over whom they
ruled. Learned and zealous they might be, and yet, at the same time,
remain entirely out of touch with the native population of England. To
presuppose this, however, would be a great injustice to the new
prelates. The very diversity of their origin prevented them from sharing
the racial pride of the lay nobility, and their position as servants of
a universal church told in the same direction. They learned the English
language, and some at least among them preached to the country folk in
the vernacular. They preserved the cult of the native saints, though
they criticised with good reason the grounds on which certain kings and
prelates had received canonisation, and in most dioceses they retained
without modification the forms of ritual which had been developed by the
Anglo-Saxon church. Among all the forces which made for the assimilation
of Englishman to Norman in the century following the Conquest the work
of King William’s bishops and abbots must certainly hold a high place.
The friendly relations which had existed between William and the Curia
during the pontificate of Alexander II. were not interrupted immediately
by the accession of Hildebrand, in 1073, but there soon appeared ominous
symptoms of coming strife. It was no longer a matter of vital importance
for William to retain the favour of the papacy—he was now the undisputed
master of England and Normandy alike. Hildebrand, a man of genius, in
whose passionate character an inherent hatred of compromise clashes with
a statesmanlike recognition of the demands of practical expediency,
could not be expected to refrain from advancing the ecclesiastical
claims to the furtherance of which his whole soul was devoted. The
Conqueror had indeed gone far in the work of reform, but neither in
England nor in Normandy did he show any intention of conforming to the
Hildebrandine conception of the model relationship which should exist
between church and state. Of his own will he appointed his bishops and
abbots, and they in turn paid him homage for their temporal possessions;
he controlled at pleasure the intercourse between his prelates and the
Holy See. Herein lay abundant materials for a quarrel; the wonder is
that it did not break out for six years after Hildebrand’s succession.
The immediate cause of the outbreak was the abstention of the English
and Norman bishops from attendance at the general synods of the church
which Hildebrand convened at Rome during these years. Lanfranc was the
chief offender in this respect, but before long Hildebrand came to
recognise that Lanfranc was only acting in obedience to his master’s
orders, and anger at the discovery drove the Pope to take the offensive
against his former ally. Lanfranc was peremptorily summoned to Rome; the
archbishop-elect of Rouen, William Bona Anima, was refused the papal
confirmation, and Archbishop Gebuin of Lyons was given an extraordinary
commission as primate of the provinces of Rouen, Sens, and Tours; a step
which at once destroyed the ecclesiastical autonomy of Normandy.
William’s reply to this attack was characteristic of the man. He was not
without personal friends at the papal court, and without yielding his
ground in the slightest in regard to the main matter in dispute he
contrived to pacify the angry Pope by protestations of his unaltered
devotion to the Holy See. Gregory bided his time; Archbishop Gebuin’s
primacy came to nothing. William of Rouen received the pallium, and
shortly after these events the Pope is found writing an admonitory
letter to Robert of Normandy, then in exile. The storm had in fact blown
over, but a greater crisis was close at hand.
It is quite possible that Gregory considered that he had won a
diplomatic victory in the recent correspondence. He had not, it is true,
carried his main point, but he had drawn from the king of England a
notable expression of personal respect, and it is possible that this
emboldened him shortly afterwards to make a direct demand upon William’s
allegiance. In the course of 1080, to adopt the most probable date,
Gregory sent his legate Hubert to William with a demand that the latter
should take an oath of fealty to the Pope, and should provide for the
more punctual payment of the tribute of Peter’s Pence due from England.
In making the latter demand Hildebrand was only claiming his rights;
from ancient time Peter’s Pence had been sent to Rome from England, and
the Conqueror admitted his obligation in the matter. But the claim of
fealty stood on a different footing. William, indeed, cannot have been
unprepared for it; it was inevitable that sooner or later the papacy
would endeavour to obtain a recognition, in the sphere of politics, of
its support of the Norman claims on England in 1066. None the less, it
was entirely inadmissible from William’s standpoint. So far as our
evidence goes, it is certain that William had made no promise of feudal
allegiance in 1066[294]; for him, as indeed for Alexander II., the
papacy had already reaped its reward in the ecclesiastical sphere, in
the power of initiating the reform of the English church, in the more
intimate connection established between Rome and England. Alexander II.
had been willing to subordinate all questions of spiritual politics to
the more pressing needs of ecclesiastical reform, and Gregory had
hitherto followed his predecessor’s lead; nor on the present occasion
did he do more than assert a claim of the recognition of which he can
have held but slender hopes. For William repudiated the Pope’s demand
outright, asserting that none of his predecessors had ever sworn fealty
to any former Pope, nor had he ever promised to do the like. We have no
information as to the reception which William’s answer met at Rome; but,
whatever resentment he may have felt, Gregory was debarred by
circumstances from taking offensive action against the king of England.
In the very year of this correspondence, Gregory found himself
confronted by an anti-pope, nominated by the emperor; and from this time
onward, the Pope’s difficulties on the continent increased, up to the
hour of his death in exile five years later. Fortune continued true to
William, even in his ecclesiastical relations.
There is no need to trace in detail the history of William’s dealings
with the church during his last years. In England the work of reform,
well begun in the previous decade, continued without interruption under
the guidance of the new prelates. There is some evidence, indeed, that
towards the close of William’s reign the English clergy were in advance
of their Norman brethren in strictness of life and regard for canonical
rule; at least in 1080, at the Synod of Lillebonne,[295] the king found
it necessary to assume for himself the jurisdiction over the grosser
offences of the clergy, on the ground that the Norman bishops had been
remiss in their prosecution. But in England the leaders of the church
seem to have enjoyed the king’s confidence to the last, and their
reforming zeal needed no royal intervention. The work of Dunstan and
Oswald, frustrated at the time by unkind circumstances, had at last,
under stranger conditions than any they might conceive, reached its
fulfilment.
-----
Footnote 287:
The ecclesiastical history of Normandy and England in the eleventh
century is treated by Böhmer, _Kirche und Staat in England, und in der
Normandie_, on which book this chapter is based.
Footnote 288:
See above, Introduction, ii., pp. 39, 40.
Footnote 289:
Especially in the Danelaw, V. C. H., Derby i., Leicester i.
Footnote 290:
Stubbs, _Select Charters_, 85. The writ in question probably belongs
to the year 1075.
Footnote 291:
Pollock and Maitland, i., 89.
Footnote 292:
_Peterborough Chronicle_, 1083.
Footnote 293:
Abbot Ethelhelm of Abingdon was considered to have offended in this
respect. _Hist. Monast. de Abingdon_, ii., 283.
Footnote 294:
See above, Chapter V.
Footnote 295:
Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 315.
CHAPTER XI
ADMINISTRATION
The art of government in the eleventh century was still a simple, or at
least an untechnical, matter. It demanded rather a strong will in the
sovereign than professional knowledge in his ministers: the
responsibility was the king’s, and his duty to his subjects was plain
and recognised by all men. No one doubted that the maintenance of order
was the king’s work, but the method of its performance was left to his
discretion. It was not a light task, but it was a task which would be
done the better the simpler were the agencies employed, the more
immediately each act of government was felt to be the personal act of
the head of the state. The time was not ripe for the highly specialised
administration of Henry II.; it was bound to take more than twenty years
before a trained body of administrators could be elaborated out of the
transplanted Norman baronage, before the king had learned to whom he
could safely entrust the permanent work of civil government. The
Conqueror’s administration was by the nature of the case empirical;
neither Normandy nor England had anything to offer in the way of
centralised routine, but for all that it is from the simple expedients
adopted by William that the medieval constitution of England takes its
origin.
Just as in Normandy an indefinite body of “optimates” surrounded the
duke, and expected to be consulted on occasions of special importance,
so in England the king’s greater tenants, lay and ecclesiastical, formed
a potential council, the “Commune Concilium” of later writers. The
connection between the council in its English and Norman manifestations
was something closer than mere similarity of composition; many a man who
witnessed the coronation of Queen Matilda in the Easter Council of 1068
must have sat in the assembly at Lillebonne which discussed the invasion
of England; and judging from the evidence of charters the barons who
accompany the king when in Normandy will probably appear as lords of
English fiefs in the pages of Domesday Book. Roger de Montgomery, Henry
de Ferrers, Walter Giffard, Henry de Beaumont—such men as these, who
were great on either side the Channel, appear in frequent attendance on
their lord, whether at Rouen or at Winchester. Their attendance, indeed,
was a guarantee of good faith; the baron who, when summoned, neglected
to obey, became thereby a suspected person at once: it was considered a
sign of disaffection when Earl Roger of Hereford persistently absented
himself from William’s court.
In England we know that it was customary for the king to hold a great
council thrice in each year. “Moreover” says the Peterborough
chronicler, “he was very worshipful: he wore his crown thrice in every
year when he was in England. At Easter he wore it at Winchester, at
Whitsuntide at Westminster, at midwinter at Gloucester, and then there
were with him all the great men of all England—archbishops and bishops,
abbots and earls, thegns and knights”; “in order,” adds William of
Malmesbury, “that ambassadors from foreign countries might admire the
splendour of the assembly and the costliness of the feasts.” As it is
only at these great seasons that the Commune Concilium comes practically
into being; we may give a list of those known to be present at the
Easter feast of 1069 and the Christmas feast of 1077, to which we may
add a list of those in attendance on the king when he held his Easter
feast of 1080 in Normandy.[296]
It will be clear that an assembly of this kind is eminently unfitted to
be the organ of systematic government. These great people, bishops,
earls, and abbots, had their own work to do, work which for long periods
kept them away from the king’s presence. The Commune Concilium is at
most what its name implies, an advisory body. As such it plays the part
taken in the Anglo-Saxon policy by the “Witan,” and the question arises
whether it can be considered a continuation of that assembly under
altered conditions and with restricted powers or whether it proceeds
from some quite different principle.
It is plain that the Norman council is in no sense a popular assembly;
we certainly cannot say of it, as has been said of the “Witan,” that
“every free man had in theory the right to attend.” On the other hand it
is probable that the alleged popular composition of the Witan is
illusory, while the nature of the body which attended Edward the
Confessor might be described equally with the Conqueror’s councils as
consisting of “archbishops and suffragan bishops, abbots and earls,
thegns and knights.” But it is probable that this similarity of
constitution is only superficial. If pressed for a definition of the
Commune Concilium we might, perhaps, venture to say that it consisted
potentially of all those men who held in chief of the crown by military
service, of those _tenentes in capite_ whose estates in Domesday are
entered under separate rubrics. This definition would include the great
ecclesiastical tenants, while it would exclude the undistinguished crowd
of sergeants (_servientes_) and king’s thegns, and it would suggest one
most important respect in which the Commune Concilium differs from its
Old English representative. All the members of the Norman council are
united to the king by the strongest of all ties, the bond of tenure.
That great change, in virtue of which every acre of land in England has
come to be held mediately or immediately of the king, influences
constitutional no less than social relations; the king’s council is a
body composed of men who are his own tenants. From this technical
distinction follows a difference of great importance; the king’s
influence over his council becomes direct and inevitable to a degree
impossible before the Conquest. Under Edward the Confessor it is not
impossible for the Witan to be found going its own way with but scanty
regard to the personal wishes of the king; under the Conqueror and his
sons the king’s will is supreme. Most true is it that the three Norman
kings were men of very different quality from the imbecile Edward; but
nevertheless, the tenurial bond between the king and his barons made it
impossible for the latter when in council to follow an independent
political course. The Norman kings were wise enough to entertain advice
and too strong for that advice ever to pass into dictation.
