by Jack Lindsay
In areas with no demesne ploughs there was usually no arable cultivated as the homefarm, but the lord might keep mills or dairy farms in his control. Berkshire shows a score of small estates where all cited ploughs belonged to the demesne. The diversity is very large. Derbyshire villages at times were populated by sokemen; in other places there were only villeins; in one place only bordars. Mostly these villages contained both villeins and bordars; at times the numbers were equal, but once the bordars were in a majority. At one site we meet five cenarii (rent-paying tenants), two sokemen, four villeins and five bordars; slaves were rare.
Northumbria cannot be said to have been manorialized; we find there villages where the people have a personal, not a tenurial tie, with the lords, paying rents often in kind or money, and where no strict line was drawn between free and unfree. The south-west and the counties bordering Wales also showed a strong resistance to manorializing trends, partly because of Celtic traditions and methods, and partly because of the strength there of pastoralism. In eastern England, south Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk the manor by no means dominated the situation; and whatever Domesday might assert, Kent claimed that villein tenure was unknown inside its borders. When we look in detail at the countryside, we find lordless villages made up of freeholders; manors with no demesne or courts, no villeins or villein tenures, no labour services. Even in more or less standard manors, the lord might have surrendered part of the demesne land, rents and services to another lord; and at times freeholders or even villeins held land in nearby manors and so had more than one lord.
The village, which had been the fundamental unit of rural organization before 1066, still maintained its character. The manor was a unit of property or of seigneurial jurisdiction, while the village was a territorial unit, which might be inside a single manor’s boundaries, but which might also be divided among several owners — it was also a unit of royal administration. When personal taxation was brought in, the collectors dealt with the villages. Even in the thirteenth century, when the manor was at its height, out of some 650 villages it has been calculated that more than half did not coincide with manors in their bounds.
We may assume that the need to discuss their affairs and to make the necessary arrangements and adaptations for daily life led to village moots, of which the hall moots mentioned in the twelfth century were the descendants. Anyhow the vills remained important in the country’s governmental system because of the police duties laid on them. Everyone had to find other persons who would appear in court if he was charged with misconduct or debts; thus members of a family became borh or surety for one another, a master for his servants, a lord for his tenants. Also in late Anglo-Saxon times in most areas of the country every male (unless excused because of high social rank or large property) had to be enrolled in a tithing, a group of ten under a tithingman. If a member was accused of any wrongdoing, the others in the tithing had to produce him for trial or pay a fine to compensate the wronged person. In some places the tithing became identified with a territorial unit of the vill, and in matters connected with producing and punishing wrongdoers the vill became a subdivision of the hundred. The lords, who had often been granted the fines imposed in the hundred courts, did not want to be in the position of guarantors of the fine to be paid to themselves, so they wanted to escape being held responsible for their tenants’ acts. They pressed their tenants to seek borh among their neighbours. Along these lines the customs of borh and tithing came together to produce what the Normans called frankpledge: the system under which the medieval peasants were set in tithings without the right to choose their own pledges. The commonfolk were thus bound together in a communal way that had no analogy on the upper levels of society.[474]
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In Domesday slaves employed in the manorial curiae seem to be in a numerical relation to the demesne plough teams, though slaves were certainly not used only as ploughmen. In 1086 a class of workers, bovarii, appeared, whom twelfth-century surveys show to have largely taken the place of demesne slaves. They had the same function, but their status was now rather that of serfs. Other farm services and minor manorial offices were met out of the same sort of service holdings or base sergeantries. The strong tendency to link all services with land and to model them on military tenures played its part in this development, and was reinforced by the wish of the lords to escape all responsibility for looking after their workers, as they had to do with slaves. The apparent drop in servi between 1066 and 1086 was in part a mere matter of terminology; many servi had become bordars; others, unfree ploughmen, are often linked in pairs with one demesne plough, and appear, as noted above, as bovarii. But the change in terms is an aspect of fundamental social changes and the tendency to drive all dependent peasants down towards serfdom.[475]
We saw how the thegnly class was either wiped out or declined in status. Free farmers were generally forced by the addition of labour services to money rents into becoming tenants bound to a lord; or they fell in status because their land was granted to the lord. We find a castastrophic fall in the number of sokemen in Cambridgeshire: from over 700 to 213. And the same tendency is to be traced in other counties; we can perhaps see it behind the descriptions in Domesday of the inhabitants of sokelands as consisting wholly of villeins and bordars. By the time of Henry II the villeins, not yet deprived of their personal as distinct from their economic freedom, found that they were on the unfree side of the sharp line being drawn between free and unfree.
