The English Village Community

CHAPTER I. THE ENGLISH OPEN FIELD SYSTEM EXAMINED IN ITS MODERN REMAINS. — I. THE DISTINCTIVE MARKS OF THE OPEN FIELD SYSTEM. — II. SCATTERED AND INTERMIXED OWNERSHIP IN THE OPEN FIELDS. — III. THE OPEN FIELDS WERE THE COMMON FIELDS OF A VILLAGE COMMUNITY OR TOWNSHIP UNDER A MANOR. — IV. THE WIDE PREVALENCE OF THE SYSTEM THROUGH GREAT BRITAIN. — CHAPTER I. FOOTNOTES.

[p001]

THE ENGLISH VILLAGE COMMUNITY.

The distinctive marks of the open or common field system once prevalent in England will be most easily learned by the study of an example.

The township of Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, will answer the purpose. From the time of Edward the Confessor—and probably from much earlier times—with intervals of private ownership, it has been a royal manor.1 And the Queen being still the lady of the manor, the remains of its open fields have never been swept away by the ruthless broom of an Enclosure Act.

Annexed is a reduced tracing of a map of the [p002] township without the hamlets, made about the year 1816, and showing all the divisions into which its fields wore then cut up.

It will be seen at once that it presents almost the features of a spiders web. A great part of the township at that date, probably nearly the whole of it in earlier times, was divided up into little narrow strips.

These strips, common to open fields all over England, were separated from each other not by hedges, but by green balks of unploughed turf, and are of great historical interest. They vary more or less in size even in the same fields, as in the examples given on the map of a portion of the Hitchin Purwell field. There are 'long' strips and 'short' strips. But taking them generally, and comparing them with the statute acre of the scale at the corner of the map, it will be seen at once that the normal strip is roughly identical with it. The length of the statute acre of the scale is a furlong of 40 rods or poles. It is 4 rods in width. Now 40 rods in length and 1 rod in width make 40 square rods, or a rood; and thus, as there are 4 rods in breadth, the acre of the scale with which the normal strips coincide is an acre made up of 4 roods lying side by side.

Thus the strips are in fact roughly cut 'acres,' of the proper shape for ploughing. For the furlong is the 'furrow long,' i.e. the length of the drive of the plough before it is turned; and that this by long custom was fixed at 40 rods, is shown by the use of the Latin word 'quarentena' for furlong. The word 'rood' naturally corresponds with as many furrows in the ploughing as are contained in the breadth of one rod. And four of these roods lying side by side made [p003] the acre strip in the open fields, and still make up the statute acre.

Part of Purwell Field, Hitchin.

Go to: List of Illustrations

This form of the acre is very ancient. Six hundred years ago, in the earliest English law fixing the size of the statute acre (33 Ed. I.), it is declared that '40 perches in length and 4 in breadth make an acre.' 2 And further, we shall find that more than a thousand years ago in Bavaria the shape of the strip in the open fields for ploughing was also 40 rods in length and 4 rods in width, but the rod was in that case the Greek and Roman rod of 10 ft. instead of the English rod of 1612 ft.

But to return to the English strips. In many places the open fields were formerly divided into half-acre strips, which were called 'half-acres.' That is to say, a turf balk separated every two rods or roods in the ploughing, the length of the furrow remaining the same.

The strips in the open fields are generally known by country folk as 'balks,' and the Latin word used in terriers and cartularies for the strip is generally 'selio,' corresponding with the French word 'sillon,' (meaning furrow). In Scotland and Ireland the same strips generally are known as 'rigs,' and the open field system is known accordingly as the 'run-rig' system.

The whole arable area of an uninclosed township was usually divided up by turf balks into as many thousands of these strips as its limits would contain, and the tithing maps of many parishes besides Hitchin, dating sixty or eighty years ago, show remains of [p004] them still existing, although the process of ploughing up the balks and throwing many strips together had gradually been going on for centuries.

Next, it will be seen that the strips on the map lie side by side in groups, forming larger divisions of the field. These larger divisions are called 'shots,' or 'furlongs,' and in Latin documents 'quarentenæ,' being always a furrow-long in width. Throughout their whole length the furrows in the ploughing run parallel from end to end; the balks which divide them into strips being, as the word implies, simply two or three furrows left unploughed between them.3

The shots or furlongs are divided from one another by broader balks, generally overgrown with bushes.

This grouping of the strips in furlongs or shots is a further invariable feature of the English open field system. And it involves another little feature which is also universally met with, viz. the headland.

It will be seen on the map that mostly a common field-way gives access to the strips; i.e. it runs along the side of the furlong and the ends of the strips. But this is not always the case; and when it is not, then there is a strip running along the length of the furlong inside its boundaries and across the ends of the strips composing it.4 This is the headland. Sometimes when the strips of the one furlong run at right angles to the strips of its neighbour, the first strip in the one furlong does [p005] duty as the headland giving access to the strips in the other. In either case all the owners of the strips in a furlong have the right to turn their plough upon the headland, and thus the owner of the headland must wait until all the other strips are ploughed before he can plough his own. The Latin term for the headland is 'forera;' the Welsh, 'pen tir;' the Scotch, 'headrig;' and the German (from the turning of the plough upon it), 'anwende.'

'Linches' in the Open Fields of Clothall, Herts.

Go to: List of Illustrations

A less universal but equally peculiar feature of the open field system in hilly districts is the 'lynch,' and it may often be observed remaining when every other trace of an open field has been removed by enclosure. Its right of survival lies in its indestructibility. When a hill-side formed part of the open field the strips almost always were made to run, not up and down the hill, but horizontally along it; and in ploughing, the custom for ages was always to turn the sod of the furrow downhill, the plough consequently always returning one way idle. If the whole hill-side were ploughed in one field, this would result in a gradual travelling of the soil from the top to the bottom of the field, and it might not be noticed. But as in the open field system the hill-side was ploughed in strips with unploughed balks between them, no sod could pass in the ploughing from one strip to the next; but the process of moving the sod downwards would go on age after age just the same within each individual strip. In other words, every year's ploughing took a sod from the higher edge of the strip and put it on the lower edge; and the result was that the strips became in time long level terraces one above the other, and the balks between them [p006] grew into steep rough banks of long grass covered often with natural self-sown brambles and bushes. These banks between the plough-made terraces are generally called lynches, or linces; and the word is often applied to the terraced strips themselves, which go by the name of 'the linces.' 5

Where the strips abruptly meet others, or abut upon a boundary at right angles, they are sometimes called butts.

Two other small details marking the open field system require only to be simply mentioned. Corners of the fields which, from their shape, could not be cut up into the usual acre or half-acre strips, were sometimes divided into tapering strips pointed at one end, and called 'gores,' or 'gored acres.' In other cases little odds and ends of unused land remained, which from time immemorial were called 'no man's land,' or 'any one's land,' or 'Jack's land,' as the case might be.

Hitchin, Purwell Field.
Proprietors Names With Their Numbers.

See Larger.
Go to: List of Illustrations

Thus there are plenty of outward marks and traits by which the open common field may be recognised wherever it occurs,—the acre or half-acre [p007] strips or seliones, the gored shape of some of them, the balks and sometimes lynches between them, the shots or furlongs (quarentenæ) in which they lie in groups, the headlands which give access to the strips when they lie off the field-ways, the butts, and lastly the odds and ends of 'no man's land.'

Passing from these little outward marks to the matter of ownership, a most inconvenient peculiarity presents itself, which is by far the most remarkable and important feature of the open field system wherever it is found. It is the fact that neither the strips nor the furlongs represented a complete holding or property, but that the several holdings were made up of a multitude of strips scattered about on all sides of the township, one in this furlong and another in that, intermixed, and it might almost be said entangled together, as though some one blindfold had thrown them about on all sides of him.

The extent to which this was the case in the Hitchin common fields, even so late as the beginning of the present century, will be realised by reference to the map annexed. It is a reduced tracing of a map showing the ownership of the strips in one division of the open fields of Hitchin called the Purwell field. The strips are numbered, and correspond with the owners' names given in the tally at the side. The strips belonging to two of the owners are also coloured, so as at once to catch the eye, and the area of each separate piece is marked upon it. The number [p008] of scattered pieces held by each owner is also given in the note below; and as the map embraces only about one-third of the Hitchin fields, it should be noticed that each owner probably held in the parish three times as many separate pieces as are there described!6 Further, at the side of the map of the Hitchin township, is a reduced tracing of a plan of the estate of a single landowner in the townfields of Hitchin, which shows very clearly the curious scattering of the strips in a single ownership all over the fields, notwithstanding that the tendency towards consolidation of the holdings by exchanges and purchases had evidently made some progress.

The next fact to be noted is that under the English system the open fields were the common fields—the arable land—of a village community or township under a manorial lordship. This could hardly be more clearly illustrated than by the Hitchin example. [p009]

The Hitchin manor was, as already stated, a royal manor. The Court Leet and View of Frankpledge were held concurrently with the Court Baron of the manor. Periodically at this joint court a record was made on the presentment of the jurors and homage of various particulars relating to both the manor and township.

The record for the year 1819 will be found at length in Appendix A, and it may be taken as a common form.

The jurors and homage first present that the manor comprises the township of Hitchin and hamlet of Walsworth, and includes within it three lesser manors; also that it extends into other hamlets and parishes.

They then record the boundaries of the township (including the hamlet of Walsworth) as follows, viz.:—

• 'From Orton Head to Burford Ray,
• and from thence to a Water Mill called Hide Mill,
• and from thence to Willberry Hills,
• and from thence to a place called Bossendell,
• and from thence to a Water Mill called Purwell Mill,
• and from thence to a Brook or River called Ippollitt's Brook,
• and from thence to Maydencroft Lane,
• and from thence to a place called Wellhead,
• and from thence to a place called Stubborn Bush,
• and from thence to a place called Offley Cross,
• and from thence to Five Borough Hills [Five Barrows],
• and from thence back to Orton Head, where the boundaries commenced.'

The form in which these boundaries are given is of great antiquity. It is a form used by the Romans two thousand years ago, and almost continuously followed from that time to this.7 Its importance for [p010] the purpose in hand will be manifest as the inquiry proceeds.

The jurisdiction of the Court Leet and View of Frankpledge is recorded to extend within the foregoing boundaries, i.e. over the township, that of the Court Baron beyond them over the whole manor, which was more extensive than the township. The Court Leet is therefore the Court of the township, the Court Baron that of the manor.

It is then stated that in the Court Leet at Michaelmas the jurors of the king elect and present to the lord—

Two constables,

Six headboroughs (two for each of the three wards),

Two ale-conners,

Two leather-searchers and sealers, and

A bellman, who is also the watchman and crier of the town.

All the foregoing presentments have reference to the township, and are those of 'the jurors of our lord the King (i.e. of the Court Leet), and the homage of the Court' [Baron] of the manor.

Then come presentments of the homage of the Court of the Manor alone, describing the reliefs of freeholders and the fines, &c., of copyholders under the manor, and various particulars as to powers of leasing, [p011] forfeiture, cutting timber, heriots, &c.; the freedom of grain from toll in the market, the provision by the lord of the common pound and the stocks for the use of the tenants of the manor, and the right of the lord with the consent of the homage to grant out portions of the waste by copy of court roll at a rent and the customary services.

Next the commons are described.

(1) The portions coloured dark green on the map are described as Green Commons, and those coloured light green as Lammas Meadows;8 and every occupier of an ancient messuage or cottage in the township has certain defined rights of common thereon, the obligation to find the common bull falling upon the rectory, and a common herdsman being elected by the homage at a Court Baron.

(2) The common fields are stated to be—

and it is recorded that these common fields have immemorially been, and ought to be, kept and cultivated in three successive seasons of tilth grain, etch grain, and fallow: Purwell field and Welshman's croft being fallow one year; Burford field and Spital field the next year; Moremead field and Bury field the year after, and so on in regular rotation. [p012]

It is stated that every occupier of unenclosed land in any of the common fields of the township may pasture his sheep over the rest of the field after the corn is cut and carried, and when it is fallow. If he choose to enclose his own portion of the common field he may do so, but he then gives up for ever his right of pasture over the rest. It is under this custom that the strips and balks are gradually disappearing.

The ancient messuages and cottages in the hamlet of Walsworth had their separate green common and herdsman, but (at this date) no common fields, because they had already been some time ago enclosed.

It will be seen from the map how very small a proportion of the land of the township was in meadow or pasture. The open arable fields occupied nearly the whole of it. The community to which it belonged, and to whose wants it was fitted, was evidently a community occupied mainly in agriculture.

Another feature requiring notice was the fact that in the open fields freehold and copyhold land were intermixed; some of the strips being freehold, whilst the next strip was copyhold, instead of all the freehold and all the copyhold lying together. And in the same way the lands belonging to the three lesser or sub-manors lay intermixed, and not all apart by themselves. The open field system overrode the whole.

Thus, if the Hitchin example may be taken as a typical one of the English open field system, it may be regarded generally as having belonged to a village or township under a manor. We may assume that the holdings were composed of numbers of strips scattered [p013] over the three open fields: and that the husbandry was controlled by those rules as to rotation of crops and fallow in three seasons which marked the three-field system, and secured uniformity of tillage throughout each field. Lastly, whilst fallow after the crop was gathered, the open fields were probably everywhere subject to the common rights of pasture. The sheep of the whole township wandered and pastured all over the strips and balks of its fields, while the cows of the township were daily driven by a common herdsman to the green commons, or, after Lammas Day, when the hay crop of the owners was secured, to the lammas meadows.

But before the attempt is made to trace back the system, it may be well to ask what evidence there is as to its wide prevalence in England, and with what reason the particular example of the Hitchin township may be taken as generally typical.

In the first place, an examination into the details of an Enclosure Act will make clear the point that the system as above described is the system which it was the object of the Enclosure Acts to remove. They were generally drawn in the same form, commencing with the recital that the open and common fields lie dispersed in small pieces intermixed with each other and inconveniently situated, that divers persons own parts of them, and are entitled to rights of common on them, so that in their present state they are incapable of improvement, and that it is [p014] desired that they may be divided and enclosed, a specific share being set out and allowed to each owner. For this purpose Enclosure Commissioners are appointed, and under their award the balks are ploughed up, the fields divided into blocks for the several owners, hedges planted, and the whole face of the country changed.

The common fields of twenty-two parishes within ten miles of Hitchin were enclosed in this way between 1766 and 1832. All the Acts were of the same character.9 And as, taking the whole of England, with, roughly speaking, its 10,000 parishes, nearly 4,000 Enclosure Acts were passed between 1760 [p015] and 1844,10 it will at once be understood how generally prevalent was this form of the open field system so late as the days of the grandfathers of this generation.

The old 'Statistical Account of Scotland,' obtained eighty years ago by inquiry in every parish, shows that at its date, under the name of 'run-rig,' a simpler form of the open field system still lingered on here and there more or less all over Scotland. Traces of it still exist in the Highlands, and there are well-known remains of its strips and balks also in Wales. The run-rig system is still prevalent in some parts of Ireland. But at present we confine our attention to the form which the system assumed in England, and for this purpose the Hitchin example may fairly be taken as typical.

Now, judged from a modern point of view, it will readily be understood that the open field system, and especially its peculiarity of straggling or scattered ownership, regarded from a modern agricultural point of view, was absurdly uneconomical. The waste of time in getting about from one part of a farm to another; the uselessness of one owner attempting to clean his own land when it could be sown with thistles from the seed blown from the neighbouring strips of a less careful and thrifty owner; the quarrelling about headlands and rights of way, or [p016] paths made without right; the constant encroachments of unscrupulous or overbearing holders upon the balks—all this made the system so inconvenient, that Arthur Young, coming across it in France, could hardly keep his temper as he described with what perverse ingenuity it seemed to be contrived as though purposely to make agriculture as awkward and uneconomical as possible.

But these now inconvenient traits of the open field system must once have had a meaning, a use, and even a convenience which were the cause of their original arrangement. Like the apparently meaningless sentinel described by Prince Bismarck uselessly pacing up and down the middle of a lawn in the garden of the Russian palace, there must have been an originally sufficient reason to account for the beginning of what is now useless and absurd. And just as in that case, search in the military archives disclosed that once upon a time, in the days of Catherine the Great, a solitary snowdrop had appeared on the lawn, to guard which a sentinel was posted by an order which had never been revoked; so a similar search will doubtless disclose an ancient original reason for even the (at first sight) most unreasonable features of the open field system.

CHAPTER II. THE ENGLISH OPEN FIELD SYSTEM TRACED BACK TO THE DOMESDAY SURVEY—IT IS THE SHELL OF SERFDOM—THE MANOR WITH A VILLAGE COMMUNITY IN VILLENAGE UPON IT. — I. THE IDENTITY OF THE SYSTEM WITH THAT OF THE MIDDLE AGES. — II. THE WINSLOW MANOR ROLLS OF THE REIGN OF EDWARD III.—EXAMPLE OF A VIRGATE OR YARD-LAND. — III. THE HUNDRED ROLLS OF EDWARD I., EMBRACING FIVE MIDLAND COUNTIES. — IV. THE HUNDRED ROLLS ( continued )—RELATION OF THE VIRGATE TO THE HIDE AND CARUCATE. — V. THE HUNDRED ROLLS ( continued )—THE SERVICES OF THE VILLEIN TENANTS. — EXAMPLES OF VILLEIN SERVICES. — Oxfordshire — Huntingdonshire — Cambridgeshire — VI. DESCRIPTION IN FLETA OF A MANOR IN THE TIME OF EDWARD I. — VII. S.E. OF ENGLAND—THE HIDE AND VIRGATE UNDER OTHER NAMES (THE RECORDS OF BATTLE ABBEY AND ST. PAUL'S). — VIII. THE RELATION OF THE VIRGATE TO THE HIDE TRACED IN THE CARTULARIES OF GLOUCESTER AND WORCESTER ABBEYS, AND THE CUSTUMAL OF BLEADON, IN SOMERSETSHIRE. — VILLEIN SERVICES. — Gloucestershire — Worcestershire — IX. CARTULARIES OF NEWMINSTER AND KELSO (XIII. CENTURY)—THE CONNEXION OF THE HOLDINGS WITH THE COMMON PLOUGH TEAM OF EIGHT OXEN. — — Bolden 87 — Reveden 88 — X. THE BOLDON BOOK, A.D. 1183. — XI. THE 'LIBER NIGER' OF PETERBOROUGH ABBEY, A.D. 1125. — XII. SUMMARY OF THE POST-DOMESDAY EVIDENCE. — CHAPTER II. FOOTNOTES.

[p017]

That this open field system, the remains of which have now been examined, was identical with that which existed in the Middle Ages might easily be proved by a continuous chain of examples. But it will be enough for the present purpose to pick out a few typical instances, using them as stepping-stones.

It would be easy to quote Tusser's description of 'Champion Farming' in the sixteenth century. In his 'Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry' he describes the respective merits of 'several,' and 'champion' or open field farming. But as he describes the latter as a system already out of date in his time, and as rapidly giving way to the more economical system of 'several' or enclosed fields, we may pass on at once to evidence another couple of centuries earlier in date. [p018]

Of the fact that the open field system 500 years ago (in the fourteenth century), with its divisions into furlongs and subdivision into acre or half-acre strips, existed in England, the 'Vision of Piers the Plowman' may be appealed to as a witness.

