i. 24, two free men held as two manors land rated at a hide

and sufficient for one team; it is now tilled by four villeins. In the Isle of Wight, D. B. i. 39 b, five free men held as five manors land sufficient for two teams; it is now tilled by four villeins. In Gloucestershire, D. B. i. 170, is a manor worth ten shillings with two serfs upon it; also a manor rated at one virgate. In Derbyshire, D. B. i. 274 b, land sufficient for four teams and rated as four carucates had formed eight manors. In Nottinghamshire, D. B. i. 285 b, land sufficient for a team and a half and valued at ten shillings had formed five manors for five thegns, each of whom had his hall.

[509] D. B. ii. 380: 'In Thistledona tenet 1 liber homo Ulmarus commendatus S. Eldrede 60 acras pro manerio et 5 liberi homines sub se.'

[510] D. B. i. 127 b: 'Wellesdone tenent canonici S. Pauli.... Hoc manerium tenent villani ad firmam canonicorum. In dominio nil habetur.'

[511] D. B. i. 235 b: Billesdone, 'In dominio nil fuit nec est.' Ibid. 166 b, Glouc.: 'Isdem Willelmus [de Ow] tenet Alvredestone. Bondi tenuit T. R. E. Ibi 3 hidae geldantes. Nil ibi est in dominio, sed 5 villani et 3 bordarii habent 3 carucas.'... 'Isdem Willelmus tenet Odelavestone. Brictri filius Algari tenuit. Ibi nil in dominio nisi 5 villani cum 5 carucis.' D. B. iv. 396: 'Rogerius habet 1 mansionem quae vocatur P...et reddit gildum pro dimidia virgata; hanc potest arare 1 carruca. Hanc tenet Anschetillus de Rogerio. Ibi habet Anschetillus 4 bordarios qui tenent totam illam terram et habent ibi 1 carrucam et 1 agrum prati, et reddit 10 solidos.'

[512] D. B. ii. 31.

[513] D. B. ii. 59 b.

[514] I leave this sentence as it stood before Mr Round had published in his Feudal England the results of his brilliant researches. Of the 'five hide unit' I already knew a good deal; of the 'six carucate unit' I knew nothing.

[515] Round, Domesday Studies, i. 109.

[516] D. B. i. 35: 'In Driteham tenet Ricardus [filius Gisleberti] 1 hidam et dimidiam. Ælmar tenuit de Rege E. pro uno manerio.... In eadem Driteham est 1 hida et dimidia quam tenuit Aluric de Rege E. pro uno manerio, et postea dedit illam terram uxori suae et filiae ad aecclesiam de Certesy, sicuti homines de hundredo testantur. Ricardus [filius Gisleberti] calumniatur. Non iacet ulli manerio, nec pro manerio tenet, set liberata fuit ei et modo 3 hidae geldant pro una hida et dimidia.' To say of the second of these two plots that it neither is a manor nor yet belongs to a manor, is to say that it is shirking the geld. D. B. i. 48: 'Walerannus tenet Dene.... Ista tera non adiacet ulli suo manerio.' Here _suo_ = _Waleranni_. Waleran seems to be holding land without good title.

[517] D. B. i. 163 b, Clifort. D. B. i. 58 b: 'In Winteham tenet Hubertus de Abbate 5 hidas, de terra villanorum fuerunt 4, et geldaverunt cum hidis manerii.'

[518] The word _wara_ means defence; it comes from a root which has given us, _wary_, _warrant_, _warn_, _guarantee_, _weir_, etc. See Vinogradoff, Villainage, 243.

[519] D. B. i. 212.

[520] D. B. i. 340, 366, 368. Is not the last part of the word A.-S. _notu_, (business, office)?

[521] D. B. i. 132 b: 'Hoc manerium tenuit Heraldus Comes et iacuit et iacet in Hiz [Hitchin, Herts] sed wara hujus manerii iacuit in Bedefordscire T. R. E. in hundredo de Maneheue.' D. B. i. 190, 'Haec terra est bereuuicha in Neuport [Essex] set wara ejus iacet in Grantebrige.' When in the survey of Oxfordshire, i. 160, it is said, 'Ibi 1 hida de _warland_ in dominio,' the taxed land is contrasted with the inland, which in this county has gone untaxed.

[522] D. B. i. 28.

[523] See the cases of the monks of Bury and the canons of S. Petroc, above, p. 55.

[524] D. B. i. 4 b: 'De terra huius manerii ten[uit] unus homo archiepiscopi dimid. solin et cum his 6 solins geldabat T. R. E. quamvis non pertineret manerio nisi de scoto quia libera terra erat.' The _scotum_ in this context seems to be or to include the geld. Compare D. B. i. 61 b: 'Haec terra iacet et appreciata est in Gratentun quod est in Oxenefordscire et tamen dat scotum in Berchescire.' D. B. ii. 11: 'In Colecestra habet episcopus 14 domos et 4 acras non reddentes consuetudinem praeter scotum nisi episcopo.'

[525] See above, p. 85.

[526] Hamilton, Inquisitio, 60.

[527] Above, p. 110.

[528] D. B. i. 35 b.

[529] Northumbrian Priests' Law, 58, 59, (Schmid, p. 369.)

[530] An Act of 1869 (32-3 Vic. c. 41) allowed the owners of certain small houses to agree to pay the rates which under the ordinary law would become due from the occupiers, and authorized the vestries to allow such owners a commission of 25 per cent. See also the instructive recital in 59 Geo. III. c. 12, sec. 19:--The small occupiers are evading the poors' rate, and the owners exact higher rents than they would otherwise get, on the ground that the occupiers can not be effectually assessed.

[531] See above, p. 24.

[532] E.g. D. B. ii. 389 b, 'Clarum tenuit Aluricus pro manerio 24 car. terrae T. R. E. Tunc 40 villani.... Tunc 12 carucae in dominio.... Tunc 36 carucae hominum.... Huic manerio semper adiacent 5 sochemani cum omni consuetudine 1 car. terrae et dim. Semper 1 caruca et dimidia.'

[533] E.g. D. B. ii. 339: 'In eadem villa 14 liberi homines commendati, Godricus faber et Edricus et Ulnotus et Osulfus et Uluricus et Stanmarus et Leuietus et Wihtricus et Blachemanus et Mansuna et Leuinus et Ulmarus et Ulfah et alter Ulfah et Leofstanus de 40 acris et habent 2 carucas et valent 10 solidos.'

[534] Above, p. 115.

[535] Rolls of the King's Court, Ric. I. (Pipe Roll. Soc.), p. xxiv. But apparently there had been considerable rearrangements in some of the counties.

[536] Hoveden, iv. 46. The important words are these: 'Statutum etiam fuit quod quilibet baro cum vicecomite faceret districtiones super homines suos; et si per defectum baronum districtiones factae non fuissent, caperetur de dominico baronum quod super homines suos restaret reddendum, et ipsi barones ad homines suos inde caperent.' The baron's _homines_ we take to be freeholders; he would be absolutely liable for the tax cast upon his villeinage. As to the tax of 1198 see Eng. Hist. Rev. iii. 501, 701; iv. 105, 108.

[537] In Dial. de Scac. ii. 14, the author tells us that until recently if a baron who owed money to the crown was insolvent, the goods of his knights could be seized. The idea of subsidiary liability is not too subtle for the time.

[538] Above, p. 108.

[539] D. B. ii. 9: 'set Comes Eustachius 1 ex illis [hidis] tenet que non est de suis c. [100] mansionibus.'

[540] D. B. ii. 233 b.

[541] D. B. ii. 242 b.

[542] D. B. ii. 258.

[543] D. B. ii. 258.

[544] D. B. ii. 447.

[545] D. B. i. 45 b.

[546] Two objections to our theory may be met by a note. (1) Some manors are free of geld, and therefore to make our definition correct we ought to say that a manor is a tenement which either pays its geld at a single place or which would do so were it not freed from the tax by some special privilege. A _manerium_ does not cease to be a _manerium_ by being freed from geld. (2) In later days we may well find a manor holden of another manor, so that a plot of land may be within two manors. If this usage of the term can be traced back into Domesday Book as a common phenomenon, then our doctrine is in great jeopardy. But we have noticed no passage which clearly and unambiguously says that a tract of land was _at one and the same time_ both a _manerium_ and also a part of another _manerium_. To this we must add that of the distribution of _maneria_ T. R. E. we only obtain casual and very imperfect tidings. If T. R. W. a free man has been 'added to' a _manerium_, the commissioners have no deep interest in the inquiry whether T. R. E. his tenement was itself an independent _manerium_. A great simplification has been effected and the number of _maneria_ has been largely reduced.

§ 7. _Manor and Vill._

[Manorial and non-manorial vills.]

After what has now been said, it is needless to repeat that in Domesday Book the _manerium_ and the _villa_ are utterly different things[547]. In a given case the two may coincide, and throughout a great tract of England such cases were common and we may even say that they were normal. But in the east this was not so. We may easily find a village which taken as a whole has been utterly free from seignorial domination. Orwell in Cambridgeshire will be a good example[548].

[The vill of Orwell.]

In King Edward's day this vill of Orwell was rated at 4 hides: probably it was somewhat underrated for at the date of the survey it was deemed capable of finding land for nearly 6 teams. The following table will show who held the four hides before the Conquest:--

H. V. A.

Two sokemen, men of Edith the Fair 2/3 A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand 1-1/3 A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 1-1/3 A sokeman, man of the King 2/3 A sokeman, man of Earl Ælfgar 1-1/3 A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 3 A sokeman, man of the King 1/3 Sigar a man of Æsgar the Staller 1-1/3 Turbert a man of Edith the Fair 3-1/4 5 Achil a man of Earl Harold 1 A sokeman of the King 1 St. Mary of Chatteris 1/3 St. Mary of Chatteris 1/4 ---------------- 4 0 0[549]

It will be seen that eight of the most exalted persons in the land, the king, the archbishop, three earls, two royal marshals or stallers, and that mysterious lady known as Edith the Fair, to say nothing of the church of Chatteris, had a certain interest in this little Cambridgeshire village. But then how slight an interest it was! Every one of the tenants was free to 'withdraw himself,' 'to give or sell his land.' Now we can not say that all of them were peasants. Achil the man of Harold seems to have had other lands in the neighbouring villages of Harlton and Barrington[550]. It is probable that Turbert, Edith's man, had another virgate at Kingston[551]: he was one of the jurors of the hundred in which Orwell lay[552]. Sigar the man of Æsgar was another juror, and held land at Thriplow, Foxton, Haslingfield and Shepreth; he seems to have been his lord's steward[553]. But we may be fairly certain that the unnamed sokemen tilled their own soil, though perhaps they had help from a few cottagers. And they can not have been constantly employed in cultivating the demesne lands of their lords. They must go some distance to find any such demesne lands. The Wetherley hundred, in which Orwell lies, is full of the sokemen of these great folk: Waltheof, for example, has 3 men in Comberton, 4 in Barton, 3 in Grantchester, 1 in Wratworth: but he has no demesne land, and if he had it, he could not get it tilled by these scattered tenants. The Fair Edith has half a hide in Haslingfield and we are told that this belongs to the manor of Swavesey. Now at Swavesey Edith has a considerable manor[554], but it can not have got much in the way of labour out of a tenant who lived at Haslingfield, for the two villages are a long ten miles apart. As to the king's sokemen, their only recorded services are the _avera_ and the _inward_. The former seems to be a carrying service done at the sheriff's bidding and to be only exigible when the king comes into the shire, while _inward_ seems to be the duty of forming a body guard for the king while he is in the shire:--if in any year the king did not come, a small sum of money was taken instead[555].