The dissolution of slavery by the Normans was thus entirely the result of economic developments. There is no sign of any argument that slavery was humanly undesirable. Servile status was recognized and defended by canon law, where we find bishops severely condemned for freeing church serfs. There was a difference here between east and west; Theodore of Tarsis, becoming archbishop of Canterbury, had noted: ‘Greek monks keep no slaves; Roman monks possess them.’ Churchmen were no more ready than laymen to free bondmen except on attractive financial terms. Anselm made an explicit defence of hereditary servitude, seeing it as a reflection of the principle that unbaptized babies were damned. St Thomas Aquinas defended servitude as economically expedient. However, as slavery became economically unacceptable, criticisms began, not of slavery in itself, but of the slave trade. The 1102 council condemned the sale of men into slavery. William of Malmesbury, looking back, says of Godwin’s mother: ‘She was in the habit of buying up companies of slaves in England and sending them off to Denmark; and especially girls whose beauty and age make them more valuable, so that she might accumulate money by this horrible traffic.’ The reason why men could not attack the principle of slavery itself was that they found it hard to distinguish it from the principle of subjection and servitude which lay at the heart of feudalism. Monks were in servitude to God, to what was considered the moral law; by their conscious and rejoicing acceptance of such a status they transformed what was a matter of naked force to the slave or serf. Pope Gregory the Great declared, ‘No society could exist in any other way than if it was maintained by such a great differentiated order’; and Anselm of Laon in the twelfth century argued that
servitude is ordained of God, either because of the sins of those who become serfs, or as a trial, in order that those thus humbled may become better. It would seem pride for anyone to wish to change that condition which has been given to him for good reason by the divine ordinance.[476]
William de Fougères held that labourers were created by God to toil for the support of other men and to eat what their lords rejected. Not till the days of Lollardism, the first embryonic stage of protestantism, do we find a leading schoolman, Wycliff, making an outright attack on hereditary bondage. ‘It is their lust of dominion’ that persuades the magnates ‘it is just and natural to hold whole tribes of serfs in bondage to them and theirs, by the law of the state, as it is natural for fire to burn?’[477]
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Peasant farms tended to concentrate on subsistence and to resemble one another, though for boonwork the men mi
ght get a meal of herrings or cheese now and then, or materials for clothes and tools not locally available. The usual diet consisted of foods produced within the village bounds: beer, bread, meat, eggs and cheese. The village organization is obscure. Later Anglo-Saxon laws mention a village reeve who worked with priest and tithingmen to enforce secular or ecclesiastical obligations; and Domesday still thus links reeve and priest. Such a reeve was never classed with serfs and at times he was shown to be superior to bordars and cottars. Saxon gerefa and Latin praepositus were used for many kinds of officials, but we may safely assume that a local community had its reeve. What is not so clear is whether they were manorial officials. Some certainly were; others seem to have been village headmen. But the distinction may have been wavering; official and headman alike would have had to deal with customary positions. Their way of performing their duties and of interpreting them would often have depended on circumstances, on the varying pressures of lord and peasants. The Rectitudines refer to beadle, hayward, and woodward. Beadles turn up occasionally in Domesday, perhaps as assistants of the reeve. These were a sort of petty constable, calling on people to fulfil their obligations, and were probably rare in 1086.
The economy of peasant holdings tended to be much more limited than that of the demesne, where the lord or his firmarius (farmer-out) could indulge in specialization and then exact carrying services from the tenants so that the product would reach the necessary markets. Firmarii were a highly varied set of men. Those of royal estates were often sheriffs, but some of them do not seem to have held that office. Perhaps, at least in some cases, while sheriff they had let out a manor to themselves to farm, and then had gone on holding it after vacating the shrievalty. In much of south England firmarii are found in Domesday renting big and valuable manors. Sometimes a great baron held land at farm. Thus Robert d’Oilly farmed a ten-hide estate, clearly because it was only six miles from the head of his own honour. And lords who were not tenants-in-chief might be firmarii on a large scale. But we also find ordinary leaseholders as farmers of a manor, as well as reeves and monks. (Two pre-1066 examples of monks in the office are given by the Chronicler of Ramsey Abbey.) The passage in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in which William is accused of letting land to the highest bidder shows the way in which the royal estates were farmed out. (Here again we meet a pre-1066 practice; for a grant made by the bishop of Winchester to a kinsman in 902 of Ebbesbourne for a rent of 45s contains the clause: ‘that no one be permitted by offering a higher rent to turn him out’.) It seems that Englishmen who were able to come into the market were forced to pay excessive rents if they wanted to gain or hold on to land.[478]
One of the landlords who early turned to careful estate management was Ernulf of Hesdin, lord of Chipping Norton and tenant-in-chief in ten counties. Domesday shows some of his estates stationary or even making a small loss, but those in six counties had made much headway since 1066 (or the date when he took over). In twenty-five sites on his fee, values had gone up and the total net gain exceeded £90 yearly value. Similar advances were made on some manors he held from Odo of Bayeux. William of Malmesbury says that he was ‘wonderful in his skill in agriculture’ — though he mentions him only in connection with the healing powers of St Aldhelm’s tomb. Though Ernulf was outstanding, there were other barons concerned with agricultural efficiency or lucky in having capable officers — though again there were large numbers interested only in what they could extort from their tenants. Abbeys were beginning in some cases to realize that profits could be made by good management, resumption of demesne lands, investment in improvements, and attempts to increase yields. They hoped to use the money in lavish building, extending their own numbers, and raising their standard of living. Houses that thus made efforts to increase agricultural gains were those at Abingdon, Battle, Hereford, Lincoln, Durham and Winchester. But it was not till the Cistercians that a really thorough effort was to be seen. At the outset the increase in efficiency was probably more in methods of collection than in management proper. The abbot of Rochester arranged for himself or his successor to take a long ride into Suffolk yearly rather than lay on the monks or the poor folk of a vill the task of transporting grain.[479]
In the Norman period leases were generally for the lessee’s life or for the lives of him and his wife. Until Stephen’s death the leasing of estates for a specified rent was so common that it seems certain that a large proportion of estates or manors in 1086 were held by a life lease or for a term of years. Stock and land leases (under which the landlord provided much of the stock) went back to Anglo-Saxon days. But the relation of lessees and manorial tenants is not clear, though no doubt a lessee obtained the right to demand such customary services as were needed for cultivating the demesne. There was recognition of the likelihood of a farmer-out abusing his position.