[Illustration:
EARLDOMS
May 1068]
Distinct then as is the Commune Concilium from the Witan, we
nevertheless meet in the earliest years of William’s reign with certain
assemblies which may fairly be considered as transitional forms between
the two. Up to the last revolt of Edwin and Morcar not a few Englishmen
continued to hold high positions at William’s court; and among the
witnesses to the few charters of this date which have survived there
still exists a fair proportion of English names. Such men as Edwin and
Morcar themselves must have represented the independent traditions of
the Old English Witan, and there are other names which are common to the
latest charters of King Edward and the earliest charters of King
William. As it is very rarely that we can obtain a glimpse of an
assembly of this intermediate type we may subjoin a list of those in
attendance on the king at or shortly after the Whitsuntide Council of
1069, taken from a charter restoring to the church of Wells lands which
Harold, “inflamed with cupidity,” is said to have appropriated unjustly:
King William; Queen Matilda; Stigand, archbishop; Ealdred, archbishop;
Odo, bishop of Bayeux; Hugh, bishop (of Lisieux); Herman, bishop (of
Thetford); Leofric, bishop of Exeter; Ethelmer, bishop of Elmham;
William, bishop of London; Ethelric, bishop of Selsey; Walter, bishop
of Hereford; Remi, bishop of Lincoln; Ethelnoth, abbot of
(Glastonbury); Leofweard, abbot of (Michelney); Wulfwold, abbot of
Chertsey; Wulfgeat, abbot; Earl William; Earl Waltheof; Earl Edwin;
Robert, the king’s brother; Roger, “princeps”; Walter Giffard; Hugh de
Montfort; William de Curcelles; Serlo de Burca; Roger de Arundel;
Richard, the king’s son; Walter the Fleming; Rambriht the Fleming;
Thurstan; Baldwin “de Wailen leige”; Athelheard; Hermenc; Tofig,
“minister”; Dinni; “Alfge atte Thorne”; William de Walville; Bundi,
the Staller; Robert, the Staller; Robert de Ely; Roger “pincerna”;
Wulfweard; Herding; Adsor; Brisi; Brihtric.[297]
Starting with the greatest persons in church and state the list
gradually shades off to a number of obscure names, the bearers of which
cannot be identified outside this record. Some of these last may be
local people connected with the estates to which the grant refers, but
most of even the English names can be recognised in the general history
of the time. The peculiar value of the list is that it shows us
Englishmen and Normans associated, apparently on terms of equality, at
the Conqueror’s court. It is instructive to see the English earls of
Northampton and Mercia signing between Earl William Fitz Osbern and
Count Robert of Mortain; the fact that men whose names are among the
greatest in Domesday Book are to be found witnessing the same document
with men who had signed Edward the Confessor’s charters helps us to
bridge the gulf which separates Anglo-Saxon from Norman England. But
this phenomenon is confined to the years immediately succeeding the
Conquest; very suddenly, after the date of this document, the English
element at William’s court gives way and disappears, and with it
disappear the names which unite the Old English “Witan” to the Norman
“Concilium.” This is a fact to which we have already had occasion to
refer, for the general change in William’s policy which occurs in 1070
affects every aspect of his history.
[Illustration:
EARLDOMS
January 1075]
The functions of this court or council seem to have been as
indeterminate as its composition. Largely, no doubt, they were
ceremonial; this aspect of the council was evidently in the mind of
William of Malmesbury when he wrote the passage quoted on page
[missing]. At times it appears as a judicial body, Waltheof was
condemned in the Midwinter Council of 1075; while of its advisory powers
we have a supreme example in the “deep speech” at Gloucester, which led
to the making of Domesday Book. If the title which is attached to the
oldest copy of William’s laws has any validity, they were promulgated in
accordance with Old English customs by the king _cum principibus suis_;
one clause in particular is said to have been ordained “in civitate
Claudia,” which may suggest that the law in question had been decreed in
one of the Midwinter Councils at Gloucester. But of one thing only we
can be sure, whatever functions the Council may have fulfilled, the
king’s will was the motive force which under lay all its action.
In later times, the chief justiciar appears as the normal president of
the Council, but in William’s reign it is hard to find any single
officer bearing that title. No doubt, when William was in England he
himself presided over his council; when he was in Normandy, if the
council met at all, which is unlikely, his place would probably be
taken by the representative he had left behind him. It is, perhaps,
impossible to give a dated list of the vicegerents who appear in
William’s reign; our notices of them are very scanty. We have seen
that in 1067 William Fitz Osbern and Odo of Bayeux were left as
“regents” of England when William made his first visit to Normandy
after the Conquest; there has survived an interesting writ of that
year in which “Willelm cyng and Willelm eorl” address jointly the
country magnates of Somersetshire.[298] At the time of the revolt of
the three earls in 1075, it is clear that Lanfranc was the king’s
vicegerent, an office which he probably filled again during William’s
last continental visit in 1086–7. For several reasons it is probable
that Odo of Bayeux was regent not long before his fall in 1082; it was
as the king’s representative that he took drastic vengeance on the
murderers of Bishop Walcher of Durham in 1080, and a most suggestive
story in the Abingdon Chartulary shows us King William repudiating the
judgment which his brother had given in a local lawsuit during his
regency.[299] From the same chartulary we learn that at some time
between 1071 and 1081 Queen Matilda herself was hearing pleas at
Windsor “in place of the king who was then in Normandy,”[300] though
this, of course, need not imply that she was regent in any wider sense
of the term. In general, the writs which the king sent from Normandy
into England will be addressed directly to the ordinary authorities of
the shire; and our knowledge of the succession of William’s
representatives is derived from incidental notices elsewhere.
[Illustration:
EARLDOMS
September 1087]
So far as we can see King William was always attended by a varying
number of his barons; a continually changing cortège followed the king
in his progress over the country. To this fluctuating body, just as to
the solemn council, our Latin authorities give the title of the King’s
Court, the “Curia Regis,” a phrase which at once connects the amorphous
group of William’s courtiers with the specialised executive of Henry II.
In a sense, no doubt, William’s court was the only executive of its
time, but the employment of these modern terms leads straight towards
anachronism; the judicial function of the Curia Regis was quite as
important as its executive work, and the court was, after all, only a
fraction of that larger council in which we have seen “judicial,”
“executive,” and “legislative” powers to be combined. If we are to make
for ourselves a distinction between two bodies which are tacitly
identified by all early writers, we may say that the Curia Regis was
composed of just those members of the Commune Concilium who happened to
be in attendance on the king at any given moment. But we must remember
that to the men of the eleventh century the king’s “court” and the
king’s “council” were one and the same; any distinction between them
which we may make exists for our own convenience and nothing more; the
court was only a shrunken form of the council.
Even those men who are most frequently to be found in attendance on the
king do not seem to be characterised either by special legal knowledge
or by definite official position. Great officers of the court, such as
the steward and the constable, do repeatedly appear; their positions
have not yet become annexed to any of the greater baronial houses, and
it is probable that their official duties are a reality; but, although
Eudo Fitz Hubert (de Rye) the steward, for instance, seems to have been
a personal friend of all three Norman kings, and accordingly is a
frequent signatory of their writs, such members of the official class
seem always to be accompanied by the unofficial barons present. Their
attendance also is very intermittent; even the chancellor is much less
in evidence in the Conqueror’s charters than in those of Henry I. or
II., and under these circumstances we may fairly ask how this
unprofessional body acted when required to behave as a court of law.
English evidence helps us little, but we get a useful hint as to
procedure in certain Norman charters and an analysis of one of them may
be quoted:
“At length both parties were summoned before the king’s court, in
which there sat many of the nobles of the land of whom Geoffrey,
bishop of Coutances, was delegated by the king’s authority as judge of
the dispute, with Ranulf the Vicomte, Neel, son of Neel, Robert de
Usepont, and many other capable judges who diligently and fully
examined the origin of the dispute, and delivered judgment that the
mill ought to belong to St. Michael and his monks forever. The most
victorious king William approved and confirmed this decision.”[301]
Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances is one of the more frequent visitors at
William’s English courts, and we may suspect that this method was not
infrequently used in England when the intricacy of a matter in dispute
surpassed the legal competence of the court as a whole. It forms, in
fact, the first stage in that segregation of a legal nucleus within the
indifferentiated _Curia_ which created the executive organ of the days
of the two great Henrys. The early part of this process takes place
almost wholly in the dark so far as England is concerned, and we must
seriously doubt whether it had led to any very definite results when the
Conqueror died; for it is to Henry I., rather than to his father, that
we should assign the formation of an organised body of royal
administrators. In this, as in other institutional matters, the
Conqueror’s reign was a time of tentative expedients and simple
solutions; it is essentially a period of origins.
The king’s court is a very mobile body. The king is always travelling
from place to place, and where he is at any moment there is his court
held also. It is possible to construct an itinerary of our kings from
Henry II. onward, but this cannot be done in the case of William, for it
is exceptional for his charters to contain any dating clause. William is
indeed to be seen issuing writs in very different parts of his kingdom:
at Winchester, the ancient capital of Wessex, and York, the ancient
capital of Northumbria; at hunting seats such as Brill and Woodstock; at
Downton in Wiltshire, Droitwich, and Burton-on-Trent; but the list of
places which we know to have been visited by William and his court in
time of peace is very small compared with the materials which we possess
for an itinerary of Henry I., or even of William Rufus. To this
deficiency of information is largely to be attributed the fact that,
compared with Henry I., William is rarely[302] to be found in the
northern parts of his kingdom; it is probable that fuller knowledge of
the details of his progresses would reveal a number of unrecorded visits
to the shires beyond Watling Street.
[Illustration: WILLIAM’S WRIT TO COVENTRY]
A natural means of transition from the king’s court to the local
divisions of the country, the shires and hundreds, is afforded by the
recognised means of communication between the two, those writs of which
mention has already been made. In form a writ is simply a letter
addressed to the persons who are responsible for the fulfilment of its
directions, and it is usually witnessed, as we have seen, by a greater
or less number of the persons present with the king at the time of its
issue. Such a letter might be written either in Latin or in Old English,
the former of course being more usual under the Norman kings, and it was
usually authenticated with the king’s great seal. This simple device
seems to have been the legal means by which the great transfer of land
which followed the Conquest was brought about; the king would send down
one of these writs to the sheriff of a county directing him to put a
certain baron in possession of certain specified lands, and the sheriff
would need no further warrant. We may give the following as an example
of a writ in its Latin form:
“William king of the English salutes Baldwin sheriff of Devonshire and
all his barons and servants in that shire.
Know ye that I have granted to my monks of Battle [de Bello] the
church of St. Olaf in Exeter with the lands of Shireford and with all
other lands and possessions belonging to the said church. Wherefore, I
will and command that they hold it freely and in peace and quit from
every duty of earthly service and from all pleas and claims and
[attendance at] shire and hundred courts and from every geld and
‘scot’ and aid and gift and danegeld and army service, with sake and
soke and infangenethef; [quit moreover from] all works on castles and
bridges, as befits my demesne alms. Witnessed by Thomas, Archbishop of
York, and William, the son of Osbert at Winchester.”[303]
Any comment on the privileges conveyed by the document would be outside
our present purpose, which is merely to illustrate the way in which King
William sent his instructions into the different parts of his kingdom.
But the formula of address deserves notice because it suggests that the
writ was really directed to the shire court where the sheriff and the
“barons and king’s servants” of the shire periodically met. There it
would be read in the presence of the assembled men of the county, and
the sheriff would forthwith proceed to carry its directions into effect.