[A Cambridgeshire hundred.]

Lest it should be thought that in picking out the village of Orwell we have studiously sought a rare case, we will here set out in a tabular form what we can learn of the state of the hundred in which Orwell lies. The Wetherley hundred contained twelve vills: it was a land of true villages which until very lately had wide open fields[556]. In the Confessor's day the lands in it were allotted thus:--

CAMBRIDGESHIRE. WETHERLEY HUNDRED[557].

I. COMBERTON. A vill of 6 hides. H. V. A. C. B. 1. Seven sokemen of the King 1 1 0} A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof} 3 0} 4 0 A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand } } 2. A man of Earl Waltheof 1 15 1 0 3. A sokeman, man of the King 1 0} A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand 1 15} 2 0 A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 1 15} 4. The King 2 2 0 5 0 --------- ------ 5 3 15[558] 12 0

II. BARTON. A vill of 7 hides. 1. Two sokemen, men of Earl Waltheof 1 1 15 } A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 3 15[559]} 5 0 A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 1 0 } 2. Juhael the King's hunter 1 0 0 1 0 3. A sokeman, man of Edith the Fair 2 0} 6 0 4. Twenty-three sokemen of the King 3 0 0} --------- ------ 7 0 0 12 0

III. GRANTCHESTER. A vill of 7 hides[560]. H. V. A. C. B. 1. Five sokemen, men of the King 3 0 1 0 2. Two sokemen, men of the King 2 1 0} 6 0 A sokeman, man of Æsgar the Staller 2 0} 3. A sokeman, man of Earl Ælfgar 3 0} Three sokemen, men of Earl Waltheof 2 0 0} 4 0 4. Godman a man of Edith the Fair 1 15 1 0 5. Juhael the King's hunter 1 0 4 6. Wulfric, the King's man 15 3 --------- ------ 7 0 0 12 7

IV. HASLINGFIELD. A vill of 20 hides. 1. The King 7 1 0 8 0 2. Five sokemen, men of the King 3 0 0} A sokeman, man of Æsgar the Staller 1 3 0} 4 0 3. Ealdred a man of Edith the Fair 1 0 15 1 4 4. Edith the Fair, belonging to Swavesey 2 0 4 5. Sigar a man of Æsgar the Staller 5 0 0 6 0 6. Two sokemen of the King 1 1 3 2 0 7. Merewin, a man of Edith the Fair 12 0 0 ---------- ------ 20 0 0 22 0

V. HARLTON. A vill of 5 hides.

1. Achil, a King's thegn and under him five sokemen of whom four were his men while the fifth was the man of Ernulf 4 0 0 6 0 2. Godman a man of Æsgar the Staller 1 0 0 1 0 --------- ----- 5 0 0 7 0

VI. BARRINGTON. A vill of 10 hides.

1. Eadric Púr a King's thegn 3 0} Fifteen sokemen, men of the King 4 1 15} Four sokemen, men of Earl Ælfgar 2 0 15} Three sokemen, men of Æsgar the } 11 0 Staller 1 0 0} Eadric Púr, holding of the Church } of Chatteris 15} 2. The Church of Chatteris 2 0 0 4 0 3. Ethsi, holding of Robert Wimarc's son 20 3 4. Achil the Dane, a man of Earl Harold 40 6 5. A sokeman, man of the King 15 2 ---------- ------ 11 0 0[561] 17 3

VII. SHEPRETH. A vill of 5 hides. H. V. A. C. B. 1. Four sokemen, men of the King} 2 0 15 2 2 A sokeman, man of Earl Ælfgar} 2. The Church of Chatteris 1 1 15 1 4 3. Sigar a man of Æsgar the Staller 1 0 0 1 0 4. Heming a man of the King 1 15 4 5. The Church of Ely 15 2 --------- ----- 5 0 0 5 4

VIII. ORWELL. A vill of 4 hides. 1. Two sokemen, men of Edith the Fair 20} A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand 1 10} A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 1 10} 1 4 A sokeman, man of the King 20} A sokeman, man of Earl Ælfgar 1 10} 2. A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 3 0} 1 0 A sokeman, man of the King 10} 3. Sigar, a man of Æsgar the Staller 1 10 4 4. Turbert, a man of Edith the Fair 3 12-1/2 1 4 5. Achil, a man of Earl Harold 1 0 2 6. A sokeman, man of the King 1 0 3 7. The Church of Chatteris 10 1 8. The Church of Chatteris 7-1/2 1/2 --------- --------- 4 0 0 5 2-1/2

IX. WRATWORTH. A vill of 4 hides. 1. A sokeman, man of Edith the Fair 3 10} A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand 3 0} A sokeman, man of Earl Ælfgar 1 10} 3 0 A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 10} A sokeman, man of the King 20} 2. A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 2 20} 1 0 A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 10} 3. A sokeman, man of Edith the Fair 1 10 4 4. A sokeman, man of the King 1 0 3 5. Two sokemen, men of the King 2 0 4 ---------- ----- 4 0 0 5 3

X. WHITWELL. A vill of 4 hides. 1. A sokeman, man of Earl Ælfgar 1 20} A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 1 0} 1 4 A sokeman, man of the King 2 0} 2. A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand 15} A sokeman, man of Edith the Fair 10} 4 [A sokeman] 15} 3. Six sokemen, men of the King 1 1 0} A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 2 0} 2 0 A sokeman, man of Earl Ælfgar 1 0} 4. Godwin a man of Edith the Fair 2 0 1 0 --------- ----- 4 0 0 5 0

XI. WIMPOLE. A vill of 4 hides. H. V. A. C. B. 1. Edith the Fair 2 2 15 3 0 2. Earl Gyrth 1 1 15 2 0 --------- ----- 4 0 0 5 0

XII. ARRINGTON. A vill of 4 hides. 1. Ælfric, a King's thegn 1 1 10} A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof 1 0 0} A sokeman, man of the Abbot of Ely 1 0 0} 8 0 A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc's son 20} 2. A man of Edith the Fair 2 0 4 --------- ----- 4 0 0[562] 8 4

[The Wetherley sokemen.]

Now if by a 'manor' we mean what our historical economists usually mean when they use that term, we must protest that before the Norman Conquest there were very few manors in the Wetherley hundred. In no one case was the whole of a village coincident with a manor, with a lord's estate. The king had considerable manors in Comberton and Haslingfield. Sigar had a manor at Haslingfield; the church of Chatteris had a manor at Barrington besides some land at Shepreth; Wimpole was divided between Edith and Earl Gyrth; Harlton between Achil and Godman. But in Barton, Grantchester, Shepreth, Orwell, Wratworth, Whitwell and Arrington we see nothing manorial, unless we hold ourselves free to use that term of a little tenement which to all appearance might easily be cultivated by the labour of one household, at all events with occasional help supplied by a few cottagers. Indeed it is difficult to say what profit some of the great people whose names we have mentioned were deriving from those of their men who dwelt in the Wetherley hundred. We take the Mercian earl for example[563]. One of the sokemen of Grantchester, four of the sokemen of Barrington, one of the sokemen of Shepreth, one of the sokemen of Orwell, one of the sokemen of Wratworth, two of the sokemen of Whitwell were Ælfgar's men. That Ælfgar got a little money or a little provender out of them is probable, that they did some carrying service for him is possible and perhaps they aided him at harvest time on some manor of his in another part of the county; but that they were not the tillers of his land seems clear[564].

[The sokeman and seignorial justice.]

What is more, our analysis of this Wetherley hundred enables us to drive home the remark that very often a sokeman was not the sokeman of his lord or, in other words, that he was not under seignorial justice[565]. Ælfgar had ten sokemen scattered about in six villages. Did he hold a court for them? We think not. Did they go to the court of some distant manor? We think not. The court they attended was the Wetherley hundred-moot. One of the sokemen in Arrington was in a somewhat exceptional position--exceptional, that is, in this hundred. Not only was he the man of the Abbot of Ely, but his soke belonged to the Abbot; and if he sold his tenement, and this he could do without the Abbot's consent, the soke over his land would 'remain' to the Abbot[566]. He was not only his lord's man but his lord's justiciable and probably attended some court outside the hundred. But for the more part these men of Wetherley were not the justiciables of their lords. It was a very free hundred when the Normans came there: much too free for the nation's welfare we may think, for these sokemen could go with their land to what lord they pleased. Also be it noted in passing that the churches have little in Wetherley.

[Changes in the Wetherley hundred.]

In 1086 there had been a change. The sokemen had disappeared. The Norman lords had made demesne land where their English _antecessores_ possessed none. Count Roger had instituted a seignorial court at Orwell. He had borrowed three sokemen 'to hold his pleas' from Picot the sheriff and had refused to give them up again[567]. Apparently they had sunk to the level of _villani_. Two centuries afterwards we see the hundred of Wetherley once more. There is villeinage enough in it. The villein at Orwell, for example, holds only 10 acres but works for his lord on 152 days in the year, besides boon-days[568]. And yet we should go far astray if we imposed upon these Cambridgeshire villages that neat manorial system which we see at its neatest and strongest in the abbatial cartularies. The villages do not become manors. The manors are small. The manors are intermixed in the open fields. There are often freeholders in the village who are not the tenants of any lord who has a manor there. A villein will hold two tenements of two lords. The villein of one lord will be the freeholder of another. The 'manorial system' has been forced upon the villages, but it fits them badly[569].

[Manorialism in Cambridgeshire.]

In the thirteenth century the common field of a Cambridgeshire village was often a very maze of proprietary rights, and yet the village was an agrarian whole. Let us take, for example, Duxford as it stood in the reign of Edward I.[570] We see 39 villein tenements each of which has fourteen acres in the fields. These tenements are divided between five different manors. Four of our typical 'townsmen' hold of Henry de Lacy, who holds of Simon de Furneaux, who holds of the Count of Britanny, who holds of the king. Two hold of Ralph of Duxford, who holds of Basilia wife of Baldwyn of St George, who holds of William Mortimer, who holds of Simon de Furneaux, who holds of the Count of Britanny, who holds of the king. Eight hold of the Templars, who hold of Roger de Colville, who holds of the Earl of Albemarle, who holds of the king. Nine hold of William le Goyz, who holds of Henry of Boxworth, who holds of Richard de Freville, who holds of the king. Sixteen hold of John d'Abernon, who holds of the Earl Marshal, who holds of the king. Three of the greatest 'honours' in England are represented. Three monasteries and two parochial churches have strips in the fields. And yet there are normal tenements cut according to one pattern, tenements of fourteen acres the holders of which, though their other services may differ, pay for the more part an equal rent[571]. The village seems to say that it must be one, though the lords would make it many. And then we look back to the Confessor's day and we see that a good part of Duxford was held by sokemen[572].

[The sokemen and the manors.]

