As a practical matter, Homo sapiens must convert the energy of the sun into fuel for operating the body’s machinery. And, like every species that hasn’t mastered the trick of photosynthesis, they must do so indirectly, by consuming either plants or animals. For hunter-gatherer societies, this is fairly straightforward: killing or scavenging other animals, and eating the edible portions of naturally occurring plants, such as roots and berries. Roughly a hundred centuries ago, some of our more forward-looking ancestors hit on the idea of cultivating those plants: combining seeds, soil, sun, and water in the cycles that can produce a crop for harvesting.*
The key was finding an efficient way to combine sun, water, land, and labor. Fifty years ago, a German American historian named Karl Wittfogel documented his so-called hydraulic hypothesis in a book with the provocative title Oriental Despotism, in which he argued that the nature of such riverine societies demanded autocracy; large-scale civil engineering was required to turn the natural flow of a river into the artificial channels needed for irrigation, aqueducts, and reservoirs. The result was the despotism of Wittfogel’s title, where pharaohs, kings, and emperors sat at the top of highly organized, bureaucratic, and religiously sanctioned autocracies.
Wittfogel’s thesis was controversial when he published it, and is even more so today. But his hydraulic civilizations were unambiguous success stories: the regions where grain first started feeding humanity achieved levels of productivity that weren’t surpassed until the nineteenth century. However, as human civilization expanded outside the great river valleys—which possessed, almost by definition, the most fertile soils on the planet—the calculus of sun and water changed, and with it the social organization needed to combine the two productively. Rome could build great aqueducts to bring water to cities and towns but grew its food on plantations that relied on rain more than rivers for their fresh water. The price was lower productivity per acre—acceptable as long as Roman armies were regularly turning conquered territory into the estates of Roman aristocrats, the villas that date to the earliest days of the Roman Republic. And for a thousand years the villa system, granting legal rights over both land and the labor to work it, endured.
By the time Duke William took his domesticated Norsemen across the English Channel, the villa system inherited by the Romans had evolved into the system known as manorialism, the legal doctrine that ascribes primary ownership of all the land in the realm to the sovereign. This sort of ownership—the technical term is alodial—was unencumbered by any obligations or duties to anyone. Any of that land transferred by the king to a loyal subject was feudal: a fief, in the form of a lease or grant made in return for an oath of fealty, which, in practical terms, meant an obligation to provide a specified number of mounted knights—and occasionally, in addition, foot soldiers—in time of war. Only the grandest nobles received their fiefs directly from the sovereign; most of them turned around and instituted the same system among lesser nobles, who continued the process by subdividing their territories into still smaller estates. At the bottom were the farmers who provided the agricultural produce on which the whole structure relied.
The upshot of this unsteady pyramid of interlocking obligations was that manorial land fell into one of three categories. The first was the demesne (pronounced not as domain but d’main), which was land devoted entirely and specifically to the support of the lord of the manor. Second were the dependencies, or dependent land, which was acreage owned by the lord but worked by tenants, who were allowed the product of the land in return for sharing a portion with the lord and providing a feudal duty to the lord, either in the form of labor or—when needed—soldiering. Third, and finally, was free peasant land, which was usually subject to a rent obligation, though not a feudal one. For all three sorts of land the lord’s will was law. A manorial grant included the right to hold a court for the resolution of disputes—the term of art was “sac, and tol, and team”—as well as the unpronounceable rights of both infangthief and outfangthief, which granted the lord the fines or ransom for thieves caught for crimes committed in the manor, whether they were captured “in” the manor or “out.”
