Part 41

In 956 King Eadwig gave to Bath Abbey thirty manses at Tidenham in Gloucestershire[1135]. A cartulary compiled in the twelfth century contains a copy of his gift, and remote from this it contains a statement of the services due from the men of Tidenham. It is possible, but unlikely, that this statement represents the state of affairs that existed at the moment when the minster received the gift; to all appearance it belongs to a later date[1136]. It begins by stating that at Tidenham there are 30 hides, 9 of inland and 21 'gesettes landes,' that is 9 hides of demesne and 21 hides of land set to tenants. Then after an account of the fisheries, which were of importance, it tells us of the services due from the _geneat_ and from the _gebúr_. The _geneat_ shall work as well on the land as off the land, whichever he is bid, and ride and carry and lead loads and drive droves 'and do many other things.' The _gebúr_ must do week-work, of which some particulars are stated, and he also must pay rent in money and in kind. Here again a well marked line is drawn between the _geneat_ and the _gebúr_. Here again the _geneat_, like the _cniht_ or _minister_ of Oswaldslaw, is under a very general obligation of obedience to his lord; but he is a riding man and there is nothing whatever to show that he is habitually employed in agricultural labour upon his lord's demesne. As to the _gebúr_, he has to work hard enough day by day, and week by week, though of his legal status we are told no word.

[The Stoke case.]

In a Winchester cartulary, 'a cartulary of the lowest possible character,' there stands what purports to be a copy of the charter whereby in the year 900 Edward the Elder gave to the church of Winchester 10 _manentes_ of land 'æt Stoce be Hysseburnan' together with all the men who were thereon at the time of Alfred's death and all the men who were 'æt Hisseburna' at the same period. Edward, we are told, acquired the land 'æt Stoce' in exchange for land 'æt Ceolseldene' and 'æt Sweoresholte [Sparsholt].' At the end of the would-be charter stand the names of its witnesses. Then follows in English (but hardly the English of the year 900) a statement of the services which the ceorls shall do 'to Hysseburnan.' Then follow the boundaries. Then the eschatocol of the charter and the list of witnesses is repeated[1137]. On the face of the copy are three suspicious traits: (1) the modernized language, (2) the repeated eschatocol, (3) the description of the services, for the like is found in no other charter. This is not all. Two other documents in the same cartulary bear on the same transaction. By the first Edward gave to the church of Winchester 50 _manentes_ 'æt Hysseburnan' which he had obtained by an exchange for land 'æt Merchamme[1138].' By the second he gave to the church of Winchester 50 _manentes_ 'ad Hursbourne' and other 10 'ad Stoke[1139].' The more carefully these three documents are examined, the more difficult will the critic find it to acquit the Winchester monks of falsifying their 'books' and improving Edward's gift. Therefore this famous statement about the ceorls' services is not the least suspicious part of a highly suspicious document. It is to this effect:--'From each _hiwisc_ (family or hide), at the autumnal equinox, forty pence and six church _mittan_ of ale and three sesters of loaf-wheat. In their own time they shall plough three acres and sow them with their own seed, and in their own time bring it [the produce of the sown land] to barn. They shall pay three pounds of gafol barley and mow half an acre of gafol-mead in their own time and bring it to the rick; four fothers of split gafol-wood for a shingle-rick in their own time and sixteen yards of gafol-fencing in their own time. And at Easter two ewes with two lambs, but two young sheep may be counted for an old one; and they shall wash and shear sheep in their own time. And every week they shall do what work they are bid, except three weeks, one at Midwinter, one at Easter and the third at the Gang Days.' Here no doubt, as in the account of Tidenham, as in the _Rectitudines_, we see what may fairly be called the manorial economy. The lord has a village; he has demesne land (_inland_) which is cultivated for him by the labour of his tenants; these tenants pay _gafol_ in money or in kind; some of them (the _geneat_ of Tidenham, the _geneat_ of the _Rectitudines_) assist him when called upon to do so; others work steadily from day to day; in many particulars the extent of the work due from them is ascertained; whether they are free men, whether they are bound to the soil, whether the national courts will protect them in their tenure, whether they are slaves, we are not told.

[Inferences from these cases.]