Perhaps we shall be guilty of needless repetition; but what is written in Domesday Book about _maneria_ is admirably designed for the deception of modern readers whose heads are full of 'the manorial system.' Therefore let us look at two Hertfordshire villages. In one of them there is a _manerium_ which Ralph Basset holds of Robert of Ouilly[573]. It has been rated at 4, but is now rated at 2 hides. There is land for 4 teams. In demesne are 2 teams; and 3-1/2 _villani_ with 2 sokemen of 1 hide and 5 _bordarii_ have 2 teams. There are 1 cottager and 1 serf and a mill of 10 shillings and meadow for 3 teams. It is now worth £3; in King Edward's day it was worth £5. Now here, we say, is a pretty little manor of the common kind. Let us then explore its past history. 'Five sokemen held this manor.' Yes, we say, before the Conquest this manor was held in physically undivided shares by five lords. Their shares were small and they were humble people; but still they had a manor. But let us read further. 'Two of them were the men of Brihtric and held 1-1/2 hides; other two were the men of Osulf the son of Frane and held 1-1/2 hides; and the fifth was the man of Eadmer Atule and held a hide.' We will at once finish the story and see how Robert of Ouilly came by this manor. 'No one of these five sokemen belonged to his _antecessor_ Wigot; every one of them might sell his land. One of them bought (i.e. redeemed) his land for nine ounces of gold from King William, so the men of the hundred say, and afterwards turned for protection to Wigot.' So Robert's title to this manor is none of the best. But are we sure that before the Conquest there was anything that we should call a manor? These five sokemen who have unequal shares, who have three different lords, who hold in all but 4 team-lands, whose land is worth but £5, do not look like a set of coparceners to whom a 'manor' has descended. When Robert of Ouilly has got his manor there are upon it 2 sokemen, 3 villeins, 5 _bordarii_, a cottager and a serf. It was not a splendid manor for five lords.

[Hertfordshire sokemen.]

We turn over a few pages. Hardouin of Eschalers has a manor rated at 5-1/2 hides[574]. It contains land for 8 teams. In demesne are 2 hides less 20 acres, and 3 teams; 11 _villani_ with the priest and 5 _bordarii_ have 5 teams. There are 4 cottagers and 6 serfs. It is worth £9; in the Confessor's day it was worth £10. Who held this manor in the past? Nine sokemen held it. Rather a large party of joint lords, we say; but still, families will grow. Howbeit, we must finish the sentence:--'Of these, one, Sired by name, was the man of Earl Harold and held 1 hide and 3 virgates for a manor; another, Alfred, a man of Earl Ælfgar, held 1-1/2 hides for a manor; and the other seven were sokemen of King Edward and held 2 hides and 1 virgate and they supplied the sheriff with 9 pence a year or 2-1/4 _averae_ (carrying services).' No, we have not been reading of the joint holders of a 'manor'; we have been reading of peasant proprietors. Two of them were substantial folk; each of the two held a _manerium_ at which geld was paid; the other seven gelded at one of the king's _maneria_ under the view of his bailiffs. _Maneria_ there have been everywhere; but 'manors' we see in the making. Hardouin has made one under our eyes.

[The small _maneria_.]

We hear the objection that, be it never so humble, a manor is a manor. But is that truism quite true? If all that we want for the constitution of a manor is a proprietor of some land who has a right to exact from some other man, or two or three other men, the whole or some part of the labour that is necessary for the tillage of his soil, we may indeed see manors everywhere and at all times. Even if we introduce a more characteristically medieval element and demand that the tillers shall be neither menial servants nor labourers hired for money, but men who make their living by cultivating for their own behoof small plots which the proprietor allows them to occupy, still we shall have the utmost difficulty if we would go behind manorialism. But suppose for a moment that we have a village the land of which is being held by nine sokemen, each of whom has a hide or half-hide scattered about in the open fields, and each of whom controls the labour of a couple of serfs, shall we not be misleading the public and ourselves if we speak of nine manors or even of nine 'embryo manors'? At any rate it is clear enough that if these estates of the sokemen are 'embryo manors,' then these embryos were deposited in the common fields. In that case the common fields, the hides and yard-lands of the village are not the creatures of manorialism.

[The Danes and freedom.]

We have seen free villages; we have seen a free hundred. We might have found yet freer hundreds had we gone to Suffolk. We have chosen Cambridgeshire because Cambridgeshire can not be called a Danish county, except in a sense in which, notwithstanding the wasted condition of Yorkshire, about one half of the English nation lived in Danish counties. When men divide up England between the three laws, they place Cambridgeshire under the Danelaw; but to that law they subject about one half of the inhabitants of England. There may have been many men of Scandinavian race in Cambridgeshire; but we find hundreds not wapentakes, hides not carucates, while among the names of villages there are few indeed which betray a Scandinavian origin. The Wetherley hundred was not many miles away from the classic fields of Hitchin[575].

[The Danish counties.]

But in truth we must be careful how we use our Dane. Yorkshire was a Danish county in a sense in which Cambridgeshire was not Danish; it was a land of trithings and wapentakes, a land without hides, where many a village testified by its name to a Scandinavian settlement. And yet to all appearance it was in the Confessor's day a land where the manors stood thick[576]. Then we have that wonderful contrast between Yorkshire and Lincolnshire which Ellis summed up in these figures:--

Sochemanni Villani Bordarii Lincolnshire 11,503 7,723 4,024 Yorkshire 447 5,079 1,819

Perhaps this contrast would have been less violent if Yorkshire had not been devastated: but violent it is and must be. It will provoke the remark that the 'faults' (if any faults there be) in a truly economic stratification of mankind are not likely to occur just at the boundaries of the shires, whereas so long as each county has a court from which there is no appeal to any central tribunal, we may expect to find that lines which have their origin in fiscal practice will be sharp lines and will coincide with the metes and bounds of jurisdictional districts.

[The contrast between villeins and sokemen.]

Nor should it escape remark that the names by which a grand distinction is expressed are in their origin very loose terms and etymologically ill-fitted to the purpose that they are serving. In English the _villanus_ is the _túnesman_ or, as we should say, the villager. And yet to all seeming the sokeman is essentially a villager. What is more the land where the sokemen and 'free men' lived was a land of true villages, of big villages, of limitless 'open fields,' whereas the hamleted west was servile. Then again _sokeman_ is a very odd term. If it signified that the man to whom it is applied was always the justiciable of the lord to whom he was commended, we could understand it. Even if this man were always the justiciable of a court that had passed into private hands, we could still understand it. But apparently there are plenty of sokemen whose soke 'is' or 'lies' in those hundred courts that have no lord but the king. The best guess that we can make as to the manner in which they have acquired their name is that in an age which is being persuaded that some 'service' must be done by every one who holds land, suit of court appears as the only service that is done by all these men. They may owe other services; but they all owe suit of court. If so we may see their legal successors in those freeholders of the twelfth century who are 'acquitting' their lords and their villages by doing suit at the national courts[577]. But when a new force comes into play (and the tribute to the pirate was a new and a powerful force) new lines of demarcation must be drawn, new classes of men must be formed and words will be borrowed for the purpose with little care for etymological niceties. One large and widely-spread class may find a name for itself in a district where the ordinary 'townsmen' or villagers are no longer treated as taxpayers responsible to the state, while some practice peculiar to a small part of the country may confer the name of 'sokemen' on those tillers of the soil who are rated to the geld. We are not arguing that this distinction, even when it first emerged, implied nothing that concerned the economic position of the villein and the sokeman. The most dependent peasants would naturally be the people who could not be directly charged with the geld, and the peasants who could not pay the geld would naturally become dependent on those who would pay it for them; still we are not entitled to assume that the fiscal scheme accurately mirrored the economic facts, or that the varying practice of different moots and different collectors may not have stamped as the villeins of one shire those who would have been the sokemen of another[578].

[Free villages.]

Be this as it may, any theory of English history must face the free, the lordless, village and must account for it as for one of the normal phenomena which existed in the year of grace 1066. How common it was we shall never know until the material contained in Domesday Book has been geographically rearranged by counties, hundreds and vills. But whether common or no, it was normal, just as normal as the village which was completely subject to seignorial power. We have before us villages which, taken as wholes, have no lords. What is more, it seems obvious enough that, unless there has been some great catastrophe in the past, some insurrection of the peasants or the like, the village of Orwell--and other villages might be named by the dozen--has never had a lord. Such lordships as exist in it are plainly not the relics of a dominion which has been split up among divers persons by the action of gifts and inheritances. The sokemen of Orwell have worshipped every rising sun. One has commended himself to the ill-fated Harold, another to the ill-fated Waltheof, a third has chosen the Mercian Ælfgar, a fourth has placed himself under the aspiring Archbishop; yet all are free to 'withdraw.' We have here a very free village indeed, for its members enjoy a freedom of which no freeholder of the thirteenth century would even dream, and in a certain sense we have here a free village community. How much communalism is there? Of this most difficult question only a few words will now be said, for our guesses about remote ages we will yet a while reserve.

[Village communities.]

In the first place, we can not doubt that the 'open field system' of agriculture prevails as well in the free villages as in those that are under the control of a lord. The sokeman's hide or virgate is no ring-fenced 'close' but is composed of many scattered strips. Again, we can hardly doubt that the practice of 'co-aration' prevailed. The sokeman had seldom beasts enough to make up a team. It is well known that the whole scheme of land-measurements which runs through Domesday Book is based upon the theory that land is ploughed by teams of eight oxen. It is perhaps possible that smaller teams were sometimes employed; but when we read that a certain man 'always ploughed with three oxen[579],' or 'used to plough with two oxen but now ploughs with half a team[580],' or 'used to plough with a team but now ploughs with two oxen[581],' we are reading, not of small teams, but of the number of oxen that the man in question contributed towards the team of eight that was made up by him and his neighbours. When of a piece of land in Bedfordshire it is said that 'one ox ploughs there,' this means that the land in question supplies but one ox in a team of eight[582]; and here and not in any monstrous birth do we find the explanation of 'terra est dimidio bovi et ibi est semibos[583]':--there is a sixteenth part of a teamland and its tenant along with some other man provides an ox. There may have been light ploughs as well as heavy ploughs, but the heavy plough must have been extremely common, since the term 'plough team' (_caruca_) seems invariably to mean a team of eight.

[The villagers as co-owners.]

Then one notable case meets our eye in which the ownership of land, of arable land, seems to be attributed to a village community. In Goldington, a village in Bedfordshire, Walter now holds a hide; there is land for one team and meadow for half a team. 'The men of the vill held this land in common and could sell it[584].' Apparently the men of the vill were Ælfwin Sac a man of the Bishop of Lincoln who held half a team-land and 'could do what he liked with it,' nine sokemen who held three team-lands between them, three other sokemen who held three team-lands, and Ælfmær a man of Asgil who held three team-lands[585]. How it came about that these men, besides holding land in severalty, held a tract in common, we are left to guess. Nor can we say whether such a case was usual or unusual. Very often in Little Domesday we meet an entry which tells how _x_ free men held _y_ acres and had _z_ teams; for example, how 15 free men held 40 acres and had 2 teams[586]. In general we may well suppose that each of them held his strips in severalty, but we dare not say that such a phrase never points to co-ownership.

[The waste land of the vill.]

Then as to such part of the land as is not arable:--Even in the free village a few enclosed meadows will probably be found; but the pasture ground lies open for 'the cattle of the vill.' At the date of the survey, though several Norman lords have estates in one vill, the common formula used in connexion with each estate is, not 'there is pasture for the cattle of this manor, or of this land,' but 'there is pasture for the cattle of the vill.' Occasionally we read of 'common pasture' in a context which shows that the pasture is common not to several manorial lords but to the villeins of one lord[587]. In the hundred of Coleness in Suffolk there is a pasture which is common to all the men of the hundred[588]. But, as might be expected, we hear little of the mode in which pasture rights were allotted or regulated. Such rights were probably treated as appurtenances of the arable land:--'The canons of Waltham claim as much wood as belongs to one hide[589].' If the rights of user are known, no one cares about the bare ownership of pasture land or wood land:--it is all one whether we say that Earl Edwin is entitled to one third of a certain wood or to every third oak that grows therein[590].