What was 'the faire felde ful of folke,' in which the poet saw 'alle maner of men' 'worchyng and wandryng,' some 'putten hem to the plow,' whilst others 'in settyng and in sowyng swonken ful harde'?11 A modern English field shut in by hedges would not suit the vision in the least. It was clearly enough the open field into which all the villagers turned out on the bright spring morning, and over which they would be scattered, some working and some looking on. In no other 'faire felde' would he see such folk of all sorts, the '[hus]bondemen,' bakers and brewers, butchers, woolwebsters and weavers of linen, tailors, tinkers, and tollers in market, masons, dikers, and delvers; while the cooks cried 'Hote pies hote!' and tavern-keepers set in competition their wines and roast meat at the alehouse.12

Then as to the division of the fields into furlongs; remembering that the wide balks between them and along the headlands were often covered with 'brakes and brambles,' the point is at once settled by the naïve confession of the priest who scarce knew perfectly his Paternoster, and could 'ne solfe ne synge' 'ne seyntes lyues rede,' yet knew well enough the 'rymes of Robyn hood,' and how to 'fynde an hare in a fourlonge.' 13 [p019]

Further, a chance indication that the furlongs were divided into half-acre strips occurs most naturally in that part of the story where the folk in the fair field, sick of priests and parsons and other false guides, come at last to Piers the plowman, and beg him to show them the way to truth; and he replies that he must first plow and sow his 'half-acre:'

And if there should remain a shadow of doubt whether Piers' half-acre must necessarily have been one of the strips between the balks into which the furlongs were divided, even this is cleared up by the perfect little picture which follows of the folk in the field helping him to plow it. For in its unconscious truthfulness of graphic detail, after saying,—

the very first lines in the list of services rendered explain that—

This incidental evidence of 'Piers the Plowman' is fully borne out by a manuscript terrier of one of the open fields near Cambridge, belonging to the later years of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century.16 It gives the names of the owners and occupiers of all the seliones or strips. They are [p020] divided by balks of turf. They lie in furlongs or quarentenæ. They have frequently headlands or foreræ. Some of the strips are gored, and called gored acres. Many of them are described as butts. Indeed, were it not that the country round Cambridge being flat there are no lynches, almost every one of the features of the system is distinctly visible in this terrier.

But this terrier also contains evidence that the system was even then in a state of decay and disintegration. The balks were disappearing, and the strips, though still remembered as strips, were becoming merged in larger portions, so that they lie thrown together sine balca. The mention is frequent of iii. seliones which used to be v., ii. which used to be iv., iii. which used to be viii., and so on. Evidently the meaning and use of the half-acre strips are already gone.

It will be well, therefore, to take another leap, and at once to pass behind the Black Death—that great watershed in economic history—so as to examine the details of the system before rather than after it had sustained the tremendous shock which the death in one year of half the population may well have given to it.

A remarkably excellent opportunity for inquiry is presented by a complete set of manor rolls during the reign of Edward III. for the Manor of Winslow in Buckinghamshire, preserved in the Cambridge University Library.17 [p021]

No evidence could possibly be more to the purpose. Belonging to the Abbey of St. Albans, the rolls were kept with scrupulous accuracy and care. Every change of ownership during the long reign of Edward III. is recorded in regular form; and the year 1348–9—the year of the Black Death—occurring in the course of this reign, and occasioning more changes of ownership than usual, the MS. presents, if one may appropriate a geological expression, something like an economic section of the manor, revealing with unusual clearness the various economic strata in which its holdings were arranged.

Before examining these holdings it is needful only to state that here, as in the later examples, the fields of the manor are open fields, divided into furlongs, which in their turn are made up with apparently almost absolute regularity of half-acre strips. Whenever (with very rare exceptions) a change of ownership takes place, and the contents of the holding are described, they turn out to be made up of half-acre pieces, or seliones, scattered all over the fields.

The typical entry on these rolls in such cases is that A. B. surrenders to the lord, or has died holding, a messuage and so many acres of land, of which a half-acre lies in such and such a field, and often in such and such a furlong, between land of C. D. and E. F., another half-acre somewhere else between two other persons' land, another half-acre somewhere else, and so on. If the holding be of 112 acres it is found to be in 3 half-acre pieces, if of 4 acres, in 8 half-acre pieces, and so on, scattered over the fields. Sometimes amongst the half-acres are mentioned still smaller portions, roods and even half-roods or doles [p022] (chiefly of pasture or meadow land), belonging to the holdings, but the division into half-acre strips was clearly the rule.

There can be no doubt, therefore, of the identity of the system seen at work in these manor rolls with that of which some of the débris may still be examined in unenclosed parishes to-day.

Starting with the fact that the fields of the manor of Winslow and its hamlets18 were open fields divided into furlongs and half-acre strips, the chief object of inquiry will be the nature of the holdings of its various classes of tenants.

In the first place the land of the manor was divided, like that of almost all other manors, into two distinct parts—land in the lord's demesne, and land in villenage.

The land in demesne may be described as the home farm of the lord of the manor, including such portions of it as he may have chosen to let off to tenants for longer or shorter terms, and at money rents in free tenure.

The land in villenage is also in the occupation of tenants, but it is held in villenage, at the will of the lord, and at customary services. It lies in open fields. These are divided into three seasons, according to the [p023] three-field system. There is a west field, east field, and south field. The demesne land lies also in these three fields,19 probably more or less intermixed, as in many cases, with the strips in villenage, but sometimes in separate furlongs or shots from the latter.

Throughout the pages of the manor rolls, in recording transfers of holdings in villenage, the common form is always adhered to of a surrender by the old tenant to the lord, and a re-grant of the holding to the new tenant, to be held by him at the will of the lord in villenage at the usual services. Where the change of holding occurs on the death of a tenant, the common form recites that the holding has reverted to the lord, who re-grants it to the new tenant as before in villenage.

Further examination at once discloses a marked difference in kind between some classes of holdings in villenage and others.

In some cases the holding handed over is simply described by the one comprehensive word 'virgata' (the Latin equivalent for 'yard-land'), without any further description. The 'virgate' of A. B. is transferred to C. D. in one lump; i.e. the holding is an indivisible whole, evidently so well known as to need no description of its contents.

In other cases the holding is in the same way described as a 'half-virgate,' without any details being needful as to its contents.

But in the case of all other holdings the contents are described in detail half-acre by half-acre, each half-acre being identified by the names of the holders [p024] of the strips on either side of it. They vary in size from one half-acre to 8 or 10 or 12 half-acres, and in a few cases more. The greater number of them are, however, evidently the holdings of small cottier tenants. A few cases occur, but only a few, where a messuage is held without land.

But the question of interest is what may be the nature of the holdings called virgates and half-virgates—these well-known bundles of land, which, as already said, need no description of their contents. Fortunately in one single case a virgate or yard-land—that of John Moldeson—loses its indivisible unity and is let out again by the lord to several persons in portions. These being new holdings, and no longer making up a virgate, it became needful to describe their contents on the rolls.20 Thus the details of which a virgate was made up are accidentally exposed to view.

Putting the broken pieces of it together, this virgate of John Moldeson is found to have consisted of a messuage in the village of Shipton, in the manor of Winslow, and the following half-acre strips of land scattered all over the open fields of the manor.

Thus the virgate or yard-land of John Moldeson was composed of a messuage and

• 68 half-acre strips of arable land,
•  3 rood strips of arable land,
•  2 doles,
•  1 acre of pasture,
•  3 half-acres of pasture, and
•  1 half-acre of meadow,

scattered all over the open fields in their various furlongs.

A Normal Virgate Or Yardland.

The normal holding of the villanus, consisting of a messuage and 30 scattered acres coloured red, by way of example on the Map of the open fields of Hitchen.

See Larger.
Go to: List of Illustrations

But it may be asked, how can it be proved that the other virgates were like the one virgate of John [p027] Moldeson thus by chance described and exposed to view on the manor rolls? Is it right to assume that this virgate may be taken as a pattern of the rest? The answer is, that in the description of its 72 half-acre strips the 144 neighbouring strips are incidentally involved. And as 66 of its strips had on one side of them 66 other strips of another tenant, viz. John Watekyns, and on the other side 43 of the next strips belonged to Henry Warde, and 23 to John Mayn, and 8 of the strips only had other neighbours, it is evident that the virgate of John Moldeson was one of a system of similar virgates formed of scattered half-acre strips, arranged in a certain regular order of rotation, in which John Moldeson came 66 times next to John Watekyns, and two other neighbours followed him, one 43 and the other 23 times, in similar succession.

Thus the Winslow virgates were intermixed, and each was a holding of a messuage in the village, and between 30 and 40 modern acres of land, not contiguous, but scattered in half-acre pieces all over the common fields. The half-virgate consisted in the same way of a messuage in the village with half as many strips scattered over the same fields. The intermixed ownership complained of in the Inclosure Acts, and surviving in the Hitchin maps, need no longer surprise us.

We know now what a virgate or yard-land was. We shall find that its normal area was 30 scattered acres—10 acres in each of the three fields. Using again the map of the Hitchin fields, we may mark upon it the contents of a normal virgate by way of impressing upon the eye the nature of this peculiar holding. It must always be remembered that when [p028] the fields were divided into half-acres instead of acres the number of its scattered strips would be doubled.

It is not possible to ascertain from a mere record of the changes in the holdings precisely how many of these virgates and half-virgates there were in the manor of Winslow. But in the year of the Black Death it may be assumed that the mortality fell with something like equality upon all classes of tenants, 153 changes of holding from the death of previous holders being recorded in 1348–9. Out of these, 28 were holders of virgates and 14 of half-virgates. The virgates and half-virgates of these holders who died of the Black Death must have included more than 2,400 half-acre strips in the open fields; and adding up the contents of the other holdings of tenants who died that year, it would seem that about two-thirds of the whole area which changed hands in that memorable year were included in the virgates and half-virgates. It may be inferred, therefore, that about the same proportion of the whole area of the open fields must have been included in the virgates and half-virgates whose holders died or survived. Clearly, then, the mass of the land in the open fields was held in these two grades of holdings.21

Thus much, then, may be learned from the Winslow manor rolls with respect to the virgates and half-virgates. Not only were they holdings each composed of a messuage and the scattered strips belonging to it in the open fields, not only did they form the [p029] two chief grades of holdings with equality in each grade, but also they were all alike held in villenage. They were not holdings of the lord's demesne land, but of the land in villenage. The holders, besides their virgates and half-virgates, often, it is true, held other land, part of the lord's demesne, as free tenants at an annual rent. But such free holdings were no part of their virgates. The virgates and half-virgates were held in villenage. Of these they were not free tenants, but villein tenants. So also the lesser cottage holdings were held in villenage. But the holders of virgates and half-virgates were the highest grades in the hierarchy of tenants in villenage. They not only held the greater part of the open fields in their bundles of scattered strips; the rolls also show that they almost exclusively served as jurors in the 'Halimot,' or Court of the Manor; though occasionally one or two other villein tenants with smaller holdings were associated with them.22

It is possible that just as villein tenants could hold in free tenure land in the lord's demesne, so free men might hold virgates in villenage and retain their personal freedom; but those at all events of the holders of virgates who were nativi, i.e. villeins by descent were adscripti glebæ. They held their holdings at the will of the lord, and were bound to perform the customary services. If they allowed their houses to [p030] get out of repair they were guilty of waste, and the jury were fined if they did not report the neglect.23

Yet the entries in the rolls prove that their holdings were hereditary, passing by the lord's re-grant from father to son by the rule of primogeniture, on payment of the customary heriot or relief.24

Widows had dower, and widowers were tenants by the curtesy, as in the case of freeholds. The holders in villenage, even 'nativi,' could make wills which were proved before the cellerarius of the abbey, and had done so time out of mind, while the wills of free tenants were proved at St. Albans.25

These things all look like a certain recognition of freedom within the restraints of the villenage. But if the 'nativi' married without the lord's consent they were fined. If they sold an ox without licence, again they were fined. If they left the manor without licence they were searched for, and if found arrested as fugitives and brought back.26 If their daughters lost their chastity27 the lord again had his fine. And [p031] in all these cases the whole jury were fined if they neglected to report the delinquent.

Their services were no doubt limited and defined by custom, and so late as the reign of Edward III. mostly discharged by a money payment in lieu of the actual service, but they rested nominally on the will of the lord; and sometimes to test their obedience the relaxed rein was tightened, and trivial orders were issued, such as that they should go off to the woods and pick nuts for the lord.28 In case of dispute a court was held under the great ash tree at St. Albans, and the decision of this superior manorial court at head-quarters settled the question.29 This villenage of the Winslow tenants was, no doubt, in the fourteenth century mild in its character; the silent working of economic laws was breaking it up; but it was villenage still. It was serfdom, but it was serfdom in the last stages of its relaxation and decay.

Already, any harking back by the landlord upon older and stricter rules—any return, for instance, to the actual services instead of the money payments in lieu of them—produced resentment and insubordination amongst the villein tenants. Murmurs were already heard in the courts, and symptoms appear on the rolls in the year following the Black Death which clearly indicate the presence of smouldering embers very likely soon to burst into flame.30 The rebellion under Wat Tyler was, in fact, not far ahead. But in this inquiry we are looking backwards into earlier times, in order to learn what English serfdom was when fully in force, rather than in the days when [p032] it was breaking up. In the meantime the practical knowledge gained from the Winslow manor rolls, how a community in serfdom fitted as it were into the open field system as into an outer shell, and still more the knowledge of what the virgate and half-virgate in villenage really were, drawn from actual examples, may prove a useful key in unlocking still further the riddle of earlier serfdom.

The facts thus learned from the Winslow Manor Rolls throw just that flash of light upon the otherwise dry details of the Hundred Rolls of Edward I. which is needful to make the picture they give in detail of the manors in parts of five midland counties vivid and clear.

English economic history is rich in its materials; and of all the records of the economic condition of England, next to the Domesday Survey, the Hundred Rolls are the most important and remarkable. The second volume, in its 1,000 folio pages, contains inter alia a true and clear description of every manor in a large district, embracing portions of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Cambridgeshire, in about the year 1279; and as in most cases the name of every tenant is recorded, with the character of his holding and a description of his payments and services, the picture of each manor has almost the detail and accuracy of a photograph. Turning over its pages, the mass of detail may at first appear confused and bewildering, and in one sense it is so, because [p033] it relates to a system which, however simple when fully at work, becomes broken up and entangled whilst in process of disintegration. But the key to it once mastered, the original features of the system may still be recognised. Even the broken pieces fall into their proper places, and the general economic outlines of the several manors stand out sharply and clearly marked.

Speaking generally, in its chief economic features every manor is alike, as in the record itself one common form of survey serves for them all. Hence the Winslow example gives the requisite key to the whole. Bringing to the record the knowledge of how the open fields were everywhere divided into furlongs, and acre or half-acre strips, and that virgates and half-virgates were equal bundles of strips scattered all over the fields, the description of the manors in the Hundred Rolls becomes perfectly intelligible.

In the first place the manor consists, as in the Winslow example, of two parts—the land in demesne and the land in villenage.

The land in demesne consists of the home farm, and portions, irregular in area, let out from it to what are called free tenants (libere tenentes), some of them being nevertheless villeins holding their portions of the demesne lands in free tenure at certain rents in addition to their regular holdings.

The land in villenage, as in the Winslow manor, is held mostly in virgates and half-virgates, and below these cottiers hold smaller holdings, also in villenage.

In describing the tenants in villenage there is first a statement that A. B. holds a virgate in villenage at such and such payments and services, which are often [p034] very minutely described. The money value of each service and the total value of them all is in many cases also carefully given. This description of the holding and services of A. B. is then followed by a list of persons who also each hold a virgate at the same services as A. B.

Secondly, there is a similar statement in detail that C. D. holds a half-virgate in villenage, and that such and such are his payments and services, followed by a similar list of persons who also each hold a half-virgate at the same services as C. D.

Then follows a list of the little cottier tenants, and their holdings and services. Amongst some of these cottage holdings there is equality, some are irregular, and some consist of a cottage and nothing else.

These holdings are all in villenage, but, as before mentioned, the names of the villein tenants often occur again in the list of free tenants (libere tenentes) of portions of the lord's demesne or of recently reclaimed land (terra assarta).

This may be taken as a fair description of the common type of manor throughout the Hundred Rolls, with local variations.

The chief of these is that in many places in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire the holdings of the villani, instead of being described as virgates and half-virgates, are described by their acreage. There are so many holders of 30, 20, 15, 10, or other number of acres each. They are not the less in grades, with equality in each grade, but the holdings bear no distinctive name.

There is also in these counties a class of tenants, partly above the villani, called sochemanni, which we [p035] shall find again when we reach the Domesday Survey. But upon exceptional local circumstances it is not needful to dwell here.

The fact is, then, that in the Hundred Rolls of Edward I. there is disclosed over the much wider area of five midland counties almost precisely the same state of things as that which existed in the manor of Winslow late in the reign of Edward III. That manor was under the ecclesiastical lordship of an abbey, but here in the Hundred Rolls the same state of things exists under all kinds of ownership. Manors of the king or the nobility, of abbeys, and of private and lesser landowners, are all substantially alike. In all there is the division of the manor into demesne land and land in villenage. In all the mass of the land in villenage is held in the grades of holdings mostly called virgates and half-virgates, with equality in each grade both as to the holding and the services. In all alike are found the smaller cottage holdings, also in villenage; and lastly, in all alike there are the free tenants of larger or smaller portions of the demesne land.

If the picture of a manor and its open fields and virgates or yard-lands in villenage—i.e. both of the shell and of the community in serfdom inhabiting the shell—drawn in detail from the single Winslow example, has thrown light upon the Hundred Rolls, these latter, embracing hundreds of manors in the midland counties of England, give the picture a typical value, proving that it is true, not for one manor only, but, speaking generally, for all the manors of central England.

They also give additional information on the relation [p036] of the holdings to the hide, and reveal more clearly than the Winslow manor rolls the nature of the serfdom under which the villein tenants held their virgates. Before passing from the Hundred Rolls it will be worth while to examine the new facts they give us, and to devote a section to an examination of the services.

Before passing to the villein services described in the Hundred Rolls, evidence may be cited from them showing the relation of the virgate or yard-land—which is now known to be the normal holding of the normal tenant in villenage—to the hide and carucate. If to the knowledge of what a virgate was, can be added an equally clear understanding of what a hide was, another valuable step will be gained.

In the rolls for Huntingdonshire a series of entries occurs, describing, contrary to the usual practice of the compilers, the number of acres in a virgate, and the number of virgates in a hide, in several manors.

These entries are given below,31 and they show clearly—

(1) That the bundle of scattered strips called a virgate did not always contain the same number of acres.

(2) That the hide did not always contain the same number of virgates.

But at the same time it is evident that the hide in [p037] Huntingdonshire most often contained 120 acres or thereabouts. It did so in twelve cases out of nineteen. In one case it contained the double of 120, i.e. 240 acres. In six cases only the contents varied irregularly from the normal amount.

Taking the normal hides of 120 acres, five of them were made up of four virgates of thirty acres each, which we may take to have been normal virgates. In one case there were eight virgates of fifteen acres each in the hide. In other places these probably would have been called half-virgates, as at Winslow.

There were occasionally five virgates and sometimes six virgates in the hide, and the fact of these variations will be found to have a meaning hereafter; but in the meantime we may gather from the instances given in the Hundred Rolls for Huntingdonshire, that the normal hide consisted as a rule of four virgates of about thirty acres each. The really important [p038] consequence resulting from this is the recognition of the fact that as the virgate was a bundle of so many scattered strips in the open fields, the hide, so far as it consisted of actual virgates in villenage, was also a bundle—a compound and fourfold bundle—of scattered strips in the open fields.

Whilst, however, marking this relation of the virgate to the hide, regarded as actual holdings in villenage, it is necessary to observe also that throughout the Hundred Rolls the assessed value of the manors is generally stated in hides and virgates; and that, in the estimate thus given of the hidage of a manor as a whole, the demesne land as well as the land in villenage is taken into account. In this case the hide and virgate are used as measures of assessment, and it does not follow that all land that was measured or estimated by the hide and virgate was actually divided up by balks into acres, although the demesne land itself was in fact, as we have seen, often in the open fields, and intermixed with the strips in villenage. Distinction must therefore be made between the hide and virgate as actual holdings and the hide and virgate as customary land measures, used for recording the assessed values or the extent of manors, just as in the case of the acre.

The virgate and the hide were probably, like the acre, actual holdings before they were adopted as abstract land measures. It may be even possible to learn or to guess what fact made a particular number of acres the most convenient holding.

In the Hundred Rolls for Oxfordshire there is frequent reference to the payment of the tax called scutage. The normal amount of this is assumed [p039] to be 40s. for each knight's fee, or scutum. And it appears that the knight's fee was assumed to contain four normal hides. There is an entry, 'One hide gives scutage for a fourth part of one scutum.' And as four virgates went usually to each hide, so each virgate should contribute 116 of a scutum. There are several entries which state that when the scutage is 40s. each virgate pays 2s. 6d., which is 1 16 of 40s.32

And these figures seem to lead one step further, and to connect the normal acreage of the hide of 120A., and of the virgate of 30A., with the scutage of 40s. per knight's fee; for when these normal acreages were adhered to in practice the assessment would be one penny per acre, and the double hide of 240 acres would pay one pound. In other words, in choosing the acreage of the standard hide and virgate, a number of acres was probably assumed, corresponding with the monetary system, so that the number of pence in the 'scutum' should correspond with the number of acres assessed to its payment. We shall find this correspondence of acreage with the coinage by no means confined to this single instance.

