The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  Chapter Six – The Norman System

  Throughout the medieval world the primary source of wealth lay in land and its products. We must look then at the systems of land-ownership to assess the stages through which a society was moving. Norman society was military in a pervasive way that Anglo-Saxon society was not; and this fact was expressed in a closer link between military service and land-ownership. Far back in late Roman times cavalry men had been given land in return for their service, and their sons tended to go into the army; the Romans distinguished land held outright and land held on conditions. The Frankish church often got control of revocable land called a beneficium; and through this form of ownership it was able to circumvent the rule that church lands could not be alienated. The same term was used for the fief, feudum, granted to warriors in the Carolingian empire, especially between the Loire and the Rhine. A free man, putting himself into subjection to a lord, became a vassal holding land as a benefice from the latter. This relationship, based on an act of commendation by which a man placed himself under the protection or mund of a lord, was to be found in all Germanic societies, including England. The English terms thegn and cniht were similar in meaning (youth, servant) to the Celtic gwas, from which came the low-Latin vassus, vassal. In the mid-eleventh century Gospatrick, lord of Allerdale and Dalston, addressed a writ to his wassenas in Cumbria.[174] The act of homage consisted of a ceremony in which the vassal knelt and set his hands between those of his lord, swearing an oath of fealty. In Gaul the lord usually gave the vassal the right to hold for life a property which still belonged to the lord. Here was the beneficium. The benefice was thus a Roman institution adopted and adapted by the Franks. Roman law had the concept of precarium, land granted at someone’s prayer and revocable at the granter’s will. The precarious nature of the grant had lessened and by the ninth century the land was generally considered to be hereditary.

  It took a long time for a vassal’s duties to be clearly defined, but certain aspects of mutual obligation and abstention from doing any harm to the lord were present throughout. Thus Bishop Fulbert of Chartres tried to define a vassal to Duke William V of Aquitaine:

  He who swears fealty to his lord should always have these six words present to his memory: safe-and-sound, sure, honest, useful, easy, possible. Safe-and-sound, because he must cause no injury to his lord’s body. Sure, because he must not injure his lord by giving up his secrets or his castles, which are the guarantees of his security. Honest, because he must do nothing to injure the rights of justice of his lord or other such prerogatives as belong to his wellbeing. Useful, because he must do no wrong to his lord’s possessions. Easy and possible, because he must not make difficult for his lord anything the latter may wish to do, and because he must not make impossible to his lord that which his lord might otherwise accomplish.

  It is only right the vassal should abstain from injuring his lord in any of these ways. But it’s not because of such abstention that he deserves to hold his fief. It’s not enough to abstain from doing wrong; it’s necessary to do right. So it’s necessary that in the six matters aforesaid, the vassal shall faithfully give to his lord his counsel and support, if he wants to appear worthy of his benefice and carry out faithfully the fealty he has sworn. The lord must also in all things do similarly to the vassal who has sworn fealty to him. If he fails to do so, he will be rightly accused of bad faith, just as a vassal who has been found lacking these qualities, whether by positive action or simply by consent, is guilty of perfidy and perjury.[175]

  The papal reform movement tried to make the king the vassal of God, which in effect put him under God’s representative on earth, the pope. Archbishop Langton told the barons under John that kings were thus God’s vassals with obligations to him not unlike those of the barons to king or liege lord.[176]

  What differentiated such land-holding from the holding of estates by soldiers of the late Roman empire were the immunities that inevitably became associated with it as central controls broke down. Delegation of power proved from the outset the only way of governing wide areas; and in such a situation there was little or no method of supervising and limiting the local lords who held delegated power. Border-lands in particular created difficult situations where lords needed strong forces and free hands. The policy of Charlemagne with regard to the marches helped to develop the fief, just as both in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England the Welsh marches produced especially warlike and consolidated earldoms. For the Anon of Aedward’s Life Harold and Tostig were march-lords: ‘The one drove back the enemy from the south and the other scared them off from the north.’[177] New fighting methods were needed to deal with swift raiders, Vikings with their ships or mounted Hungarians; the large heavy armies that had faced early barbarian invasions were no longer effective.

  To hold up the fissiparous tendencies a Frankish king might send a count, comes, to each city; but in the conditions of the ninth century all local powers tended to grow autonomous. The magnates assumed the right to levy troops or taxes, to exercise police and law administration. Not that they needed any formal grant of such powers; they simply took them over, found them in their hands. Thus the kings kept some system of government in existence by not attempting to apply any system. The magnates wanted as much profit and power as they could conveniently take, but they did not want a state of endless private war and usurpation. They needed the king’s sanction to hold the power structure together and in the last resort to legalize or maintain their positions. Things could still collapse into considerable anarchy at moments, but in varying states of tension a mixture of accord and conflict between king and lords continued throughout all the phases of the medieval period. The king was the lord of lords whose overlordship gave the individual lord his rights of control and profit, of exacting rents and fines from his tenants. The kingship had its prerogative as a final weapon, however little it could use it in any broad or consistent way during the more anarchic phases.