[Co-ownership of mills.]

Sometimes the ownership of a mill is divided into so many shares that we are tempted to think that this mill has been erected at the cost of the vill. In Suffolk a free man holds a little _manerium_ which is composed of 24 acres of land, 1-1/2 acres of meadow and 'a fourth part of the mill in every third year[591]':--he takes his turn with his neighbours in the enjoyment of the revenue of the mill. We may even be led to suspect that the parish churches have sometimes been treated as belonging to the men of the vill who have subscribed to erect or to endow them. In Suffolk a twelfth part of a church belongs to a petty _manerium_ which contains 30 acres and is cultivated by two bordiers with a single team[592]. When a parish church gets its virgate by 'the charity of the neighbours[593],' when nine free men give it twenty acres for the good of their souls[594], we may see in this some trace of communal action.

[The system of virgates in a free village.]

Incidentally we may notice that the system of virgate holdings seems quite compatible with an absence of seignorial control. In the free village, for example in Orwell, we shall often find that one man has twice, thrice or four times as much as another man:--the same is the case in the manorialized villages of Middlesex, where a villein may have as much as a hide or as little as a half-virgate; but all the holdings will bear, at least in theory, some simple relation to each other. Thus in Orwell the virgates are divided into thirds and quarters, and in several instances a man has four thirds of a virgate. In Essex and East Anglia, though we may find many irregular and many very small holdings, tenements of 60, 45, 40, 30, 20, 15 acres are far commoner than they would be were it not that a unit of 120 acres will very easily break into such pieces. Domesday Book takes no notice of family law and its 'vendere potuit' merely excludes the interference of the lord and does not imply that a man is at liberty to disappoint his expectant heirs. Very possibly there has been among the small folk but little giving or selling of land.

[The virgates and inheritance.]

Nor is a law which gives the dead man's land to all his sons as co-heirs a sufficient force to destroy the system of hides and virgates when once it is established by some original allotment. In the higher ranks of society we see large groups of thegns holding land in common, holding as the Normans say 'in parage.' We can hardly doubt that they are co-heirs holding an inheritance that has not been physically partitioned[595]. Sometimes it is said of a single man that he holds in parage[596]. This gives us a valuable hint. Holding in parage implies that one of the 'pares,' one of the parceners,--as a general rule he would be the eldest of them--is answerable to king and lord for the services due from the land, while his fellows are bound only to him; they must help him to discharge duties for which he is primarily responsible[597]. This seems the import of such passages as the following--'Five thegns held two bovates; one of them was the _senior_ (the elder, and we may almost say the lord) of the others[598]'--'Eight thegns held this manor; one of them Alli, a man of King Edward, was the _senior_ of the others[599]'--'Godric and his brothers held three carucates; two of them served the third[600]'--'Chetel and Turver were brothers and after the death of their father they divided the land, but so that Chetel in doing the king's service should have help from Turver his brother[601]'--'Siwate, Alnod, Fenchel and Aschil divided the land of their father equally, and they held in such wise that if there were need for attendance in the king's host and Siwate could go, his brothers were to aid him [with money and provisions]; and on the next occasion another brother was to go and Siwate like the rest was to help him; and so on down the list; but Siwate was the king's man[602].' No doubt similar arrangements were made by co-heirs of lowlier station[603]. The integrity of the tenement is maintained though several men have an interest in it. In relation to the lord and the state one of them represents his fellows. When the shares become very small, some of the claimants might be bought out by the others[604].

[The farm.]

But, to return to the village, we must once more notice that the Canons of St Paul's have let their manor of Willesden to the villeins[605]. This leads us to speculate as to the incidence and collection of those great provender rents of which we read when royal manors are described. In King Edward's day a royal manor is often charged with the whole or some aliquot share of a 'one night's farm,' that is one day's victual for the king's household. Definite amounts of bread, cheese, malt, meat, beer, honey, wool have to be supplied; thus, for example, Cheltenham must furnish three thousand loaves for the king's dogs and King's Barton must do the like[606]. Then too Edward the sheriff receives as the profits of the shrievalty of Wiltshire, 130 pigs, 32 bacons, certain quantities of wheat, malt, oats, and honey, 400 chicken, 1600 eggs, 100 cheeses, 100 lambs, 52 fleeces[607]. Between the king and the men of the manor, no doubt there stands a farmer, either the sheriff or some other person, who is bound to supply the due quantity of provender; but to say that this is so does not solve the problem that is before us. We have still to ask how this due quantity is obtained from the men of the village. It is a quantity which can be expressed by round figures; it is 3000 dog-cakes, or the like. We do not arrive at these pretty results by adding up the rents due from individuals. Again, just in the counties which are the homes of freedom we hear much of sums of money that are paid to a lord by way of free will offering[608]. In Norfolk and Suffolk the villagers will give a yearly _gersuma_, in Lincoln they will pay a yearly _tailla_, and this will be a neat round sum; very often it is 20 shillings, or 40 or 10.

[Round sums raised from the villages.]

In this particular we seem to see an increase of something that may be called communalism, as we go backwards. Of course in the cartularies of a later age we may discover round sums of money which, under the names of 'tallage' or 'aid' are imposed upon the vill as a whole; but in general we may accept the rule that tributes to be paid by the vill as a whole, in money or in kind, are not of recent origin. They are more prominent in the oldest than in other documents. As examples, we may notice the 'cornage' of the Boldon Book--one vill renders 20 shillings, another 30 shillings for cornage[609]; also the contributions of sheep, poultry, bread and cloth which the vills of Peterborough Abbey bring to the monks on the festival of their patron saint--one vill supplying ten rams and twenty ells of cloth, another four rams, five ells of cloth, ten chicken and three hundred loaves[610]. But then we have to notice that a village which has to pay a provender rent or even a _tailla_ or _gersuma_ is not altogether a free village. Its communal action is called out by seignorial pressure.

[The township and police law.]

And as we go backwards the township seems to lose such definiteness as is given to it by the police law of the thirteenth century[611]. This was to be expected, for such law implies a powerful, centralized state, which sends its justices round the country to amerce the townships and compel these local communities to do their duties. Once and once only does the township appear in the Anglo-Saxon dooms. This is in a law of Edgar. If a man who is on a journey buys cattle, then on his return home he must turn them onto the common pasture, 'with the witness of the township.' If he fails to do so, then after five nights the townsmen are to give information to the elder of the hundred, and in that case they and their cattle-herd will be free of blame, and the man who brought the cattle into the town will forfeit them, half to the lord and half to the hundred. If, on the other hand, the townsmen fail in the duty of giving information, their herd will pay for it with his skin[612]. The township has very little organization of which the state can make use. It does not seem even to have an 'elder' or head-man, and, from the threat of a flogging, we may gather that its common herdsman will be a slave. Purchases of cattle can not be made 'with the witness of the township'; the purchaser ought to seek out two or three of those twelve standing witnesses who are appointed for every hundred[613]. So again, in the twelfth century we see the finder of a stray beast bringing it into the vill; he conducts it to the church-door and tells his story to the priest, the reeve and as many of the best men of the vill as can be got together. Then the reeve sends to the four neighbouring vills, calls in from each the priest, the reeve and three or four men and recounts the tale in their presence. Then on the following day he goes to the head-man of the hundred and puts the whole matter before him and delivers up the beast to him, unless indeed the place where it was found straying was within the domain of some lord who had sake and soke[614]. Here again, the organization of the township appears to be of a most rudimentary kind. It has no court, unless its lord has sake and soke; it has no power to detain an estray for safe custody. In this very simple case it requires the help of other vills and must transmit the cause to the hundred court. And so again, though there may be some reason for thinking that at one time the murder fine--the fine payable if the slayer of a foreigner was not arrested--was primarily exigible from the vill in which the corpse was found, the hundred being but subsidiarily liable, still this rule seems to have been soon abandoned and the burden of the fine, a fine far too heavy for a single vill, was cast upon the hundred[615]. For all this, however, the law knew and made use of the township. The Domesday commissioners required the testimony of the priest, the reeve and six _villani_ of every vill. So soon as the law about suit to the hundred court becomes at all plain, the suit is due rather from vills than from men, and the burden is discharged by the lord of the vill or his steward, or, if neither of them can attend, then by the priest, the reeve and four of the vill's best men[616].

[The free village and Norman government.]

How could these requirements be met by a vill which had no lord? It would be a fair remark that the existence of such vills is not contemplated by the Norman rulers. The men who will represent the vill before the Domesday commissioners will in their eyes be _villani_. This assumption is becoming true enough. We have seen Orwell full of sokemen; in 1086 there is never a sokeman in it; there is no one in it who is above the rank of a villein. Count Roger and Walter Giffard, Count Alan and Geoffrey de Mandeville can make such arrangements about the suit of Orwell, the reeveship of Orwell, as they think fit. Everywhere the Frenchmen are consolidating their manors, creating demesne land where their English _antecessores_ had none, devising scientific frontiers, doing what in them lies to make every vill a manor. Thus is evolved that state of things which comes before us in the thirteenth century. The work of the foreigners was done so completely that we can see but very little of the institutions that they swept away.

[Organization of the free village.]

On the whole, however, we shall do well not to endow the free township of the Confessor's day with much organization. We may be certain that, at least as a general rule, it had no court; we may doubt very gravely whether it always had any elder, head-man, or reeve. Often it was a small and yet a heterogeneous, and a politically distracted body. Some of its members might be attached to the house of Godwin, some had sworn to live and die for the house of Leofric. Just because it is free it has few, if any, communal payments to make. Only if it comes under a single lord will it have to render a provender rent, a _tailla_ or _gersuma_. As a sphere for communal action there remains only the regulation of the arable lands, the woods and waste. We can not say for certain that these give scope for much regulation. The arable strips are held in severalty; if by chance some of them are held in common, this in all probability is a case rather of co-ownership than of communal ownership. The pasture rights may well be regarded as appurtenances of the arable strips. The practice of 'co-aration' need not be enforced by law; the man who will not help his neighbours must be content to see his own land unploughed. The course of agriculture is fixed and will not be often or easily altered. The 'realism' which roots every right and duty in a definite patch of soil, the rapid conversion of new arrangements into immemorial customs, the practice of taking turn and turn about, the practice of casting lots, these will do much towards settling questions such as our modern imaginations would solve by means of a village council. No doubt, from time to time a new departure is made; new land is reclaimed from the waste, perhaps the pasture rights are stinted or redistributed, a mill is built or a church is endowed;--but all this requires no periodic assemblies, no organization that we dare call either permanent or legal. Once in five years or so there may be something to be done, and done it will be by a resolution of the villagers which is or calls itself an unanimous resolution. If the Cambridgeshire townships had been landowning corporations, each of them would have passed as a single unit into the hands of some Norman baron. But this did not happen. On the contrary, the Norman barons had to content themselves with intermixed strips; the strips of Ælfgar's men went to Count Roger, the strips of Edith's men went to Count Alan. We are far from denying the existence of a communal sentiment, of a notion that somehow or another the men of the vill taken as a whole owned the lands of the vill, but this sentiment, this notion, if strong was vague. There were no institutions in which it could realize itself, there was no form of speech or thought in which it could find an apt expression. It evaded the grasp of law. At the touch of jurisprudence the township became a mere group of individuals, each with his separate rights[617].