The sheriff in the king’s eyes is clearly the executive officer of the
shire and his importance is not to be measured by the modern
associations aroused by his title. The Latin word which we translate as
“sheriff” is _vicecomes_ and this word also represents the French
_vicomte_, a fact which should by no means be ignored, for the sheriffs
of the half-century succeeding the Conquest resemble their French
contemporaries much more closely than either their English successors of
the twelfth century or the shire reeves of the Anglo-Saxon period. For
one thing, they are in a sense true _vicecomites_: the sheriff was the
chief officer in each county in which there was no earl, and the
earldoms created by William were few, and with the exception of Kent
were situated in remote parts of the land. Then also it is certain that
some at least of the more important sheriffdoms were hereditary in much
the same sense as that in which the great earldoms before the Conquest
were hereditary—the cases of Devon, Wiltshire and Essex are examples—to
which we must add that the early Norman sheriffs are often very great
men. Baldwin the sheriff of Devon was the son of William’s own guardian,
Count Gilbert of Brionne, and two of his sons followed him in the
office. Edward the sheriff of Wiltshire was the ancestor of the medieval
earls of Salisbury. Urse de Abetot, alternately despoiler and tenant of
the church of Worcester was the chief lay landowner in Worcestershire,
Hugh Fitz Baldric, sheriff of Yorkshire, was among the greater tenants
in chief in that county. In local, as in general constitutional history,
it is most important not to read the ideas of Henry II.’s time into the
institutions which prevailed under the Conqueror. Had William in 1070
tried to carry out a general deposition of his sheriffs, such as Henry
II. actually achieved in 1170, the attempt, we may be sure, would have
led to a revolt, and the mass of the baronage would have sided with the
official members of their class. But indeed, so long as the Normans were
still intruders in a conquered country, it was only politic on William’s
part to govern through men of strong territorial position, men who had
the power to enforce the king’s commands in their own localities. In the
choice of his local administrators, as in certain other aspects of his
policy, William was preparing difficulties for his successors, but his
justification lay in the essential needs of his own time. The great
transfer of land from Englishmen to Normans, to take one instance, could
never have been accomplished if the local government of the country had
been in weak hands.
In the period immediately following the Conquest, the four years between
1066 and 1070, which in so many respects are distinct from the rest of
William’s reign, perhaps the majority of the sheriffdoms continued to be
held by Englishmen. Within this period writs are addressed to Edmund,
sheriff of Herefordshire, Sawold of Oxfordshire, Swegen of Essex, and
Tofig of Somerset, and even after 1070 such Englishmen as Ethelwine,
sheriff of Staffordshire,[304] continue the series. In fact, the
development of the provincial administration in this respect seems to
have followed a very similar course to that which we have noted in the
case of the king’s court; there is a period in which men of both races
are mingled in the government of the shires, as well as in attendance on
the king’s person. But by the end of the reign the change in both
respects had become almost complete, and the introduction of Norman
sheriffs began early; for before 1069 Urse de Abetot had already entered
upon his aggressive course as sheriff of Worcestershire, and it is very
probable that even by the time of William’s coronation the Norman
Geoffrey had succeeded Ansgar the Staller in his sheriffdom of London
and Middlesex.[305]
From the sheriffs we may pass naturally to their superiors in rank, the
earls. Taught by experience, William regarded the vast, half-independent
earldoms of the later Anglo-Saxon period with profound mistrust, and as
the occasion presented itself he allowed them to lapse. All the earldoms
held by members of the house of Godwine became extinct with the battle
of Hastings, but the great provincial governments of Mercia and
Northumbria probably lasted until the final revolt of Earls Edwin and
Morcar in the spring of 1069. After their suppression there remained
three minor earldoms of Anglo-Saxon origin, East Anglia, Northampton,
and Bernicia, the holders of which, as we have seen, were mainly
responsible for the rebellion of 1075. Upon William’s triumph in the
latter year the East Anglian earldom was suppressed, that of Northampton
ceases to exist for the remainder of the Conqueror’s reign, and we have
already noticed the reasons which led to the continuance of the earldom
of Bernicia. Similar motives led to the creation of the four earldoms
which alone can be proved to have come into being before 1087, and which
deserve to be considered in detail here. They are:
1. Hereford, granted to William Fitz Osbern before January, 1067.
2. Shrewsbury, granted to Roger de Montgomery circ. 1070.
3. Chester, granted to Hugh d’Avranches, before January, 1071.
4. Kent, granted to Odo, bishop of Bayeux, possibly before January,
1067.
The exact extent of the earldom of Hereford is doubtful, for there
exists a certain amount of evidence which makes it probable that William
Fitz Osbern possessed the rights of an earl over Gloucestershire and
Worcestershire in addition to the county from which he took his title.
We have already discussed the general significance of the early writ
which the king addressed to Earl William and the magnates of
Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, and the evidence of this document is
supported by the fact that the earl appears as dealing in a very
arbitrary fashion with land and property in both shires.[306] It is
probable on other grounds that Gloucestershire lay within the Fitz
Osbern earldom, for William’s possessions extended far south of the
Herefordshire border to the lands between Wye and Usk in the modern
county of Monmouth, and the addition of Gloucestershire to Herefordshire
is required to complete the line of earldoms which lay along the Welsh
border. On the other hand it seems probable that Worcestershire never
belonged to Roger, William Fitz Osbern’s son, for in 1075 it was the
main object of the royal captains in the west to prevent him from
crossing the Severn to the assistance of his friends in the midlands. In
any case the early date at which the earldom of Hereford was created
deserves notice, for it shows that within four months of the battle of
Hastings William was strong enough to place a foreign earl in command of
a remote and turbulent border shire. Short as was his tenure of his
earldom William Fitz Osbern was able to leave his mark there; fifty
years after his death there still remained in force an ordinance which
he had decreed to the effect that no knight should be condemned to pay
more than seven shillings for any offence.[307] Lastly, it should be
noted that in a document of 1067[308] William Fitz Osbern is styled
“consul palatinus,” a title which should not be construed “palatine
earl,” but which rather means that William, though raised to comital
rank, still retained the position of “dapifer” or steward of the court,
which he inherited from his father, the unlucky Osbern of the
Conqueror’s minority, and in virtue of which the earl of Hereford
continued to be the titular head of the royal household.
To the north of William Fitz Osbern, Roger de Montgomery, the other
friend of William’s early days, was established in an earldom threaded
by the Severn as Herefordshire is threaded by the Wye, and stretching
along the former river to the town and castle to which the house of
Montgomery left its name. From the standpoint of frontier strategy
Roger’s position was even more important than that held by his neighbour
of Hereford; for Shrewsbury, the point where roads from London, Stafford
and the east, and Chester and the north met before crossing the Severn,
continued throughout the Middle Ages to be the key to mid-Wales.
Unfortunately, the date at which Roger received the Shropshire earldom
cannot be fixed with certainty, for, while he appears at court in the
enjoyment of comital rank as early as 1069, the one account which we
possess of the operations at Shrewsbury in the latter year virtually
implies that the town was then in the king’s hand. Probably the
discrepancy is to be explained by the fact that before he received his
grant of Shropshire Roger had been given the castle of Arundel and the
town of Chichester in the distant shire of Sussex.[309] It is highly
probable, in fact, that Roger possessed the rights of an earl over the
latter county,[310] and such a grant would fall in well with the general
policy of the Conqueror, for Sussex was only less important than Kent as
a point of arrival from the continent, and in the eleventh century
Arundel was a port. Most probably Roger was appointed earl of Shrewsbury
after the events of 1069 had shown that a coalition of Welsh and English
was the most pressing danger of the moment, but he continued in
possession of Arundel and Chichester.[311] Once established at
Shrewsbury, Roger and his followers speedily proceeded to take the
offensive against the Welsh, and in 1072 Hugh de Montgomery, the earl’s
eldest son, extended his raids as far south as Cardigan. In addition to
being the earl of two English shires, Roger de Montgomery held great
possessions in Normandy and France; in right of his wife he was count of
Bellême, and by a more distant succession he became Seigneur of Alençon,
while a series of marriage alliances placed him at the head of a
powerful group of kinsmen. But it is probable that the place which he
holds in history is due less to his wide lands and great power than to
the accident that one of his knights became the father of the greatest
historian whom Normandy had so far produced. The earl of Shrewsbury was
a great baron and a loyal knight, but when we regard him as representing
the best aspect of the Norman conquerors of England we are, consciously
or otherwise, guided by the place which he fills in the narrative of the
chronicler born within his earldom, Ordericus Vitalis.
The circumstances under which the earldom of Chester was created present
a certain amount of difficulty. Chester itself was the last great town
of England which called for separate reduction at William’s hands, and
it did not fall until the beginning of 1070. Then we are told that
William gave the earldom of Cheshire to Gherbod, one of his Flemish[312]
followers, but an original charter[313] of the time shows us Hugh Lupus
of Avranches already addressed as earl of Chester in or before February,
1071. Now Gherbod (who never appears in any English document) was killed
in Flanders in the latter month, so that we can only suppose that, if he
ever received the earldom, he never took practical possession of it, and
resigned it almost immediately. The historical earldom of Chester is
that which remained in the family of Hugh of Avranches for two centuries
and formed the “county palatine” which survived until 1536. It was a
frontier earldom in a double sense: Chester controlled the passage of
the Dee into North Wales and also the coast road to Rhuddlan and
Anglesey, while so long as all England north of Morecambe Bay was Scotch
territory, it was politic to entrust much power to the man who commanded
the west coast route from the midlands to the north. Judging from the
evidence of Domesday Book, the whole of Cheshire formed one compact fief
in the hands of its earl; it is the only county in England possessed
outright by one tenant-in-chief. Of Earl Hugh, we can draw the outlines
of no very pleasing picture. He was devoted to every kind of sensual
indulgence, and so fat that no horse could carry him; he is charged like
most of his contemporaries with disrespect to the rights of church
property. On the other hand, he was, so far as we can see, unswervingly
faithful to the king, and he abundantly fulfilled his natural duty of
keeping the Welsh away from the English border; nor is it probable that
William would have entrusted to a lethargic fool one of the most
responsible positions in his kingdom.
The case of Kent stands apart from that of its three sister earldoms.
The latter were created as the readiest means of securing a part of the
country remote from the centre of authority. The importance of Kent lay
in its position between London and the Channel ports. Through the county
ran the great Dover road, the main artery of communication between all
northern England and the continent, the obvious line along which an
invader would strike at London. The rising of 1067 proved the reality of
such danger and it was reasonable that the county should be placed in
charge of the man who by relationship was the natural vicegerent of the
king when the latter was across the Channel. Territorially, Kent was
much less completely in the hands of its earl than was the case with
either of the three western earldoms, but the possessions of Odo of
Bayeux in the rest of England placed him in the first rank of
landowners. The date at which the earldom was created is not quite
certain; like William Fitz Osbern, Odo may have received his earldom at
the time of his joint regency with the former in 1067. He is addressed
as bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent in a charter which is not later
than 1077, and his rank as an earl is strikingly brought out in the
circumstances of his dramatic arrest in 1082.
Judged by later events, the creation of these four great earldoms may
seem to have been a mistake on the part of the Conqueror. Hereford,
Kent, and Shropshire in turn served as the base of operations for a
formidable revolt within fifty years of the Conquest. Their formation
also contrasts with the general principles which governed the
distribution of land among the Norman baronage, principles which aimed
in the main at reproducing the discrete character of the greater old
English estates. Before the Conquest no such compact block of territory
as the earldom of Cheshire had ever been given in direct possession to
any subject. But here, as in the case of the powerful sheriffdoms of
William’s time, his justification lay in his immediate necessities. His
reason for the creation of the western earldoms was the same as that
which prompted his successors to entrust almost unlimited power to the
great lords on the march of Wales. It was absolutely necessary to secure
central England against all danger from Welsh invasion, and the king
himself had neither the time nor the means to conquer Wales outright. He
found a temporary solution by placing on the debatable border three
earls, strong enough in land and men to keep the Welsh at bay and
impelled by self-interest to carry out his wishes. And also we should
remember that it was only wise to guard against a repetition of that
combination of independent Welsh and irreconcilable English which had
been planned in 1068; the three western earldoms were all created before
the capture of Ely in 1071 ended the series of national risings against
the Conqueror. Lastly, it will not escape notice that at the outset all
four earldoms were given to men whom William knew well and had every
reason to trust. Odo of Kent was his half-brother; Roger de Montgomery
and William Fitz Osbern were young men already at his side in his early
warfare before Domfront; Hugh of Chester belonged to a family which had
held household positions in his Norman court. William might well have
felt that he could not entrust his delegated power to safer hands than
these.