In the later twelfth century clauses in leases insisted that he should treat the men on a manor reasonably and that he should not oppress them. The big landowners were certainly often mere receivers of rent, though, as we saw, some of them took a hand in running things.
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In considering the role and status of the peasants we need to note the variations between nucleated villages and scattered hamlets, and in the amount of near forest. Apart from the use of forest for pasturing swine, it made peasant expansion possible. At times the denes in the Weald, which were some distance from their manors, grew into fair-sized settlements through assarting. In such places peasants were likely to grow more independent.[480] An important area of reclamation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the fenland; more than a hundred square miles were saved from fen and sea. A great deal of the reclaiming work in Lincolnshire was done before 1200, most of it in the second half of the twelfth century. The next century was one of bad weather and incessant rain, which may have affected the movement, though it did not halt it, since work went on in the wapentake of Elloe until 1241 on the fen side and 1286 on the sea side.[481] We need to glance at this development since it shows us the free peasants of the period at their best, and it is likely that there was a considerable Danish strain among them.
Between 800 and the close of the eleventh century the east coast was emerging from the North Sea, but in the twelfth century a marine transgression began, worsening from 1236 onwards. Archaeological evidence supports this thesis. By the time of the Danish conquest the area round Breydon Water was used for settlement; by 1086 there were many free peasants with wide sheep pastures in the estuarine area. These Anglo-Danish settlers no doubt began the digging of turf, which was sold up to 1340. But the great flood of 1287 started off a process of deterioration that in the end brought the sea some thirteen feet higher than it had been in the late thirteenth century.[482]
An account by the prior of Crowland shows what sort of men these fen peasants were:
So when according to the usual custom the abbot of Crowland placed his fen in defence, as used to be done every year about Rogationtide, and had publicly announced the fact on Spalding bridge, so that the men of Holland and others might keep back their livestock from the entrance to the fen, that the hay might be at liberty to grow, they were unwilling to do this, but incited each other to enter more than before. So the abbot’s servants, who were appointed by custom to do this work, upon his order just as they had been in the habit of doing in other years, impounded the beasts. But the men of Holland, who are our neighbours in the northern side, strongly desired to have the common of the marsh of Crowland. For since their own marshes have dried up [each village has its own], they have converted them into good and fertile ploughland. Whence it is that they lack common pasture more than most people; indeed they have very little.[483]
These men were a disorderly crew ready to rush in and take advantage of the weakness of others, while the abbot was ready to use forged charters to grab land. We may note that there is no hint of a soke and its constituent townships; the abbey wanted to enclose and the fenmen objected, the abbot set himself up as supreme lord of the fen.
Later the prior of Spalding got permission to build a great wall round the curia against the violent raids of the men of Deeping, who used to attack the town of Spalding across the fens and carry off the cattle of the men of Holland when they thought they could get away with it.
There was a fen reeve whose office was ancient and who seems to have been an officer of the sokes of Horncastle and Scrivelsby. We get a glimpse of how independently and unmanorially the fenmen acted in an account of sokemen from three sokes dividing Wildmore from West Fen in about 1140-53. ‘These men set down the Stones and Marks as follows...’ Many fen regulations were communal in origin and operation, but the lords were liable to intrude. In the great fens of the northern marches in this region they hatched an agreement among themselves in connection with demesne farming.
The size of townships in these fenlands had increased much by 1086, in part through the reclamations; but the reclamations themselves had been the result of the pressure of population on the small amount of arable available in the eleventh century. In Domesday the townships are among the largest in England, and a striking feature is the weakness of the lordships. Considerable proportions of tenants lived on unmanorialized land, with no demesne farm and no heavy work weeks.[484] Sokemen are found living on sokeland in manors with a homefarm, but many such manors were very small in 1086 and some were made up wholly of sokeland. Throughout we see communal activity and initiative in the methods of reclamation and fen management, and much land continued without a manorial lord, as did Kirton and Skirbeck wapentakes.