But there remains the question, why the acreage in the virgate and hide as actual holdings, and the [p040] number of virgates in the hide, were not constant. Their actual contents and relations were evidently ruled by some other reason than the number of pence in a pound.

A trace at least of the original reason of the varying contents and relations of the hide and virgate is to be found in the Hundred Rolls, as, indeed, almost everywhere else, in the use of another word in the place of hide, when, instead of the anciently assessed hidage of a manor, its more modern actual taxable value is examined into and expressed. This new word is 'carucate'—the land of a plough or plough team,—'caruca' being the mediæval Latin term for both plough and plough team.

The Hundred Rolls for Bedfordshire afford several examples in point. In some cases the carucate seems to be identical with the normal hide of 120 acres, but other instances show that the carucate varied in area.33 It is the land cultivated by a plough team; varying in acreage, therefore, according to the lightness or heaviness of the soil, and according to the strength of the team.

In the Hundred Rolls for Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire the services of the villein tenants [p041] are almost always commuted into money payments. From each virgate a payment of from 16s. to 20s. is described as due, or services to that value (vel opera ad valorem), showing that the actual services have become the exception, and the money payments the rule. But in many cases distinguishing marks of serfdom still remained in the fine upon the marriage of a daughter, the heriot on the death of the holder, and the restraint on the sale of animals.34

In Huntingdonshire and Oxfordshire, on the other hand, the services, whilst often having their money value assigned, are mostly given in great detail, as though still frequently enforced.

Speaking generally, the chief services, notwithstanding variations in detail, may be classed under three different heads.

(1) There is the weekly work at ploughing, reaping, carrying, usually for two or three days a week, and most at harvest-time. In other cases there are so many days' work required between certain dates.

(2) There are precariæ, or 'boon-days,' sometimes called bene works—special or extra services which the lord has a right to require, sometimes the lord providing food for the day, and sometimes the tenant providing for himself.

(3) There are payments in kind or in money at specified times, such as Christmas, Easter, Martinmas, and Michaelmas dues; churchshot, an ancient ecclesiastical [p042] due; besides contributions towards the lord's taxes in the shape of tallage or scutage.

Sometimes the services are to be performed with one or two labourers, showing that the cottier tenants were labourers under the holders of virgates, or indicating possibly in some cases the remains of a slave class.

The chief weekly services were those of ploughing, the tenants sometimes supplying oxen to the lord's plough team, sometimes using their own ploughs, two or more joining their oxen for the purpose. This co-operation is a marked feature of the services, and is found also in connexion with reaping and carrying.

The cottier tenants in respect of their smaller holdings often worked for their lord one day a week, and having no plough, or oxen, their services did not include ploughing.

Annexed are typical instances of the services of both classes of tenants. They are taken from three counties, and placed side by side for comparison.

Contemporary in date with the Hundred Rolls is the anonymous work bearing the title of 'Fleta,' which may be described as the vade mecum of the landlords of the time of Edward I. It was designed to put them in possession of necessary legal knowledge; and mixed up with this are practical directions regarding the management of their estates. The writer advises landlords on taking possession of their manors to have a survey made of their property, so that they may know the extent of their rights and income.

If in the Hundred Rolls we have photographic details of hundreds of individual manors surveyed [p046] for purposes of royal taxation, so here is a picture of an ordinary or typical manor—a generalisation of the ordinary features of a manor—drawn by a contemporary hand, and regarding all things from a landlord's point of view.

The manor as described in Fleta is a territorial unit, with its own courts and local customs known only on the spot. Therefore the extent is to be taken upon the testimony of 'faithful and sworn tenants of the lord.' And inquiry is to be made43—

•  (1) Of castles and buildings in the demesne (intrinsecis) within and without the moat, with gardens, curtilages, dovecotes, fishponds, &c.
•  (2) What fields (campi) and culturæ there are in demesne, and how many acres of arable in each cultura of meadow and of pasture.
•  (3) What common pasture there is outside the demesne (forinseca), and what beasts the lord can place thereon [he, like his tenants, being as to this limited in his rights by custom].
•  (4) Of parks and demesne woods, which the lord at his will can cultivate and reclaim (assartare).
•  (5) Of woods outside the demesne (forinsecis), in which others have common rights, how much the lord may approve.
•  (6) Of pannage, herbage, and honey, and all other issues of the forests, woods, moors, heaths, and wastes.
•  (7) Of mills [belonging to the lord, and having a monopoly of grinding for the tenants at fixed charges], fishponds, rivers (ripariis), and fisheries several and common.
•  (8) Of pleas and perquisites belonging to the county, manor, and forest courts.
•  (9) Of churches belonging to the lord's advowson.
• (10) Of heriots, fairs, markets, tolls, day-works (operationes), services, foreign (forinseci) customs, and gifts (exhenniis).
• (11) Of warrens, liberties, parks, coneyburrows, wardships, reliefs, and yearly fees.

Then regarding the tenants,—

•  (1) De libere tenentibus, or free tenants, how many are intrinseci and how many forinseci; what lands they hold of the lord, and [p047] what of others, and by what service; whether by socage, or by military service, or by fee farm, or 'in eleemosynam'; who hold by charter, and who not; what rents they pay; which of them do suit at the lord's court, &c.; and what accrues to the lord at their death.
•  (2) De custumariis, or villein tenants; how many there are, and what is their suit; how much each has, and what it is worth, both de antiquo dominico and de novo perquisito; to what amount they can be tallaged without reducing them to poverty and ruin; what is the value of their 'operationes' and 'consuetudines'—their day-works and customary duties—and what rent they pay; and which of them can be tallaged 'ratione sanguinis nativi,' and who not.

Then there follows a statement of the duties of the usual officials of the manor.

First there is the seneschal,44 or steward, whose duty it is to hold the Manor Courts and the View of Frankpledge, and there to inquire if there be any withdrawals of customs, services, and rents, or of suits to the lord's courts, markets, and mills, and as to alienations of lands. He is also to check the amount of seed required by the præpositus for each manor, for under the seneschal there may be several manors.

On his appointment he must make himself acquainted with the condition of the manorial ploughs and plough teams. He must see that the land is properly arranged, whether on the three-field or the two-field system. If it be divided into three parts, 180 acres should go to each carucate, viz. 60 acres to be ploughed in winter, 60 in Lent, and 60 in summer for fallow. If in two parts, there should be 160 acres to the carucate, half for fallow, half for winter and Lent sowing, i.e. 80 acres in each of the two 'fields.' [p048]

Besides the manorial ploughs and plough teams he must know also how many tenant or villein ploughs (carucæ adjutrices) there are, and how often they are bound to aid the lord in each manor.

He is also to inquire as to the stock in each manor, whereof an inventory indented is to be drawn up between him and the serjeant; and as to any deficiency of beasts, which he is at once to make good with the lord's consent.

The seneschal thus had jurisdiction over all the manors of the lord. But each single manor should have its own præpositus.

The best husbandman is to be elected by the villata, or body of tenants, as præpositus, and he is to be responsible for the cultivation of the arable land. He must see that the ploughs are yoked early in the morning—both the demesne and the villein ploughs—and that the land is properly ploughed (pure et conjunctim) and sown. He is a villein tenant, and acts on behalf of the villeins, but he is overlooked by the lord's bailiff.

The bailiff's45 duties are stated to be—To rise early and have the ploughs yoked, then walk in the fields to see that all is right. He is to inspect the ploughs, whether those of the demesne or the villein or auxiliary ploughs, seeing that they be not unyoked before their day's work ends, failing which he will be called to account. At sowing-time the bailiff, præpositus, and reaper must go with the ploughs through the whole day's work until they have completed their proper quantity of ploughing for the day, [p049] which is to be measured, and if the ploughmen have made any errors or defaults, and can make no excuses, the reaper is to see that such faults do not go uncorrected and unpunished.

Such is the picture, given by Fleta, of the manorial machine at work grinding through its daily labour on the days set apart for service on the lord's demesne.

The other side of the picture, the work of the villani for themselves on other days, the yoking of their oxen in the common plough team, and the ploughing and sowing of their own scattered strips; whether this was arranged with equal regard to rigid custom, or whether in Fleta's time the co-operation had become to some extent broken up, so that each villein tenant made his own arrangements by contract with his fellows, or otherwise—this inferior side of the picture is left undrawn.

In the meantime, returning to the question of the holdings in villenage, an additional reason for the variations in their acreage is found in the statement already alluded to, viz. that the extent of the actual carucate, or land of one plough team, was dependent, among other things, upon whether the system of husbandry was the two-field or the three-field system, each plough team being able to cultivate a larger acreage on the former than on the latter system.

Passing now to the south-eastern counties, there are in the Record Office valuable MSS. relating to the [p050] estates of Battle Abbey.46 There are two distinct surveys of these estates, made respectively in the reigns of Edward I. and Henry VI.

The date of the earliest MS. is from 12 to 15 Edward I. (1284–7). It is, therefore, almost contemporaneous with the Hundred Rolls. The estates lay in various counties; but wherever situated, the same general phenomena as those already described are found.

Confining attention to the regular grades of holdings in villenage, the following are examples from the Battle Abbey estates.

The abbot had an estate at Brichwolton (or Brightwalton), in Berkshire. In the survey of it 10 holders of a virgate each are recorded as virgarii, and in the MS. of Henry VI., 5 holders of half-virgates are in the same way called dimidii virgarii.

There was another estate at 'Apeldreham,' in Sussex. Here, under the heading 'Isti subscripti dicuntur Yherdlinges,' there is a list of 5 holders of virgates, 4 holders of 112 virgates each, and one of 12 a virgate.

At 'Alsiston,' in Sussex, a manor nestling under the chalk downs, the holdings were as follows:—

• 1 wista and 1 great wista.
• 12 hide.
• 1 hide.
• 12 hide and 1 wista.
• 3 wistas and 1 great wista.
• 12 hide.
• 12 hide.
• 12 hide.
• 12 hide.
• 1 wista.
• 12 hide.
• 12 hide.
• 12 hide.
• 1 wista.
• 12 hide.
• The præpositus 1 wista (without services). [p051]

In the description of the services, those for each half-hide are first given, and then there follows a note that each half-hide contains two wistas; wherefore the services of each wista are half those above mentioned.

There is another manor (Blechinton, near the coast), where there were—

• 2 holdings of half-hides,
• 9 of wistas,
• 6 of half-wistas,

and two other manors where the holders were in one case 5, all of half-hides; and in the other case one of a hide and 4 of half-hides.

These are valuable examples of hides and half-hides, as still actual holdings in villenage, whilst apparently instead of virgates in some of these Sussex manors a new holding—the wista—occurs. And among the documents of Battle Abbey given by Dugdale there is the following statement, viz., that 8 virgates = 1 hide, and 4 virgates = 1 wista (great wista?). Supposing the virgate here, as mostly elsewhere, to have been, normally, a bundle of 30 acres, it is clear that in this hide of 8 virgates we get another instance of the double hide of 240 acres; whilst the 'great wista' of 4 virgates would correspond with the single hide of 120 acres, and the wista would equal the ordinary half-hide of two virgates.

We pass to another cartulary, and of earlier date. In 1222 a visitation was made of the manors belonging to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's, London. The register of this visitation is known as the 'Domesday of St. Paul's.' 47 The manors were scattered in [p052] Herts, Essex, Middlesex, and Surrey—all south-eastern counties.

In the survey of Thorp,48 one of the manors in Essex, after a list of tenants on the demesne land, and others on reclaimed land (de essarto), there follows a list of tenants in villenage who are called hydarii. As in the Battle Abbey records the virgarii were holders of virgates, so these hydarii were probably, as their name implies, groups of villani holding a hide. But the holdings had in fact become subdivided and irregular. Nevertheless, those belonging to each original hide are bracketed together; and adding together their acreage, it appears that the hide is assumed to contain 120 acres. The following examples will make it clear that the holdings were once hides of four virgates of 30 acres each.

The services also were reckoned by the hide, and an abstract of them is here given, from which it will be seen that for some purposes the tenants of the now divided hide still clubbed as it were together to [p053] perform the services required for the hide; whilst for others 'each homestead (domus) of the hide' had its separate duties to perform.

The following were the services on the manor of Thorp:49—

• Each of the hidarii ought to plough 8 acres, 4 in winter and 4 in Lent.
  • Also to harrow and sow with the lord's seed.
  • After Pentecost each house (domus) of the hide has to hoe thrice.
  • And to reap 4 acres, 2 of rye (siligine), and 2 of barley and oats.
  • And find a waggon (carrum) with 2 men to carry the hard grain, and another to carry the soft grain; and each waggon (plaustrum) shall have 1 sheaf.
• Each house of the hide has to mow 3 half-acres.
• Each house of the hide has to provide a man to reap until the third [day], if aught remains.
• Each house of the hide and of the demesne allotted to tenants has to provide the strongest man whom it has for the lord's 'precariæ' in autumn, the lord providing him meals twice a day.
• All men, both of the hide and of the demesne, have to provide their own ploughs for the lord's 'precariæ,' the lord providing their meals.
• And each hide ought to thresh out seed for the sowing of 4 acres after Michaelmas Day.
• Each hide must thresh out so much seed as will suffice for the land ploughed by one team in winter and in Lent.
• Each house of the whole village owes a hen at Christmas and eggs at Easter.
• These 10 hides ought to repair and keep in repair these houses in the demesne, viz. the Grange, cowhouse, and threshing house.
• Each of these hidarii owes 2 doddæ of oats in the middle of March.
  • And 14 loaves for 'mescinga' (?).
  • And a 'companagium' (flesh, fish, or cheese).
• Each hide owes 5s. by the year, and ought to make of the lord's wood 4 hurdles of rods for the fold.

The instance of another manor of St. Paul's (Tillingham), in Essex,50 may be cited as further evidence that sometimes, even where the holdings (as at Winslow) were virgates and half-virgates, their original relation to the hide was not yet forgotten. For after giving the list of tenants in demesne, and of 19 [p054] tenants holding 30 acres each, who 'faciunt magnas operationes,' i.e. do full service, there is a statement that in this manor 30 acres make a virgate, and 120 acres a hide;51 so that here also there are 4 virgates to the hide. But there was further in this manor a double hide, called a 'solanda,' 52 presumably of 240 acres. A double hide called a solanda is also mentioned in Sutton in Middlesex,53 and another in Drayton;54 and the term solanda is probably the same as the well-known 'sullung' or 'solin' of Kent, meaning a 'plough land.'

It will be remembered that in the Huntingdonshire Hundred Rolls a double hide of 240 acres was noticed.

It may also be mentioned that in Kent55 the division of the sullung, or hide, was called a yoke, instead of a yard-land or virgate; suggesting that the divisions of the plough land in some way corresponded with the yokes of oxen in the team.

On the whole little substantial difference appears between the grades of holdings in the south-east of England and those of the midland counties. We may add also that here, as elsewhere, the humbler class of cottier tenants are found beneath the regular holders of hides and virgates, and that on the demesne lands there appears the constantly increasing class of libere tenentes. Also passing from the holdings in villenage to the serfdom under which they were held, [p055] and speaking generally, the description obtained from the Hundred Rolls of the services might with little variation be applied to the different area embraced in this section.

Further facts relating to the hide and the virgate are elicited by extending the inquiry into the west of England. Turning to the cartulary of the monastery of St. Peter at Gloucester,56 there are several 'extents' of manors in the west of England of about the year 1266, which give valuable evidence, not only of the existence of the open fields divided into three fields or seasons, furlongs, and half-acre strips, but also as regards the holdings.

The virgates in this district varied in acreage, some containing 48 acres, others 40, 38, 36, and 28 acres respectively.57 In one case it is incidentally mentioned that 4 virgates make a hide.58 We have thus in these extents evidence both of the prevalence and of the varying acreage of the virgate in the extreme west of England, to add to the evidence already obtained in respect of the midland counties.

So also the register of the Priory of St. Mary, Worcester,59 dated 1240, affords still earlier evidence for the west of England of a similar kind. [p056]

In the first manor mentioned therein the customary services of the villeins are described as pertaining to each pair of half-virgates, i.e. to each original virgate.60 In the next manor there were 35 holdings in half-virgates, and so in other manors.61 It is sometimes mentioned how many acres in each field belong to the several half-virgates, thus showing not only the division of the fields into seasons, but the scattered contents of the holdings.

Finally, with local variations serfdom in these two western counties was almost identical with that in other parts of England.

Two examples of the services of holders of virgates and half-virgates respectively are appended as before for comparison with others, and also examples of the services of cottier tenants. The list given in the note below of the 'common customs' of the villein tenants of one of the manors of Worcester Priory, describes some of the more general incidents of villenage, and shows how thorough a serfdom it originally was.62 [p057]

To this evidence from the counties of Worcester and Gloucester we may add the evidence of the Custumal of Bleadon, in Somersetshire, also dating from the thirteenth century.

The manor belonged to the Prior of St. Swithin, at Winchester. There were very few libere tenentes. The tenants in villenage were virgarii, or holders of virgates, and dimidii-virgarii, or holders of half-virgates. There were also holders of fardels or quarter-virgates, and half-fardels, or one-eighth-virgates, and other small cottier tenants. Four virgates went to the hide. And the services were very similar to those of the Gloucester and Worcester tenants. They are described at too great length to be inserted here. We may, however, notice the importance amongst other items of the carrying service or averagium—a service often mentioned among villein services, but here defined with more than usual exactness.63

In short, without going further into details, it is obvious that the open field system and the serfdom which lived within it were practically the same in their general features in the west and in the east of England.

The following are the examples of the services in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire:— [p058]

Passing to the north of England, substantially the same system is found, along with customs and details which still further connect the gradations of the holdings in villenage with the plough team and the yokes of oxen of which it was composed.

North of the Tees, in the district of the old Northumbria, virgates and half-virgates were still the [p061] usual holdings, but they were called 'husband-lands.' The full husband-land, or virgate, was composed of two bovates, or oxgangs, the bovate or oxgang being thus the eighth of the hide or carucate.

In the cartulary of Newminster,69 under date 1250, amongst charters giving evidence of the division of the fields into 'seliones,' or strips,70 the holdings of which were scattered over the fields,71 as everywhere else, is a grant of land to the abbey containing 8 bovates in all, made up of 4 equal holdings of two bovates each.

In the 'Rotulus Redituum' of the Abbey of Kelso, dated 1290,72 the holdings were 'husband-lands.' In one place73—Selkirk—there were 15 husband-lands, each containing a bovate. In another74—Bolden—the record of which, with the services of the husband-lands, is referred to several times in the document as typical of the rest, there were 28 husband-lands, owing equal payments and services. The contents are not given, but as the services evidently are doubles of those of Selkirk, it may be inferred that the husband-lands each contained 2 bovates (i.e. a virgate), and that so did the usual husband-lands of the Kelso estates. This inference is confirmed by the record for the manor of Reveden, which states that the monks had there 8 husband-lands,75 from each of which were due the services set out at length at the end of this section; and then goes on to say that formerly each 'husband' took with his 'land' his stuht, viz. 2 oxen, 1 horse, 3 chalders of oats, 6 bolls [p062] of barley, and 3 of wheat. 'But when Abbot Richard commuted that service into money, then they returned their stuht, and paid each for his husband-land 18s. per annum.' The allotment of 2 oxen as stuht, or outfit, to the husband-land evidently corresponds with its contents as two bovates.

If the holding of 2 bovates was equivalent to the virgate, and the bovate to the half-virgate or one-eighth of the hide, then the hide should contain 8 bovates or oxgangs; and as the single oxgang had relation to the single ox, and the virgate or 'two bovates' to the pair of oxen allotted to it by way of 'stuht,' or outfit, so the hide ought to have a similar relation to a team of 8 oxen. Thus, if the full team of 8 oxen can be shown to be the normal plough team, a very natural relation would be suggested between the gradations of holdings in villenage, and the number of oxen contributed by the holders of them to the full plough team of the manorial plough. And, in fact, there is ample evidence that it was so.

In the Kelso records there is mention of a 'carucate,' or 'plough-land' 76 ('plough' being in these records rendered by 'caruca'); and this plough-land turns out, upon examination, to contain 4 husband-lands, i.e. presumably 8 bovates.