That such an arrangement was common in the eleventh century we know; a solitary instance of it comes to us professedly from the first year of the tenth, and certainly from a cartulary that is full of lies. To draw general inferences from a few such instances would be rash. What should we believe of 'the English village of the eleventh century' if the one village of which we had any knowledge was Orwell in Cambridgeshire[1140]? What should we believe of 'the English village of the thirteenth century' if our only example was a village on the ancient demesne? The traces of a manorial economy that have been discovered in yet remoter times are few, slight and dubious. A passage in the laws of Ine[1141] seems to prove that there were men who had let out small quantities of land, 'a yard or more,' to cultivators at rents and who were wrongfully endeavouring to get from their lessees work as well as _gafol_. The same law may prove the highly probable proposition that some men had taken 'loans' of manses and were paying for them, not only by _gafol_, but by work done on the lord's land. That already in Ine's day there were many free men who were needy and had lords above them, that already the state was beginning to consecrate the relation between lord and man as a security for the peace and a protection against crime is undoubted[1142]. But this does not bring us very near to the Roman _villa_. Nor shall we see a _villa_ wherever the dooms or the land-books make mention of a _hám_ or a _tún_, for the meanest ceorl may have a _tún_ and will probably have a home of his own[1143].

[The _villa_ and the _vicus_.]

It is said that the England of Bede's day was full of _villae_ and that Bede calls the same place now _villa_ and now _vicus_[1144]. But before we enter on any argument about the use of such words, we ought first to remember that neither Bede nor the scribes of the land-books were trained philologists. London is a _villa_[1145], but it is also a _civitas_, _urbs_, _oppidum_, _vicus_, a _wíc_, a _tún_, a _burh_, and a _port_. When we see such words as these used promiscuously we must lay but little stress upon the occurrence of a particular term in a

## particular case. Suppose for a moment that in England there were many

villages full of free landholders: what should they be called in Latin? They should, it is replied, be called _vici_ and they should not be called _villae_, for a _villa_ is an estate. But it is part of the case of those who have used this argument that at the time of the barbarian invasions the Roman world was full of _villae_, so full that every or almost every _vicus_ was situated on and formed part of a _villa_[1146]. We are therefore exacting a good deal from Bede, from a man who learnt his Latin in school, if we require him to be ever mindful of this nice distinction. We are saying to him: 'True it is that a knot of neighbouring houses with the appurtenant lands is habitually called a _villa_; but then this word introduces the notion of ownership; the _villa_ is an unit in a system of property law, and, if your village is not also an estate, a _praedium_, then you should call it _vicus_ and not _villa_.' To this we must add that, while the word _villa_ did not until after the Norman Conquest force its way into English speech, the word _vicus_ became an English word at a very early period[1147]. It became our word _wick_ and it became part of a very large number of place-names[1148]. The Domesday surveyors found _herdwicks_ and _berewicks_ in many parts of the country[1149]. Moreover we can see that in the Latin documents _villa_ is used in the loosest manner. London is a _villa_; but a single house, a single 'haw,' in the city of Canterbury or the city of Rochester is a _villa_[1150].

[Notices of manors in the charters.]

If we carefully attend to the wording of the land-books, we shall find the manorial economy far more visible in the later than in the earlier of them. The Confessor gives to Westminster 'ða cotlife Perscore and Dorhurste' with all their lands and all their berewicks[1151]. He gives the cotlif Eversley and all things of right belonging thereto, with church and mill, with wood and field, with meadow and heath, with water and with moor[1152]. From 998 we have a gift of a 'heafod-botl,' a capital mansion, we may say, and its appurtenances[1153]. In earlier times we may sometimes find that the subject matter of the royal gift is spoken of as forming a single unit; it is a _villa_, or it is a _vicus_. But rarely is the thing that is given called a _villa_ except when the thing that is given is just a single hide[1154]. If a charter freely disposes of several _villae_, meaning thereby villages, we shall probably find some other reasons for assigning that charter, whatever date it may bear, to the eleventh, the twelfth or a yet later century[1155]. Sometimes in old books the king will say that he is giving a _vicus_, a _vicus_ of five or eight or ten _tributarii_[1156]. Much more frequently he will not speak thus; he will not speak as though the subject matter of his gift had a physical unity and individuality. 'I give,' he will say, 'so many _manentes_, _tributarii_, or _casati_ in the place known as _X_,' or 'I give a certain part of my land, to wit, that of so many _manentes_, _tributarii_, or _casati_ at the spot which men call _Y_.' Such language does not suggest that the manses thus given are subservient to one dominant and dominical manse or manor; it is very unlike the language of the twelfth century[1157]. Such words as _fundus_ and _praedium_ are conspicuously absent, and _ager_ usually means but a small piece of land, an acre. Foreign precedents would have suggested that when an estate was to be conveyed it should be conveyed _cum servis et ancillis_, or _cum mancipiis et accolabus_; such clauses are rare in our English land-books[1158].

[The _mansa_ and the _manens_.]