  What ultimately prevented sheer anarchy and breakdown was the personal relation of lord and man, for the strengthening of which every possible religious and social sanction was brought to bear. The man, homo, made his solemn act of homage; by accepting it the lord bound himself to a set of obligations as well. However many infringements in fact occurred in feudal society, the lord and man relationship did make sense of the society, provided its deepest moral values and a cohesive force counteracting the many centrifugal ones. To withdraw from the relationship another solemn ceremony, diffidatio, was required.[178] The magnate’s estate tended to become a miniature state in which the tenants acted the part which the king’s subjects acted for the king; and the magnate in turn enjoyed on a smaller scale the rights of the king, military, fiscal, judicial, and policing. But we must not think the magnate’s estate was a self-contained entity. There was enough interaction between the many miniature systems, and enough links with the royal system itself, to check disintegration without bringing the units together in an integrated whole. The medieval epoch in effect was the working out of this conflict through a long series of balances and imbalances till the relative triumph of the centralized state in the absolutist monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  In pre-1066 Normandy the magnates and older churches already held land by military tenure from the duke; and the knights whose services they had to provide were generally grouped in units of five or ten. Much of what was to grow familiar later in England had appeared in great households. The duke or barons could take aids or reliefs from their military tenants, assume guardianship of heirs under age, hand out heiresses in marriage. They held the honour, with its rights and its court.[179] But Normandy did not have such a fully developed system of military tenures as was imposed in England. There are few signs of such a system before 1047. That is, it seems largely to have been the creation of William in his struggle to impose order on his duchy and gain a firm hold on the loyalties of all free tenants. As late as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the feudal inquests of C
hampagne and France made no attempts to specify the number of knights to be supplied by a lord; and in earlier days the conditions of service were left rather vague, no doubt in part deliberately. The considerable orderliness of Anglo-Norman feudalism was thus the result of working out and applying a particular aspect of the feudal system under which land was the prime source of value and the extraction of profit from it (and from other value-creating sources) was done by non-economic methods: that is, through the lord’s physical power to evict, kill and damage. The special circumstances which produced this were first William’s protracted struggle for order in a situation where ducal administration was threatened by local immunities, and his need to dominate England as an alien ruler imposing an alien ruling class. In the early medieval world, where money forces were only partially operative, a ruler needed to combine control of the land (the source of wealth) with a military system linked with land-holdings. Only thus could his military and his administrative systems be brought effectively together. Hence throughout the period the shifting methods of getting wealth from the land through the peasants, and for combining with this wealth-extraction a method of controlling and drawing together the available number of warriors. Above all it was the low level of economic activity and the ramshackle administrative systems that compelled the development of the fief; and as soon as there was a considerable economic advance, military service based on land tenure began to give way to service based on wages.

  In the transfer and the imposition of Norman methods on the different society of England, things were both simplified and made more complex. Some aspects of the previous system at once disappeared; others became mere survivals; others took on a new strength. A rapid process of transformation was at once evident.

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  Now let us look more specifically at the Norman scene. A document like the Bayeux Inquest of 1133 may contain developments since 1066, but it seems to give us the essentials of William’s system before that date. For the land’s defence the duke could summon every man holding a knight’s fee; for less serious war inside the duchy, or for service due to the French overlord, he could call up only some of the men holding land by military tenures. From the fief of the bishop of Bayeux one man in five had to come for service in the marchis Normannie, one in ten for service due to the French king. On such an occasion forty days’ service was required. We know also that in times of extreme danger the arrière-ban was summoned. This was an emergency levy that reached out beyond the system based on military tenures and applied to all free tenants, although it stressed the obligations of the most prosperous landowners (those with knights’ fees and vavasours who held more than fifty acres).[180]

  The system was thus far more precisely organized than that in England with its stress on the fyrd and the local levies. Apart from the ban there were three sorts of armed gatherings: the duke’s forces proper, his retainers with some groups of friends and adherents; the host which had been duly summoned; and an army recruited in various ways according to circumstances for long or large-scale campaigns. The first sort was made up of horsemen who were expert fighters. We do not know a great deal of the second sort, its quota and the length or conditions of service. William seems to have used new enfeoffments of knights and new appointments in the church to tighten up and regularize the system. For the third sort of army the duke had to look beyond the duchy. Thus, he freed the captured count of Ponthieu on condition that he became a vassal providing a hundred soldiers for yearly service when called on; and he paid the count of Flanders a yearly sum of money (a money-fief), presumably on condition that he provided on demand a certain number of soldiers. Probably most of the men whom a vassal brought along were mounted, but such a contingent as that of Ponthieu would doubtless include foot-soldiers. However, in pre-1066 Normandy we cannot expect any precise and uniform system: rather a conglomeration of customs which the duke kept trying to develop into a coherent unity. He seems to have expected the ducal host to keep together till the end of a campaign; he was furious when the count of Argues left during the Domfront fighting of 1051-2.[181]

  We saw that the dukes had tried to control private wars; but even William set himself only to limit their range and to impose rules — the defeated were not to be ransomed or pillaged, nor their houses and mills burned. He tried to persuade his barons to bring their quarrels to his court. But a man was expected to fight in his lord’s disputes; he was obliged to guard his castle and pay him sums called incidents, which included a relief when he, the tenant, entered on his inheritance, and contributions when the lord’s eldest son was knighted or his eldest daughter married.