Further, among the 'Ancient Acts of the Scotch Parliament' there is an early statute77 headed 'Of Landmen telande with Pluche,' which ordains that 'ilk man teland with a pluche of viii. oxin' shall sow at the least so much wheat, &c.: showing that the team of 8 oxen was the normal plough team in Scotland. [p063] Again, among the fragments printed under the heading of 'Ancient Scotch Laws and Customs,' without date, occurs the following record:78—

'In the first time that the law was made and ordained they began at the freedom of "halikirk," and since, at the measuring of lands, the "plew-land" they ordained to contain viii. oxingang, &c.'

Even so late as the beginning of the present century, we learn from the old 'Statistical Account of Scotland' that in many districts the old-fashioned ploughs were of such great weight that they required 8, 10, and sometimes 12 oxen to draw them.79

Information from the same source also explains the use of the word 'caruca' for plough. For the construction of the word involves not 4 yoke of oxen, but 4 oxen yoked abreast, as are the horses in the caruca so often seen upon Roman coins. And the 'Statistical Account' informs us that in some districts of Scotland in former times 'the ploughs were drawn by 4 oxen or horses yoked abreast: one trod constantly upon the tilled surface, another went in the furrow, and two upon the stubble or white land. The driver walked backwards holding his cattle by halters, and taking care that each beast had its equal share in the draught. This, though it looked awkward, was contended to be the only mode of yoking by which 4 animals could best be compelled to exert all their strength.' 80

The ancient Welsh laws, as we shall see by-and-by, also speak of the normal plough team as consisting from time immemorial, throughout Wales, of 8 [p064] oxen yoked 4 to a yoke. The team of 8 oxen seems further to have been the normal manorial plough team throughout England, though in some districts still larger teams were needful when the land was heavy clay.

In the 'Inquisition of the Manors of St. Paul's' 81 it is stated of the demesne land of a manor in Hertfordshire, that the ploughing could be done with two plough teams (carucæ), of 8 head each. And in another case in the same county 'with 2 plough teams of 8 heads, "cum consuetudinibus villatæ"—with the customary services of the villein tenants.' 82 In another, 'with 5 ploughs, of which 3 have 4 oxen and 4 horses, and 2 each 6 horses.' In another, 'with 3 ploughs of 8 heads.'

In manors in Essex, on the other hand, where the land is heavier, there are the following instances:83—

• 4 plough teams, 10 in each.
• 2 plough teams,  8 in each.
• 1 plough team,  10.
• 3 plough teams,  8 oxen and 2 horses.
• 2 plough teams, 10 oxen and 10 horses for the two.
• 2 plough teams, 12 oxen and 8 horses the two.
• 2 plough teams,  4 horses and 4 oxen in each.
• 2 plough teams, 10 each.
• 1 plough team,   6 horses and 4 oxen.

In two manors in Middlesex the teams were as under:84—

• 1 of 8 heads.
• 2 of 8 oxen and 2 horses. [p065]

In the Gloucester cartulary85 there are the following instances:—

All these instances are from documents of the thirteenth century, and they conspire in confirming the point that the normal plough team was, by general consent, of 8 oxen; though some heavier lands required 10 or 12, and sometimes horses in aid of the oxen.

Nor do these exceptions at all clash with the hypothesis of the connexion of the grades of holdings with the number of oxen contributed by the holders to the manorial plough team of their village; for as the number of oxen in the team sometimes varied from the normal standard, so also did the number of virgates in the hide or carucate.

So that, summing up the evidence of this chapter, daylight seems to have dawned upon the meaning of the interesting gradation of holdings in villenage in the open fields. The hide or carucate seems to be the holding corresponding with the possession of a full plough team of 8 oxen. The half-hide corresponds with the possession of one of the 2 yokes of 4 abreast; the virgate with the possession of a pair of oxen, and the half-virgate or bovate with the possession of a single ox; all having their fixed relations to the full manorial plough team of 8 oxen. And this conclusion receives graphic illustration when the Scotch chronicler Winton thus quaintly describes [p066] the efforts of King Alexander III. to increase the growth of corn in his kingdom:—

Not that Alexander III. was really the originator of the terms 'plow-land' and 'oxgate,' but that he attained his object of increasing the growth of corn by extending into new districts of Scotland, before given up chiefly to grazing, the same methods of husbandry as elsewhere had been at work from time immemorial, just as the monks of Kelso probably had done, by giving each of their villein tenants a 'stuht' of 2 oxen with which to plough their husband-lands.

One point more, however, still remains to be explained before the principle of the open field system can be said to be fully grasped, viz. why the strips of which the hides, virgates, and bovates were composed were scattered in so strange a confusion all over the open fields.

In the meantime the following examples of the services of the villein tenants of Kelso husband-lands and bovates are appended for the purpose of comparison with those of other districts:— [p067]

We are now in a position to creep up one step nearer to the time of the Domesday Survey, and in the Boldon Book to examine earlier examples of North Country manors.

The Boldon Book is a survey of the manors belonging to the Bishop of Durham in the year 1183, nearly a century earlier than the date of the Hundred Rolls.

The typical entry which may be taken as the common form used throughout the record relates to the village of Boldon, from which the name of the survey is taken.

It is as follows:89—

• In Boldon there are 22 villani, each holding 2 bovates, or 30 acres, and paying 2s. 6d. for 'scat-penynges' [being in fact 1d. per acre], a half 'shaceldra' of oats, 16d., for 'averpenynges' [in lieu of carrying service], 5 four-wheel waggons of 'woodlade' [lading of wood], 2 cocks, and 10 eggs.

  • They work 3 days a week throughout the year, excepting Easter week and Pentecost, and 13 days at Christmas.
  • In autumn they do 4 dayworks at reaping, with all their family except the housewife. Also they reap 3 roods of 'averype,' and plough and harrow 3 roods of 'averere.'
  • Also each villein plough-team ploughs and harrows 2 acres, with allowance of food ('corrodium') once from the bishop, and then they are quit of that week's work.
  • When they do 'magnas precationes,' they have a food allowance (corrodium) from the bishop, and as part of their works do harrowing when necessary, and 'faciunt ladas' (make loads?). And when they do these each receives 1 loaf.
  • Also they reap for 1 day at Octon till the evening, and then they receive an allowance of food.
  • And for the fairs of St. Cuthbert, every 2 villeins erect a booth; and when they make 'logiæ' and 'wodelade' (load wood), they are quit of other labour. [p069]
  • There are 12 'cotmanni,' each of whom holds 12 acres, and they work throughout the year 2 days a week except in the aforesaid feasts, and render 12 hens and 60 eggs.
  • Robertus holds 2 bovates or 36 acres, and renders half a mark.
  • The Punder holds 12 acres, and receives from each plough 1 'trave' of corn, and renders 40 hens and 500 eggs.
  • The Miller [renders] 512 marks.
  • The 'Villani' are, if need be, to make a house each year 40 feet long and 15 feet wide, and when they do this each is quit of 4d. of his 'averpenynges.'
  • The whole 'villa' renders 17s. as 'cornagium' (i.e. tax on horned beasts), and 1 cow 'de metride.'
  • The demesne is at farm, together with the stock for 4 ploughs and 4 harrows, and renders for 2 ploughs 16 'celdræ' of corn, 16 'celdræ' of oats, 8 'celdræ' of barley, and for the other 2 ploughs, 10 marks.

Here then at Boldon were 22 villani, each holding two bovates or 30 acres, equivalent to a virgate or yard-land. In another place (Quycham) there are said to be thirty-five 'bovat-villani,' each of whom held a bovate of 15 acres, and performed such and such services.90 These correspond with holders of half-virgates.

Below these villani, holding one or two bovates, as in all other similar records, were cottage holdings, some of 12 acres, some of 6 acres each. There seems to have been a certain equality in some places, even in the lowest rank of holdings.

Here then, within about 100 years of the Domesday Survey, are found the usual grades of holdings in villenage. The services, too, present little variation from those of later records and other parts of England.

From the Boldon Book may be gathered a few points of further information, which may serve to complete the picture of the life of the village community in villenage. [p070]

The unity of the 'villata' as a self-acting community is illustrated by the fact that in many instances the services of the villani are farmed by them from the monastery as a body, at a single rent for the whole village91—a step in the same direction as the commutation of services and leasing of land to farm tenants, practices already everywhere becoming so usual.

The corporate character of the 'villata' is also illustrated by frequent mention of the village officials. The faber,92 or blacksmith, whose duty it was to keep in repair the ironwork of the ploughs of the village, usually held his bovate or other holding in respect of his office free from ordinary services. The carpenter93 also held his holding free, in return for his obligation to repair the woodwork of the ploughs and harrows.

The punder94 (pound-keeper) was another official with a recognised position. And, as a matter of course, the villein tenant holding the office of præpositus for the time being was freed by virtue of his office from the ordinary services of his virgate or two bovates,95 but resumed them again when his term of [p071] office ceased, and another villein was elected in his stead.

In addition to the ordinary agricultural services in respect of the arable land, there is mention, in the services of Boldon and other places, of special dues or payments, probably for rights of grazing or possession of herds of cattle. This kind of payment is called 'cornagium,' either because it is paid in horned cattle, or, if in money, in respect of the number of horned cattle held.

There are also services connected with the bishop's hunting expeditions. Thus there are persons holding in 'drengage,' who have to feed a horse and a dog, and 'to go in the great hunt' (magna caza) with two harriers and 15 'cordons,' &c.96

So of the villani of 'Aucklandshire' 97 it is recorded that they are 'to furnish for the great hunts of the bishop a "cordon" from each bovate, and to make the Bishop's hall (aula) in the forest, sixty feet long and sixteen feet wide between the posts, with a buttery, a steward's room, a chamber and "privat." Also they make a chapel 40 feet long by 15 wide, receiving two shillings, of charity; and make their portion of the hedge (haya) round the lodges (logiæ). On the departure of the bishop they have a full tun of beer, or half a tun if he should stay on. They also keep the eyries of the hawks in the bailiwick of Radulphus Callidus, and put up 18 booths (bothas) at the fairs of St. Cuthbert.'

The last item, which also occurs in the services of Boldon, is interesting in connexion with a passage in a letter of Pope Gregory the Great to the Abbot [p072] Mellitus (A.D. 601), in which he requests the Bishop Augustine to be told that, after due consideration of the habits of the English nation, he (the Pope) determines that, 'because they have been used to slaughter many oxen in the sacrifices to devils, some solemnity must be exchanged for them on this account, as that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs, whose relics are there deposited, they may build themselves huts of the boughs of trees, about those churches which have been turned to that use from temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer beasts to the devil, but kill cattle to the praise of God in their eating, it being impossible to efface everything at once from their obdurate minds: because he who tries to rise to the highest place rises by degrees or steps, and not by leaps.' 98

The villeins of St. Cuthbert's successor are found 500 years after Pope Gregory's advice still, as a portion of their services, yearly putting up the booths for the fairs held in honour of their patron saint—a fact which may help us to realise the tenacity of local custom, and lessen our surprise if we find also that for the origin of other services we must look back for as long a period.

Fifty or sixty years earlier than the Boldon Book, was compiled the 'Liber Niger' 99 of the monastery of St. Peter de Burgo, the abbey of Peterborough. [p073]

This record is remarkably exact and full in its details. Its date is from 1125 to 1128; and its evidence brings up our knowledge of the English manor and serfdom—the open field and its holdings—almost to the threshold of the Domesday Survey, i.e. within about 40 years of it.

The first entry gives the following information:100—

This entry may be taken as a typical one.

Here, then, within forty years of the date of the Domesday Survey is clear evidence that the normal holding of the villanus was a virgate. Elsewhere there were semi-villani with half-virgates.102 [p074]

Further, throughout this record fortunately the number of ploughs and oxen on the lord's demesne happens to be mentioned, from which the number of oxen to the team can be inferred. And the result is that in 15 out of 25 manors there were 8 oxen to a team; in 6 the team had 6 oxen, and in the remaining 4 cases the numbers were odd.

So far as it goes, this evidence proves that, as a rule, 8 oxen made up the full normal manorial plough team in the twelfth as in the thirteenth century. But it should be observed that this seems to hold good only of the ploughs on the lord's demesne—in dominio curiæ. The villani held other and apparently smaller ploughs, with about 4 oxen to the team instead of 8, and with these they performed their services.103 [p075]

But this fact does not appear to clash with the supposed connexion between the hide of 8 bovates and the manorial plough with its team of 8 oxen. It probably simply shows that the connexion between them on which the regular gradation of holdings in villenage depended had its origin at an earlier period, when a simpler condition of the community in villenage existed than that to be found in those days immediately following the Domesday Survey. There were, in fact, many other symptoms that the community in villenage had long been losing its archaic simplicity and wandering from its original type.

One of these symptoms may be found in the fact observed in the later evidence, that the number of irregular holdings increased as time went on. In the 'Liber Niger,' with the exception of the peculiar and local class of 'sochmanni' found in some of the manors, these irregular holdings seldom occur—a fact in itself very significant.

Another symptom may be noticed in the circumstance mentioned in the Boldon Book, and also in other cartularies, of the land in demesne being as a whole sometimes let or farmed out to the villani. Another was the fact, so apparent in the Hundred Rolls and cartularies, of the substitution of money payments for the services. There is no mention in the 'Liber Niger' of either of these practices.

All these are symptoms that the system was not a system recently introduced, but an old system gradually breaking up, relaxing its rules, and becoming in some points inconsistent with itself. [p076]

To sum up the evidence already examined, and reaching to within forty years of the date of the Domesday Survey, it is clear that England was covered with manors. And these manors were in fact, in their simplest form, estates of manorial lords, each with its village community in villenage upon it. The land of the lord's demesne—the home farm belonging to the manor-house—was cultivated chiefly by the services of the villata, i.e. of the village community, or tenants in villenage. The land of this village community, i.e. the land in villenage, lay round the village in open fields. In the village were the messuages or homesteads of the tenants in villenage, and their holdings were composed of bundles of scattered strips in the open fields, with rights of pasture over the latter for their cattle after the crops were gathered, as well as on the green commons of the manor or township.

The tenants in villenage were divided into two distinct classes.

First, there were the villani proper, whose now familiar holdings, the hides, half-hides, virgates, and bovates, were connected with the number of oxen allotted to them or contributed by them to the manorial plough team of 8 oxen, the normal holding, the virgate or yard-land, including about 30 acres in scattered acre or half-acre strips.

And further, these holdings of the villani were indivisible bundles passing with the homestead which [p077] formed a part of them by re-grant from the lord from one generation of serfs to another in unbroken regularity, always to a single successor, whether the eldest or the youngest son, according to the custom of each individual manor. They possessed all the unity and indivisibility of an entailed estate, and were sometimes known apparently for generations by the family name of the holders.104 But the reason underlying all this regular devolution was not the preservation of the family of the tenant, but of the services due from the yard-land to the lord of the manor.

Below the villani proper were the numerous smaller tenants of what may be termed the cottier class—sometimes called in the 'Liber Niger,' as it is important to notice, bordarii105 (probably from the Saxon 'bord,' a cottage). And these cottagers, possessing generally no oxen, and therefore taking no part in the common ploughing, still in some manors seem to have ranked as a lower grade of villani, having small allotments in the open fields,—in some manors 5 acre strips apiece, in other manors more or less.

Lastly, below the villeins and cottiers were, in some districts, remains, hardly to be noticed in the later cartularies, of a class of servi, or slaves, fast becoming [p078] merged in the cottier class above them, or losing themselves among the household servants or labourers upon the lord's demesne.

Thus the community in villenage fitted into the open field as into its shell—a shell which was long to survive the breaking up of the system of serfdom which lived within it. The débris of this shell, as we have seen, still remains upon the open fields of some English villages and townships to-day; but for the full meaning of some of its features, especially of the scattering of the strips in the yard-lands, we have to look still farther back into the past even than the twelfth century.

Passing from the shell to the serfdom which lived within it, we have found it practically alike in the north and south and east and west of England, and from the time of the Black Death back to the threshold of the Domesday Survey. Complicated as are the numerous little details of the services and payments, they fall with great regularity under three distinct heads:—

• 1. Week-work—i.e. work for the lord for so many days a week, mostly three days.
• 2. Precariæ, or boon-work—i.e. special work at request ('ad precem' or 'at bene'), sometimes counting as part of the week-work, sometimes extra to it.
• 3. Payments in money or kind or work, rendered by way of rent or 'Gafol'; and various dues, such as Kirkshot, Hearth-penny, Easter dues, &c.

The first two of these may be said to be practically quite distinct from the third class, and intimately connected inter se. The boon-work would seem to be a necessary corollary of the limitation of the week-work. If the lord had had unlimited right to the whole work [p079] of his villein tenant all days a week, and had an unrestricted choice as to what kind of work it should be, week-work at the lord's bidding might have covered it all. But custom not only limited the number of days' work per week, but also limited the number of days on which the work should consist of ploughing, reaping, and other work of more than usual value, involving oxen or piece-work, beyond the usual work of ordinary days.

The week-work, limited or otherwise, was evidently the most servile incident of villenage.

The payments in money or kind, or in work of the third class, to which the word gafol, or tribute, was applied, were more like modern rent, rates, and taxes than incidents of serfdom.

Comparing the services of the villani with those of the cottiers or bordarii, the difference evidently turns upon the size of the holdings, and the possession or non-possession of oxen.

Naturally ploughing was a prominent item in the services of the villanus holding a virgate, with his 'stuht,' or outfit of two oxen. As naturally the services of the bordarius or cottager did not include ploughing, but were limited to smaller services.

But apparently the services of each class were equally servile. Both were in villenage, and week-work was the chief mark of the serfdom of both.

Besides the servile week-work and 'gafol,' &c., there were also other incidents of villenage felt to be restrictions upon freedom, and so of a servile nature. Of these the most general were—

• The requirement of the lord's licence for the marriage of a daughter, and fine on incontinence. [p080]
• The prohibition of sale of oxen, &c., without the lord's licence.
• The obligation to use the lord's mill, and do service at his court.
• The obligation not to leave the land without the lord's licence.

It was the week-work of the villanus, and these restrictions on his personal liberty, which were felt to be serfdom.106

But these servile incidents were limited by custom, and this limitation by custom of the lord's demands, as well as the more and more prevalent commutation of services into money payments in later times, were, as has been said, notes and marks of a relaxation of the serfdom. The absence of these limitations would be the note and mark of a more complete serfdom.

Thus, in pursuing this economic inquiry further back into Saxon times, the main question will be whether the older serfdom of the holder of yard-lands was more or less unlimited, and therefore complete, than in the times following upon the Norman conquest.

In the meantime the Domesday Survey is the next evidence which lies before us, and judging from the tenacity of custom, and the extreme slowness of economic changes in the later period, it may be approached with the almost certain expectation that no great alteration can well have taken place in the English open-field and manorial system in the forty [p081] years between its date and that of the Liber Niger of Peterborough Abbey.

If this expectation should be realised, the Domesday Survey, approached as it has been by the ladder of the later evidence leading step by step up to it, ought easily to yield up its secrets.

If such should prove to be the case, though losing some of its mystery and novelty, the Domesday Survey will gain immensely in general interest and importance by becoming intelligible. The picture it gives of the condition of rural England will become vivid and clear in its outlines, and trustworthy to a unique degree in its details. For extending as it does, roughly speaking, to the whole of England south of the Tees and east of the Severn, and spanning as it does by its double record the interval between its date and the time of Edward the Confessor, it will prove more than ever an invaluable vantage-ground from which to work back economic inquiries into the periods before the Norman conquest of England. It may be trusted to do for the earlier Saxon records what a previous understanding of later records will have done for it.

CHAPTER III. THE DOMESDAY SURVEY ( A.D. 1086). — I. THERE WERE MANORS EVERYWHERE. — II. THE DIVISION OF THE MANOR INTO LORD'S DEMESNE AND LAND IN VILLENAGE. — III. THE FREE TENANTS ON THE LORD'S DEMESNE. — IV. THE CLASSES OF TENANTS IN VILLENAGE. — V. THE VILLANI WERE HOLDERS OF VIRGATES, ETC. — VI. THE HOLDINGS OF THE BORDARII OR COTTIERS. — VII. THE DOMESDAY SURVEY OF THE VILLA OF WESTMINSTER. — VIII. THE EXTENT OF THE CULTIVATED LAND OF ENGLAND, AND HOW MUCH WAS INCLUDED IN THE YARD-LANDS OF THE VILLANI. — CHAPTER III. FOOTNOTES.