Manorialism had emerged more or less organically in continental Europe under the Carolingians as a method of allocating land through feudal obligations. Like so much else, it owed its origins to the four centuries of the Medieval Warm Period that both permitted and required the cultivation of more and more land to feed more and more mouths. However, what happened over the course of centuries in Normandy took place in a matter of years in Britain, as a direct consequence of Duke William’s offer of feudal grants as an inducement to the knights he recruited and who won the day for him at Hastings. A case in point: After Hastings, Pope Alexander II ordered 120 days of penance for every Saxon soldier killed . . . without specifying who would be required to perform the penance. William’s response was to plant dozens of monasteries in the middle of the most worthless land in England—“in a desert surrounded by swampy valleys and by forests out of which only a few homesteads had yet to be carved”—simultaneously increasing his virtue and his new country’s arable land. The lordships William granted ranged from the most modest—one village, perhaps, with the lord in residence: a few dozen tenants on a few hundred acres, producing 10 to 15 pounds in cash rents,* plus produce and harvest services—to the grandest. Some of William the Conqueror’s original tenants-in-chief evolved from senior officers in an army of occupation into de facto owners of the land itself: the greatest lords of the land might rule fifty or more villages, exercising political power comparable to, and frequently in opposition to, the king himself.
A manorial grant was, in essence, a bargain: productive acreage in return for rents and military service, quid pro quo. After 1066, the quid, in the form of acreage, was clear enough; less so the quo, or what it was producing. In 1085, nearly twenty years after the invasion, William met with his council and directed them to perform a survey of his new kingdom: “how it was occupied, and by what sort of men.” Then he sent his men over all England into each shire, commissioning them to find out “how many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.” Because William maintained the comforting fiction that he had the land by right of inheritance from Edward the Confessor, he was determined to guarantee that he would receive the rents and taxes that his predecessors had enjoyed, even though he had completely upended the system that guaranteed them.
The Domesday Book—really two books—was completed the following year, and was a brave attempt to put a value on everything of property in the kingdom: every piece of land, livestock, coin, and—not at all incidentally—people. In addition to every other bit of census data, William’s great survey included a four-part taxonomy for the rural population.
The first category was the Liberi homines, or “freemen.” Freemen were subject to the lord’s justice but able to own land free and clear. Among other things, they were able to buy, sell, and bequeath it.
Just underneath them, in the agonizingly precise hierarchy of the day, were villeins, or serfs, who were permitted to own land but weren’t completely free to move from it. They were legally tied to their lord’s lands, though, by long tradition, villeins or serfs who managed to spend a year away from the manor were considered free of their obligations. They were just a bit higher on the social scale than cottagers (sometimes “cottars”; also Bordars), who were permitted ownership of land under more restrictions than villeins. Even they had a class at which they could sneer: the true slaves, who were forbidden not just ownership of land but of their own bodies. Depending on the local traditions, true slaves could be bought and sold without reference to the land they were bound to; though, unlike slaves in the antebellum American South, they weren’t necessarily born as property of their lords.*
All of this—the manorial arrangement that distributed the realm’s arable land; the feudal
military structure that domesticated, somewhat, the professional practitioners of violence who would otherwise fight over that land; and the finely nuanced system of vassalage that tied to the land the labor needed to transform it into food—began at the same time, and the same place, as did the Medieval Warm Period. As the population affected by the MWP was able to grow more food—remember: a few additional weeks of reliable sunshine, over a four-century period, produces a lot more food—it expanded. It takes about three to four acres to feed every additional person, so as the European population grew from 12 million to 40 million, 100 million more acres needed to be captured, from forests, marshes, and bogs. No great civil engineering projects were needed to irrigate those acres, not as long as the sun remained steady, the rains reliable, and the growing season even a little longer. What was needed was some way to manage the giant increase in arable land, to keep the crops coming as the population kept growing (which, often enough, meant keeping famines—which were a regular feature of rural life—localized).
Manors and knights didn’t, of course, solve the food-and-land problem. Nor did they diminish the era’s violence, or simplify its politics. Quite the contrary.
• • •
By the thirteenth century, feudal manorialism was doing a respectable job of land management, at least in allocating the constantly increasing inventory of arable land in Europe. To be sure, it didn’t do much to increase per-acre productivity, but that wasn’t really its purpose. It provided a formal structure for the inevitable disputes over sale, inheritance, and the “metes and bounds” of a particular plot of land.
