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