[p082]

The manor.

In the Domesday Survey, as might be expected from the evidence of the foregoing chapter, the unit of inquiry is everywhere the manor, and the manor was a landowner's estate, with a township or village community in villenage upon it, under the jurisdiction of the lord of the manor.

But the same person was often the lord of many manors.

1,422 manors were in the ancient demesne of the Crown at the date of the Survey,107 and most of them had also been Crown manors in the time of Edward the Confessor. Thus, for centuries after the Conquest, the Domesday book was constantly appealed to as evidence that this manor or that was of 'ancient demesne,' i.e. that it was a royal manor in the time of Edward the Confessor; because the tenants of these manors claimed certain privileges and immunities which other tenants did not enjoy. [p083]

The monasteries also at the time of Edward the Confessor were holders of many manors, often in various counties, and the Survey shows that they were generally permitted to retain them after the Conquest.

Earls and powerful thanes were also at the time of Edward the Confessor possessors of many manors, and so were their Norman successors at the date of the Survey. The resident lord of a manor was often the mesne tenant of one of these greater lords. However this might be, every manor had its lord, resident, or represented by a steward or reeve (villicus).

Sometimes the Survey shows that a village or township, once probably under a single lord, had become divided between two or more manors; and sometimes again, by what was called subinfeudation, lesser and dependent manors, as in the Hitchin example, had been carved out of the original manor, once embracing directly the whole village or township.

But these variations do not interfere with the general fact that there were manors everywhere, and that the typical manor was a manorial lord's estate, with a village or township upon it, under his jurisdiction, and in villenage.

Further, this was clearly the case both after the Conquest at the date of the Survey, and also before the Conquest in the time of Edward the Confessor.

What land was extra-manorial or belonged to no township was probably royal forest or waste. At the date of the Survey this unappropriated forest, as well as the numerous royal manors already alluded to, was included in the royal demesne. Whatever belonged to the latter was excluded from the jurisdiction [p084] of the courts of the hundreds. It acknowledged no lordship but that of the king, and was described in the Survey as terra regis.

Not only were there manors everywhere, but throughout the Domesday Survey the division of the land of the manor into lord's demesne and land in villenage was all but universal, both in the time of Edward the Confessor and at the later date. It was so equally in the case of manors both in royal and in private hands.

The record generally begins with the number of hides or carucates at which the whole manor was rated according to ancient assessment. Generally, except in the Danish district of England (where the carucate only is used), the word hide (though often originally meaning, as already mentioned, the same thing as a carucate, viz. the land of one plough) was used in the Survey exclusively as the ancient unit of assessment, while the actual extent of the manor was described in carucates, and thus the number of hides often fell far short of the number of carucates.

In the Inquisitio Eliensis the Huntingdonshire manors of the abbey are described as containing so many hides 'ad geldum,' and so many carucates 'ad arandum,' thus exactly explaining the use of the terms.

Domesday Surveys: Sochmanni and Liberi Homines; Servi; Bordarii and Cotarii; and Villani.

See Larger: Sochmanni and Liberi Hominies, and Servi
Bodarii and Cotarii, and Villani
Go to: List of Illustrations

In Kent the ancient assessment was, consistently with later records, given by the number of [p085] solins—sulung being an old word used both long before and afterwards, as we have seen, in the south-east of England for 'plough land.'

Generally, whatever the terms made use of, the basis of the assessment seems to have been the number of plough teams at the time it was made, and (except in the west of England) this probably had been the case also as regards the ancient one quoted in the Survey. The actual circumstances of the manors had at the date of the Survey wandered far away from those at the date of the ancient assessment, and therefore it was needful to state the present actual number of carucates (carucatæ) or plough teams (carucæ).108 The devastations of the Norman Conquest had not been wholly repaired at the date of the Survey, and therefore after the number of actual plough teams in demesne and in villenage it is often stated that so many more might be added.

The total number of plough teams being given, information is almost always added how many of them were in demesne and how many belonged to the villeins. And it is to be noticed that the plough teams of the villeins were smaller than the typical manorial plough team of 8 oxen, just as was the case on the Peterborough manors, according to the Liber Niger.

There were on an average in most counties about half as many ploughs in villenage as there were villeins; so that, roughly speaking, two villeins, as in [p086] the Peterborough manors, seem to have joined at each villein plough, which thus can hardly have possessed more than 4 oxen in its team.

In the Domesday Survey for the greater part of England there is no mention of free tenants, whether 'liberi homines' or 'libere tenentes.'

Nor, considering the extreme completeness of the Survey, is it easy to explain their absence on any other hypothesis than that of their non-existence.109 A glance at the map will show that throughout those [p087] counties of England most completely under Danish influence there were plenty of liberi homines and of the allied class of sochmanni, but nowhere else. And that these two classes were distinctly and exceptionally Danish there is evidence in a passage in the laws of Edward the Confessor, in which the 'Manbote in Danelaga' is given separately and as different from that of the rest of England, viz. 'de vilano et socheman xii. oras: de liberis hominibus iii. marcas.' 110

That the existence of these classes in a manor was local and quite exceptional is also confirmed by the place in which they are mentioned in the list of classes of tenants, the numbers of whom were to be recorded. They are placed last of all, even after the 'servi.' Inquiry was to be made, 'quot villani, quot cottarii, quot servi, quot liberi homines, quot sochemanni.' These were the words used in the statement of the inquiry to be made in the manors of the monks of Ely, [p088] which manors lay in the Danish district; and the two last-mentioned classes were added out of order at the end of a common form, to meet its special needs.111

It is remarkable, however, that by common law (which generally represents very ancient custom) the existence of free tenants was essential to the Court Baron of a manor. Without some freemen, according to the old law books, it could not be held.112 And there is a curious instance, in the Survey, of three sochmanni being lent by one lord to another, so that he might hold his court.113

This being so, it is curious and important to notice that the survey of the manors of the monks of Ely was to be taken upon the oaths of the sheriff of the county, and of all the barons and of their Norman associates (eorum Francigenarum), and of the whole hundred (tocius centuriatus), the priests, præpositi, and six villani of each manor (villa).114

The sochmanni and liberi homines must here be included either among the 'Norman associates' or the 'whole hundred.'

It may be concluded, therefore, that the liberi homines and sochmanni were of Danish or Norman origin, as also probably was the Court Baron itself; whilst in those districts of England not so much under Danish or Norman influence, the demesne lands were not let out until a later period to permanent freeholding tenants. Upon the lord's demesne, and perhaps [p089] in the manorial hall, may have been the 'Francigenæ eorum' belonging to the 'Comitatus,' not necessarily holders of land, but more or less dependants of the lord of the manor. Out of the Danish district nearly all the population on the manor seems clearly to have been tenants in villenage or slaves.

We turn now to the tenants in villenage, who formed the bulk of the population, and with whom this inquiry has most to do.

The terms of the writ ordering the survey to be made on the Ely manors show clearly what classes of tenants in villenage were expected to be found on the manors. The jury were to inquire—

• (1) Quot villani.
• (2) Quot cotarii.
• (3) Quot servi.

The three classes of tenants in villenage actually mentioned in the Survey are almost universally the—

As regards the servi, the map will show that whilst only embracing nine per cent. of the whole population of England, they were most numerous towards the south-west of England, less and less numerous as the Danish districts were approached, and absent [p090] altogether from Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and bordering districts.

Even when most numerous they were hardly tenants in villenage. They seem to have held no land, and often to have been rather household thralls of the lord of the manor than tenants in any ordinary sense of the word.115

Thus the real tenants in villenage were confined mainly to the two classes of villani and bordarii, or cottiers.

Taking the bordarii or cottage tenants first, the map will show how evenly they were scattered over the whole country. They embraced 32 per cent.—roughly one-third—of the whole population in their number, and in no county were there less than 12 per cent. of them.

But the villani were evidently at the date of the Survey, and at the earlier date of Edward the Confessor, as they were afterwards, by far the most important and typical tenants in villenage.

They were at the date of the Survey even more numerous than the cottier class below them. They embraced 38 per cent. of the whole population, and, except where partially displaced by the sochmanni of the Danish district, were pretty evenly dispersed all over England. Except in Norfolk and Suffolk, they were seldom less than one-third of the population. And if at the time of the Survey they were holders of virgates and half-virgates, as their successors were afterwards, then it follows that they held by far the largest proportion of the land of England [p091] in their holdings. But before we assume this, some proof may fairly be required that it was so. In the meantime it is clear that the classes of tenants in villenage bore the same names at the time of the Survey as they did afterwards. The presumption evidently is that they held similar holdings.

The compilers of the Survey were not in the habit of describing in detail the character of the holdings of the villani. Whilst recording how many villani there were in a manor, the Domesday Survey does not, like the Hundred Rolls, usually go on to state how many of them held a virgate and how many a half-virgate each.

Still, notwithstanding this general silence of the Survey on this point, treating the matter manor by manor, and taking for example the Peterborough manors, it might be inferred almost with certainty that as the villani of the Liber Niger in 1125 were holders of virgates and half-virgates, so their fathers and grandfathers before them must also have held virgates and half-virgates at the time of the Domesday Survey and of Edward the Confessor. And such an inference would be strengthened by the occasional use in the Survey of the terms integri villani116 and villani dimidii,117 answering no doubt to the same terms, and to the pleni virgarii and semi-virgarii of the Liber Niger and the Battle Abbey records. [p092]

That the land was really held at the date of the Survey in hides and virgates may also be gathered from the well-known statement of the Saxon Chronicle that 'næs an ælpig hide ne an gyrde landes' was omitted from the Survey—a statement which does not mean that not a hide nor a yard of land was omitted, but not a hide or a yard-land, i.e. a virgate.118 So that it might fairly be inferred from this passage that the virgate was the normal or typical holding of the villanus, and this inference might well cover the whole area of the Survey.

But there is more direct evidence than these general inferences. It so happens that there are a few local exceptions to the general silence of the Survey as regards the holdings of the villani.

The most remarkable exception to the general reticence occurs in the survey for Middlesex, the compilers of which go out of their way fortunately to give precisely the desired information. And wherever they do so the holdings are found to be in the now familiar grades of hides, half-hides, virgates, and half-virgates.

The following are a few examples:—

As might be expected, most of the villani held virgates and half-virgates, but there are a sufficient number of cases of hides and half-hides to show conclusively the relation to each other of the four grades in the regular hierarchy of villenage.

Another local and solitary exception occurs in the record for Sawbridgeworth, in Hertfordshire. The holdings in this case were as follows:—

A few other exceptional cases occur in the [p094] Liber Eliensis. The abbey had three manors in Hertfordshire, and in these the holdings were as follows:

The monks of Ely also had several manors in the Fen country, but the holdings in this district seem to have been peculiar. Instead of being 'each of a virgate,' or 'each of a half-virgate,' they are 'each of so many acres,' as was also found to be the case in some districts of Cambridgeshire in the Hundred Rolls. The Fen district seems to have had its own local peculiarities, both in the eleventh and in the fourteenth centuries, just as Kent also had. But here was no exception to the rule that the villani were classed in grades, each grade with equal holdings.

These accidental instances in the Domesday Survey in which the required information is given are numerous enough to make it clear that at the date of the Survey the holdings of the villani were generally hides, half-hides, virgates, and half-virgates. The virgate or yard-land was the normal holding, as it was afterwards. And this being so, it may reasonably be [p095] concluded also that the virgates and half-virgates were themselves what they were afterwards—bundles of strips scattered over the open fields, and having some connexion not yet fully explained, but clearly indicated, with the number of oxen allotted to their holders or contributed by them to the manorial plough team of eight oxen.

It has already been noticed that in the Inquisitio Eliensis the particulars to be recorded as regards the tenants were—

• 1. Quot villani.
• 2. Quot cottarii.
• 3. Quot servi, &c.

And that with few exceptions throughout the Survey the three classes actually found in the Survey were—

• 1. Villani.
• 2. Bordarii.
• 3. Servi.

From this fact alone it would not be wrong to conclude that to a great extent the words bordarii and cottarii were interchangeable.

This inference gains much weight from the fact that a great many bordarii as well as cottarii are found even in the Inquisitio Eliensis itself. The facts, however, when collected together are somewhat [p096] curious, as a reference to the note below will show.119

In a few cases there are both bordarii and cottarii mentioned, which would lead to the conclusion that they were distinct classes. But in most cases there are either one or the other of the two classes mentioned, but not both. Examining their holdings there seems to be no difference between them.

There are bordarii holding so many acres each, generally five, but varying sometimes from one to ten. There are cottarii with all these variations of holdings. There are 'bordarii with their gardens,' and there are likewise 'cottarii with their gardens.' There are both bordarii and cottarii who, as their holdings are not described at all, may, for anything we know, have held cottages only, and no land or gardens.

Comparing these Cambridgeshire examples with those in Hertfordshire, and others in the Domesday Survey for Middlesex, we may conclude that for all [p097] practical purposes the bordarius was a cottier—sometimes with no land, sometimes with a garden, sometimes with one solitary acre strip in the open fields, sometimes with more, even up to 10 acres, but that the typical bordarius was a cottager who held, in addition to his cottage, 5 acres in the open fields. His was, therefore, a subordinate position to that of the villanus proper in the village hierarchy, and he differed from the villanus probably most clearly in this, that he put no oxen into the village plough teams, and took no part in the common ploughing.

His services were no less servile than those of the villanus, but of a more trivial kind. He was above the servus, or slave, but his was the class which most easily would slide into that of the modern labourer, and in which the servus himself in his turn might most easily merge. The word 'bordarius' was noticed in the Liber Niger of Peterborough, but though so universal in the Domesday Survey it soon slipped out of use; and as 'bord' gave place to 'cottage' in the common speech, so the whole class below the villani came to be known as cottagers.

It may be worth while to test the value of the key which the results of this inquiry have put into our hand by applying it to the Domesday description of a particular manor.

For this purpose the survey of the manor of [p098] Westminster may be chosen as one of great national and historical interest. It is as follows:120—

• In the villa where is situated the church of St. Peter [i.e. the abbey] the abbot of the same place holds 1312 hides [i.e. land rated at so much]. There is land for 11 plough teams.
• To the demesne belong 9 hides and 1 virgate, and there are 4 plough teams.
• The villeins have 6 plough teams, and one more might be made.
• There are 9 villani with a virgate each.
  •  1 villanus with a hide.
  •  9 villani with a half-virgate each.
  •  1 cottier with 5 acres.
  • 41 cottiers rendering a shilling each yearly for their gardens.
• There is meadow for 11 plough teams,
  • Pasture for the cattle of the village,
  • Wood for 100 pigs.
• There are 25 houses of the abbot's soldiers and of other men, who render 8s. per annum or 10l. in all; when he received them, the same; in the time of King Edward, 12l.
• This manor was and is in the demesne of the Church of St. Peter of Westminster.
• In the same villa Bainiardus holds 3 hides of the abbot. There is land for 2 plough teams, and they are there, in demesne, and one cottier. Wood for 100 pigs. Pasture for cattle. Four arpents of vineyard newly planted. All these are worth 60s.; when he received them, 20s.; in the time of King Edward, 6l. This land belonged, and belongs, to the Church of St. Peter.

It is clear from this description that the village which nestled round the new minster just completed by Edward the Confessor, was on a manor of the abbot. It consisted of 25 houses of the abbot's immediate followers, 19 homesteads of villani, 42 cottages with their little gardens, and one of them with 5 acres of land. There was also the larger homestead of the sub-manor of the abbot's under-tenant, with a single cottage and a vineyard of 4 half-acres newly planted. There was meadow enough by the river side to make hay for the herd of oxen [p099] belonging to the dozen plough teams of the village, and pasture for them and other cattle. Further round the village in open fields were about 1,000 acres of arable land mostly in the acre strips, lying no doubt in their shots or furlongs, and divided by green turf balks and field-ways. Lastly, surrounding the whole on the land side were the woods where the swineherd found mast for the 200 pigs of the place. On every one of these points we have the certain evidence of sworn eye-witnesses.

And so with little variation must have been the condition of things in all material points twenty years earlier,121 when King Edward lay on his death-bed and wandered in his mind, and saw in his delirium two holy monks whom he remembered in Normandy, who foretold to him the coming disasters to the realm, which should only be ended when 'the green tree, after severance from its trunk and removal for the space of three acres (trium jugerum spatio), should return to its parent stem, and again bear leaf and fruit and flower.' It may be that the delirious king as 'he sat up in bed' dreamily gazed through the window of his chamber upon the open fields, and the turf balks dividing the acres. The green tree may have been suggested to his mind by an actual tree growing out of one of the balks. The uneven glass of his window-panes would be just as likely as not as he rose in his bed to sever the stem from the root to his eye, moving it apparently three acres' breadth higher up the open field, restoring it again to its root as he sank back on his pillow. The very delirium of [p100] the dying king thus becomes the most natural thing in the world when we know that all round were the open fields, and balks, and acres. Without this knowledge even the learned and graphic historian of the Norman Conquest can make nothing of the 'trium jugerum spatio,' and casts about for other renderings instead of the perfectly intelligible right one.122

Once more; the contemporary biographer of Edward the Confessor, with the accuracy of one to whom Westminster was no doubt familiar, tells us that 'the devout king destined to God that place, both for that it was near unto the famous and wealthy city of London, and also had a pleasant situation amongst fruitful fields lying round about it, with the principal river running hard by, bringing in from all parts of the world great variety of wares and merchandise of all sorts to the city adjoining; but chiefly for the love of the apostle, whom he reverenced with a special and singular affection.' 123 Even the delicate historical insight of the late historian of the abbey, to whom all its picturesque surroundings were so dear, failed to catch the full meaning of this passage. Whilst referred to in a note it becomes paraphrased thus in the text:—'By this time also the wilderness of Thorney was cleared; and the crowded river with its green meadows, and the sunny aspect of the island, may have had a charm for the king whose choice had hitherto lain in the rustic fields of Islip and Windsor.' 124 Yes, 'meadows of Thorney' there were, [p101] on which the oxen of a dozen plough teams were grazing, but the contemporary writer's 'fruitful fields lying round about the place' were the 1,000 acres of corn land of which Dean Stanley was unconscious. No blame to him, for what economic student had sufficiently understood the Domesday Survey to tell him that every virgate of the villani of the 'villa ubi sedet Æcclesia Sancti Petri' was a bundle of strips of arable land scattered all over the three great fields stretching away from the village, and the river, and the 'meadows of Thorney' for a mile or two round?

Knowing now that the virgate or yard-land was the normal holding of the villanus, though some villani held hides and half-hides, i.e. more virgates than one, and others half-virgates; and knowing that the normal holding of the villanus, whether called a yard-land or a husband-land, or by any other name, was a bundle of scattered strips, containing normally thirty acres; and knowing also the number of villani in the several counties embraced in the Survey, it becomes perfectly possible to estimate, roughly no doubt, but with remarkable certainty, the total area contained in their holdings.

The total number of villani in these counties was 108,407.125 If each villanus held a yard-land or virgate of 30 acres, then about 3,250,000 acres were [p102] contained in their holdings. The number of villani holding half-virgates was, however, probably greater than the number holding half-hides and hides; so that the average holding would perhaps hardly be equal in acreage to the normal holding of 30 acres. Taking the average holding at 20 acres instead of 30, we should probably under-estimate the acreage. It would even then amount to 2,168,000. We shall be safe if we say that the villani held in their bundles of strips 214 millions of acres.126

We must add the holdings of the 82,000 bordarii and of the 6,000 or 7,000 cottier tenants.127 If these lesser holdings averaged three acres each, we must add another quarter of a million acres for them. The total of two and a half millions of acres can thus hardly be an over-estimate of the acreage of the arable strips in the open fields held by the villani and bordarii in villenage. What proportion did this bear to the whole cultivated area of these counties?

To include the total acreage under the plough, the holdings of the sochmanni and liberi homines of the Danish district must be added, and also the arable land (ploughed mainly by the villani) on the lord's demesne. The 23,000 sochmanni128 can hardly have held as little as a similar number of villani—say half a million acres. The 12,000 liberi homines may have held another half-million. And one or two million acres can hardly be an excessive estimate for the arable portion of the lord's demesne.