Ignoring, for a moment, the tyranny the system imposed on the rural peasantry, feudal manorialism did far better at resolving disputes nonviolently at the lower reaches of the social hierarchy than the upper. The system did a fair job keeping the lower nobility from killing one another over a piece of land; a poor job at preventing violent disputes between a realm’s dukes and earls; and nothing at all to prevent wars over national boundaries, or the right to sit on thrones. In fact, by enlarging a class of professional soldiers who owed military service in payment for land, it enabled it.
Predictably, then, the centuries following the Norman Conquest were violent ones; and the violence wasn’t confined to Britain. The notably bloody civil wars between two of William’s fractious grandchildren—an era known as “The Anarchy” or “The Unlaw”—ended with his great-grandson on the throne as England’s first Plantagenet king, Henry II. The end of the Anarchy, however, wasn’t order, but more war, since the feudal mess that was twelfth-century Europe granted Henry lordly authority over the county of Anjou (the hereditary fiefdom of his father), the duchy of Normandy (which his father had conquered from King Stephen during the Anarchy), and the huge duchy of Aquitaine, stretching from Gascony and the Pyrenees to Poitiers in the north and Clermont in the east, which Henry had acquired with his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1154. With all that, plus the kingdom of England (and, when the gods of conquest smiled on him, occasionally Ireland and Wales), Henry ruled the largest empire since Charlemagne, and more of France than the French king, which would be a casus belli until the fifteenth century.
To secure his northern border while fighting battles in France (and insurrections in England, often enough led by his wife and sons) Henry negotiated a series of feudal grants in Scotland to more than a dozen Anglo-Norman nobles: barons with family names like Moreville, Soulise, Comyn, Balliol and Le Brus—or, as the latter became known, the Bruces. Simultaneously, they were given royal charters as vassals to the English throne, which meant that Scotland was essentially ruled by men with one foot in England, and vice versa.
Given the nature of feudal vassalage, Scottish sovereignty was a huge tangle. In 1174, the king of Scotland signed a treaty accepting Henry II as his overlord. When Henry died in 1189, his successor, Richard Lionheart, sold the overlordship back to Scotland for 10,000 silver marks, when he decided he preferred attacking Jerusalem to ruling Scotland (so eager was Richard to go on Crusade that he reportedly said he would sell London itself if he could find a rich enough buyer).*
And so it went for the next century, the thrones of Scotland and England closely enough related that Henry II had received his knighthood at the hands of David I of Scotland, while Henry’s youngest son, John, returned the favor to David’s grandson, Alexander II. The royal families, both Norman in ancestry and language, regularly intermarried.
However, the relative size of the two nations made for a distinctly asymmetric relationship. England counted eight times the population and wealth of its northern neighbor, which made the heads wearing the Scottish crown even more uneasy than usual. In 1251, when King Alexander III of Scotland performed the feudal obligation of making homage—a ceremony in which he acknowledged formally and publicly his vassalage—to the king of England for his English lands, he felt obliged to point out that “homage to my Kingdom of Scotland, no one has any right but God alone, nor do I hold it of any but God.”
It’s with the death of Alexander III that the uneasiness grew into fear, and then into open war. Though Alexander had fathered three children by his first wife, by 1283, all were dead. Recognizing that the first responsibility of a dynast was to continue his dynasty, Alexander felt the need for an heir keenly, a need that led him, in November 1285, to marry again: to Yolande of Dreux, a French princess twenty-four years his junior.