FOOTNOTES:

[547] D. B. ii. 174: 'Hec villa fuit in duobus maneriis T. R. E.' Ibid. i. 164: 'De his 2 villis fecit Comes W. unum manerium.'

[548] Inquisitio, 77-9.

[549] This result comes out correctly if 1H=4V=120A. For the state of this vill T. R. W. see Round, Feudal England, 40.

[550] His plot at Orwell is said to belong to Harlton. Then at Harlton we find an Achil with sokemen under him, and though in D. B. he is described as a king's thegn, this is not incompatible with his being the man of Harold for some of his lands. At Barrington Achillus Danaus homo Haroldi has a holding of 40 acres.

[551] Inquisitio, 86.

[552] Ibid. 68.

[553] Ibid. 43, 44, 45, 73, 76.

[554] D. B. i. 195.

[555] D. B. i. 139: 'De consuetudine 1 averam inveniebat cum Rex in scyra veniebat, si non 5 den. reddebat.' D. B. i. 190, '[Sochemanni in Fuleberne] reddunt per annum 8 libras arsas et pensatas et unoquoque anno 12 equos et 12 inguardos si Rex in vicecomitatu veniret, si non veniret 12 sol. et 8 den.; T. R. E. non reddebant vicecomiti nisi averas et inguardos vel 12 sol. et 8 den. et superplus invasit Picot [vicecomes] super Regem.'

[556] Wratworth has completely disappeared from the modern map; its territory seems to be included in that of the present Orwell. See Rot. Hund. ii. 559 and Lysons, Magna Britannia, ii. 243. A small hamlet called Malton seems to represent it. Whitwell also is no longer the name of a village, while the modern Coton is not mentioned in D. B. There is now a Whitwell Farm near the village of Coton, but in the parish of Barton. The modern Coton does not seem to be the ancient Whitwell, for on Subsidy Rolls we may find Whitwell annexed to Barton and Coton to Grantchester.

[557] The figures in our first column represent the division of the vill among the Norman lords. H. V. A. stand for Hides, Virgates, Acres. By C. and B. we signify the Carucae and Boves for which 'there was land.'

[558] There is some small error in this case.

[559] A small conjectural emendation.

[560] The Inq. Com. Cant. says 6 hides.

[561] An error of one hide in the particulars. The two records do not fully agree.

[562] A small emendation justified by Inq. Eliensis (Hamilton, p. 110).

[563] Ælfgar died before King Edward; Freeman, Norman Conquest, ed. 3, iii. 469, places his death in or about 1062.

[564] The history of the earldoms during Edward's reign is exceedingly obscure. See Freeman's elaborate note: Ibid., 555. In particular Cambridgeshire seems to have lain now in one and now in another earldom. Thus it comes about that Cambridgeshire sokemen are commended some to Ælfgar, some to Waltheof, some to Harold, some to Gyrth. Ælfgar, for example, had at one time been earl in East Anglia. Men who had commended themselves to an earl would, unless they 'withdrew themselves,' still be his men though he had ceased to be earl of their county.

[565] See above, p. 105. Observe how frequently our record speaks of 'sochemanni _homines_ Algari' and the like. These sokemen are Ælfgar's men; but are not properly his sokemen.

[566] Inq. Com. Cant. 110. This is from the Inquisitio Eliensis. Compare p. 83.

[567] Inq. Com. Cant. 77-8.

[568] Rot. Hund. ii. 558.

[569] One instance may suffice. In Sawston (Rot. Hund. ii. 575-80) are three manors, _A_, _B_, _C_; _A_ has a sub-manor. One Thomas Dovenel holds in villeinage of the lord of _A_; in villeinage of the lord of _B_; in freehold of the lord of _B_; in freehold of a tenant of the lord of _B_; in freehold of a tenant of a tenant of the lord of _B_.

[570] Rot. Hund. ii. 580.

[571] On four out of the five manors the rent is 2_s._ 3_d._; on the fifth 3_s._ 0_d._

[572] Inq. Com. Cant. 41.

[573] D. B. i. 137 b.

[574] D. B. i. 141 b.

[575] Inq. Com. Cant., pp. 108-110. As names of the Abbot of Ely's sokemen in Meldreth and neighbouring villages we have Grimmus, Alsi Cild, Wenesi, Alsi, Leofwinus, Ædricus, Godwinus, Almarus, Aluricus frater Goduuini, Ædriz, Alsi Berd, Alricus Godingessune, Wenestan, Alwin Blondus, Alfuuinus, Aluredus, Alricus Brunesune, Alware, Hunuð, Hunwinus, Brizstanus. This does not point to a preponderance of Norse or Danish blood.

[576] Owing to the wasted condition of Yorkshire, the information that we obtain of the T. R. E. is meagre and perfunctory. But what seems characteristic of this county is a holding of two or three ploughlands which we might fairly call an embryo manor.

[577] See the early extents in Cart. Rams. iii. Thus (242) at Hemingford: 'R. V. tenet tres virgatas et dimidiam et sequitur hundredum et comitatum.... R. H. tenet duas virgatas et sequitur hundredum et comitatum.' Elsworth (249): 'R. filius T. duas virgatas. Pro altera sequitur comitatum et hundredum; pro altera solvit quinque solidos.' Brancaster (261): 'Cnutus avus Petri tenebat terram suam libere in tempore Regis Henrici et sequebatur comitatum et hundredum, et fuit quietus ab omni servitio.' See also Vinogradoff, Villainage, 411 ff.

[578] Some thirty years ago the whole political world of England was agitated by controversy about 'the compound householder.' Was he to have a vote? The historian of the nineteenth century will not treat the compound householders as forming one homogeneous class of men whose general status could be marked off from that of other classes. Nor, it is to be hoped, will etymological guesses lead him to believe that the compound householder held a compound house. He will say that a landlord 'compounded for' the rates of the aforesaid householder. _Mutatis mutandis_ may not the villein have been the compound householder of the eleventh century?

[579] D. B. ii. 204: '3 liberi homines ... semper arant cum 3 bobus.'

[580] D. B. ii. 184 b.

[581] D. B. ii. 192 b.

[582] D. B. i. 211.

[583] D. B. i. 218 b. Compare the 'dimidius porcus' of ii. 287.

[584] D. B. i. 213 b: 'Hanc terram tenuerunt homines villae communiter et vendere potuerunt.'

[585] D. B. i. 210, 212 b, 213 b.

[586] D. B. i. 214: 'In Meldone Johannes de Roches occupavit iniuste 25 acras super homines qui villam tenent.' This is a vague phrase.

[587] e.g. D. B. i. 112 b: 'Colsuen homo Episcopi Constantiensis aufert ab hoc manerio communem pasturam quae ibi adiacebat T. R. E. et etiam T. R. W. quinque annis.'

[588] D. B. ii. 339 b.

[589] D. B. i. 140 b.

[590] D. B. i. 75: 'tercia vero pars vel tercia quercus erat Comitis Eduini.'

[591] D. B. ii. 404 b: 'et in tercio anno quarta pars mol[endini].'

[592] D. B. ii. 291 b.

[593] D. B. ii. 24 b.

[594] D. B. ii. 438.

[595] D. B. i. 83: 'sex taini in paragio,' 'quatuor taini in paragio.' Ibid. 83 b: 'novem taini in paragio.' Ibid. 168 b: 'quinque fratres tenuerunt pro 5 maneriis et poterant ire quo volebant et pares erant.'

[596] D. B. i. 96 b: 'dim. hida quam tenebat T. R. E. unus tainus in paragio.' Ibid. 40: 'Brictric tenuit de episcopo in paragio.'

[597] But it was possible for several men to be holding in parage and yet for each of them to have a separate _manerium_. This seems to imply that their holdings were physically separate and that each holding was separately liable for geld, though as regards other matters, e.g. military service, the division was ignored.

[598] D. B. i. 291.

[599] D. B. i. 145 b.

[600] D. B. i. 341.

[601] D. B. i. 354.

[602] D. B. i. 375 b: 'Siuuate et Alnod et Fenchel et Aschil equaliter et pariliter diviserunt inter se terram patris sui T. R. E. et ita tenuerunt ut si opus fuit expeditione Regis et Siuuate potuit ire, alii fratres iuverunt eum. Post istum, ivit alter et Siuuate cum reliquis iuvit eum; et sic de omnibus. Siuuate tamen fuit homo Regis.'

[603] D. B. i. 206: 'sex sochemanni id est Aluuoldus et 5 fratres eius habuerunt 4 hid. et dim. ad geldum.'

[604] D. B. i. 233: 'Hanc terram tenuerunt 2 fratres pro 2 maneriis, et postea emit alter ab altero partem suam et fecit unum manerium de duobus T. R. E.'

[605] D. B. i. 127 b: 'Hoc manerium tenent villani ad firmam canonicorum.'

[606] D. B. i. 162 b.

[607] D. B. i. 69.

[608] D. B. ii. 118 b Yarmouth: 'De gersuma has 4 libras dant burgenses gratis et amicitia.'

[609] Thus D. B. iv. 568: 'Due ville reddunt 30 sol. de cornagio.' Ib. 570: 'Queryngdonshire reddit 76 sol. de cornagio.'

[610] Black Book of Peterborough, _passim_.

[611] Hist. Engl. Law, i. 550.

[612] Edgar IV. 8. 9.

[613] Ibid. 6.

[614] Leg. Edw. Conf. 24.

[615] Leg. Edw. Conf. 15. Compare Leg. Henr. 91; Leg. Will. Conq. I. 22; Leg. Will. Conq. III.. 3.

[616] Leg. Henr. 7 § 7.

[617] It is possible that the entry (i. 204) which tells how the sokemen of Broughton enjoyed the smaller _wites_ points to a free village court; but we have put another interpretation upon this; see above, p. 99.

§ 8. _The Feudal Superstructure._

[The higher ranks of men.]

It remains that we should speak very briefly of the higher ranks of men and the tenure by which they held their land. Little accurate information can be extorted from our record. The upper storeys of the old English edifice have been demolished and a new superstructure has been reared in their stead. It is not the office of Domesday Book to tell us much even of the new nobility, of the services which the counts and barons are to render to the king in return for their handsome endowments:--as to the old nobility, that has perished. Still there are some questions that we ought to ask.

[Dependent tenure.]

The general theory that all land tenure, except indeed the tenure by which the king holds land in demesne, is dependent tenure, seems to be implied, not only by many particular entries, but also by the whole scheme of the book. Every holder of land, except the king, holds it of (_de_) some lord, and therefore every acre of land that is not royal demesne can be arranged under the name of some tenant in chief. Even a church will hold its land, if not of the king, then of some other lord[618]. The terms of the tenure are but very rarely described, for Domesday Book is no feodary. Just now and again a tenure _in elemosina_ is noticed and in some of these cases this term seems already to bear the technical sense that it will have in later days; the tenant owes a spiritual, but no secular service[619]. A few instances of what later lawyers would call a 'tenure by divine service,' as distinct from a tenure in frank-almoin, may be found[620]. A few words here and there betray the existence of tenure by knight's service and of castle guard[621]. In the _servientes Regis_ who have been enfeoffed in divers counties we may see the predecessors of the tenants by serjeanty[622]. We shall remark, however, the absence of those abstract terms which are to become the names of the various tenures. We read of _servientes_, _sochemanni_, _villani_, _burgenses_, but not of _seriantia_[623], _socagium_, _villenagium_, _burgagium_. As we pursue our retrogressive course through the middle ages, we do not find that the law of personal condition becomes more and more distinct from the law of land tenure; on the contrary, the two become less and less separable.