Putting all these figures together, the evidence of the Domesday Survey seems therefore to show that [p103] at its date about five million acres were under the plough, i.e. from one-third to one-half of the acreage now in arable cultivation in the same counties of England.129

This is not mere conjecture. It rests upon facts recorded in detail in the Survey for each manor upon the oath of the villani themselves; with no chance of exaggeration, because upon the result was to be founded a tax; with little chance of omission, because the men of the hundred, who also were sworn, would take care in their own interests that one place was not assessed more lightly than others. The general opinion was that 'not a single hide or yard-land was omitted.'

The acreage under arable cultivation at the time of the Survey, and twenty years earlier in the time of Edward the Confessor, was thus really very large. And the villani in their yard-lands held nearly half of it, and together with the bordarii fully half of it, in villenage. It must be borne in mind also that by their services they tilled the greater part of the rest.

This was the economic condition in which England was left by the Saxons as the result of the 500 years of their rule. The agriculture of England, as they left it, was carried on under the open field system by village communities in villenage. It was under the system of Saxon serfdom, with some little help from the actual slaves on the lord's demesne, that the land was tilled throughout all those counties which the Saxons had thoroughly conquered, with some partial exception [p104] as regards the Danish districts, where the sochmanni and liberi homines were settled.

This is the solid foundation of fact firmly vouched for by the Domesday Survey, read in the light of the evidence leading up to it.

From this firm basis the inquiry must proceed, carefully following the same lines as before—working still from the known to the unknown—tracing the open field system, its villani, and their yard-lands still farther back into the earlier periods of Saxon rule.

The question to be answered is, how far back into the earlier Saxon times the open field system and its yard-lands can be followed, and whether the serfdom connected with them was more or was less complete and servile in its character in the earlier than in the later period.

CHAPTER IV. THE OPEN FIELD SYSTEM TRACED IN SAXON TIMES—THE SCATTERING OF THE STRIPS ORIGINATED IN THE METHODS OF CO-ARATION. — I. THE VILLAGE FIELDS UNDER SAXON RULE WERE OPEN FIELDS. — II. THE HOLDINGS WERE COMPOSED OF SCATTERED STRIPS. — III. THE OPEN FIELD SYSTEM OF CO-ARATION DESCRIBED IN THE ANCIENT LAWS OF WALES. — CHAPTER IV. FOOTNOTES.

[p105]

Traces of the open field in Saxon times.

We have learned from a long line of evidence, leading backwards to the date of the Domesday Survey, that the community in villenage fitted into the open field system as a snail fits into a shell. Let us now, following the same method, and beginning again with the shell, inquire whether its distinctive features can be traced on English fields in early Saxon times from the date of the Domesday Survey, and of Edward the Confessor, backwards.

And first it will be convenient to find out whether traces can be found of the 'strips,' and the 'furlongs,' 'headlands,' 'linches,' 'gored acres,' 'butts,' and odds and ends of 'no-man's-land,' the remains of which are still to be seen wherever the open fields are unenclosed.

It will be remembered that the strips upon examination were found to be acres laid out for ploughing [p106] on the open fields. They were, in fact, the original actual divisions, from the general dimensions of which the statute acre, with its four roods, was derived.

Bearing this in mind, the Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospels may be quoted in proof that the fields round a Saxon village were open fields, and generally divided into acre strips in the tenth century, just as the vision of Piers Plowman was quoted in proof that it was so in the fourteenth century.

The Saxon translator of the story of the disciples walking through the corn-fields describes them as walking over the 'æceras.'

Obviously the translator's notion of the corn-fields round a village was that of the open fields of his own country. They were divided into 'acres,' and he who walked over them walked over the 'acres.'

But by far the best evidence occurs in the multitudes of charters, from the eighth century downwards, so many of which are contained in the cartularies of the various abbeys, and more than 1,300 of which are collected in Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus.

These charters are generally in Latin. They most often relate to the grant of a whole manor or estate with the village upon it. And to the charters is generally added in Saxon a description of the boundaries as known to the inhabitants. These descriptions are in precisely the same form as the description of the boundaries on the Hitchin manor rolls as presented by the homage in 1819.130

The boundary is always described as starting at [p107] some well-known point—perhaps a road or stream—as passing on from it to some other, and so on, from point to point, till the starting-place is reached again. The chance of finding out from these boundaries whether they contained within them open fields lies simply in the possibility that some one or another of the distinctive features of the system may happen to occur at the edge of the estate or township, and so to be mentioned among the links in the chain of objects making up the boundary.

The fact is that this happens very often.

By way of example, the boundaries of Hordwell in Hampshire may be taken. They are appended to a charter131 by which King Edward, the son of King Alfred, gave the estate to the Abbey of Abingdon, and they are as follows:—

In this single instance there is mention of acres or strips, of gores or gored-acres, of headlands, of furlongs, and of linches.

Scores of similar instances might be given from the Abingdon charters, 'Liber de Hyda,' and the 'Codex Diplomaticus,' showing that the boundaries constantly make mention of one or another of the distinctive marks by which the open field system may be recognised.132 [p109]

There can, therefore, be no doubt that the fields of Saxon manors or villages were open fields divided into furlongs and strips, and having their headlands and linches. Even the little odds and ends of 'no mans land' are incidentally found to have their place in the Saxon open fields 1,000 years ago.

But how far back can these Saxon open fields be traced? The answer is, as far back as the laws of King Ine can be held to reach into the past.

These laws were republished by King Alfred as 'The Dooms of Ine,' who came to the throne in A.D. 688. In their first clause they claim to have been recorded by King Ine with the counsel and teaching of his father Cenred, and of Hedde, his bishop (who was Bishop of Winchester from A.D. 676 to 705), and of Eorcenwold, his bishop (who obtained the see of London in 675); and so, if genuine, they seem to represent what was settled customary law in Wessex during the last half of the seventh century—the century after the conquest of the greater part of Wessex.

In these laws there occurs a section which so clearly refers to open common fields divided into acres, and to common meadows also divided into strips or doles, that it would have been perfectly intelligible and reasonable if it had been included word for word in the record of the customs of the Hitchin manor as regards the three common fields and the green commons and Lammas land:— [p110]

There is here in the smallest possible compass the most complete evidence that in the seventh century the fields of Wessex were common open fields, the arable being divided into acres and the meadows into doles134; and as the system is incidentally mentioned as a thing existing as a matter of course, it is not likely to have been suddenly or recently introduced. The evidence throws it back, therefore, at least to the earliest period of Saxon rule.

Let us next ask whether there are traces of the scattered ownership—the scattering all over the open fields of the strips included in the holdings—which was so essential a characteristic of the system; and, further, whether in tracing it back into early Saxon [p111] times any clue to its original meaning and intention can be found.

First, it may be stated generally that, when the nature and incidents of the holdings are examined hereafter, it will be found that throughout the period of Saxon rule, from the time of Edward the Confessor backward to the date of the laws of King Ine, 300 years earlier, the holdings were mainly the same as those with which we have become familiar, viz. hides, half-hides, and yard-lands, and that, generally speaking, there were no other kinds of holdings the names of which are mentioned.

That these Saxon hides and yard-lands were composed of scattered strips in the open fields, as they were afterwards, might well be inferred from the mere fact that they bore the same names as those used after the Conquest. It would be strange indeed if the same names at the two dates meant entirely different things—if the virgate or yard-land before the Conquest was a thing wholly different from what it was after it.

But there is other evidence than the mere names of the holdings.

There is a general characteristic of the numerous Saxon charters of all periods, which, when carefully considered, can hardly have any other explanation than the fact that the holdings were composed not of contiguous blocks of land, but of scattered strips.

It is this—that whatever be the subject of the grant made by the charter, i.e. whether it be a whole manor or township that is granted, or only some of the holdings in it, the boundaries appended are the boundaries of the whole manor or township. No doubt the royal gifts to the monastic houses generally [p112] did consist of whole manors, and thus the boundaries in most cases naturally were the boundaries of the whole, and could not be otherwise. But it was not always so. Thus, among the Abingdon charters there are two of Edward the Martyr, one of vii. hides (cassatos), in 'Cingestune,' and another of xiii. 'mansas' in 'Cyngestun,' one to the Church of St. Mary at Abingdon, the other to a person named Ælfstan;135 and to both charters are appended the same boundaries in substantially the same words. And these are the boundaries of the whole township.136

There can hardly be any other explanation of this peculiarity than the fact that the holdings were not blocks of land, the boundaries of which could be easily given, but, in fact, like the hides and virgates after the Conquest, bundles of strips scattered over the open fields, and intermixed with strips belonging to other holdings. Indeed, there is in a charter of King Ethelred (A.D. 982) among the Abingdon series relating to five hides at 'Cheorletun,' a direct confession of the reason why in this case all boundaries are omitted. Instead of the usual boundaries of the whole township there is the statement that the estate is 'the less distinctly defined by boundaries, quia jugera altrinsecus copulata adjacent'—because the acres are intermixed.137

On the hypothesis already suggested that the hides, half-hides, virgates, and bovates were the shares in the results of the ploughing of the village plough [p113] teams—in other words, the number of strips allotted to each holder in respect of the oxen contributed by him to the plough team of eight oxen—it is perfectly natural that in a grant of some only of the holdings the boundaries given should be those of the whole township, viz. of the whole area, an intermixed share in which constituted the holding.

There is another fact, which has, perhaps, never yet been explained, but which is nevertheless perfectly intelligible on the same hypothesis.

It will be remembered that there was observed in the Winslow example of a virgate a certain regular turn or rotation in the order of the strips in the virgates—that John Moldeson's strips almost always came next after the strips of one, and were followed by those of another, particular neighbour. Now this fact strongly suggests that originally the holdings had not always and permanently consisted of the same actual strips, but that once upon a time the strips were perhaps allotted afresh each year in the ploughing according to a certain order of rotation, the turn of the contributor of two oxen coming twice as often as that of the contributor of one ox, and so making the virgate contain twice as many strips as the bovate. This, and this alone, would give the requisite elasticity to the system so as to allow, if necessary, of the admission of new-comers into the village community, and new virgates into the village fields.

So long as the limits of the land were not reached a fresh tenant would rob no one by adding his oxen to the village plough teams, and receiving in regular turn the strips allotted in the ploughing to his oxen. In the working of the system the strips of a new holding [p114] would be intermixed with the others by a perfectly natural process.

Now, that something like this process did actually happen in Saxon times is clear from the way in which the Church was provided for under the Saxon laws.

In the light which is given by the knowledge of what the open field system really was, there is nothing intrinsically impossible even in the alleged but doubtful donation by King Ethelwulf of one-tenth of the whole land of England by one stroke of the pen to the Church. It has been said that he could not do it except on the royal domains without robbing the landowners and their tenants of their holdings. It would be so if the holdings were blocks. But there is nothing impossible in the supposition that a Saxon king should enact a law that every tenth strip ploughed by the common ploughs throughout the villages of England should be devoted to the Church. It would create no confusion or dislocation anywhere. And it would have meant just the same thing if Ethelwulf had enacted that every tenth virgate, or every tenth holding, should be devoted to the Church. For the sum of every tenth strip ploughed by the villagers, when the strips were tied, as it were, together into the bundles called virgates or hides, would amount to every tenth virgate, or hide, as the case might be. Nor would there be anything strange in his freeing the strips thus granted to the Church from all secular services.138

The alleged donation may be spurious, the documents relating to it may be forgeries, but there is [p115] nothing impossible or unlikely in the thing itself. And the very fact of the forgery of such a grant is evidence of its intrinsic possibility. And, whatever may be said as to the donation of Ethelwulf, whether it be spurious or not, there are other proofs that something of the kind was afterwards effected.

In No. XXV.139 of the 'Excerptiones' of Archbishop Egbert (A.D. 735–766) it is ordained that 'to every church shall be allotted one complete holding (mansa), and that this shall be free from all but ecclesiastical services.' This was simply putting the priest in the position of a recognised village official, like the præpositus or the faber. They held their virgates free of service, and perhaps their strips were ploughed by the common ploughs in return for their services without their contributing oxen to the manorial plough team. The Domesday Survey proves that, in a great number of instances at least, room had in fact been made in the village community for the priest and his virgate.140

The following passages in the Saxon laws also show that for some time, at all events, the tithes were actually taken, not in the shape of every tenth sheaf, but exactly in accordance with the plan suggested by the spurious grant of Ethelwulf, by every tenth strip being set aside for the Church in the ploughing.

In the laws of King Ethelred141 (A.D. 978–1016) [p116] there is a command that every Christian man shall 'pay his tithe justly, always as the plough traverses the tenth "æcer."'

Further, in a Latin law of King Ethelred there is the following direction:-

And that this applied to land in villenage as well as to land in demesne is clear from a still earlier law of King Edgar (A.D. 959, 975): 'That every tithe be rendered to the old minster to which the district belongs, and that it be then so paid both from a thane's in-land and from geneat-land, so as the plough traverses it.'

There is very little reference in the Domesday Survey to the churches and their tithes, but there happens to be one entry at least in which there seems [p117] to be a clear reference to this practice of the tithes being taken in actual strips and acres. It relates to the church at Wallop, in Hampshire (the place from which the family name of the Earls of Portsmouth is derived), and it states that 'to the church there pertains one hide, also half of the tithes of the manor, also the whole kirkshot. And of the tithes of the villani xlvi. pence and half of the acres. There is in addition a little church to which pertain viii. acres of the tithes.' 145

It may be taken then as certain that the holdings in villenage in the open fields of the Saxon 'hams' and 'tuns' were composed, like the virgate of John Moldeson, in the manor of Winslow, centuries afterwards, of strips scattered, one in this furlong and another in that, all over the village fields; and it may be taken as already almost certain that the scattering of the strips was in some way connected with the order in which the strips were allotted in respect of the oxen contributed to the village plough teams.

The law that every tenth strip as it was traversed by the plough was to be set apart for the tithe is certainly the clearest hint that has yet been discovered of the perhaps annual redistribution of the strips among the holdings in a certain order of rotation, [p118] though it is possible of course that a redistribution being once made, to make room for the acres set apart for the tithe, the same strips might always thereafter be assigned to the tithe and to each particular yard-land year after year without alteration.

What is still wanted to lift the explanation already offered of the connexion of the grades of holdings in the open fields and the scattering of the strips in each holding, with the team of 8 oxen, out of the region of hypothesis into that of ascertained fact is the discovery if possible somewhere actually at work of the system of common ploughing with eight oxen, and the assignment of the strips in respect of the oxen to their several owners. Were it possible to watch such an example of the actual process going on, there probably would be disclosed by some little detail of its working the reason and method of the scattering of the strips, and of the order of rotation in which they seem to have been allotted.

Now it happens that such an instance is at hand, affording every opportunity for examination under the most favourable circumstances possible. We find it in the ancient Welsh laws, representing to a large extent ancient Welsh traditions collected and codified in the tenth century, but somewhat modified afterwards, and coming down to us in a text of the fourteenth century. In these laws is much trustworthy evidence from which might be drawn a very graphic picture of the social and economic condition of the unconquered Welsh people, at a time parallel to the centuries of Saxon rule in England. And amongst other things fortunately there is an almost perfect picture of the method of ploughing. Nor is it too [p119] much to say that in this picture we have a key which completely fits the lock, and explains the riddle of the English open field system.

For the ancient Welsh laws describe a simple form of the open field system at an earlier stage than that in which we have yet seen it—at a time, in fact, when it was a living system at work, and everything about it had a present and obvious meaning, and its details were consistent and intelligible.

Let us examine this Welsh evidence.

Precisely as the modern statute acre had its origin in the Saxon æcer, which was an actual division of the fields, so that the Saxon æceras were the strips divided by balks—the seliones—of the open field system; so the modern Welsh word for acre as a quantity of land is 'erw,' and the same word in its ancient meaning in the Welsh laws was the actual strip in the open fields. This is placed beyond a doubt by the fact that its measurements are carefully given over and over again, and that it was divided from its neighbours by an unploughed balk of turf two furrows wide.146

The Welsh laws describe the primitive way in which the erw was to be measured. In one province this was to be done by a man holding a rod of a certain length and stretching it on both sides of him to fix the width, while the length is to be a certain multiple of its breadth.147 In other provinces of Wales the width was to be fixed by a rod equal in length to the [p120] long yoke used in ploughing with four oxen abreast.148 The erw thus ascertained closely resembled in shape the English strips, though it varied in size in different districts, and was less than the modern acre in its contents.

Next there was, according to the Welsh laws, a certain regulated rotation of ownership in the erws 'as they were traversed by the plough,' resulting from a well-ordered system of co-operative ploughing. In the Venedotian Code especially are elaborate rules as to the 'cyvar' or co-aration, and these expose the system in its ancient form actually at work, with great vividness of detail.

The chief of these rules are given below,149 from [p121] which it will be seen that in the co-tillage the team, as in England and Scotland, was assumed to be of eight oxen. And those who join in co-ploughing must bring a proper contribution, whether oxen or plough irons, handing them over during the common ploughing to the charge of the common ploughman and the driver, who together are bound to keep and use everything as well as they would do their own, till, the co-ploughing being done, the owners take their own property away.

So the common ploughing was arranged. But how was the produce of the partnership to be divided? This, too, is settled by the law, representing no doubt immemorial custom. The first erw ploughed was to go to the ploughman, the second to the irons, the third to the outside sod ox, the fourth to the outside sward ox, the fifth to the driver, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh to the other six oxen in order of worth; and lastly, the twelfth was the plough erw, for ploughbote, i.e. for the maintenance of the woodwork of the plough; and so, it is stated, 'the tie of 12 erws was completed.' Further, [p122] if any dispute should arise between the co-tillers as to the fairness of the ploughing, the common-sense rule was to be followed that the erw which fell to the ploughman should be examined as to the depth, length, and breadth of the furrows and every one's erw must be ploughed equally well.

Here, then, in the Welsh laws is the clearest evidence not only of the division of the common fields by turf balks two furrows wide into the long narrow strips called erws, or acres, and roughly corresponding in shape, though not in area, with those on English fields, but also of the very rules and methods by which their size and shape, as well as the order of their ownership, were fixed in Wales.

And this order in the allotment of the erws turns out to be an ingenious system for equitably dividing year by year the produce of the co-operative ploughing between the contributors to it.

Now, without entering at present into the question of its connexion with the tribal system in Wales, which will require careful consideration hereafter, several interesting and useful flashes of light may be drawn from this glimpse into the methods and rules of the ancient Welsh system of co-operative ploughing.

In the first place, ancient Welsh ploughing was evidently not like the classical ploughing of the sunny south, a mere scratching of the ground with a light plough, which one or two horses or oxen could draw. In the Welsh laws a team of eight oxen, as already said, is assumed to be necessary. And hence the necessity of co-operative ploughing. The plough was evidently heavy and the ploughing deep, just as was the case in [p123] the twelfth century, and probably from still earlier to quite modern times in Scotland, where, as we have seen, the plough was of the same heavy kind, and the team of eight or of twelve oxen. And it is curious to observe that the Welsh, like the Scotch oxen in modern times, were driven four abreast, i.e. yoked four to a yoke. So that, as already suggested, the plough was aptly described by the monks in their mediæval Latin as a 'caruca,' and the ploughed land as a 'carucate.'

But the most interesting point about the ancient Welsh co-operative ploughing was the fact that the key to a share in the produce was the contribution of one or more oxen to the team. He who contributed one ox was entitled to one erw in the twelve. He who contributed two oxen was entitled to two erws. He who contributed a whole yoke of four oxen would receive four erws, while only the owner of the full team of eight oxen could possibly do without the co-operation of others in ploughing. Surely this Welsh evidence satisfactorily verifies the hypothesis already suggested by the term bovate, and by the allotment of two oxen as outfit to the yard-land or virgate, and by the taking of tithes in the shape of every tenth strip as it was traversed by the plough, and lastly by the order of rotation in the strips disclosed by the Winslow example.

It explains how the possession of the oxen came to be in Saxon, as probably in still earlier British or Roman times, the key to the position of the holder, and his rank in the hierarchy of the village community. And it points to the Saxon system of hides and yard-lands having possibly sprung naturally out [p124] of pre-existing British or Roman arrangements, rather than as having been a purely Saxon importation.

It also suggests a ready explanation of how when the common tillage died out, and the strips included in a hide, yard-land, or virgate, instead of varying with each year's arrangements of the plough teams, became occupied by the villein tenant year after year in permanent possession, there would naturally be left, as a survival of the ancient system, that now meaningless and inconvenient scattering of the strips forming a holding all over the open fields which in modern times so incensed Arthur Young, and made the Enclosure Acts necessary.