  The barons or tenants-in-chief held direct from the duke and were his vassals with fiefs. They in turn granted sections of their land to under-tenants in a process of sub-infeudation. The resulting pattern could be complicated: one man holding land from several lords and owning fractions of a knight’s fee. A baron might owe the duke five tenants, but he might grant his land so that he had ten at his disposal; he then had five left over for himself. The bishop of Bayeux is said to have had the service of some 120 knights for his own use, while he owed the duke twenty knights for the ducal and ten for the royal army. Between 1050-7 Wiliam made the abbey of St Évroult a barony and fixed the abbot’s military service at two knight’s fees, which were granted to two knights with the duke’s consent. Grimoald du Plessis, imprisoned after Val-ès-Dunes, seems to have owed the service of ten knights for his fief. The principle of a fixed rate of knight service was doubtless inherited by William, but he certainly did much to regularize and extend it. We meet ecclesiastical decrees later condemning the bishops who converted church lands into lay fees for their relatives.

  Except for churchmen, all men of any consequence bore arms, while the humbler folk tilled the soil. At the lowest level were the villani or villeins tied to the land and giving the lord special services such as work on his demesne, the land he reserved for his own support. In Richard II’s time there was a slightly superior section of peasants, hospices, who performed occasional services, but were not bound to regular labour. Above them were the vavasours or smaller freeholders, bound to military service, mostly as footmen. Above them came the knightly class — though the line between vavasour and knight was often not clear cut. At first the military classes of northeast France and the counties bordering the North Sea and Channel were often of lowly and even unfree origin, and they held very small fiefs and rents. About 1050, however, knightood grew in status and knights became more wealthy.[182] A decade or so before 1066 Normandy had many knights with small holdings. One charter deals with an estate and its appurtenances: ‘a church, land for 3 plough-teams, 5 free knights, and a mill’. Knights of the superior type acted as witnesses.[183] Though Normandy had few serfs, in a document issued shortly before the Conquest William found it necessary to specify that he spoke to free knights. Before 1000 it was rare to find a simple knight witnessing acts of his lord, much less acting as adviser or judge in his court. Witnesses and judges were all of higher status, members of a count’s own family, bishops or abbots (almost all of whom were members of the great families), vicomtes, castellans. Only with the fragmentation of power during the eleventh century did the lords find it necessary to call in knights for help in making judgments.[184] The vavasours were the lowest grade among the holders of military fiefs: their type of grant was half-fief, half villein-tenement. A knight, Ralf, in the decade after 1066, gave the abbey of Preaux his land, ‘namely that of a vavasour’, with the consent of William I and of his own lord in whose demesne lay the land.[185] Such early knights may be compared with the drengs of Norman England, who lay on the borderline of the noble class, ministerial in character, with their typical holding a single plough-gate, a small township, an outlying dependency of a village, often with lordship over villeins and bordars. Mercenary knights in the twelfth century were often given land in knight’s fee which had been previously held in thegnage or drengage.[186]

  The degree to which estat
es were inheritable is not clear; but it is more than unlikely that a society so feudalized as Normandy in the eleventh century would not have rigorously applied an hereditary principle. The tenth and eleventh centuries saw the emergence of the new sense of lineage in the use of family names, often toponymic in form. The family was identified with the chief seat of its property, and so toponymic names give us a rough but good measure of the increase of inherited estates. Among the great families before 1066 we meet Montgomery, Bellême, Tosny, Beaumont, Ferrières, Grandmesnil, l’Aigle, Warenne, Montfort, Mandeville, Gournay, Bully, Port, Mowbray, Tracy, Sai and St John; and among the lesser, Aunou, Drincurt, Granville, Le Mesnil, Limesy, Luvetot, Planches and Vernon. Most of the great Norman families established in England used Norman toponymic names. Patronymics were still common, and some of them developed into family names, e.g. fitzWalter. There were also a few family surnames (Malet, Martel, Giffard, Bigod), and a few tenants-in-chief took English toponyms: Essex, Berkeley, Gloucester, Salisbury, Tonbridge, Tornes, Stafford. It is possible that the Normans, finding themselves in an alien world, wanted to identify themselves by their relation to French localities, but it is much more likely that they were carrying on a custom learned in Normandy, and that among the great tenants of the duke hereditary tenures were the rule by the third quarter of the eleventh century.

  We may also note that with the revival of the Norman church under Richard II grants were made to abbeys and cathedral churches of land or rights to be held iure hereditario or in perpetuam hereditatem. The terms were meant to indicate a perpetual benefaction, but are strange since the church did not die or have heirs. Probably we see the influence of Roman law, and an ecclesiastical wish to use terms which the laymen would comprehend. The same terms are used in documents concerned with laymen before 1066, and always refer to the fact that the property has been or is now being inherited.