[_Feudum._]

It has sometimes been said that a feudal tenure was the only kind of land tenure that the Norman conquerors could conceive. In a certain sense this may be true, but we should have preferred to say that probably they could not easily conceive a kind of tenure that was not dependent:--every one who holds land (except he be the king) holds it of someone else. The adjective 'feudal' was not in their vocabulary, and their use of the word _feudum_--occasionally we meet the older _feum_[624]--is exceedingly obscure. Very rarely does it denote a tenure or a mass of rights; usually, though it may connote rights of a certain order, it denotes a stretch of land; thus we may read of the fee of the Bishop of Bayeux, thereby being meant the territory which the bishop holds. Occasionally, however, we hear of a man holding land _in feudo_. One instance may be enough to show that such a phrase did not imply military tenure:--'William the Chamberlain held this manor _in feudo_ of the Queen [Matilda] at a rent of £3 a year and after her death he held it in the same fashion of the king[625].' All sense of militariness, and all sense of precariousness, that the word has ever had in its continental history, seems to be disappearing. Already the process has begun which will make it applicable to every person who has heritable rights in land. William the Chamberlain is, we take it, already a fee farmer, that is, a rent-paying tenant with heritable rights[626]. As to the word _beneficium_, which _feum_ or _feudum_ has been supplanting, we shall hardly find it with its old meaning. It seems to be holding its own only within the sphere of ecclesiastical rights, where the 'benefice' will survive until our own day[627].

[_Alodium._]

A yet more interesting and equally foreign word is not unfrequently used, namely, _alodium_. The Norman commissioners deemed that a large number of English tenants in Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire and some in Berkshire had been _alodiarii_ or _aloarii_ and had held _in alodium_ or _sicut alodium_. The appearance of this term in one district and in one only is far from proving that there had been anything peculiar in the law of that district. It may well be a mere chance that the _liberi homines_ of other counties are not called _alodiaries_. Still in Hampshire, where alodiaries abounded, it was not every free man holding land who had an _alod_[628]. Perhaps we shall be right in thinking that the term pointed to heritability:--the free man who holds land but has no _alod_ has only an estate for life. Certainly it does not mean that the tenant has no lord. The alodiary may hold his alod 'of' his lord[629]; he may owe service to his lord[630]; he may pay a relief[631]; he may have no power 'to withdraw himself with his land' from his lord[632]. The Norman lawyers had no speculative objection to the existence of alodiaries; it in no way contradicted such doctrine of tenure as they had formed. In 1086 there were still alodiaries in Berkshire[633], and in royal charters of a much later day there is talk of the alodiaries of Kent as of an existing class[634]. It is just possible that William's commissioners saw some difference between holding _in feudo_ and holding _in alodio_. If ever they contrasted the two words, they may have hinted that while the _feudum_ has been given by the lord to the man, the _alodium_ has been brought by the man to the lord; but we can not be very certain that they ever opposed these terms to each other[635]. Such sparse evidence as we can obtain from Normandy strengthens our belief that the wide, the almost insuperable, gulf that modern theorists have found or have set between 'alodial ownership' and 'feudal tenure' was not perceptible in the eleventh century[636]. It can be no part of our task to trace the history of these terms _alodium_ and _feudum_ behind the date at which they are brought into England, but hereafter we shall see that here in England a process had been at work which, had these terms been in use, would have brought the alod very near to the feud, the feud very near to the alod.

[Application of the formula of dependent tenure.]

It is probable that this process had gone somewhat further in Normandy than in England. It is probable that the Normans knew that in imposing upon all English lands 'the formula of dependent tenure' they were simplifying matters. They seem to think, and they may be pretty right in thinking, that every English land-holder had held his land under (_sub_) some lord; but apparently they do not think that every English land-holder had held his land of (_de_) some lord. Not unfrequently they show that this is so. Thus one Sigar holds a piece of Cambridgeshire _of_ Geoffrey de Mandeville; he used to hold it _under_ Æsgar the Staller[637]. We catch a slight shade of difference between the two prepositions; _sub_ lays stress on the lord's power, which may well be of a personal or justiciary, rather than of a proprietary kind, while _de_ imports a theory about the origin of the tenure; it makes the tenant's rights look like derivative rights:--it is supposed that he gets his land from his lord. And at least in the eastern counties--so it may well have seemed to the Normans--matters sadly needed simplification. Even elsewhere and when a large estate is at stake they can not always get an answer to the question 'Of whom was this land holden[638]?' Still they thought that some of the greatest men in the realm had held their lands, or some of their lands, of the king or of someone else. The formulas which are used throughout the description of Hampshire and some other counties seem to assume that every holder of a manor, at all events if a layman, had held it _of_ the king, if he did not hold it _of_ another lord. Tenure _in feudo_ again they regarded as no innovation[639]. They saw the work of subinfeudation:--Brihtmær held land of Azor and Azor of Harold; we may well suppose that Harold held it _of_ the king and that some villeins held part of it of Brihtmær, and thus we see already a feudal ladder with no less than five rungs[640]. They saw that the thegns owed 'service' to their lords[641]. They saw the heriot; they sometimes called it a relief[642]. We can not be sure that this change of names imported any change in the law; when a burgess of Hereford died the king took a heriot, but if he could not get the heriot he took the dead man's land[643]. They saw that in certain cases an heir had to 'seek' his ancestor's lord if he wished to enjoy his ancestor's land[644]. They saw that many a free man could not give or sell his land without his lord's consent. They saw that great and powerful men could not give or sell their land without the king's consent[645].

[Military tenure.]

They saw something very like military tenure. No matter with which we have to deal is darker than the constitution of the English army on the eve of its defeat. We may indeed safely believe that no English king had ever relinquished the right to call upon all the free men of his realm to resist an invader. On the other hand, it seems quite clear that, as a matter of fact, 'the host' was no longer 'the nation in arms.' The common folk of a shire could hardly be got to fight outside their shire, and ill-armed troops of peasants were now of little avail. The only army upon which the king could habitually rely was a small force. The city of Oxford sent but twenty men or twenty pounds[646]: Leicester sent twelve men[647]: Warwick sent ten[648]. In Berkshire the law was that, if the king called out the host, one soldier (_miles_) should go for every five hides and should receive from each hide four shillings as his stipend for two months' service. If the man who was summoned made default, he forfeited all his land to the king; but there were cases in which he might send one of his men as a substitute, and for a default committed by his substitute he suffered no forfeiture, but only a fine of fifty shillings[649]. It is probable that a similar 'five hide rule' obtained throughout a large part of England. The borough of Wilton was bound to send twenty shillings or one man 'as for an honour of five hides[650].' When an army or a fleet was called out, Exeter 'served to the amount of five hides[651].' All this points to a small force of well armed soldiers. For example, 'the five hide rule' would be satisfied if Worcestershire sent a contingent of 240 men. But not only was the army small; it was a territorial army; it grew out of the soil.

[The army and the land.]

At first sight this 'five hide rule' may seem to have in it little that is akin to a feudal system of knights' fees. We may suppose that it will work thus:--The host is summoned; the number of hides in each hundred is known. To despatch a company of soldiers proportioned to the number of the hides, for example twenty warriors if the hundred contains just one hundred hides, is the business of the hundred court and the question 'Who must go?' will be answered by election, rotation or lot. But it is not probable that the territorializing process will stop here, and this for several reasons. An army that can not be mobilized without the action of the hundred moots is not a handy force. While the hundredors are deliberating the Danes or Welshmen will be burning and slaying. Also a king will not easily be content with the responsibility of a fluctuating and indeterminate body of hundredors; he will insist, if he can, that there must be some one person answerable to him for each unit of military power. A serviceable system will not have been established until the country is divided into 'five-hide-units,' until every man's holding is such an unit, or is composed of several such units, or is an aliquot share of such an unit. Then again the holdings with which the rule will have to deal are not homogeneous; they are not all of one and the same order. It is not as though to each plot of land there corresponded some one person who was the only person interested in it; the occupiers of the soil have lords and again those lords have lords. The king will insist, if he can, that the lords who stand high in this scale must answer to him for the service that is due from all the lands over which they exercise a dominion, and then he will leave them free to settle, as between themselves and their dependants, the ultimate incidence of the burden:--thus room will be made for the play of free contract. At all events when, as is not unusual, some lord is the lord of a whole hundred and of its court, the king will regard him as personally liable for the production of the whole contingent that is due from that hundred. In this way a system will be evolved which for many practical purposes will be indistinguishable from the system of knights' fees, and all this without any help from the definitely feudal idea that military service is the return which the tenant makes to the lord for the gift of land that the lord has made to the tenant.

[Feudalism and army service.]

That this process had already done much of its work when the old English army received its last summons, we can not doubt, though it is very possible that this work had been done sporadically. We see that the land was being plotted out into five-hide-units. In one passage the Norman clerks call such a unit an honour, an 'honour of five hides[652].' There is an old theory based upon legal texts that such an honour qualifies its lord or owner to be a thegn. If a ceorl prospers so that he has five hides 'to the king's útware,' that is, an estate rated as five hides for military purposes, he is worthy of a thegn's wergild[653]. Then the Anglo-Saxon charters show us how the kings have been endowing their thegns with tracts of territory which are deemed to contain just five or some multiple of five hides[654]. The thegn with five hides will have tenants below him; but none of them need serve in the host if their lord goes, as he ought to go, in person. Then each of these territorial units continues to owe the same quantum of military service, though the number of persons interested in it be increased or diminished, and thus the ultimate incidence of the duty becomes the subject-matter of private arrangements. That is the point of a story from Lincolnshire which we have already recounted:--A man's land descends to his four sons; they divide it equally and agree to take turns in doing the military service that is due from it; but only the eldest of them is to be the king's man[655]. Then we see that the great nobles lead or send to the war all the _milites_ that are due from the lands over which they have a seignory. There are already wide lands which owe military service--we can not put it otherwise--to the bishop of Winchester as lord of Taunton:--they owe 'attendance in the host along with the men of the bishop[656].' The churches of Worcester and Evesham fell out about certain lands at Hamton; one of the disputed questions was whether or no Hamton ought to do its military service 'in the bishop's hundred of Oswaldslaw' or elsewhere[657]. This question we take to be one of great importance to the bishop. Lord of the triple hundred of Oswaldslaw, lord of three hundred hides, he is bound to put sixty warriors into the field and he is anxious that men who ought to be helping him to make up this tale shall not be serving in another contingent.

[Default of service.]

But from Worcestershire we obtain a still more precious piece of information. The custom of that county is this:--When the king summons the host and his summons is disregarded by one who is a lord with jurisdiction, 'by one who is so free a man that he has sake and soke and can go with his land where he pleases,' then all his lands are in the king's mercy. But if the defaulter be the man of another lord and the lord sends a substitute in his stead, then he, the defaulter, must pay forty shillings to his lord,--to his lord, not to the king, for the king has had the service that was due; but if the lord does not send a substitute, then the forty shillings which the defaulter pays to the lord, the lord must pay to the king[658]. A feudalist of the straiter sort might well find fault with this rule. He might object that the lord ought to forfeit his land, not only if he himself fails to attend the host, but also if he fails to bring with him his due tale of _milites_. Feudalism was not perfected in a day. Still here we have the root of the matter--the lord is bound to bring into the field a certain number of _milites_, perhaps one man from every five hides, and if he can not bring those who are bound to follow him, he must bring others or pay a fine. His man, on the other hand, is bound to him and is not bound to the king. That man by shirking his duty will commit no offence against the king. The king is ceasing to care about the ultimate incidence of the military burden, because he relies upon the responsibility of the magnates. How this system worked in the eastern counties where the power of the magnates was feebler, we can not tell. It is not improbable that one of the forces that is attaching the small free proprietors to the manors of their lords is this 'five hide rule'; they are being compelled to bring their acres into five-hide-units, to club together under the superintendence of a lord who will answer for them to the king, while as to the villeins, so seldom have they fought that they are ceasing to be 'fyrd-worthy[659].' But in the west we have already what in substance are knights' fees. The Bishop of Worcester held 300 hides over which he had sake and soke and all customs; he was bound to put 60 _milites_ into the field; if he failed in this duty he had to pay 40 shillings for each deficient _miles_. At the beginning of Henry II.'s reign he was charged with 60 knights' fees[660].