There is, lastly, another point in which the Welsh laws of co-aration suggest a clue to the reason and origin of a widely spread trait of the open field system. Why were the strips in the open field system uniformly so small? The acre or erw was obviously a furrow-long for the convenience of the ploughing. But what fixed its breadth and its area? This, too, is explained. According to the Welsh laws it was the measure of a day's co-ploughing. This is clear from two passages in the laws where it is called a 'cyvar,' or a 'co-ploughing.' 150 And it would seem that a day's ploughing ended at midday, because in the legal description of a complete ox it is required to plough only to midday.151 The Gallic word for the acre or strip, 'journel,' in the Latin of the monks 'jurnalis,' and [p125] sometimes diurnalis,152 also points to a day's ploughing; while the German word 'morgen' for the same strips in the German open fields still more clearly points to a day's work which ended, like the Welsh 'cyvar,' at noon.

CHAPTER V. MANORS AND SERFDOM UNDER SAXON RULE. — I. THE SAXON 'HAMS' AND 'TUNS' WERE MANORS WITH VILLAGE COMMUNITIES IN SERFDOM UPON THEM. — II. THE RECTITUDINES SINGULARUM PERSONARUM. — III. THE THANE AND HIS SERVICES. — IV. THE GENEATS AND THEIR SERVICES. — V. THE DOUBLE AND ANCIENT CHARACTER OF THE SERVICES OF THE GEBUR—GAFOL AND WEEK-WORK. — VI. SERFDOM ON A MANOR of KING EDWY. — VII. SERFDOM ON A MANOR OF KING ALFRED. — VIII. THE THEOWS OR SLAVES ON THE LORD'S DEMESNE. — IX. THE CREATION OF NEW MANORS. — X. THE LAWS OF KING ETHELBERT—THERE WERE MANORS IN THE SIXTH CENTURY. — XI. RESULT OF THE SAXON EVIDENCE. — CHAPTER V. FOOTNOTES.

[p126]

The hams and tuns were manors.

Having now ascertained that the open field system was prevalent during Saxon, and probably pre-Saxon times, we have next to inquire whether the 'hams' and 'tuns' to which the common fields belonged were manors—i.e. estates with a village community in serfdom upon them—or whether, on the contrary, there once dwelt within them a free village community holding their yard-lands by freehold or allodial tenure.

Let us at once dismiss from the question the word 'manor.' It was the name generally used in the Domesday Survey, for a thing described in the Survey as already existing at the time of Edward the Confessor. The estate called a manor was certainly as much a Saxon institution under the Confessor as it was a Norman one afterwards.

The Domesday book itself does not always adhere to this single word 'manor' throughout its pages. [p127]

The word manerium gives place in the Exeter Survey to the word villa for the whole manor, and mansio for the manor-house; and the same words, villa and mansio, are also used in the instructions153 given at the commencement of the Inquisitio Eliensis. It is perfectly clear, then, that what was called a manor or villa, both in the west and in the east of England, was in fact the estate of a lord with a village community in villenage upon it.

In the Boldon Book also the word villa is used instead of manor.

So in Saxon documents the whole manor or estate was called by various names, generally 'ham' or 'tun.'

In King Alfred's will154 estates in the south-east of England, including the villages upon them, which by Norman scribes would have been called manors, are described as hams (the ham at such a place). In the old English version of the will given in the 'Liber de Hyda' 155 the word 'twune' is used to translate 'ham,' and in the Latin version the word 'villa.' 156

In the Saxon translation of the parable of the prodigal son, the country estate of the citizen—the 'burh-sittenden man'—to which the prodigal was sent to feed swine, and where he starved upon the 'bean-cods' that the swine did eat, was the citizen's 'tune.' 157

So that the 'hams' and 'tuns' of Saxon times were in fact commonly private estates with villages upon them, i.e. manors.

This fact is fully borne out by the series of Saxon [p128] charters from first to last. They generally, as already said, contain grants of whole manors in this sense, including the villages upon them, with all the village fields, pastures, meadows, &c., embraced within the boundaries given. And these boundaries are the boundaries of the whole village or township—i.e. of the whole estate.

Further, a careful examination of Anglo-Saxon documents will show that the Saxon manors, not only at the time of Edward the Confessor, as shown by the Domesday Survey, but also long previously, were divided into the land of the lord's demesne and the land in villenage, though the Norman phraseology was not yet used. The lord of the manor was a thane or 'hlaford.' The demesne land was the thane's inland. All classes of villeins were called geneats. The land in villenage was the geneat-land, or the gesettes-land, or sometimes the gafol-land. And further, this geneat-, or gesettes-, or gafol-land was composed, like the later land in villenage, of hides and yard-lands, whilst the villein tenants of it, as in the Domesday Survey, were divided mainly into two classes: (1) the geburs (villani proper), or holders of yard-lands; and (2) the cottiers with their smaller holdings. Beneath these two classes of holders of geneat land were the theows or slaves, answering to the servi of the Survey. Lastly, there is clear evidence that this was so as early as the date of the laws of King Ine, which claim to represent the customs of the seventh century.

To the proof of these points attention must now be directed. [p129]

In order to make these points clear, attention must be turned to a remarkable document, the Saxon version of which dates probably from the tenth, and the Latin translation from the twelfth century.158

It is entitled the 'Rectitudines Singularum Personarum,' which may be translated 'the services due from various persons.'

It commences with two general sections, the first relating to the services of the 'thane,' and the second to those of the 'geneat.'

Then follow what really are sub-sections of the latter clause, and they describe the services of the various classes of geneats; first of the cottiers.

Then the services of the gebur or holder of a yard-land are described as follows:—

Then follow the special services of the beekeeper, oxherd, cowherd, shepherd, goatherd, &c., upon which we need not dwell here; and the document concludes with another declaration that the services vary according to the custom of each district. [p134]

This important document is therefore a general description of the services due from the thane to the king, and from the classes in villenage to their manorial lord. And it might be the very model from which the form of the Domesday Survey was taken. Both, in fact, first speak of the lord of the manor, and then of the villein tenants; the latter being in both cases divided into the two main classes of villani and cottiers; for, as already stated, the Saxon thane answered to the Norman lord, the Saxon gebur answered to the villanus of the Survey, and the cotsetle to the cottier or bordarius of the Survey. But these various classes require separate consideration.

The 'Rectitudines' begins with the thane or lord of the manor; and informs us that he owed his military and other services (for his manor) to the king—always including the three great needs—the trinoda necessitas; viz. (1) to accompany the king in his military expeditions, or fyrd; (2) to aid in the building of his castles, or burhbote; (3) to maintain the bridges, or brigbote.

The lord's demesne land was called the 'thane's inland.' So, too, in a law of King Edgar's already quoted, the tithes are ordered to be paid 'as well on the thane's inland as on geneat land,' showing that this distinction between the two was exhaustive.

So also in Scotland, where the old Saxon words were not so soon displaced by Norman terms as in [p135] England, the lord of a manor was long called the thane of such and such a place. In the chronicler Wintoun's story of Macbeth, as well as in Shakespeare's version of it, there are the 'thane of Fyfe' and the 'thane of Cawdor.'

And the circumstance which, according to Wintoun, gave rise to Macbeth's hatred of Macduff is itself a graphic illustration of the 'burhbote,' or aid in castle-building due from the thane to his king:—

But the military service was by far the most important of 'the three needs' or services due from the thane to the king. The thane was a soldier first of all things. The very word thane implies this. In translating the story of the centurion who had soldiers under him, the Saxon Gospel makes the [p136] 'Hundredes ealdor' say, 'I have thanes under me' (ic hæbbe þegnas under me).160 And though the text of the translation may not be earlier than the tenth century, yet, as the meaning of words does not change suddenly, it shows that the military service of the thane dated from a still earlier period.

And just as in Norman times the barons and their Norman followers (Francigenæ eorum) were marked off from the population in villenage as companions or associates of the king or some great earl, or as they might now be called 'county men,' so the Saxon thanes 400 years before the Norman Conquest were 'Gesithcundmen,' in respect of their obligation to 'do fyrd-færeld,' i.e. to accompany the king in his royal expeditions. But this association with the king did not break the bond of service. By the laws of King Ine161 the gesithcundmen were fined and forfeited their land if they neglected their 'fyrd:'—

But the 'gesithcund' thanes were landlords as well as soldiers. And King Ine found it needful to enact laws to secure that they performed their landlord's duties. They must not absent themselves from their manors without provision for the cultivation of the land. When he færes, i.e. goes on long expeditions, a gesithcundman may take with him on his journey his reeve, his smith to forge his weapons, and his child's fosterer, or nurse.162 But if he have xx. hides of land, he must show xii. hides at least of [p137] gesettes land on his manor; if he have x. hides, vi. hides of gesettes land; and if he have iii. hides, one and a half hides of gesettes land before he absents himself from his manor.163

That 'geset land' was a general and rather loose term meaning the same thing as 'geneat land' is clear from a charter of A.D. 950, which will be referred to hereafter, wherein a manor is described as containing xxx. hides, ix. of inland and xxi. of 'gesettes land,' and the latter is said to contain so many yard-lands ('gyrda gafol-landes'). This instance also helps us to understand how gafol land, and gesettes land, and geneat land were all interchangeable terms—all, in fact, meaning 'land in villenage,' to the tenants on which we must now turn our attention.

It has been shown that the Saxon thane's estate or manor was divided into thane's inland or demesne land, and geneat land or gesettes land, answering to the land in villenage of the Domesday Survey. Let us now examine into the nature of the villenage on the geneat land under Saxon rule.

'Gesettes land' etymologically seems to mean simply land set or let out to tenants. In the parable of the vineyard, the Saxon translation makes the 'wíngeardes hlaford164 gesette' it out to husbandmen (gesette þone myd eorð-tylion) before he takes his journey into a far country, and the husbandmen are to pay him as tribute a portion of the annual fruits. [p138]

In early times, when population was scanty, there was a lack of husbandmen.

King Alfred, in his Saxon translation of Boethius, into which he often puts observations of his own, expresses in one of the most often quoted of these interpolations what doubtless his own experience had shown him, viz., that 'a king must have his tools to reign with—his realm must be well peopled—full manned.' Unless there are priests, soldiers, and workmen—'gebedmen, fyrdmen, and weorcmen'—no king, he says, can show his craft.165

We are to take it, then, that population was still scanty, that a thane's manor was not always as well stocked with husbandmen as the necessities of agriculture required. The nation must be fed as well as defended, and both these economic needs were imperative. How, then, was a thane to plant new settlers on his 'gesettes-land'?

We have seen the Kelso monks furnishing their tenants with their outfit or 'stuht'—the two oxen needful to till the husbandland of two bovates; also a horse, and enough of oats, barley, and wheat for seed. The 'Rectitudines' shows that in the tenth century this custom had long been followed by Saxon landlords. It further shows that the new tenants so created were settled on yard-lands, and called geburs.

It states that in some places it is the custom that in settling the gebur on the land, there shall be given to him 'to land setene' (i.e. as 'stuht' or outfit) two oxen, one cow, six sheep, and seven acres sown on his yard-land or virgate. Then after the first year [p139] he performs the usual services. Having been supplied by his lord, not only with his stuht, but also even with tools for his work and utensils for his house, it is not surprising that on his death everything reverted to his lord.

The gebur here answers exactly to the villanus of post-Domesday times.166 His normal holding is the yard-land or virgate. His stuht, which goes with the yard-land 'to setene,' or for outfit, is two oxen, one cow, &c.; i.e. one ox for each of the two bovates which made up the yard-land.

That this was the usual outfit of the yard-land, and that the yard-land at the same time was the one-fourth part of the sulung or full plough-land, in still earlier times than the date of the 'Rectitudines,' receives clear confirmation from an Anglo-Saxon will dated A.D. 835, in which there is a gift of 'an half swulung,' and 'to ðem londe iiii oxan & ii cy & 1 scepa,' &c.167 The half-sulung being the double of the yard-land, it is natural that the allowance for outfit in [p140] the bequest of oxen and cows should be just double the outfit assigned by custom to the yard-land. It is obvious that the allotment to the whole sulung would be a full team of eight oxen.

The gebur, then, having been 'set' upon his yard land by his lord, and supplied with his setene or 'stuht,' had to perform his services.

What were these services?

An examination of them as stated in the 'Rectitudines' will show at once their close resemblance to those of the holders of virgates in villenage in post-Domesday times.

They may be classified in the same way as these were classified.

Some of them are called gafol; i.e. they were tributes in money and in kind, and in work at ploughing, &c., in the nature rather of rent, rates, and taxes than anything else. They were as follows:

• At Michaelmas x. gafol-pence.
• At Martinmas xxiii. sesters of barley and ii. hens.168
• At Easter a young sheep, or ii.d.
• Of gafol-ploughing (gafol-yrð) to plough three acres, and sow it from his barn.
• The hearth-penny.
• With another gebur to feed a hound.
• Six loaves to the swineherd of the manor, when he takes the flock to pasture.
• In some places the gebur gives honey-gafol, in some mete-gafol, and in some ale-gafol.

Next there were the precariæ or bene-work, extra special services:

• To plough three acres 'to bene' (ad precem), and two to 'gærsyrðe.' 169 [p141]

Lastly, the chief services were the regular week-work (wic-weorc), generally limited to certain days a week according to the season.

• 'He shall work for week-work two days at such work as he is bid throughout the year, each week; and in August three days' week-work, and from Candlemas to Easter three days.'

These were the services of the gebur or villanus, and we may gather that his yard-land embraced the usual thirty acres or strips, i.e. ten strips in each of the three common fields of his village. This seems to follow from the fact that his outfit included 'seven acres sown.' These seven acres were no doubt on the wheat-field which had to be sown before winter. It was seven acres, and not ten, because the crop on the other three counted as 'gafolyrð' to his lord, and this was not due the first season. The oats or beans on the second or spring-sown field he could sow for himself. The third field was in fallow. The only start he required was therefore the seven acres of wheat which must be sown before winter.

So much for the gebur; now as to the cottier.

The cottier tenant, in respect of his five acres (more or less), rendered similar services on an humbler scale. His week-work was on Mondays each week throughout the year, three days a week at harvest. He was free from land-gafol, but paid hearth-penny and church-scot at Martinmas. The nature of his work was the ordinary service of the geneat as [p142] required by his lord from time to time; only, having no oxen, he was exempt from ploughing, as he was also after the Norman Conquest.

Returning to the services of the gebur, stress must be laid upon their double character. Like the later villanus he paid a double debt to his lord in respect of his yard-land and outfit, or 'setene'—(1) gafol; (2) week-work.

This is a point of great importance at this stage of the inquiry; for it gives us the key to the meaning of an otherwise almost unintelligible passage in the laws of King Ine,170 which bears directly upon the matter in hand.

This passage immediately follows those already quoted, requiring one-half or more of the land of the absentee landlord to be 'gesettes land.'

It follows in natural order after this requirement, because it evidently relates to the process of increasing the number of tenants on the gesettes land, so introducing new geburs or villani, with new yard-lands or virgates, into the village community. The clause is as follows:

[p143] The meaning of it apparently is that if a man agree for a yard-land or more to 'ræd-gafol' (i.e. at such gafol payments as have been described), and plough it, still the lord cannot put the new holding 'to weorce and to gafole,' that is, make the holder completely into a gebur or villanus, owing both gafol and week-work to his lord, unless the lord also supply the homestead ('botl').

That the 'botl' or homestead was looked upon as the essential part of a man's holding is shown by another law of King Ine:—

Now the importance of these passages can hardly be exaggerated; for, if we may trust the genuineness of the laws of King Ine,171 they show more clearly than anything else could do, that in the seventh century—400 years before the Domesday Survey—the manor was already to all intents and purposes what it was afterwards. They show that at that early date part of the land was in the lord's demesne and part let out to tenants, who when supplied by the lord with everything—their homestead and their yard-land—owed, not only customary tribute or gafol, but also 'weorc' or service to the lord; and how otherwise could this 'weorce' be given then or afterwards [p144] except in the shape of labour on the lord's demesne, as is described in the 'Rectitudines'?

It is worth while to notice that while the double debt of both gafol and week-work was due from the gebur or villanus proper, and the week-work was the most servile service, yet even the mere payment of gafol was the sign of a submission to an overlordship. It had a servile taint about it, as well it might, being paid apparently part in kind and part in work. As the class of free hired labourers had not yet been born into existence under these early Saxon economic conditions, in times when the theows were the servants, so the modern class of farmers or free tenants at a rent of another's land had not yet come into being. It was the 'ceorl' who lived on 'gafol land,' 172 and to pay gafol was to do service, though of a limited kind.

The Saxon translators of the Gospels rendered the question, 'Doth your master pay tribute?' 173 by the words 'gylt he gafol?' And they used the same word gafol also in translating the counter question, 'Of whom do kings take tribute, of their own people or of aliens?'

So when Bede described the northern conquest of Ethelfred, king of the Northumbrians, over the Britons in A.D. 603, and spoke of the inhabitants as being either exterminated or subjugated, and their lands as either cleared for new settlers or made tributary to the English, King Alfred in his translation expressed [p145] the latter alternative by the words 'set to gafol'—to gafulgyldum gesette.174

No doubt the Teutonic notion of a subjugated people was that of a people reduced to serfdom or villenage. They—the conquerors—were the nation, the freemen. The conquered race were the aliens, subjected to gafol and servitude.

Thus, recurring to the Saxon translation of the parable of 'the unjust steward,' one may recognise how perfectly naturally everything seemed to the translators to transfer itself to a Saxon thane's estate, and to translate itself into Saxon terms.175

The 'hlaford' of the 'tun' or manor had his 'tun-gerefa' or reeve, just as the Saxon thane had. The land in villenage was occupied not by mere trade debtors of the lord, as our version has it, but by 'gafol-gyldan'—tenants to whom land and goods of the lord had been entrusted, as Saxon tenants were entrusted with their 'setene,' and who, therefore, paid gafol or tribute in kind. The natural gafol of the tenant of an olive-garden would be so many 'sesters' of oil. The tenant of corn land would pay for gafol, like the English tenant of a yard-land inter alia so [p146] many 'mittan' of wheat; and it was the duty of the unrighteous 'tun-gerefa,' or reeve of the manor, to collect the gafol from these tenants, as it was the duty of the Saxon thane's reeve to gather the dues from his servile tenants.

How many otherwise free tenants hired yard-lands without becoming geburs, and rendering the full week-work as well as gafol, we do not know. Except in the Danish district they seem to have left, as we have seen, no trace behind them on most manors in the Domesday Survey. The fact already mentioned, that the yard-lands of geburs, who owed both gafol and services, were sometimes called 'gyrda gafollandes,' shows how completely the gafol and the services had become united as coincidents of a common villein tenure. All villein tenants were apparently 'geneats' and paid 'gafol,' and there is a passage in the laws of King Edgar which states that if a geneat-man after notice should persist in neglecting to pay his lord's gafol, he must expect that his lord in his anger will spare neither his goods nor his life.176

On the whole, leaving out of notice doubtful and exceptional tenants, as well we may, we are now in a position to state generally what were the main classes of villein tenants in early Saxon times, and what were their holdings on the land in villenage, whether it were known as geneat, or geset, or gafol land.

First, the 'Rectitudines,' of the tenth century, describes, as we have seen, these tenants as all geneats or villeins, and records their services in general terms. [p147] It then divides them into classes, just as the Domesday Survey does. And the two chief classes of the geneats are the geburs and the cottiers. These two classes are evidently the villani and the bordarii or cottiers of the Domesday Survey.

Secondly, the same document describes the holdings of these two classes. It speaks of the cottiers as holding mostly five acres each—sometimes more and sometimes less—in singular coincidence with the Domesday Survey and later evidence. And it describes the gebur, as we have seen, as holding a yard-land or virgate, the typical holding of the Domesday villanus, and as having allotted to him as 'outfit' two oxen, just as was the case with the Kelso husbandmen.

Thirdly, the laws of King Ine bring back the evidence to the seventh century by their incidental mention of the yard-land as a typical holding on geset-land; and also of half-hides177 and hides, as well as of geneats178 and geburs,179 with their gafol and weorc.