Alexander’s story is a reminder that not all of history’s significant turns are caused by grand ideas like feudalism, or anonymous forces like climate change. Scotland’s king apparently felt that his kingly duty demanded not just a legitimate heir but the widest possible distribution of the royal genetic patrimony, whenever and wherever possible. The Chronicle of Lanercost—a history begun in the thirteenth century at the priory of Lanercost, probably by a monk named Thomas of Otterbourne—describes Alexander as a man who “never used to forbear on account of season or storm, nor for perils of flood or rocky cliffs, but would visit, not too creditably, [both] matrons and nuns, virgins and widows, by day or by night as the fancy seized him, sometimes in disguise, often accompanied by a single follower.”
This was conscious foreshadowing by the Lanercost authors. On March 19, 1286, the king was celebrating the conclusion of a meeting of his royal council at Edinburgh when he decided that nothing would complete the festivities more happily than a connubial visit to his wife of four months, then staying at the town of Kingorn in Fife. Undeterred by either the raging storm, the advice of his nobles, or even the ferryman who carried him across the Firth of Forth to Inverkeithing, he raced for the coast road that led to his bride.
He never made it; in 1886, the local burghers erected a monument to the place where, presumably, having lost his footing in the winds and rain off the North Sea, Alexander fell to his death. On the statue is the inscription:
Ouen Alysandyr Oure King wes dede
That Scotland led in luive and le
Away wes sonce of ale and brede
Of wyne and wax, of gamyn and gle
Our gold wes changed into lede
When Alexander, Our King, was dead
That Scotland led, in love, and [probably] peace
Gone was the source of ale and bread
Of wine and wax; of gaming and glee
Our gold was changed into lead
The result of exposing the king’s intemperance to poor roads and poorer weather was that the three-year-old daughter of King Erik II of Norway, who had survived the death in childbirth of Alexander’s daughter Margaret, was the heir to the Scottish throne.
The complications weren’t just that Scotland’s sovereign was still cutting her milk teeth on the opposite side of the North Sea. The girl—named, like her mother, Margaret—was the last of her line. Until she could marry, and bear a child, the only protection Scotland had against civil war was the health of a toddler now known as the Maid of Norway. That’s why,
a month after the death of King Alexander, a group of the leading nobles of Scotland met at Scone and nominated six men as custodes (usually translated as “Guardians”) to govern the kingdom during Margaret’s minority.
The selection of the Guardians reflected, as it must, Scotland’s political structure, which had been remade, ever since the time of Malcolm III (“Henceforth be earls”) on the English model, which was itself a result of the specific circumstances of the Norman Conquest. William had assembled his army with the promise of titles and lands in England, under the feudal doctrine that the French-speaking Normans would have known as nulle terre sans seigneur (“no land without a lord”). This meant, in practice, that all the productive land in England was to be divided into manors, each with a lord. To those lords who held their land directly from the king, and therefore owed him military service in return, William granted the title of “baron”—by extension, those vassals entitled and obligated to sit in council with the king.* However, since they were also permitted to grant parts of their fiefs to other lords—to subinfeudiate them—the relatively simple map of the eleventh century was anything but simple two hundred years later.
One result was that the border between England and Scotland became an accidental experiment in testing the limits of feudalism. England’s earldoms, because of the all-at-once grants that followed the Conquest, were typically granted (and taken away) without any reference to geographic sense: the earl of Surrey might have no lands at all in Surrey, but lots in Yorkshire or Sussex. In Scotland, on the other hand, the system had grown organically over centuries, and was, by comparison, considerably more sensible: thirteen earls, holding the territories of their titles as fiefs; the earl of Atholl was a feudal lord in Atholl.
The first six Guardians—Alexander Comyn, earl of Buchan; Duncan, earl of Fife; Bishops William Fraser of St. Andrews and Robert Wishart of Glasgow; and two “barons,” John Comyn of Badenoch and James Stewart—worked together reasonably well as Scotland’s rulers for the next four years until tragedy struck. In the fall of 1290, a ship carrying seven-year-old Margaret to Scotland from Norway landed on Orkney. The princess had acquired a fever; and, on September 26, she died.
The Third Horseman Page 4