[The new military service.]

We are not doubting that the Conqueror defined the amount of military service that was to be due to him from each of his tenants in chief, nor are we suggesting that he paid respect to the rule about the five hides, but it seems questionable whether he introduced any very new principle. A new theoretic element may come to the front, a contractual element:--the tenant in chief must bring up his knights because that is the service that was stipulated for when he received his land. But we cannot say that even this theory was unfamiliar to the English. The rulers of the churches had been giving or 'loaning' lands to thegns. In so doing they had not been dissipating the wealth of the saints without receiving some 'valuable consideration' for the gift or the loan (_lǽn_); they looked to their thegns for the military service that their land owed to the king. To this point we must return in our next essay; but quite apart from definitely feudal bargains between the king and his magnates, between the magnates and their dependants, a definition of the duty of military service which connects it with the ownership of land (and to such a definition men will come so soon as the well-armed few can defeat the ill-armed many) will naturally produce a state of things which will be patient of, even if it will not engender, a purely feudal explanation. If one of the men to whom the Bishop of Worcester looks for military service makes a default, the fine that is due from him will go to the bishop, not to the king. Why so? One explanation will be that the bishop has over him a sake and soke of the very highest order, which comprehends even that _fyrd-wíte_, that fine for the neglect of military duty, which is one of the usually reserved pleas of the crown[661]. Another explanation will be that this man has broken a contract that he made with the bishop and therefore owes amends to the bishop:--to the bishop, not to the king, who was no party to the contract. Sometimes the one explanation will be the truer, sometimes the other. Sometimes both will be true enough. As a matter of fact, we believe that these men of the Bishop of Worcester or their predecessors in title have solemnly promised to do whatever service the king demands from the bishop[662]. Still we can hardly doubt which of the two explanations is the older, and, if we attribute to the Norman invaders, as perhaps we may, a definite apprehension of the theory that knight's service is the outcome of feudal compacts, this still leaves open the inquiry whether the past history of military service in Frankland had not been very like the past history of military service in England. Already in the days of Charles the Great the duty of fighting the Emperor's battles was being bound up with the tenure of land by the operation of a rule very similar to that of which we have been speaking. The owner of three (at a later time of four) manses was to serve; men who held but a manse apiece were to group themselves together to supply soldiers. Then at a later time the feudal theory of free contract was brought in to explain an already existing state of things[663].

[The thegns.]

Closely connected with this matter is another thorny topic, namely, the status of the thegn and the relation of the thegn to his lord. In the Confessor's day many _maneria_ had been held by thegns; some of them were still holding their lands when the survey was made and were still called thegns. The king's thegns were numerous, but the queen also had thegns, the earls had thegns, the churches had thegns and we find thegns ascribed to men who were neither earls nor prelates but themselves were thegns[664]. Many of the king's thegns were able to give or sell the lands that they held, 'to go to whatever lord they pleased[665].' On the other hand, many of the thegns of the churches held lands which they could not 'withdraw' from the churches[666]; in other words 'the thegn-lands' of the church could not be separated from the church[667]. The Conqueror respected the bond that tied them to the church. The Abbot of Ely complained to him that the foreigners had been abstracting the lands of St. Etheldreda. His answer was that her demesne manors must at once be given back to her, while as for the men who have occupied her thegnlands, they must either make their peace with the abbot or surrender their holdings[668]. Thus the abbot seems to have had the benefit of that forfeiture which his thegns incurred by espousing the cause of Harold. We see therefore that the relation between thegn, lord and land varied from case to case. The land might have proceeded from the lord and be held of the lord by the thegn as a perpetually inheritable estate, or as an estate granted to him for life, or granted to him and two successive heirs[669]; on the other hand, the lord's hold over the land might be slight and the bond between thegn and lord might be a mere commendation which the thegn could at any time dissolve. Again, the relation between thegn and lord is no longer conceived as a menial, 'serviential' or ministerial relation. The _Taini Regis_ are often contrasted with the _Servientes Regis_[670]. The one trait of thegnship which comes out clearly on the face of our record is that the thegn is a man of war[671]. But even this trait is obscured by language which seems to show that there has been a great redistribution of military service. Though there is no Latin word that will translate _thegn_ except _miles_, though these two terms are never contrasted with each other, and though there are thegns still existing, still of these two terms one belongs to the old, the other to the new order of things[672]. Thus thegnship is already becoming antiquated and we are left to guess from older dooms and later Leges what was its essence in the days of King Edward.

[Nature of thegnship.]

The task is difficult for we can see that this institution has undergone many changes in the course of a long history and yet can not tell how much has remained unchanged. We begin by thinking of thegnship as a relation between two men. The thegn is somebody's thegn. The household of the great man, but more especially the king's household, is the cradle of thegnship. The king's thegns are his free servants--servants but also companions. In peace they have duties to perform about his court and about his person; they are his body-guard in war. Then the king--and other great lords follow his example--begins to give lands to his thegns, and thus the nature of the thegnship is modified. The thegn no longer lives in his lord's court; he is a warrior endowed with land. Then the thegnship becomes more than a relationship, it becomes a status. The thegn is a 'twelve hundred man'; his wergild and his oath countervail those of six ceorls. This status seems to be hereditary; the thegn's sons are 'dearer born' than are the sons of the ceorl[673]. But we can not tell how far this principle is carried. We can not easily reconcile this hereditary transmission of thegn-right with the original principle that thegnship is a relation between two men. We may have thegns who are nobody's thegns, or else we may have persons entitled to the thegnly wergild who yet are not thegns. What is more, since the law which regulates the inheritance of land does not favour the first-born, we may have poor thegns and landless thegns. Yet another principle comes into play. A duty of finding well armed warriors for the host is being territorialized; every five hides should find a soldier. The thegn from of old has to attend the host with adequate equipment; the men who under the new system have to attend the host with horse and heavy armour are usually thegns. Then the man who has five hides, and who therefore ought to put a warrior into the field, is a thegn or is entitled to be a thegn. The ceorl obtains the thegnly wergild if he has an estate rated for military purposes at five hides. Another version of this tradition requires of the ceorl who 'thrives to thegn-right' five hides of his own land, a church, a kitchen, a house in the _burh_, a special office in the king's hall. To be 'worthy of thegn-right' may be one thing, to be a thegn, another. To be a thegn one must be some one's thegn. The prosperous ceorl will be no thegn until he has put himself under some lord. But the bond between him and his lord may be dissoluble at will and may hardly affect his land. It is, we repeat, very difficult to discover how these various principles were working together, checking and controlling each other in the first half of the eleventh century. Several inconsistent elements seem to be blended. There is the element of hereditary caste:--the thegn transmits thegnly blood to his offspring. There is the element of personal relationship:--he is the thegn of some lord and owes fealty to that lord. There is the military element:--he is a warrior who has horse and heavy armour and is bound to fight the nation's battles. Connected with this last there is the proprietary element:--each five hides must send a warrior to the host; the man with five hides is entitled to become, perhaps he may be compelled to become a thegn, a warrior[674].

[The thegns of Domesday.]

On the whole, we gather from Domesday Book that the military element is subduing the others. The thegn is the man who for one reason or another is a warrior. For one reason or another, we say; for the class of thegns is by no means homogeneous. On the one hand, we see the thegns of the churches, who have been endowed by the prelates in order that they may do the military service due from the ecclesiastical lands. Many of the prelates have thegns, and for the creation of thegnlands by the churches it would not be easy to find any explanation save that which we have already found in the territorialization of military service. The thegn might pay some annual 'recognition' to the church, he might send his labourers to help his lord for a day or two at harvest time; but we may be sure that he was not rack-rented and that, if military service be left out of account, the church was a loser by endowing him. Here the land proceeds from the lord to the thegn; the thegn can not give or sell it; the holder of that land can have no lord but the church; if he forfeits the land, he forfeits it to the church. But, on the other hand, we see numerous king's thegns who are able 'to go to what lord they please.' We may see in them landed proprietors who by the play of 'the five hide rule' have become bound to serve as warriors. We may be fairly certain that they have not been endowed by the king, otherwise they would not enjoy the liberty, that marvellous liberty, of leaving him, of putting themselves under the protection and the banner of some earl or some prelate. Not that every thegn will (if we may borrow phrases from a later age) possess a full 'thegn's fee' or owe the service of a whole warrior. Large groups of thegns we may see who obviously are brothers or cousins enjoying in undivided shares the inheritance of some dead ancestor. They may take it in turns to go to the war; the king may hold the eldest of them responsible for all the service; but each of them will be called a thegn, will be entitled to a thegnly wergild and swear a thegnly oath. Still, on the whole, the thegn of Domesday Book is a warrior, and he holds--though perhaps along with his coparceners--land that is bound to supply a warrior.

[Greater and lesser thegns.]

In the main all thegns seem to have the same legal status, though they may not be all of equal rank. All of them seem to have the wergild of twelve hundred shillings. A law of Cnut, after describing the heriot of the earl, distinguishes two classes of thegns; there is 'the king's thegn who is nighest to him' and whose heriot includes four horses and 50 mancuses of gold, and 'the middle thegn' or 'less thegn' from whom he gets but one horse and one set of arms or £2.[675] This law should we think be read in connexion with the rule that is recorded by Domesday Book as prevailing in the shires of Derby and Nottingham:--the thegn who had fewer than seven manors paid a relief of 3 marks to the sheriff, while he who had seven and upwards paid £8 to the king[676]. A rude line is drawn between the richer and the poorer thegns of the king. The former deal immediately with the king and pay their reliefs directly to him; the latter are under the sheriff and their reliefs are comprised in his farm. Thus the wealthy thegns, like the _barones maiores_ of later days, are 'nigher to' the king than are the 'less-thegns' or those _barones minores_ who in a certain sense are their successors.

[The great lords.]

The kings, the earls and the churches have of course many demesne manors. Of the ecclesiastical estates we shall speak in our next essay, for they can be best examined in the light that is cast upon them by the Anglo-Saxon charters. Here we will merely observe that some of the churches have not only large, but well compacted territories. The abbey of St. Etheldreda, for example, besides having outlying manors, holds the two hundreds which make up the isle of Ely; her property in Cambridgeshire is valued at £318[677]. The earls also are rich in demesne manors and so is the king.

[The king as landlord.]