Four or five shires only were placed under the control of separate
earls, and in them as elsewhere in England the old English system of
local government continued with but little change. The shire and hundred
courts continued to meet to transact the judicial and administrative
business of their respective districts though the manorial courts which
sprang up in great numbers as a result of the Conquest were continually
withdrawing more and more of this work. We know very little of the
ordinary procedure of the local courts; it is only when they take part
in some especially important affair such as the Domesday Inquest that
the details of their action are recorded. An excellent illustration of
the way in which the machinery of the shire court was applied to the
settlement of legal disputes is afforded by the following record, taken
from the history of the church of Rochester:
“In the time of William the Great, king of the English, father of
William, also king of that nation, there arose a dispute between
Gundulf, bishop of Rochester, and Picot, sheriff of Cambridge, about
certain land, situated in Freckenham, but belonging to Isleham, which
one of the king’s sergeants, called Olchete, had presumed to occupy in
virtue of the sheriff’s grant. For the sheriff said that the land in
question was the king’s, but the bishop declared that it belonged to
the church of St. Andrew. And so they came before the king who ordered
that all the men of that shire should be brought together, that by
their verdict [_judicio_], it might be determined to whom the land
should rightly belong. Now they, when assembled, through fear of the
sheriff, declared the land to belong to the king, rather than to
Blessed Andrew, but the bishop of Bayeux, who was presiding over the
plea, did not believe them, and directed that if they were sure that
their verdict was true, they should choose twelve out of their number
to confirm with an oath what all had said. But when the twelve had
withdrawn to consider the matter, they were struck with terror by a
message from the sheriff and so, on returning, they swore that to be
true which had been declared before. Now, these men were Edward of
Chippenham, Heruld and Leofwine ‘saca’ of Exning, Eadric of Isleham,
Wulfwine of Landwade, Ordmer of Bellingham, and six others of the
better men of the county. After all this, the land remained in the
king’s hand. But in that same year a certain monk, called Grim came to
the bishop like a messenger from God, for when he heard what the
Cambridge men had sworn, he was amazed, and in his wrath called them
all liars. For this monk had formerly been the reeve of Freckenham,
and had received services and customary payments from the land in
question as from the other lands belonging there, while he had had
under him in that manor one of the very men who had made the sworn
confirmation. When the bishop of Rochester had heard this, he went to
the bishop of Bayeux and told him the monk’s story in order. Then the
bishop of Bayeux summoned the monk before himself and heard the same
tale from him, after which he summoned one of those who had sworn, who
instantly fell down before his feet and acknowledged himself to be a
liar. Then again he summoned the man who had sworn first of all, and
on being questioned he likewise confessed his perjury. Lastly, he
ordered the sheriff to send the remaining jurors to London to appear
before him together with twelve others of the better men of the county
to confirm the oath of the former twelve. To the same place also, he
summoned many of the greater barons of England, and when all were
assembled in London, judgment was given both by French and English
that all the jurors were perjured since the man after whom all had
sworn had owned himself to be a liar. After a condemnation of this
kind the bishop of Rochester kept the land, as was just, but since the
second twelve jurors wished to assert that they did not agree with
those who had first sworn, the bishop of Bayeux said that they should
prove this by the ordeal of iron. They promised to do so, but failed,
and by the judgment of the other men of their county they paid three
hundred pounds to the king.”[314]
In this extract we get a vivid picture of the way in which the two
systems of government, Norman and English, worked in conjunction. In the
above transactions the matter in dispute is referred for settlement to
the ancient shire court of Cambridgeshire, and determined by the oaths
of English jurors, but the procedure is a Norman innovation, and it is
the Conqueror’s brother who presides over the plea. The terror inspired
by the sheriff is an eloquent commentary on the vague complaints of the
chroniclers concerning the oppression of the king’s officers, and we may
welcome this casual glimpse into the relations between the English folk
of the county and the formidable president of their court. But the
remaining details of the story may well be left to explain themselves.
But a suit of this kind must not be taken as typical of the ordinary
work of the shire court; it was not every day that it had to discuss the
affairs of a king and a bishop. It was the exceptional rank of the
parties concerned in this instance which enabled them to traverse the
original judgment of the shire court and to employ a procedure quite
alien to the methods of the Old English local moots. So far as we can
see, the practice of settling disputes by the verdict of a small body of
sworn jurors was entirely a Norman innovation, and we may be sure that
it would not have been employed in this case if the veracity of the men
of the shire had not been called in question. Within ten years of the
date of our story the king’s fiscal rights all over England were to be
ascertained by the inquisition of sworn juries in the Domesday Inquest,
but the employment of this method in ordinary judicial cases continued
to be highly exceptional down to the beginning of the Angevin period,
and our instance may perhaps claim to be the first recorded example of
its use. The duty of the shire court in all pleas of the kind, to which
it would have been confined in all probability in the above case if the
king had not been attracted within the dispute, was simply to declare
the customary law which related to the matter in hand. In principle, a
judgment of this kind is entirely different from the verdict on oath
given by men selected for their local knowledge as were the jurors in
our story: if carried out honestly the result would be the same in
either case—the land would be assigned to the proper person; but whereas
this would only follow incidentally if inevitably from the unsworn
judgment of the court as a whole, the sworn verdict would consist of an
actual award. The latter principle produced the Angevin juries of
presentment; the former principle continued to underlie the action of
the shire and hundred courts so long as they exercised judicial
functions. The interest of the Isleham case above lies in its
transitional character: it shows us the sworn jury used as a secondary
resort after the accustomed practice of the shire court had failed to
give satisfaction; already in 1077 it is available for the amendment of
wrongs arising “_pro defectu recti_,” on the part of the domesmen of the
local assemblies.
But just as the introduction of the jury was bringing a new procedure
into competition with the antiquated methods of the local courts, so a
quite different set of causes was cutting at the root of their
influence. Centuries before the Conquest considerable powers of
jurisdiction had been placed in private, generally ecclesiastical,
hands, but the gradual extension of the sphere of private justice, until
it became an integral part of the whole manorial organisation, was due
to the feudal principles which triumphed in 1066. Private jurisdiction,
as it existed in the Conqueror’s day, represents the blending of at
least three distinct principles. In the first place, the king can confer
jurisdictional rights on whomsoever he pleases; from this point of view
a private court will represent a portion of royal power in the hands of
a subject. But in the second place, the king himself is only the first
of a number of men who possess these rights in virtue of their rank; it
is probable that the political theory of the eleventh century would
allow that a great man was naturally possessed of such powers of justice
as were appropriate to his personal status, though it would be unable to
give a rational explanation of the fact. And then even in the
Conqueror’s time there can be traced the idea, the prevalence of which
was destined to cover England with manorial courts, that the tenurial
relation between a lord and his tenant gave the former jurisdictional
powers over the latter; that, independently of a royal grant, or of his
personal rank, a lord was entitled to hold a court for his “men”; that
the economic relation between landlord and tenant produced a
corresponding tie in the sphere of jurisdiction. It is the first two of
these principles which produced the “sake and soke” of Anglo-Saxon law,
it is the last which explains the extension of manorial justice in the
century following the Conquest.[315] It is worth while making this
classification, for it reveals one of the main lines of divergence
between English and French law in the Middle Ages. That which in England
was the least persistent of our three principles, the element of
personal rank, became in France the basis of the famous classification
of jurisdictional powers into “haut, moyen, et bas justice,” which
endured until the Revolution, and the main reason for this difference
lies in the circumstances of the Norman Conquest. By that event,
whatever the explanation of private justice which may have passed
current among those who troubled themselves about such matters, all such
powers proceeded directly or indirectly from the king; directly when the
Conqueror made an explicit grant of “sake and soke” to a baron,
indirectly if the latter claimed his court as proceeding from his tenure
of his land, for the land itself was held of the king who had granted it
to him. Here then, in the Sphere of local justice, we see the union of
Norman and English ideas; the judicial power which results from the
facts of tenure is added to the judicial power which is exercised in
virtue of the king’s grant.
[Illustration: PLAN OF GREAT CANFIELD CASTLE, ESSEX]
It should not be thought that the Norman barons, in their seats across
the Channel, had exercised jurisdictional powers in advance of those
possessed by the English nobles and thegns whom they were destined to
displace. The fact that the grants of private justice which the
Conqueror made to his followers in England were set forth in the same
conventional phrases as Edward the Confessor would have employed in like
case, may be set down to William’s desire to preserve the forms of Old
English law; but there is no doubt that the Norman barons were quite
content to accept the Anglo-Saxon formulas as a satisfactory expression
of the jurisdictional powers which they were to enjoy. In fact, the
latter were ample enough. Thus, when the Conqueror confirmed his
“customs” to the abbot of Ely, these included “sake and soke, toll and
team and infangenethef, hamsocne and grithbrice, fihtwite and fyrdwite
within boroughs and without, and the penalties for all other crimes
which are emendable on his land and over his men, as he held them on the
day when King Edward was alive and dead.”[316] Terms like these cover
nearly the whole field of “civil and criminal justice.” Sake and soke
may be construed as the right to hold a court; toll explains itself;
“team” implies that persons might be “vouched to warranty” in the court,
a process which is too technical to be explained here, but the grant of
which made a court capable of entertaining suits arising out of the
transfer of land; “infangenethef” is the right of trying and executing
thieves taken on one’s land; “hamsocne” (or rather “hamfare”) is the
breach of a man’s house; “grithbrice” is the violation of the grantees’
special peace; “fihtwite” is the fine for a general breach of the peace;
“fyrdwite” is the fine for failure to appear in the national militia,
the fyrd. Privileges like these, within the area to which they are
applicable, empower the grantees’ court to take cognisance of all crimes
and misdemeanours which might be expected to occur in the ordinary
course of events; the Isle of Ely and some dozens of external manors
were practically withdrawn altogether from the national system of
justice. We have no reason to suppose that the average baron in Normandy
was endowed with anything like these powers, nor need we suppose that
grants of such wide application were very frequently made to the
conquerors of England; but when, two years after the date of Domesday
Book, we find Roger de Busli—a great baron certainly, but not belonging
absolutely to the first rank—granting to his monks of Blyth “sac and
soke, tol and team and infangenethef, iron and ditch and gallows with
all other privileges [_libertates_] which I formerly held of the
king,”[317] we can see that the feudalisation of justice had gone far by
the time of King William’s death.
We may then fairly inquire what was the relation which these new
manorial courts bore to the old national courts which they were destined
to supplant. With reference to the hundred and shire assemblies, the
answer is fairly simple: the two systems of jurisdiction were
concurrent. The hundred court, we must remember, was in no sense
inferior to the shire court, and in the same way the manorial court was
in no sense inferior to either of these bodies; it rested with the
individual litigant before which of them he should bring his plea, with
this most important exception—that the lord of the party impleaded could
if he wished “claim his court,” and so appropriate the profits of the
trial. Here was a most powerful force steadily drawing business away
from the shires and hundreds, and attracting it within the purview of
the manor. But then the wishes of the peasantry told in the same
direction: the manorial court was close at hand; it was composed of
neighbours who knew each others’ concerns, and were constantly
associated in the common agricultural work of the vill; it gratified the
tendencies towards local isolation, which were pre-eminently strong in
the early Middle Ages. The manorial court supplied justice at home, and
we should remember how many hindrances beset recourse to the hundreds
and shires. In all Staffordshire there were only five hundreds; in all
Leicestershire only four wapentakes; the prosecution of a suit in any of
these courts must have meant grievous weariness and loss, the
establishment of a manorial court must have meant an immediate
alleviation of the law’s delay. He would have been an exceptionally
far-sighted villein who in 1086 could foresee that the convenient local
court would eventually be the agent by which his descendants would be
thrown into dependence on the will of the lord, with no other protection
than the traditional and unwritten “custom of the manor”; that the
establishment of the lord’s justice would ultimately exclude all
reference to the more independent if more antiquated justice of the men
of the hundred of the shire, on the part of the lesser folk of his vill.