But, it will be said, at all events the king is giving persons, men, as well as land; he is giving _manentes_, _casati_, _tributarii_. What is more these are foreign words and they describe the 'semi-servile' occupants of the soil. Now it is true that sometimes he gives _manentes_, _casati_, _tributarii_, though more often he gives either so many manses (_mansas_), or 'the land of so many _manentes_, _casati_, _tributarii_,' while in Kent he gives plough-lands or sullungs. But we think it plain that in England these Latin words were used simply to describe the extent, or rather the rateable extent, of land, without much reference to the number or the quality of its occupants. The _terra unius manentis_, even the _unus casatus_ when that is the subject of a conveyance, is like Bede's _terra unius familiae_, the unit known to Englishmen as the _hiwisc_, or _hide_[1159]. Hence it is that reference is so often made to repute and estimation. 'I give,' says Egbert, 'a certain portion of land to the amount, as I estimate, of five _casati_,' or (it may be) 'of twenty _manentes_[1160].' Nothing can be easier than to count whether there be four, five, or six 'semi-servile' households on a given piece of land. Far easier would it be to do this than to do what is habitually done, namely, to set forth the boundaries of the land with laborious precision. But there is already an element of estimation, of appreciation, in these units. Already they are units in a system of taxation. Hence also it is that so very frequently what the king gives is just exactly five, or some multiple of five, of these units[1161]. Rating is a rough process; five and ten are pleasant numbers.

[The hide.]

But against the argument which would see in every conveyance of 'five _manentes_' or of 'the land of five _casati_' a conveyance of five semi-servile households with their land we have another objection to urge. Here we will state it briefly; a fuller statement would take us far away from our present theme. If the land-books of the churches are to lead up to Domesday Book, the unit conveyed as _terra unius manentis_ (_casati_, _tributarii_) is a hide with some 120 acres of arable land, the land appropriate to a plough-team of eight oxen. Had the semi-servile _manens_ as a general rule 120 arable acres, a plough-team of eight oxen? We do not believe it, and those who have most strongly insisted on the servility or 'semi-servility' of the tillers of the soil, do not believe it. They would give the _gebúr_ but a quarter of a hide and but two beasts of the plough. That being so, it should be common ground that the _terra unius manentis_ (_casati_, _tributarii_) can not be construed as 'the land occupied by one semi-servile tenant.' An explanation of the fact that land is conveyed by reference to units so large as the hide of 120 acres and that these units are spoken of as though each household would normally have one of them must be sought elsewhere; we can not here pause to find it. But in any case these foreign terms should give us little trouble. When he hears such words as _manens_, _casatus_, _tributarius_, the man who has lived in Gaul may hear some undertone of servility or 'semi-servility.' We do not discuss this matter; it may be so. But look at the words themselves, what do they primarily mean? A _manens_ is one who dwells upon land, a _casatus_ is one to whom a _casa_ has been allotted, a _tributarius_ pays _tributum_; the free English landowner pays a _tributum_ to the king[1162]. We must make the best we can of a foreign, an inappropriate tongue, and the best that we make is often very bad, especially when we have a taste for fine writing. And so England is full of villas which are Roman and satraps who, no doubt, are Persian.

[The strip-holding and the villa.]

And whence, we must ask, comes that system of intermixed 'strip-holding' that we find in our English fields? Who laid out those fields? The obvious answer is that they were laid out by men who would sacrifice economy and efficiency at the shrine of equality. Each manse is to have the same number of strips; the strips of one manse must be neither better nor worse than those of its neighbour and therefore must be scattered abroad over the whole territory of the village. That this system was not invented by men who owned large continuous tracts is plain. No such owner would for one moment dream of cutting up his land in this ridiculous fashion, and of reserving for his own manse, not a ring-fenced demesne, but strips lying here and there, 'hide-meal and acre-meal' among the strips of his serfs. That is not the theory. No one supposes that a Roman landowner whose hands were free allowed the soil of his villa to be parcelled out in accordance with this wasteful, cumbrous, barbarous plan. So his hands must not be free; the soil of which he becomes the owner must already be plotted out in strips, and these strips must be so tightly bound up into manses, that he scruples to overturn an existing arrangement, and contents himself with appropriating a few of the manses for his own use and compelling the occupants of the others to labour for him and pay him rents. In this there is nothing impossible; but we have only deferred, not solved the problem. Who laid out our English fields and tied the strips into manses? That this work was done by the Britons before they were brought under the Roman yoke does not seem very probable. Celtic rural economy, whenever it has had a chance of unfettered development, has made for results far other than those that are recorded by the larger half of the map of England. If throughout England the Romans found so tough a system of intermixed manses that, despite all its absurdities, they could not but spare it, then the Britons who dwelt in the land that was to be English were many centuries in advance of the Britons who dwelt in the land that was to be Welsh. To eke out this hypothesis another must be introduced. The Teutonic invaders of Britain must be brought from some manorialized province. So, after all, the model of the English field may have been 'made in Germany.' Somehow or another it was made in South Germany by semi-servile people, whose semi-servility was such a half-and-half affair that they could not be prevented from sacrificing every interest of their lords at the shrine of equality[1163].