King William is much richer than King Edward was. The Conqueror has been chary in appointing earls and consequently he has in his hand, not only the royal manors, but also a great many comital manors, to say nothing of some other estates which, for one reason or another, he has kept to himself. Edward had been rich, but when compared with his earls he had not been extravagantly rich. In Somersetshire, for example, there were twelve royal manors which may have brought in a revenue of £500 or thereabouts, while there were fifteen comital manors which were worth nearly £300[678]. The royal demesne had been a scattered territory; the king had something in most shires, but was far richer in some than in others. It was not so much in the number of his manors as in their size and value that he excelled the richest of his subjects. Somehow or another he had acquired many of those vills which were to be the smaller boroughs and the market towns of later days. We may well suppose that from of old the vills that a king would wish to get and to keep would be the flourishing vills, but again we can not doubt that many a vill has prospered because it was the king's.

[The ancient demesne.]

Among the manors which William holds in the south-west a distinction is drawn by the Exeter Domesday. The manors which the Confessor held are 'The King's Demesne which belongs to the kingdom,' while those which were held by the house of Godwin are the 'Comital Manors[679].' So in East Anglia certain manors are distinguished as pertaining or having pertained to the kingdom or kingship, the _regnum_ or _regio_[680]. This does not seem to have implied that they were inalienably annexed to the crown, for King Edward had given some of them away. Neither when it speaks of the time of William, nor when it speaks of the time of Edward, does our record draw any clear line between those manors which the king holds as king and those which he holds in his private capacity, though it may just hint that certain ancient estates ought not to be alienated. The degree in which the various manors of the crown stood outside the national system of finance, justice and police we can not accurately ascertain. Some, but by no means all, pay no geld. Of some it is said that they have never paid geld. Perhaps in these ingeldable manors we may see those which constituted the royal demesne of the West Saxon kings at some remote date. Of the king's vill of Gomshall in Surrey it is written: 'the villeins of this vill were free from all the affairs of the sheriff[681],' as though it were no general truth that with a royal manor the sheriff had nothing to do.

[The comital manors.]

As with the estates of the king, so with the estates of the earls, we find it impossible to distinguish between private property and official property. Certain manors are regarded as the 'manors of the shire' (_mansiones de comitatu_[682]); certain vills are 'comital vills[683],' they belong to 'the consulate[684].' Hereditary right tempered by outlawry was fast becoming the title by which the earldoms were holden. The position of the house of Leofric in Mercia was far from being as strong as the position of the house of Rolf in Normandy, and yet we may be sure that King Harold would not have been able to treat the sons of Ælfgar as removable officers. But one of the best marked features of Domesday Book, a feature displayed on page after page, the enormous wealth of the house of Godwin, seems only explicable by the supposition that the earlships and the older ealdormanships had carried with them a title to the enjoyment of wide lands. That enormous wealth had been acquired within a marvellously short time. Godwin was a new man: nothing certain is known of his ancestry. His daughter's marriage with the king will account for something; Harold's marriage with the daughter of Ælfgar will account for something, for instance, for manors which Harold held in the middle of Ælfgar's country[685]; and a great deal of simple rapacity is laid to the charge of Harold by jurors whose testimony is not to be lightly rejected[686]; but the greater part of the land ascribed to Godwin, his widow and his sons, seems to consist of _comitales villae_.

[Private rights and governmental revenues.]

The wealth of the earls is a matter of great importance. If we subtract the estates of the king, the estates of the earls, and the estates of the churches--and, as we shall see hereafter, the churches had obtained the bulk of their wealth directly from the kings,--if we subtract again the lands which the king, the earls, the churches have granted to their thegns, the England of 1065 will not appear to us a land of very great landowners, and we may obtain a valuable hint as to one of the origins of feudalism. A vast amount of land is or has recently been held by office-holders, by the holders of the kingship, the earlships, or the ealdormanships. We seem to see their proprietary rights arising in the sphere of public law, growing out of governmental rights, which however themselves are conceived as being in some sort proprietary. Many a passage in Domesday Book will suggest to us that a right to take tribute and a right to take the profits of justice have helped to give the king and the earls their manors and their seignories. Even in his own demesne manors the king is apt to appear rather as a tribute taker than as a landowner. Manors of very unequal size and value have had to supply him with equal quantities of victuals; each has to give 'a night's farm' once a year. Then from the counties at large he has taken a tribute; from Oxfordshire, for example, £10 for a hawk, 20 shillings for a sumpter horse, £23 for dogs and 6 sesters of honey[687]; from Worcestershire £10 or a Norway hawk, 20 shillings for a sumpter horse[688]; from Warwickshire £23 for 'the dog's custom,' 20 shillings for a sumpter horse, £10 for a hawk and 24 sesters of honey[689]. The farm of the county that the sheriff pays is made up out of obscure old items of this sort. Many men who are not the king's tenants must assist him in his hunting, must help in the erection of his deer-hays[690]. Then there are the _avera_ and the _inwards_ that are exacted by the king or his sheriff from sokemen who are not the king's men. The sheriff also is entitled to provender rents; out of 'the revenues which belong to the shrievalty' of Wiltshire, Edward of Salisbury gets pigs, wheat, barley, oats, honey, poultry, eggs, cheeses, lambs and fleeces; and besides this he seems to have 'reveland' which belongs to him as sheriff[691]. Then we see curious payments in money and renders in kind made to some royal or some comital manor by the holders of other manors. In Devonshire, Charlton which belongs to the Bishop of Coutances, Honiton which belongs to the Count of Mortain, Smaurige which belongs to Ralph de Pomerai, Membury which belongs to William Chevre, Roverige which belongs to St. Mary of Rouen, each of these manors used to pay twenty pence a year to the royal manor of Axminster[692]. In Somersetshire there are manors which have owed _consuetudines_, masses of iron and sheep and lambs to the royal manors of South Perrott and Cury, or the comital manors of Crewkerne and Dulverton[693]. Then again, we find that pasture rights are connected with justiciary rights:--Godwin had a manor in Hampshire to which belonged the third penny of six hundreds, and in all the woods of those six hundreds he had free pasture and pannage[694]; the third penny of three hundreds in Devonshire and the third animal of the moorland pastures were annexed to the manor of Molland[695]. Many things seem to indicate that the distinction between private rights and governmental powers has been but faintly perceived in the past.

[The English state.]

If now we look at that English state which is the outcome of a purely English history, we see that it has already taken a pyramidal or conical shape. It is a society of lords and men. At its base are the cultivators of the soil, at its apex is the king. This cone is as yet but low. Even at the end of William's reign the peasant seldom had more than two lords between him and the king, but already in the Confessor's reign he might well have three[696]. Also the cone is obtuse: the angle at its apex will grow acuter under Norman rulers. We can indeed obtain no accurate statistics, but the number of landholders who were King Edward's men must have been much larger than the tale of the Norman tenants in chief. In the geographical distribution of the large estates under William there is but little more regularity than there was under his predecessor. In Cheshire and in Shropshire the Conqueror formed two great fiefs for Hugh of Avranches and Roger of Montgomery, well compacted fiefs, the like of which England had not yet seen. But the units which William found in existence and which he distributed among his followers were for the more part discrete units, and seldom did the Norman baron acquire as his honour any wide stretch of continuous territory. Still a great change took place in the substance of the cone, or if that substance is made up of lords and men and acres, then in the nature of, or rather the relation between, the forces which held the atoms together. Every change makes for symmetry, simplicity, consolidation. Some of these changes will seem to us predestined. To speculate as to what would have happened had Harold repelled the invader would be vain, and certainly we have no reason for believing that in that case the formula of dependent tenure would ever have got hold of every acre of English land and every right in English land. The law of 'land loans' (_Lehnrecht_) would hardly have become our only land law, had not a conqueror enjoyed an unbounded power, or a power bounded only by some reverence for the churches, of deciding by what men and on what terms every rood of England should be holden. Had it not been for this, we should surely have had some _franc alleu_ to oppose to the _fief_, some _Eigen_ to oppose to the _Lehn_. But if England was not to be for ever a prey to rebellions and civil wars, the power of the lords over their men must have been--not indeed increased, but--territorialized; the liberty of 'going with one's land to whatever lord one chose' must have been curtailed. As yet the central force embodied in the kingship was too feeble to deal directly with every one of its subjects, to govern them and protect them. The intermediation of the lords was necessary; the state could not but be pyramidal; and, while this was so, the freedom that men had of forsaking one lord for another, of forsaking even the king for the ambitious earl, was a freedom that was akin to anarchy. Such a liberty must have its wings clipt; free contract must be taught to know its place; the lord's hold over the man's land must become permanent. This change, if it makes at first for a more definite feudalism, or (to use words more strictly) if it substitutes feudalism for vassalism, makes also for the stability of the state, for the increase of the state's power over the individual, and in the end for the disappearance of feudalism. The freeholder of the thirteenth century is much more like the subject of a modern state than was the free man of the Confessor's day who could place himself and his land under the power and warranty of whatever lord he chose. Lordship in becoming landlordship begins to lose its most dangerous element; it is ceasing to be a religion, it is becoming a 'real' right, a matter for private law. Again, we may guess, if we please, that but for the Norman Conquest the mass of the English peasantry would never have fallen so low as fall it did. The 'sokemen' would hardly have been turned into 'villeins,' the 'villeins' would hardly have become 'serfs.' And yet the villeins of the Confessor's time were in a perilous position. Already they were occupying lands which for two most important purposes were reckoned the lands of their lords, lands for which their lords gelded, lands for which their lords fought. Even in an English England the time might have come when the state, refusing to look behind their lords, would have left the protection of their rights to a _Hofrecht_, to 'the custom of the manor.'

[Last words.]

It is, we repeat it, vain to speculate about such matters, for we know too little of the relative strength of the various forces that were at work, and an accident, a war, a famine, may at any moment decide the fate, even the legal fate, of a great class. And above all there is the unanswerable question whether Harold or any near successor of his would or could have done what William did so soon as the survey was accomplished, when he proved that, after all, the pyramid was no pyramid and that every particle of it was in immediate contact with him, and 'there came to him all the land-sitting men who were worth aught from over all England, whosesoever men they were, and they bowed themselves to him, and became this man's men[697].'

FOOTNOTES:

[618] D. B. i. 91: 'Ecclesia Romana beati Petri Apostoli tenet de Rege Peritone.' Ib. 157: 'Ecclesia Sancti Dyonisii Parisii tenet de Rege Teigtone. Rex Edwardus ei dedit.' Ib. 20 b: 'Abbas de Grestain tenet de Comite 2 hidas in Bedingham.'

[619] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 220.

[620] D. B. i. 218 b: 'Rex vero Willelmus sibi postea in elemosina concessit, unde pro anima Regis et Regine omni ebdomada 2 feria missam persolvit.' D. B. ii. 133: 'et cantat unaquaque ebdomada tres missas.'

[621] D. B. i. 3: 'reddit unum militem in servitio Archiepiscopi.' Ib. 10 b: 'servitium unius militis.' Ib. 32: 'servitium unius militis.' Ib. 151 b: 'inveniebat 2 loricatos in custodiam de Windesores.'

[622] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 268.

[623] But D. B. i. 218 b gives us 'tenet in ministerio Regis.'

[624] D. B. i. 4 b: 'De terra huius manerii tenet Godefridus in feuo dimid. solin.' Ib. 36 b: 'Humfridus Camerarius tenet de feuo Reginae Cumbe.' Ib. 336 b: 'Ipsam [domum] clamat Normannus Crassus de feuo Regis.'

[625] D. B. i. 129 b: 'Postea Willelmus Camerarius tenuit de Regina in feudo pro 3 lib. per annum de firma, et post mortem Reginae eodem modo tenuit de Rege.'

[626] But, as in general a farmer would have no heritable rights, holding in fee may be contrasted with holding in farm. D. B.