One question connected with the rise of manorial courts deserves
attention here—did they displace any court proper to the vill as a
whole, independently of its manorial aspect? It is clear that every now
and again the men of the vill must have met, if only to regulate the
details of its open-field husbandry. But whether such a meeting had any
formal constitution or judicial functions—whether, that is, it was a
“township-moot,” in the accepted sense of the words[318]—is excessively
doubtful. The fact that we hear nothing definitely about it in the
documents of the Anglo-Saxon period is not quite conclusive against its
existence; it is more to the point that the hundred moot seems to be the
lowest stage reached by the descending series of national courts. It is
probable, therefore, that the ordinary township never possessed any
court other than that which belonged to it in its manorial aspect.
We have seen enough to know that the jurisdictional and economic aspects
of feudalism were intimately connected: the manorial court was the
normal complement of the average manor. No less closely associated in
practice were the military and tenurial elements of the feudal system,
and upon a superficial view of this system it is these latter elements
which rise into greatest prominence. Nor is this altogether unjust, for,
although it is not probable that any change induced by the Norman
Conquest so profoundly affected English social life as did the universal
establishment of private jurisdiction, yet the introduction of military
tenures, and the creation of a feudal army rooted in the soil of
England, are phenomena of the first importance, and the form which they
assumed in the course of the next century was due in essence to the
personal action of the Conqueror himself, and to the political
necessities of his position.
The rapidity with which England had been conquered had demonstrated
clearly enough the inefficiency of the Anglo-Saxon military system, and
the changes introduced in this matter by King William were
revolutionary, both in details and in principle. The military force at
the disposal of Edward the Confessor had consisted of two parts: first,
the fyrd or native militia, based on the primitive liability of every
free man to serve for the defence of his county, and secondly a body of
housecarles, professional men-at-arms, who served for pay and were
therefore under better discipline and available for longer periods of
service than the rustic soldiery of the shires. There is no good
evidence to prove that the Anglo-Saxon thegn was burdened with any
military obligation other than that which rested on him as a free man,
but there are certain passages which suggest that, in the latter days of
the old English state, the king in practice would only call out one man
from each five hides of land, and that he would hold his more powerful
subjects responsible for the due appearance of their dependants. If this
were an attempt to create a small but efficient host out of the great
body of the fyrd, it came too late to save the situation and, so far as
our evidence goes, it was the professional housecarles who bore the
brunt of the great battles of 1066. By derivation at least the
housecarle must have been a man who dwelt in his lord’s house as a
personal retainer; and, although we know that men of this class had
received grants of land from the last native kings, there is no reason
to believe that their holdings were conditional on their services, or
indeed that they were other than personal marks of favour, quite
unconnected with the military duty of the recipient.
The essential features of the Norman system were entirely different to
this. Each tenant in chief of the crown, as the condition on which he
held his lands, was required to maintain, equip, and hold ready for
immediate service a definite number of knights, and the extent of his
liability in this matter was not, save in the roughest sense,
proportional to his territorial position, but was determined solely by
the will of the king. Transactions of this kind most probably took place
at the moment when each tenant in chief was put into possession of his
fief, and their observance on the part of the grantee was guaranteed by
the penalty of total forfeiture in the event of his appearance at the
king’s muster with less than his full complement of knights. His
military liability once ascertained, a tenant would commonly proceed to
enfeof some of his knights on portions of his estate, keeping the
remainder in attendance on his person. As time went on the number of
landless knights continually became less and less, and by the end of the
Conqueror’s reign, the greater part of every fief was divided into
knight’s fees, whose holders were bound by the circumstances of their
tenure to serve with their lord in the discharge of the military service
which he owed the crown. No definite quantity of land, measured either
by assessment or value, constituted the knight’s fee; but, judging from
the evidence of a later period, it seems certain that each tenant in
chief was burdened with the service of a round number of knights,
twenty, thirty, or the like, and it is quite possible that these round
figures were influenced by the Norman _constabularia_ of ten knights, a
military unit which we know to have prevailed across the Channel before
the conquest of England.[319]
But the work of subinfeudation once started, no limit in theory or
practice was ever set to it in England, and in the earliest period of
Norman rule we find knights, who held of a tenant-in-chief, subletting
part of their land to other knights and the latter continuing the
process at their own pleasure. In Leicestershire, for example, the vill
of Lubbenham was held of the king by the archbishop of York, and had
been let by him to a certain Walchelin, who had enfeoffed with it a man
of his own called Robert, who had granted three carucates of land in the
manor to an unnamed knight as his tenant. But this is an exceptional
case, for it is unusual for Domesday to reveal more than two lords in
ascending order between the peasant and the king. A process of the same
kind had not been unknown in England in the time of King Edward;
churches had been leasing land to their thegns; and thegns, whom a
Norman lawyer would consider to hold of the king, had been capable of
subletting their estates to their dependants. But the legal principles
which underlay dependant land tenure had never been worked out in
England, as they had been elaborated in Normandy before the Conquest,
and in two important respects at least there was a marked difference
between the old and the new system. On the one hand it is extremely
doubtful whether Anglo-Saxon law had developed the idea that all land,
not in the king’s immediate possession, was held directly or indirectly
of the crown; and in the second place the old English system of land
tenure was far slacker and less coherent than its Norman rival. Domesday
Book contains frequent references to men who could leave one lord and
seek another at will, and this want of stability in what was perhaps the
most important division of private law meant a corresponding weakness in
the whole of the Anglo-Saxon body politic. Here as elsewhere the Norman
work made for cohesion, permanence, and theoretical consistency.
[Illustration: AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURES TO WINDSOR AGREEMENT]
It was also an innovation upon accepted practice that the Conqueror
extended to ecclesiastical estates the military responsibilities which
he imposed upon lay fiefs. Long before the Confessor’s time, the
churches had been subletting land to their thegns on condition that the
latter should do the military service which the said churches owed to
the king; but the duty in question merely represented the amount of fyrd
service due from the lands of each religious house, and was in no sense
the result of any bargain between the king and the latter. On the other
hand, the number of knights maintained by an ecclesiastical tenant of
King William depended in the last resort upon the terms which that
tenant, whether bishop or monastery, had made with the new sovereign.
The Conqueror could not venture to dispossess a native religious house
as he could dispossess a native thegn or earl; but he could insist that
such a body should make its contribution towards the new army which he
was planting on the soil of England, and he could determine the minimum
amount of the contribution in each case. So far as our evidence goes,
the knight service demanded from a monastery was fixed in a much more
arbitrary manner than that imposed on a lay tenant; a baron’s military
liabilities would greatly correspond in the main, though very roughly,
with the extent of his fief, but no principle of the kind can have been
applied to the burden laid upon the church lands. The abbeys of
Peterborough and Abingdon were bound to supply sixty and thirty knights
respectively, but St. Albans escaped with a _servitum debitum_ of six,
and St. Benet of Hulme was only debited with three. It is more than
probable that political conditions went far towards producing these
violent discrepancies; a monastery, like Peterborough, which had
displayed strong nationalist tendencies, might fairly enough be
penalised by the imposition of a heavy burden of service towards the
maintenance of the foreign rule. On the other hand, the process in
question was regarded in a very different light by the Norman abbots who
were gradually introduced in the course of the reign, and by the English
monks placed under their government. To the former the creation of
knights’ fees meant a golden opportunity of providing for their
necessitous kinsmen beyond the Channel; to the latter the withdrawal of
land from the immediate purposes of the church forboded an ultimate
shrinkage in the daily supply of beef and beer. The local chronicler of
Abingdon abbey tells us sorrowfully how Abbot Ethelhelm sent over into
Normandy for his kinsmen, and invested them with the possessions of the
monastery to such an extent that in one year he granted seventy manors
to them, which were still lacking to the church a hundred years later.
Reference should perhaps be made here to the difficult question of the
actual numbers of the territorial army which rose at King William’s
bidding upon the conquered land. In a matter of this kind the statements
of professed chroniclers must be wholly ignored; they represent mere
guesswork, and show a total insensibility to the military and
geographical possibilities of the case. Several attempts, based upon the
safer evidence of records, have recently been made to estimate the total
number of knights whom the king had the right to summon to his banners
at any given moment, and it is probable that the results of such
inquiries represent a sufficiently close approximation to the truth of
the matter. On the whole, then, we may say that the total knight service
of England was fixed at something near five thousand knights, of whom
784 have been assigned to religious tenants-in-chief, 3534 have been set
down as the contribution of lay barons, the remainder representing the
allowance properly to be made for the deficiencies in our sources of
information.[320] The question is important, not only for the influence
which tenure by knight service exercised on the later English land-law,
but also for its bearing upon the cognate problem of the numbers engaged
in the battle of Hastings, which has already received discussion here.
From knight service we may pass naturally enough to the kindred duty of
castle-guard. The castles which had arisen in England by the time of the
Conqueror’s death belong to one or other of two great classes. On the
one hand, there was the royal fortress, regarded as an element in the
system of national defence, whether against foreign invasion or native
revolt; to the second class belong the castles which were merely the
private residence of their lord. In castles of the former class, which
were mostly situated in boroughs and along the greater roadways, the
governor was merely the king’s lieutenant; Henry de Beaumont and William
Peverel were placed in command of the castles of Warwick and Nottingham
respectively, in order that they might hold those towns on the king’s
behalf. This being the case, it was only natural that garrison duty as
well as service in the field should be demanded from the knights whom
the barons of the neighbourhood were required to supply; the knights of
the abbot of Abingdon were required to go on guard at Windsor Castle. Of
the seventy castles which we may reasonably assume to have existed in
1087, twenty-four belong to this class, and twenty of the latter are
situated in some borough or other, and this close connection of borough
and royal castle is something more than a fortuitous circumstance. In
Anglo-Saxon times, it is well ascertained that each normal borough had
been the military centre of the district in which it lay, and had in
fact been the natural base of operations in the work of local defence.
The Normans brought with them new ideas on the subject of defensive
strategy, but the geographical and economic conditions which gave to the
boroughs their military importance in early times were not annulled by
the Norman Conquest; and it would still have been desirable to safeguard
the growing centres of trade from external attacks, even if it had not
been expedient in Norman eyes to set a curb upon the national spirit
among the dwellers in the English towns. No general rule can be laid
down as to the custody of these royal castles; it was not infrequent for
them to be held on the king’s behalf by the sheriff of the shire in
which they might be situated, but the Conqueror would entrust his
fortress to any noble of sufficient military skill and loyalty, and, as
in the cases of Warwick and Nottingham, a tenure which was originally
mere guardianship might pass in the course of time into direct
possession.
The larger class of private castles is less important from the
institutional standpoint. In Normandy the duke had the right to garrison
the castles of his nobility with troops of his own, but the Conqueror
does not seem to have extended this principle to England. It is very
probable that he would insist on his own consent being given to any
projected fortification on the part of his feudatories, but so long as
his rule was threatened by English revolt, rather than by Norman
disloyalty, he would not be greatly concerned to limit the
castle-building tendencies of his followers. On the Welsh border, for
example, where the creation of a strong line of castles was an essential
part of the business of frontier defence, the work of fortification must
largely have been left to the discretion of the earls of Shrewsbury and
Chester, and to the enterprise of the first generation of marcher lords.
East of a line drawn north and south through Gloucester, lie nearly half
of the total number of castles which we can infer to have been built
during the Conqueror’s reign, but only fourteen of them were in private
hands.