[The lords and the strips.]

We are far from saying that wherever there is strip-holding, there liberty and equality have once reigned[1164]. It is very possible that where a barbarian chieftain obtained a ring-fenced allotment of conquered soil, he sometimes divided it into scattered strips which he parcelled out among his unfree dependants. But if he did this, he did it because his only idea of agriculture was derived from a village formed by men who were free and equal. The maintenance of a system of intermixed strip-holding may be due to seignorial power, and a great deal of the rigidity of the agrarian arrangements that we see in the England of the thirteenth century may be due to the same cause. Seignorial power was not, at least in origin, absolute ownership. It had to make the best it could of an existing system. For the lord's purposes that system was at its best when it was rigid and no tenement was

## partible. But assuredly this plan was not originally invented by great

proprietors who were seeking to get the most they could out of their land, their slaves and their capital.

[The ceorl and the slave.]

That we have not been denying the existence of slavery will be plain. Indeed we may strongly suspect that the men who parcelled out our fields were for the more part slave-owners, though slave-owners in a very small way. To say nothing of Welshmen, there was quite enough inter-tribal warfare to supply the ceorl with a captive. But it was not for the sake of slaves or serfs or 'semi-servile' folk that the system of intermixed strips was introduced.

[The condition of the Danelaw.]

Lastly, the theory which would derive the English manor from the Roman _villa_ must face the grave problem presented to it by the account which Domesday Book, when speaking of the Confessor's day, gives of the eastern and northern counties, of a large quarter of all England, and of just that part of England which was populous. We see swarms of men who are free men but who are subject, they and their land, to various modes and degrees of seignorial power. The modes are many, the degrees are gentle. Personal, tenurial, justiciary threads are woven into a web that bewilders us. Here we see the work of commendation, there the work of the land-loan, and there again what comes of grants of sake and soke. We see the formation of manors taking place under our eyes, and as yet the process is by no means perfect. In village after village there is nothing that our economic historians would consent to call a manor. Now, no doubt, the difference between the east and the west is, at least in part, due to Danish invasions and Danish settlements. But how shall we picture to ourselves the action of the Danes? Is it to be supposed that they found the Anglo-Roman manor-villa a prevalent and prosperous institution, that they destroyed it and put something else in its place, put in its place the village of free peasants who could 'go with their land' to what lord they pleased? If so, then we have to face the question why these heathen Danes acted in a manner so different from that in which their predecessors, the heathen Angles and Saxons, had acted. Surely one part of the explanation is that the inswarming barbarians checked the manorializing process that was steadily at work in Wessex and Mercia. We do not say that this is the whole explanation. We have seen how free were many of the Cambridgeshire villages and have little reason to believe that they had been settled by Danes[1165]. The west country is the country to which we shall naturally look for the most abundant traces of the _Wealh theow_. There it is that we find numerous _servi_, and there that we find rather _trevs_ than villages. But also we have hardly a single land-book of early date which deals with any part of the territory that became the Danelaw. Many a book the Danes may have burnt when they sacked the monasteries. They sacked the monasteries, burnt the books and freed the land. But still we may doubt whether the practice of booking lands to the churches had gone far in East Anglia and the adjacent shires when they were once more overwhelmed by barbarism. No doubt in course of time the churches of the east became rich: Ely and St Edmunds, Peterborough and Ramsey, Croyland and Thorney. But, even when supplemented by legend and forgery, their titles to wide territories can seldom be compared for antiquity to the titles that might have been pleaded by the churches of Kent and Wessex and the Severn Valley. Richly endowed churches mean a subjected peasantry. And thus we may say of the Danes that if in a certain sense they freed the districts which they conquered, they in the same sense enslaved the rest of England. Year by year Wessex and Mercia had to strain every nerve in order to repel the pagans, to fit out fleets, build burgs and keep armies always in the field. The peasant must in the end bear the cost of this exhausting struggle. Meanwhile in the north and the east the process that makes manors has been interrupted; it must be begun once more. It was accomplished by men some of whom had Scandinavian blood in their veins, but who were not heathens, not barbarians: it was accomplished by Normans steeped in Frankish feudalism.

FOOTNOTES:

[1101] K. 313 (ii. 110); T. 129; B. ii. 172.

[1102] In many cases the one night's farm is reckoned at £100 or thereabouts; Round, Feudal England, 112.

[1103] K. 477 (ii. 354); T. 509.