Underneath all these violent changes in the higher departments of the
military art, the old native institution of the fyrd lived on. Two years
after Hastings, at the dangerous crisis occasioned by the revolt of
Exeter, we find the Conqueror calling out the local militia, and at
intervals during his reign the national force continues to be summoned,
not only by the king but by his lieutenants, such as Geoffrey of
Coutances at the time of the relief of Montacute. It is not necessary to
assume that William had prescience of a day when an English levy might
be a useful counterbalance to a feudal host in rebellion; he inherited
the military as well as the financial and judiciary powers of his
kinsman King Edward, and obedience would naturally be paid to his
summons by everybody who did not wish to be treated as a rebel on the
spot. It does not seem that the Conqueror materially altered the
constitution or equipment of the fyrd; in fact he had no need to do
this, for its organisation and armament, obsolete as they were in
comparison with those of the feudal army, still enabled it to fight with
revolted Englishmen or Scotch raiders on more or less of an equality.
For the serious business of a campaign the Conqueror would rely on the
small but efficient force of knights at his command, and it is to be
noted that no barrier of racial prejudice prevented the absorption of
Englishmen of sufficient standing into the knightly class. The number of
Englishmen who are entered in Domesday Book, on a level with the Norman
tenants of a great baron, is considerable, and it is by no means
improbable that, below the surface of our records, a process had been
going on which had robbed the heterogeneous militia of King Edward’s day
of its wealthier and more efficient elements. Many a thegn who would
formerly have joined the muster of his shire with an equipment little,
if at all, superior to that of the peasantry of his neighbourhood, will
have received his land as the undertenant of some baron, and have
learned to adopt the military methods of his Norman fellows. We cannot
define with accuracy the stages by which this process did its work, but
when the time came for Henry II. to reorganise the local militia, it was
with a force of yeomen and burgesses that he had to deal.
We have now given a brief examination to the main departments of
administration, military and political, as they existed under the
Conqueror. Two general conclusions may perhaps be suggested as a result
of our survey. The first is that, throughout the field of government,
revolutionary changes in all essential matters have been taking place
under a specious continuity of external forms. The second is, that the
Conqueror’s work is in no respect final; the shock of his conquest had
wrecked the obsolescent organisation of the old English state, but the
development of the new order on which his rule was founded was a task
reserved for his descendants. The _Curia Regis_, which attended King
William as he passed over his dominions, was a body the like of which
had not been seen in King Edward’s day, but it was a body very unlike
the group of trained administrators who transacted the business of
government under the presidency of Henry II. The feudal host in England
owed its being to the Conqueror, but no sooner was it firmly seated on
the land than the introduction of scutage under Henry I. meant that the
king would henceforth only allow the Conqueror’s host to survive in so
far as it might subserve the purposes of the royal exchequer. King
William’s destructive work had been carried out with unexampled
thoroughness, order, and rapidity, but it was inevitable that the
process of reconstruction which he began should far outrun the narrow
limits of any single life.
[Illustration: Penny of William I.]
-----
Footnote 296:
_Easter_, 1069: King William; Matilda, the Queen; Richard, the King’s
son; Stigand, archbishop of Canterbury; Ealdred, archbishop of York;
William, bishop of London; Ethelric, bishop of Selsey; Herman, bishop
of Thetford; Giso, bishop of Wells; Leofric, bishop of Exeter; Odo,
bishop of Bayeux; Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances; Baldwin, bishop of
Evreux; Arnold, bishop of Le Mans; Count Robert (of Mortain), Earl
William Fitz Osbern, Count Robert of Eu, Earl Ralf (of Norfolk?),
Brian of Penthievre, Fulk de Alnou, Henry de Ferrers; Hugh de
Montfort, Richard the son of Count Gilbert, Roger d’ Ivri, Hamon the
Steward, Robert, Hamon’s brother.—Tardif, _Archives de l’Empire_, 179.
_Christmas_, 1077: King William; Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury;
Thomas, archbishop of York; Odo, bishop of Bayeux; Hugh, bishop of
London; Walkelin, bishop of Winchester; Remi, bishop of Lincoln;
Maurice, the chancellor; Vitalis, abbot of Westminster; Scotland,
abbot of Ch. Ch., Canterbury; Baldwin, abbot of St. Edmunds; Simeon,
abbot of Ely; Aelfwine, abbot of Ramsey; Serlo, abbot of Gloucester;
Earl Roger of Montgomery, Earl Hugh of Chester, Count Robert of
Mortain, Count Alan of Richmond, Earl Aubrey of Northumbria, Hugh de
Montfort, Henry de Ferrers, Walter Giffard, Robert d’ Oilli, Hamon the
Steward, Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester.—Ramsey Chartulary, R. S., ii.,
91.
_Easter_, 1080: King William; Matilda the Queen; Robert, the king’s
son; William, the king’s son; William, archbishop of Rouen; Richard,
archbishop of Bourges; Warmund, archbishop of Vienne; Geoffrey, bishop
of Coutances; Gilbert, bishop of Lisieux; Count Robert, the king’s
brother; Count Roger of Eu, Count Guy of Ponthieu, Roger de Beaumont,
Robert and Henry, his sons, Roger de Montgomery, Walter Giffard,
William d’ Arques.—_Calendar of Documents Preserved in France_, ed. J.
H. Round, No. 78.
Footnote 297:
Printed in Transactions of Somerset Archæological and Historical
Society, xxiii., 56
Footnote 298:
Bath Chartulary (Somerset Record Society), i., 36.
Footnote 299:
_Hist. Monasterii de Abingdon_, R. S., ii., 9.
Footnote 300:
_Ibid._, 10.
Footnote 301:
Round, _Calendar of Documents Preserved in France_, No. 712.
Footnote 302:
Henry I. is seldom found north of Nottingham.
Footnote 303:
_Monasticon_, iii., 377.
Footnote 304:
V. C. H., Warwick, i., 258.
Footnote 305:
See above, Chapter VI.
Footnote 306:
See the complaints of his aggressions in Heming’s _History of the
Church of Worcester_; _Monasticon_, i., 593–599.
Footnote 307:
William of Malmesbury, ii., 314.
Footnote 308:
_Calendar of Documents Preserved in France_, No. 77.
Footnote 309:
Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 178.
Footnote 310:
Compare Round, _Geoffrey de Mandeville_, 322.
Footnote 311:
See the charters of William II. in _Monasticon_, viii., 1167.
Footnote 312:
Ordericus Vitalis, ii., 219.
Footnote 313:
Reproduced herewith.
Footnote 314:
Wharton, _Anglia Sacra_, i., 339.
Footnote 315:
Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, 80-83.
Footnote 316:
Charter of William I., _Monasticon_, i., 477.
Footnote 317:
Foundation charter of Blyth Priory, _Monasticon_, iv., 623.
Footnote 318:
There is some evidence to suggest that the lord of a vill could cause
a court to be held there by his steward. This, however, is the result
of seignorial, not communal, ideas.
Footnote 319:
Round, _Feudal England_, 225–314, has given the clearest account of
the introduction and development of knight service in England.
Footnote 320:
_Feudal England_, as quoted above, page 447. See also Morris, _Welsh
Wars of Edward_, i., 36, arguing for a total of 5000.
CHAPTER XII
DOMESDAY BOOK
The eventful life of the Conqueror was within two years of its close
when he decreed the compilation of that record which was to be the
lasting monument of his rule in England. It is probable that if due
regard be paid to the conditions of its execution Domesday Book may
claim to rank as the greatest record of medieval Europe; certainly it
deserves such preference among the legal documents of England. For,
while we admire the systematic treatment which the great survey accords
to county after county, we must also remember that no sovereign before
William could have had the power to draw such wealth of information from
all England between the Channel and the Tees; and that the thousands of
dry figures which are deliberately accumulated in the pages of Domesday
represent the result of the greatest catastrophe which has ever affected
the national history. Domesday Book, indeed, has no peer, because it was
the product of unique circumstances. Other conquerors have been as
powerful as William, and as exigent of their royal rights; no other
conqueror has so consistently regarded himself as the strict successor
of the native kings who were before him; above all, no other conqueror
has been at pains to devise a record of the order of things which he
himself destroyed, nor even, like William, of so much of it as was
relevant to the more efficient conduct of his own administration.
Domesday Book is the perfect expression of the Norman genius for the
details of government.
It is needless to say that William had no intention of enlightening
posterity as to the social and economic condition of his kingdom. His
aim was severely practical. How it struck a contemporary may be gathered
from that well-known passage in which the Peterborough chronicler opens
the long series of commentaries on Domesday by recording his impressions
of the actual survey:
“After this the king held a great council and very deep speech with
his wise men about this land, how it was peopled and by what men. Then
he sent his men into every shire all over England and caused it to be
ascertained how many hundred hides were in the shire and what land the
king had, and what stock on the land, and what dues he ought to have
each year from the shire. Also he caused it to be written, how much
land his archbishops, bishops, abbots, and earls had, and (though I
may be somewhat tedious in my account) what or how much each
land-holder in England had in land or in stock and how much money it
might be worth. So minutely did he cause it to be investigated that
there was not one hide or yard of land, nor even (it is shameful to
write of it though he thought it not shameful to do it) an ox nor a
cow or swine that was not set down in his writ. And all the writings
were brought to him afterwards.”
[Illustration:
PORTION OF A PAGE OF DOMESDAY BOOK
(THE BEGINNING OF THE BERKSHIRE SECTION)]
Opinion at Peterborough was clearly adverse to the survey, and Florence
of Worcester tells us that the proceedings of the king’s commissioners
caused riots in various parts of England. The exact scope of the
information demanded by the commissioners cannot be better expressed
than in the words of a writer belonging to the neighbouring abbey of
Ely, who took an independent copy of the returns made to those officers
concerning the lands of his monastery, and describes the nature of the
inquiry thus:
“This is the description of the inquiry concerning the lands, which
the king’s barons made, according to the oath of the sheriff of the
shire and of all the barons and their Frenchmen and of the whole
hundred-court—the priests, reeves and six villeins from every vill. In
the first place [they required] the name of the manor; who held it in
the time of King Edward, and who holds it now, how many hides [_hidæ_]
are there, how many ploughs in demesne and how many belonging to the
men, how many villeins, cottars, slaves, freemen and sokemen; how much
woodland, meadow and pasture, how many mills and fisheries; how much
has been added to or taken from the estate, how much the whole used to
be worth, and how much it is worth now; and how much each freeman or
sokeman had or has there. All this thrice over; with reference to the
time of King Edward, and to the time when King William gave the land
and to the present time; and if more can be got out of it than is
being drawn now.”[321]
Now, although the fact may not appear on a first reading of these
passages, all these details were entirely subsidiary to one main
object—the exact record of the local distribution of the king’s “geld”
or Danegeld, the one great direct tax levied on the whole of England.
Domesday is essentially a financial document; it is a noteworthy example
of that insistence on their fiscal rights which was eminently
characteristic of the Anglo-Norman kings, and was the chief reason why
they were able to build up the strongest government in Western Europe.
Every fact recorded in Domesday bears some reference, direct or
indirect, to the payment of the Danegeld, for the king’s commissioners
knew their business, and the actual scribes who arranged the results of
the survey were remorseless in rejecting all details which did not fit
into the general scheme of their undertaking. It should not escape
observation that this fact prepares many subtle pitfalls for those who
would draw a picture of English society based on the materials supplied
by Domesday; but more of this will be said later, for there are certain
questions of history and terminology which demand attention at the
outset.
The most important of those points is the meaning of those “hides,”
which are mentioned in both of the above extracts. This, indeed, is the
essential clue to the interpretation of Domesday, and it is
unfortunately very elusive, for the term can be traced back to a very
early period of Anglo-Saxon history and more than one meaning came to be
attached to it in the course of its long history. When we first meet the
“hide,” the word seems to denote the amount of land which was sufficient
for the support of a normal household; it is the average holding of the
ordinary free man of Anglo-Saxon law. This much is reasonably certain,
but difficulties crowd in upon us when we attempt to estimate the
capacity of the hide in terms of acreage. Much discussion has arisen
about this point, but we may say that at present there are two main
theories on the subject, one assigning to the hide one hundred and
twenty acres of arable land, the other some much smaller quantity, such
as forty-eight or thirty acres, in either case with sufficient
appurtenances in wood, water, and pasture for the maintenance of the
plough and its oxen. Just now the prevailing view seems to be that the
areal capacity of the hide may have varied from county to county—that,
for instance, while we know that in the eleventh century the hide stood
at one hundred and twenty acres in Cambridgeshire and Essex, it may not
improbably have contained forty-eight acres in Wiltshire. Important, or
rather vital, as is the question for students of Anglo-Saxon history, it
does not concern us to quite the same extent, and we must pass on to a
change which came over men’s conception of this tenement and intimately
affects the study of Domesday.
Our normal free householder, the man who held a “hide” in the seventh
century, was burdened with many duties towards the tribal state to which
he belonged. He had to serve in the local army, the fyrd, to keep the
roads and bridges in his neighbourhood in repair, to help to maintain
the strong places of his district as a refuge in time of invasion, and
to contribute towards the support of the local king or ealdorman. Out of
these elements, and especially the last, was developed a rudimentary
military and financial system which is recorded in certain ancient
documents which have come down to us from the Anglo-Saxon period, and
deserve our attention as the direct ancestors of Domesday Book. They may
be described as a series of attempts to express, in terms of hides, the
capacity of the several districts of England with which they deal, for
purposes of tribute or defence. The eldest of these documents, which is
now generally known as the Tribal Hidage,[322] is a record of which the
date cannot be fixed within a century and a half, while very much of its
text is quite unintelligible, but in form it is clear enough. It
consists of a string of names with numbers of hides attached; thus, the
dwellers in the Peak are assigned 1200 hides, the dwellers in Elmet 600,
the Kentishmen 15,000, and the Hwiccas 7000. Now, it is obvious that all
these are round numbers, as in fact are all the figures occurring in the
document; and this is a point of considerable importance, for it implies
that the distribution of hides recorded in this early list was a matter
of rough estimate, rather than of computation, since we cannot suppose
that there were just 1200 free householders in the Peak of Derbyshire,
nor exactly 15,000 in Kent. These figures are intended to represent
approximately the respective strength of such districts, and are
expressed in even thousands or hundreds because numbers of this kind
will be easy to handle, a practice which we can see to be inevitable,
for a barbarian king of the time of Beda would be a very unlikely person
to institute statistical inquiries as to the exact number of hides under
his “supremacy.” But the point that concerns us is, as we shall see
later, that the distribution of hides in Domesday, for all its
appearance of statistical precision, is in reality just as much a matter
of estimate and compromise as was the rough reckoning which is recorded
in the Tribal Hidage.
These remarks apply equally to the next document in the series of fiscal
records which leads up to Domesday. Probably in the reign of Edward the
Elder, when Wessex was recovering from the strain of the great Danish
invasion, some scribe drew up a list of strong places or “burhs,” mostly
in that country, with the number of hides assigned to the maintenance of
each, and here again we find round figures resembling those which we
have noticed in the Tribal Hidage.[323] In this way 700 hides are said
to belong to Shaftesbury, 600 to Langport, 100 to Lyng. Apparently the
wise men of Wessex have decreed that an even number of hides, roughly
proportional to the area to be defended, should be assigned to the
upkeep of each of those “burhs,” and have left the men of each district
to settle the incidence of burden among themselves. It will be seen that
the system on which this document (which is conveniently called the
“Burghal Hidage”) is based is much more artificial than that represented
in the Tribal Hidage—in the latter we are dealing with “folks” or
“tribes,” if the word be not expressed too strictly; here we have
conventional districts, the extent of which is evidently determined by
external authority. This being so, it becomes possible to make certain
suggestive comparisons between the Burghal Hidage and Domesday Book.
Thus the former assigns 2400 hides to Oxford and Wallingford,
respectively, and 1200 to Worcester; and if we count up the number of
hides which are entered in the Domesday surveys of Oxfordshire,
Berkshire and Worcestershire, we shall find that in all three cases the
total will come very near to the number of hides assigned to the towns
which represent these shires in the Burghal Hidage; the correspondence
being much too close to be the result of chance. Hence, if the
distribution of hides in the Burghal Hidage is artificial, we should be
prepared for the conclusion that the similar distribution in Domesday is
artificial also.
A century passed, and England was again being invaded by the Danes. In
the vain hope of buying off the importunate enemy the famous Danegeld
was levied, originally as an emergency tax, but one which was destined
to be raised, at first sporadically, and then at regular intervals until
the end of the twelfth century. This new impost must, one would suppose,
have called for a re-statement of the old Hidages, but no such record
has come down to us. On the other hand we possess a list of counties
with their respective Hidages annexed, which is generally known as the
“County Hidage,” and assigned to the first half of the eleventh century.
This document[324] forms a link between the Burghal Hidage and Domesday;
for, while it agrees with the older record in the figures which it gives
for Worcestershire, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire, its estimate
approximates very closely to the Domesday assessment of Staffordshire,
Gloucestershire, and Bedfordshire.
And so we come to the Norman Conquest. At the very beginning of his
reign, William, undeterred by the legend of his saintly predecessor, who
had seen the devil sitting on the money bags, and had therefore
abolished the Danegeld, laid on the people a geld exceeding stiff. At
intervals during his reign a “geld” was imposed: in particular, in 1083,
he raised a tax of seventy-two pence on the hide, the normal rate being
only two shillings. It is not improbable that the grievance caused by
this heavy tax may have been one chief reason why Domesday Book was
compiled. We have seen enough to know that the system of assessment
which underlies Domesday was, in principle at least, very ancient. It
must have become very inequitable, for mighty changes had passed over
England even in the century preceding the Conquest. We know that William
had tried to rectify matters by drastic reductions of hidage in the case
of individual counties, and it is by no means improbable that the
Domesday Inquest was intended to be the preliminary to a sweeping
revision of the whole national system of assessment. William died before
he could undertake this, and so far as we know it was never attempted
afterwards, for it has been pointed out that in 1194 the ransom of
Richard I. was raised in certain counties according to the Domesday
assessment.[325] This rigidity of the artificial old system makes its
details especially worthy of study, for it is strange to see a fiscal
arrangement which can be traced back to the time of Alfred still capable
of being utilised in the days of Richard I. and Hubert Walter.
[Illustration:
PORTION OF A PAGE OF DOMESDAY BOOK
(THE BEGINNING OF THE BERKSHIRE SECTION)]
What, then, are the main features of this system? Much of its vitality,
cumbrous and unequal as it was, may doubtless be ascribed to the fact
that it was based on the ancient local divisions of the country, the
shires, wapentakes or hundreds, and vills. Put into other words, the
distribution of the hides which we find in Domesday is the result of an
elaborate series of subdivisions. At some indefinitely distant date, it
has been decreed that each county shall be considered to contain a
certain definite number of hides, that Bedfordshire, for example, shall
be considered to contain—that is, shall be assessed at—1200 hides. The
men of Bedfordshire, then, in their shire court, proceeded to distribute
these 1200 hides among the twelve “hundreds” into which the county was
divided, paying no detailed attention to the area or population of each
hundred, nor even, so far as can be seen, obeying any rule which would
make a hundred answer for exactly one hundred hides, but following their
own rough ideas as to how much of their total assessment of their county
each hundred should be called upon to bear. The assessment of the
hundreds being thus determined, the next step was to divide out the
number of hides cast upon each hundred among the various vills of which
it was composed, the division continuing to be made without any
reference to value or area. And then the artificiality of the whole
system is borne in upon us by the most striking fact—the discovery of
which revolutionised the study of Domesday Book—that in the south and
west of England the overwhelming majority of vills are assessed in some
fraction or multiple of five hides.[326] The ubiquity of this “five-hide
unit” is utterly irreconcilable with any theory which would make the
Domesday hide consist of any definite amount of land; a vill might
contain six or twenty real, arable hides, scattered over its fields,
but, if it agreed with the scheme of distribution followed by the men of
the county in the shire and hundred courts, that vill would pay Danegeld
on five hides all the same. The Domesday system of assessment, then, was
not the product of local conditions but was arbitrarily imposed from
above. The hide was not only a measure of land, but also a fiscal term,
dissociated from all necessary correspondence with fact.
But, before passing to further questions of terminology, it will be well
to give some instances of the application of the “five-hide unit,” and,
as Bedfordshire has been specially referred to above, we may take our
examples from that county. Accordingly, if with the aid of a map we
follow the course of the Ouse through Bedfordshire, we shall pass near
to Odell, Risely, and Radwell, assessed at ten hides each; Thurghley and
Oakley at five; Pavenham, Stagsden, Cardington, Willington, Cople, and
Northill at ten; Blunham at fifteen; Tempsford at ten; Roxton at twenty;
Chawston at ten; Wyboston at twenty, and Eaton Socon at forty. Thus,
within a narrow strip of one county we have found seventeen instances of
this method of assessment, and there is no need to multiply cases in
point. On almost every page of the survey in which we read of hides, we
may find them combined in conventional groups of five, ten, or the like.
Not all England, however, was assessed in hides; three other systems of
rating are to be found in the country. In Kent, the first county entered
in Domesday Book, a peculiar system prevailed in which the place of the
hide was taken by the “sulung,” consisting of four “yokes” (_iugera_),
and most probably containing two hundred and forty acres, thus equalling
a double hide.[327] The existence of the sulung in Kent as a term of
land measurement can be traced back to the time when that county was an
independent kingdom; the process by which the word came to denote a
merely fiscal unit was doubtless analogous to the similar development
which we have noticed in the case of the “hide.” Taken in conjunction
with the singular local divisions of Kent, and with the well-known
peculiarities of land tenure found there, this plan of reckoning by
“sulungs” instead of hides falls into place as a proper survival of the
independent organisation of the county.
Another ancient kingdom also preserves an unusual form of assessment in
Domesday. In East Anglia we get for once a statement in arithmetical
terms as to the amount which each vill must contribute to the Danegeld.
Instead of being told that there are, say, five hides in a vill, and
being left to draw the conclusion that that vill must pay ten shillings
or more according to the rate at which the Danegeld is being levied on
the hide, we are given the amount which each vill must pay when the
hundred in which it is situated pays twenty shillings. This form of
sliding scale is unknown outside Norfolk and Suffolk, and is even more
obviously artificial than the assessment of other counties. Each hundred
in East Anglia seems to have been divided into a varying number of
“leets,”—and it has been suggested that each leet had to pay an equal
amount towards the Danegeld due from the hundred,[328] but the
assessment of East Anglia in other respects presents some special
difficulties of its own, although they cannot be discussed here.
Of much greater importance is the remaining fiscal unit to be found in
Domesday. In Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire,
Leicestershire, and Rutland all assessments are expressed in
“carucates,” instead of hides, each carucate being composed of eight
bovates, and each bovate containing, as is probable, fifteen (fiscal)
acres. This distinction was remarked on in the twelfth century by Hugh
“Candidus,” the historian of Peterborough, who says, “In Lincolnshire
there are no hides, as in other counties, but instead of hides there are
carucates of land, and they are worth the same as the hides.” It is
evident that by derivation at least the Domesday _carucata terræ_ must
originally have meant a ploughland, that is, the amount of land capable
of being tilled in one year by the great plough-team of eight oxen,
according to whatever system of agriculture may have then been current,
and it is equally certain that the word “bovate” takes its derivation
from the ox. But, just like the hide, the carucate, from denoting a
measure of land, had come to mean an abstract fiscal quantity, subject
to the same conditions of distribution as affected the former unit. This
is proved by the fact that the carucates are found combined in the above
counties into artificial groups according to exactly the same principle
as that which determined the distribution of hides in the south, with
one highly curious variation in detail. Whereas we have seen that in the
south and west vills are nominally assessed at some multiple of five
hides, in the north-eastern counties, with which we are now concerned,
the prevailing tendency is for the vills to be rated at some multiple or
fraction of six carucates. Put in another way: the assessment of the
south and west was decimal in character, that of the north and east was
duodecimal; while we should expect a Berkshire vill to be rated at five,
ten, or fifteen hides, we must expect to find a Lincolnshire vill
standing at six, twelve, or eighteen carucates.[329] We have in this way
a “six-carucate unit,” to set beside and in distinction to the
“five-hide unit,” which we have already considered.
Now, these details become very significant when we consider the
geographical area within which these carucates are found combined after
this fashion. The district between the Welland and the Tees has a
historical unity of its own. As was the case with East Anglia and Kent,
fiscal peculiarities are accompanied in this quarter also by a
distinctive local organisation. The co-existence in this part of England
of “Danish” place-names with local divisions such as the wapentake,
which can be referred to northern influence, has always been considered
as proving an extensive Scandinavian settlement to have taken place
there; and we can now reinforce this argument by pointing to the above
fiscal peculiarities, which we know to be confined to this quarter and
which are invaluable as enabling us to define with certainty the exact
limits of the territory which was actually settled by the Danes in the
tenth century. In Denmark itself we find instances of the employment of
a duodecimal system of reckoning similar to that on which we have seen
the Domesday assessment of the above north-eastern counties to be based;
and we may recognise in the latter the equivalent of the territory of
the “Five Boroughs” of Nottingham, Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, and
Stamford, together with the Danish kingdom of Deira (Yorkshire), across
the Humber.
Tedious as these details may well seem, the conclusions to which they
lead us are by no means unimportant. In the first place, we see how such
ancient kingdoms as Kent, East Anglia and Deira, to which we may add the
territory of the Five Boroughs, preserved in their financial
arrangements many relics of their former independent organisation long
after they had lost all trace of political autonomy. And then in the
second place we obtain a glimpse into the principles which governed the
policy of the Norman rulers of England towards native institutions.
These were not swept away wholesale; centralisation was only introduced
where it was absolutely necessary, and so long as local arrangements
sufficed to meet the financial needs of the crown, they were not
interfered with. Here, as elsewhere, it was not the policy of William or
of his successors to disturb the ancient organisation of the country,
for it could well be adapted to the purposes of a king who was strong
enough to make his government a reality over the whole land, and in this
respect the Conqueror and his sons need have no fear.
In the above account we have considered the Domesday system of
assessment in its simplest possible form, but certain complications must
now receive notice. In the first place the plan on which the survey
itself is drawn up places difficulties in our way, for it represents a
kind of compromise between geographical and tenurial principles. Thus,
each county is entered separately in Domesday, but within the shire all
estates are classified according to the tenant-in-chief to whom they
belonged, and not according to the hundred or other local division in
which they are situated. This is a fact to which we shall have again to
refer, but it will be evident that more than one tenant-in-chief might
very well hold land in the same vill, and this being the case, we can
never be sure, without reading through the entire survey of a county,
that we have obtained full particulars of any single vill contained in
it. In other words, vill and manor were never of necessity identical,
and in some parts of England, especially the north and east, such an
equivalent was highly exceptional. In this way, therefore, in the
all-important sphere of finance, the lowest point to which we can trace
the application of any consistent principle in the apportionment of the
“geld” was not the manor, but the vill; and accordingly before we can
discover the presence of those five-hide and six-carucate units, which
have just been described, we have often to combine a number of
particulars which, taken individually, do not suggest any system at all.
Two instances, one from Cambridgeshire and one from Derbyshire, will be
in point here:
HASLINGFIELD (CAMBS.)[330]
Hides. Virgates. Acres.
The King 7 1
Picot the Sheriff 4 3
Count Alan 1 ½
” ” ½
Geoffrey de Mandeville 5 0
Guy de Reinbudcurt 1 1 3
Count Alan 12
—— —— ——
20 0 0
BREASTON (DERBY)[331]
Carucates. Bovates.
Henry de Ferrers 3
Geoffrey Alselin 1
Gilbert de Gand 2 0
Roger de Busli 3 0
” ” 4
—— ——
6 0
These examples show very clearly that no consistent principle governed
the assessment of a fractional part of vills, and are typical of the
neatness with which unpromising figures combine into even totals. As to
the way in which the men of a vill apportioned their fiscal
responsibility, we are left almost entirely in the dark; the vill or
township seems to have had no court of its own capable of deciding such
a matter. Largely, no doubt, it was a matter of tradition; a certain
holding which had once answered for two hides would continue to do so,
no matter into whose hands it might come, unless the assessment of the
whole vill were arbitrarily raised or lowered from without, when the
assessment of this particular parcel of land would almost automatically
be affected in proportion. But these local matters do not come within
the scope of our slender stock of early fiscal authorities, and so we
hear nothing about them.
We are now in a position to examine a normal entry from Domesday Book in
the light of the above conclusions. A Nottinghamshire manor will do very
well:
“M[anor]—In Hoveringham Swegn had two carucates of land and two
bovates assessed to the geld. There is land for four ploughs. There
Walter [de Aincurt] has in demesne two ploughs, and five sokemen on
three and a third bovates of this land, and nine villeins and three
bordars who have four ploughs. There is a priest and a church and two
mills rendering forty shillings, and forty acres of meadow. In King
Edward’s time it was worth £4; now it is worth the same and ten
shillings more.”
We ought first to see how each detail here fits into the general scheme
of the survey. The statement as to the former owner of the manor was
important; for, just as King William maintained that he was the lawful
successor of King Edward, so also he was determined that each of his men
should occupy in each manor which he might hold the exact legal position
filled by the Englishman or group of Englishmen, as the case might be,
whom he had dispossessed in that particular estate. In particular it was
essential that he should take up his predecessor’s responsibility with
reference to the “geld” due from his land, a point which is well brought
out in the above entry, for Walter de Aincurt clearly is being debited
with the same number of carucates and bovates as were laid to the
account of “Swegn” before the Conquest. Probably fiscal in character
also is the statement which follows, to the effect that in Hoveringham
“there is land for four ploughs.” For all its apparent simplicity, this
formula, which is extremely common in the survey, presents upon
investigation an extraordinary number of difficult complications. Taken
simply it would seem to denote the number of ploughs which could find
employment on the manor, and most probably it has such an agricultural
significance in many counties, the argument in the mind of the
commissioners being: if this estate has land for more ploughs than are
actually to be found there, it is undeveloped, and more “geld” may be
got out of it some day; if it is being cultivated to the full extent of
its areal capacity or in excess of it (for this often happens) its
assessment probably represents its agricultural condition well enough,
and it may therefore stand. By making this inquiry about “ploughlands”
the commissioners are probably fulfilling the instruction which directed
them to find out whether the king was drawing the largest possible
amount from each manor, but great caution is needed before we decide
that they are obtaining this information in quite the same way from
every county surveyed. In one county, for example, the jurors may be
stating the amount of land in their manor which has never been brought
under the plough at all; in another we may be given the total number of
ploughs, actual and potential, which could be employed in the estate; in
yet a third the commissioners may have taken as an answer a statement of
the number of ploughs that had been going in the time of King Edward.
The commissioners are not in the least concerned with details about
ploughs and ploughlands merely as such; their interest is entirely
centred in a possible increase of the king’s dues from each manor
surveyed. But it is well to remember this fact, for it throws most
serious difficulties in the way of any estimate of the agricultural
condition of England in the eleventh century.
More straightforward are the details which follow in our entry. It will
be seen that the scribes have marked a distinction between three
divisions of the land of the vill: first the lord’s demesne, then the
land held of him by sokemen, then the holdings of the villeins and
bordars. That such a distinction should be made was in accordance with
the instruction given to the commissioners by which they were directed
to find out not only how many ploughs were in demesne and on the
villeins’ land respectively, but also how much each free man and sokeman
in the manor possessed. These latter are so entered, not necessarily
because they were more definitely responsible for their share of the
manorial Danegeld[332] than were the villeins and bordars for their own
portion, but largely no doubt because they were less directly under
manorial control. We have seen that the sokemen and free men of Domesday
most probably represent social classes which have survived the Conquest,
and are rapidly becoming modified to suit the stricter conditions of
land tenure which the Conquest produced. But in Domesday the process is
not yet complete; the sokeman is still a somewhat independent member of
the manorial economy, and as such it is desirable to indicate exactly
the place which he fills in each estate. But that this part of the
inquiry was not essential is proved by the fact that the holdings of the
sokemen, whether in ploughs or land, are usually combined with those of
the villeins and bordars, even in the surveys of the eastern counties,
where the free population was strongest.
The communistic system of agriculture is sufficiently well brought out
in this entry; the four plough teams which the men of Hoveringham
possessed, so far as we can see, were composed of oxen supplied by
sokemen, villeins, and bordars alike, and the survey is not careful to
tell us what proportion of the thirty-two oxen implied in these teams
was supplied by each of the above three classes. We should beware of the
assumption that the sokemen of Domesday were invariably wealthier than
the villeins; we know little enough about the economic position of
either class, but we know enough to see that many a sokeman of the
Conqueror’s time possessed much less land than was considered in the
thirteenth century to be the normal holding of a villein. In the entry
we have chosen we can see that the average number of oxen possessed by
each man in the vill is something under two; and we may suspect that the
three bordars owned no oxen, at all; but although the possession of
plough oxen may here and there have been taken as a line of definition
between rural classes, we cannot be sure that this is so everywhere,
certainly we cannot assume that it is the case here.[333]
After its enumeration of the several classes of peasantry, with their
agricultural equipment, the survey will commonly proceed to deal with
certain incidental sources of manorial revenue; in the present case the
church, the mills, and the meadow. Even in the eleventh century the
relations between the lord of a manor and the church on his estate bear
a proprietary character; the lord in most cases possesses the right of
advowson and he can make gifts from the tithes of his manor to a
religious house for the good of his individual soul. The village church
and the village mill were both in their several ways sources of profit
to the lord, and in the case we have chosen it will be noted that nearly
half the value assigned to the manor by the Domesday jurors is derived
from the proceeds of the latter. “Mill soke,” the right of the lord to
compel his tenants to grind their corn at his mill, long continued to be
a profitable feature of the manorial organisation. The peculiar value of
the meadow lay in the necessity of providing keep for the plough-oxen
over and above the food which they obtained by grazing the fallow
portion of the village lands. The distribution of meadow land along the
rivers and streams of a county determines to a great extent the relative
value of the vills contained in it.[334]
The value which is assigned to a manor in Domesday Book seems to
represent, as a general rule, a rough estimate of the rent which the
estate would bring in to its lord if he let it on lease, stocked as it
was with men and cattle. In general it is probable that the jurors were
required to make such an estimate with regard to three periods, namely,
1066, 1086, and the time when King William gave the manor to its
existing owner. The last estimate, however, is frequently omitted from
the completed survey; but it is included often enough for us to be able
to say that the disorder which attended the Conquest was commonly
accompanied by a sharp depreciation in the value of agricultural land;
and in many counties manorial values in general had failed to rise to
their pre-Conquest level in the twenty years between 1066 and 1086. If
the whole of England be taken into account, it has been computed that
the average value of the hide or carucate will be very close to one
pound, and the Nottinghamshire manor we are considering is sufficiently
typical in this respect. But it must be remembered that the jurors on
making their estimate of value would certainly have to take into
consideration sources of local revenue which were not agricultural in
character, and the tallage of the peasantry and the profits of the
manorial court will be included in one round figure, together with the
value of the labour services of the villeins and the rent of mills and
meadows.