When this concurrence of the evidence of the tenth and the seventh century is duly considered, it will be seen how complete is the proof that in the seventh century the West Saxon estate, though called a 'tun' or a 'ham,' was in reality a manor in the Norman sense of the term—an estate with a village community in villenage upon it under a lord's jurisdiction. [p148]

The evidence hitherto given on the nature of the serfdom on Anglo-Saxon manors has been of a general character.

We are fortunately able to confirm and illustrate it by reference to actual local instances.

The first example is that of the manor of Tidenham, and it derives a more than ordinary value from its peculiar geographical position.

The parish of Tidenham comprises the wedge-shaped corner of Gloucestershire, shut in between the Wye and the Severn, where they join and widen into the Bristol Channel; while to the north-east, on its land side, it was surrounded by the Forest of Dean.

In the belief of local antiquaries, the Roman road from Gloucester to Caerleon-upon-Usk—the key to South Wales—passed through it as well as the western continuation of the old British road of Akeman Street from the landing-place of the Severn, opposite Aust (where St. Augustine is said to have met the Welsh Christians) to the further crossing-place on the Wye. Lastly, upon it was the southern end of Offa's Dyke, the mysterious rampart which, commencing thus at the mouth of the Wye, extended to the mouth of the Dee.180

The manor probably has been in English hands ever since about the time when, according to the Saxon Chronicle, after Deorham battle in A.D. 577, Bath, Gloucester, and Cirencester were wrested from [p149] the Welsh by Ceawlin, king of the West Saxons. According to the Welsh legends of the Liber Landavensis181 this was about the time when the diocese of Llandaff was curtailed by the Wye instead of the Severn becoming the boundary between the two kingdoms. It may therefore have been for nearly five centuries before the Norman Conquest the extreme corner of West Saxon England on the side of South Wales.

The Manor of Tidenham, & West Wales.

See Larger: West Wales.
Manor of Tidenham.
Go to: List of Illustrations

Conquered probably by Ceawlin, or soon after the year 577, the manor of Tidenham seems to have remained folkland or terra regis of the West Saxon kings, till Offa conquered it from them and gave his name to the dyke upon it. One of its hamlets bore, as we shall find, the name of Cinges tune, and Tidenham Chase remained a royal chase till after the Norman Conquest.

The manor itself was granted by King Edwy in A.D. 956 by charter182 to the Abbot of Bath, under whose name it is registered in the Domesday Survey. It is in this charter of King Edwy that the description of the manor and of the services of the tenants is contained. The services must be regarded, therefore, as those of a royal manor before it was handed over to ecclesiastical hands.

The boundaries as appended to the charter are given below,183 and may still, with slight exceptions, be traced on the Ordnance Survey. [p150]

The northern limit on the Severn is described as Astege pul, now, after a thousand years, known as Ashwell Grange Pill, the puls of 1,000 years ago and the present pills being the little streams which wear away a sort of miniature tidal estuary in the mudbanks as they empty themselves into the Severn and the Wye. Numbers of pills are marked in the Ordnance map, and as many 'puls' are mentioned in the boundaries of Saxon charters and those inserted in the Liber Landavensis.

After the boundaries, under the heading 'Divisiones et consuetudines in Dyddanhamme,' 184 the document proceeds to state that 'at Dyddanhamme are xxx. hides, ix. of inland and xxi. of gesettes land.' The manor was therefore in the tenth century divided into demesne land and land in villenage.

Next are stated separately the contents of each hamlet on the manor, as follows:—

• At Stræt are xii. hides—xxvii. gyrda gafollandes, and on the Severn xxx. cytweras.
• At Middeltun are v. hides—xiiii. gyrda gafollandes, xiiii. cytweras on the Severn, and ii. hæcweras on the Wye.
• At the Cinges túne are v. hides—xiii. gyrda gafollandes, and i. hide above the dyke, which is now also gafolland; and that outside the hamme is still part inland and part gesett to gafol to 'scipwealan.' At the Cinges túne on the Severn are xxi. cytweras, and on the Wye xii.
• At the Bishop's túne are iii. hides, and xv. cytweras on the Wye.
• At Landcawet are iii. hides and ii. hæcweras on the Wye, and ix. cytweras.

Thus this manor, like the Winslow manor, had hamlets or small dependencies upon it, and these are [p151] still traceable on the map. Street is still Stroat on the old Roman street—the Via Julia (?)—from Gloucester to Caerleon. The Cinges túne, now Sudbury, lay on the high wedge-shaped southern promontory above the cliffs, between the Wye and Severn where they join; and it lies as it did then, part on one side and part on the other side of Offa's Dyke, as if the dyke had been cut through its open fields. Its fisheries were naturally some on the Severn and some on the Wye. The 'Bishop's túne' is still traceable in Bishton farm. Lastly, Llancaut, the only hamlet on this Saxon manor 900 years ago with a Welsh name, bears its old name still. This hamlet is surrounded almost entirely by a bend of the Wye, and its situation backed by its woods (coit=wood) may well have protected it from destruction at the time of the Saxon conquest.

Next, it is clear that the geset land in the open fields round each 'túne' or hamlet, except at Llancaut and Bishop's tune, was divided, as usual, into yard-lands—gyrda gafollandes. These yard-lands and the open fields have long since been swept away by the enclosure of the parish.

Besides the yard-lands there were belonging to each hamlet the numerous fisheries—cytweras and hæcweras—some on the Severn and some on the Wye. What were these 'cyt' and 'hæc' weirs?

They certainly were not the ancient dams or banks across the river which are now called 'weirs,' over which the tidal wave sweeps, thus—

It is impossible that there can have been so many of these as there were cytweras and hæcweras 900 [p152] years ago—as many as thirty together at Street, fourteen at Middletune, and twenty-one at Cingestune. The fact is that the old Saxon word wera meant any structure for entrapping fish or aiding their capture. And no doubt arrangements which would not be called 'weirs' now were so called then. The words cyt and hæc weras seem to point rather to wattled basket and hedge weirs than to the solid structures now called weirs.

But the best illustration of what they were may be derived from the arrangements now at work for catching salmon in the Wye and Severn.

The stranger who visits this locality will find here and there across the muddy shore of the Severn structures which at a distance look like breakwaters; but on nearer inspection he will find them to be built up of rows two or three deep of long tapering baskets arranged between upright stakes at regular distances. These baskets are called putts or butts or kypes, and are made of long rods wattled together by smaller ones, with a wide mouth, and gradually tapering almost to a point at the smaller or butt end. These putts are placed in groups of six or nine between each pair of stakes, with their mouths set against the outrunning stream; and each group of them between its two stakes is called a 'puttcher.' The word 'puttcher' can hardly be other than a rapidly pronounced putts weir, i.e. a weir made of putts. If the baskets had been called 'cyts' instead of 'putts,' the group would be a cytweir. So, e.g., the thirty cytweras at Street would represent a breakwater such as may be seen there now, consisting of as many puttchers. This use of what may be called basket weirs [p153] is peculiar to the Wye and the Severn, and has been adopted to meet the difficulty presented by the unusual volume and rapidity of the tidal current.

Group of Puttchers on the Severn near Tedenham.

Go to: List of Illustrations

Then as to the hæcweras there is nothing unusual in the use of barriers or fences of wattle, or, as it is still called, hackle, to produce an eddy, or to entrap the fish. Thus a statute (1 Geo. I. c. 18, s. 14) relating to the fisheries on the Severn and the Wye uses the following words: 'If any person shall make, 'erect, or set any bank, dam, hedge, stank, or net across the same,' &c.

These wattled hedges or hackle-weirs are sometimes used to guide the fish into the puttchers, but generally in the same way as more permanent structures on the Wye, now called cribs, to make an eddy in which the fish are caught from a boat in what is called a stop-net.

This mode of fishing is also peculiar to the Wye and Severn. The boat is fixed by two long stakes sideways across the eddy, and a wide net, like a bag with its open end stretched between two poles, is let down so as to offer a wide open mouth to the stream which carries the closed end of the bag-net under the boat. When a salmon strikes the net the open end is raised out of the water, and the fish is taken out behind. This clumsy process of catching salmon is the ancient traditional method used in the Wye and Severn fisheries, and so tenaciously is it adhered to that the fishermen can hardly be induced to substitute more efficient modern improvements.

So much for the cytweras and the hæcweras.

The fisheries are now almost exclusively devoted to salmon. About the date of the Norman Conquest [p154] the manor of Tidenham was let on lease by the Bishop of Bath to Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury,185 and as a portion of the rent reserved was 6 porpoises (merswin) and 30,000 herrings, it would seem at first sight that the main fisheries there were for herrings rather than salmon, but it is more probable that the lease was a mutual arrangement whereby the archbishop's table was provided with salmon from the west, and the monks of Bath with herrings from the east.

Turning from the fisheries to the services, they are described as follows:186—

And after thus stating, to begin with, the general services of all geneats, the document proceeds, like the 'Rectitudines,' to describe the special services of the gebur, or holder of a yard-land.

[p155] These are the various details of his week-work. Then follow the gafol-payments.

It will be observed that in their week-work the geburs of Tidenham, in addition to strictly agricultural services, had to provide the materials for the puttchers and hedge-weirs, as well as other requisites for the fisheries.

What the eight geocu to be built may have been is doubtful; but the tyning or wattling of three ebbs was at once explained on the spot by the lessee of the fisheries, who pointed out that when hackle weirs were used, three separate wattled hedges would always be needed, as, owing to the very various heights of the tide, the hedge must be differently placed for the spring tides, the middle tides, and the neap tides respectively.

The 'week-work' was shown by the 'Rectitudines' to be the chief service of the gebur, and this work, added to the gafol, made the holder of the yard-land into a gebur, according to the laws of Ine.

Two things are very striking about the week-work on the manor of Tidenham. (1) There is no limit to three days a week more or less, as in the 'Rectitudines.' (2) There is a clear adaptation of the week-work [p156] to local circumstances. In particular the fisheries have a prominent regard in its arrangement. As described in the 'Rectitudines,' the work varied according to the customs of each place.

So much for the 'week-work.'

Next, there were at Tidenham no 'precariæ,' or 'bene' works, which formed so prominent a feature in the later services. When the week-work was not limited to some days only, clearly there was no need or room for these additional services.

Lastly, as to the gafol—this formed a prominent feature of the weorc-ræden of the Tidenham yard-land.

It consisted mainly of the produce of the land, like the gafol of the gafolgylders in the Saxon translation of the parable of 'the unjust steward.' Honey and malt, or ale, and yarn and pork—these, as we shall see by-and-by, were the chief products of this and the adjoining districts of Wales.

These, then, were the services of the geburs of Tidenham in respect of their yard-lands in A.D. 950, while the manor was still in royal hands just before it was handed over to the Abbot of Bath.

Now let us compare these services with the services on the same manor 350 years afterwards, in the time of Edward I. An Inquisitio post mortem of the 35th year of Edward I. enables us to make this comparison.187

The following is an abstract of the services of a tenant who held a messuage and xviii. acres of land in villenage (probably a half-virgate). [p157]

His week-work was—

• 5 days in every other week for xxxv. weeks in the year from Michaelmas to Midsummer, except the festival works of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost; 8712 works.
• 212 days every week for 6 weeks from Midsummer to Gules of August; 15 works.
• 3 days every week for 8 weeks from Gules of August to Michaelmas; 24 works.
• And of this week-work between Michaelmas and Christmas, 1 day's work every other week was to lie ploughing and harrowing a half-acre. Each ploughing was accounted for a day's work.

Then as to his precariæ,—

• He made 1 precaria called 'cherched,' and he ploughed and harrowed a half-acre for corn, and sowed it with 1 bushel of corn from his own seed; and in the time of harvest he had to reap and bind and stack the produce, receiving one sheaf for himself on account of the half-acre, 'as much as can be bound with a binding of the same corn, cut near the land.'
• And he had to plough 1 acre for oats, and this was accounted for 2 days' manual work.
• And he made another precaria, ploughing a half-acre with his own plough for winter sowing with as many oxen as he possessed, so that there should be a team of 8 oxen. But if he had no oxen he did not plough.
• And he made [several other precariæ of various kinds].

Lastly came his gafol, &c.

• He gave i. hen, which was called 'wodehen,' at Christmas.
• And 5 eggs at Easter.
• And 1d. for every yearling pig, and 12d. for those only of half-year, by way of pannage.
• He paid . . . for every horse or mare sold.
• And viii. gallons of beer at every brewing.
• And he could not marry his daughter without licence.

Now, comparing the services on the manor of Tidenham at these dates 300 years apart, at which period was the service most complete serfdom? at the later date, when the week-work of the villeins was limited to two and a half or three days a week, and in addition he made precariæ or extra works; or at the earlier date, when his week-work was unlimited [p158] as to the days, and therefore there was no room for the extra work?

Surely the unlimited week-work marked the most complete serfdom. Surely the later services, limited in their amount and commutable into money payments, were clearly a mitigated service fast growing into a fixed money rent. In fact, the gebur or villanus was fast growing into a mere customary tenant in the time of Edward I. Indeed, he is not called in the 'Inquisition' a 'villanus,' but a 'custumarius,' and such he was. He was halfway on the road to freedom. Another sign of the times was this, that at the later date, side by side with the customary tenants on the land in villenage, a whole host of libere tenentes had already grown up upon the lord's demesne, not, as we have more than once observed, necessarily liberi homines at all, but some of them villein tenants or custumarii holding additional pieces of free land of the lord's demesne. Of these free tenants there were none at the earlier period. So that the gebur, with his weorc-ræden 100 years and more before the Norman Conquest, was much more clearly a serf, and rendered far more complete and servile services than his successor in the thirteenth century, with the Black Death and Wat Tyler's rebellion in the near future before him.

Finally, let us look backward and ask how long this more complete serfdom had lasted on the manor of Tidenham.

If in the laws of King Ine are found, as we have seen, the 'geset land' and 'gyrd lands,' and the 'gafol,' and the 'weorc,' and the 'geneat,' and the 'gebur,' and the obligation not to leave the lord's [p159] land; and if all those were incidents of what in the 'Rectitudines' and in the charter of King Edwy just examined was in fact serfdom—if the laws of Ine are good evidence that this serfdom existed in full force in the seventh century anywhere—they must surely be good evidence that it existed on the manor of Tidenham. For it was, as we have seen, a royal manor of King Edwy, and most probably he had received it through a succession of royal holders from King Ine. There is no evidence of its having ceased to be folcland, and so to be in the royal demesne of the kings of Wessex or of Mercia, from Ine's time to Edwy's. And if it was a royal manor of King Ine's, surely the laws of King Ine may be taken to interpret the serfdom on his own estate. Lastly, looking further back still, as King Ine probably held the manor in direct succession from Ceawlin, or whoever conquered it from the Welsh, and cut it from the diocese of Llandaff in A.D. 577 or thereabouts, the inference is very strong indeed that the weorc-ræden had remained much the same ever since, 100 years before the date of King Ine's laws, it first fell under Saxon rule.

The lesson to be learned from a careful tracing back of the customs of such a manor as Tidenham, and we might add also the methods of fishing, and the construction of the 'cyt' and 'hæcweras,' surely is, that in those early times changes in custom and habit were slow, and not easily made. It would be as unlikely that between the days of King Ceawlin and those of King Ine great changes should have been made in the internal economic structure of a Saxon manor, as that in the same period bees should have changed the shape of their hexagonal cells. [p160]

The second example of a Saxon manor is that of 'Stoke-by-Hysseburne,' a royal estate in Hampshire.188 It had belonged in succession to King Egbert, King Ethelwulf, and King Alfred, and was by his son Edward given over to the monks of the 'old minster' at Winchester under the following curious circumstances.

King Alfred, towards the close of his reign, in his anxiety for the better education of the children of his nobles, called to his aid the monk Grimbald, from the monastery of St. Bertin, near St. Omer in Picardy, in which he himself had spent some time in his childhood on his way to Rome. It was the plan of Grimbald and King Alfred to build a new monastery (the 'new minster') at Winchester where Grimbald should carry out the royal object. But King Alfred died before this wish was fully accomplished. He had bought the land for the chapel and dormitory in [p161] the city, but the building and endowment of the monastery was left for his son King Edward to complete. Grimbald, then eighty-two years old, was the first abbot, but within a year died and was canonised. The body of King Alfred lay enshrined in Winchester Cathedral, in the 'old minster' of the bishop; but the canons of the old foundation having, according to the Abbey Chronicle, conceived 'delirious fancies' that the royal ghost, roaming by night about their cloisters, could not rest in peace, the remains of Alfred and his queen were removed to the 'new minster.' 189

Now, King Ethelwolf, when dying, having left to King Alfred his son certain lands at 'Cyseldene' and elsewhere, with instructions when he died to give them over to the refectory of the old minster, King Alfred in his will gave his land at that place to the proper official at Winchester accordingly. In other words, the body of King Alfred lay in the 'new minster,' and this land given for the good of his soul belonged to the 'old minster.' So it came to pass—whether this time the 'delirious fancies' of the superstitious canons had anything to do with it or not cannot be told—that this property at Cyseldene, like the royal donor's body, could not rest in the hands of the 'old minster,' but must be transferred to the 'new minster.' So King Edward in the year 900 made an arrangement with the monks, whereby the lands at Cyseldene were transferred to the 'new minster,' and by charter he gave instead of them to the 'old minster' ten holdings (manentes) at [p162] Stoke-be-Hisseburne, with all the men who were thereon, and those at 'Hisseburne,' when King Alfred, died.

It is in the charter190 effecting this object that the services are described. 'Here are written the gerihta 'that the ceorls shall do at Hysseburne.' From every 'hiwisc' such and such services. The hiwisce or family holding seems from the services to have been a yard-land of 30 acres. The services were as follows:—

Here we have clearly, as in the 'Rectitudines,' the gafol, including the three acres of gafol-yrth or ploughing, as well as other gafol-work and payments in [p163] kind. And if the services had stopped here, we might have concluded that the 'ceorls' of Hysseburne were gafolgelders, and not serfs. But there is another clause which forbids such a conclusion—which shows that, in the words of the laws of King Ine, they were 'set to work as well as to gafol.' It is this:—

Comparing these services with the other examples, they do not seem to be any more the services of freemen, or any less those of serfs. They seem to plainly bear the ordinary characteristics of what is meant by serfdom wherever it is found. There is the gafol and there is the week-work; and the latter is not limited to certain days each week, as in the 'Rectitudines,' but 'each week, except three in the year, they are TO WORK AS THEY ARE BID.'

And these are the services—this is the serfdom—on a manor which was part of the royal domain of King Alfred, which for three successive reigns at least, and probably for generations earlier, had been royal domain, and now by the last royal holder is handed over, with the men that were upon it, to the perpetual, never-dying lordship of a monastery, as an eternal inheritance.

Finally, the evidence of these Saxon documents—the 'Rectitudines' and the charters of Tidenham and Hysseburne—read in the light of the later evidence and of the earlier laws of King Ine, is so clear that it seems needful to explain how it has happened that [p164] there has ever been any doubt as to the servile nature of the services of the holders of yard-lands in Saxon times. The explanation is simple. Mr. Kemble quotes from all these documents in his chapter on 'Lænland;' 191 but for want of the clear knowledge what a yard-land was, it never seems to have occurred to him that in these services of the geburs or holders of yard-lands we have the services of the later villani of the Domesday Survey—the services of the holdings embracing by far the greater part of the arable land of England. Dr. Leo, in his work on the 'Rectitudines,' confesses that he does not know what is meant by the yard-land of the gebur.192 It is only when, proceeding from the known to the unknown, we get a firm grasp of the fact that the yard-land was the normal holding of the gebur or villanus, that it was a bundle of normally thirty scattered acres in the open fields, that it was held in villenage, and that these were the services under which it was held of the manorial lord of the ham or tun to which it belonged—it is only when these facts are known and their importance realised, that these documents become intelligible, and take their proper place as links in what really is an unbroken chain of evidence.

One word must be said of the theows or slaves on the lord's demesne—the thane's inland—lest we should [p165] forget the existence of this lowest class of all, in contrast with whose slavery the geburs and cottiers on the geneat land, notwithstanding their serfdom, were 'free.' These latter were prædial serfs 'adscripti glebæ,' but not slaves. The theows were slaves, bought and sold in the market, and exported from English ports across the seas as part of the commercial produce of the island. Some of the theows were slaves by birth. But it seems to have been a not uncommon thing for freemen to sell themselves into slavery under the pressure of want.193

The 'servi' of the Domesday Survey were no doubt the successors of the Saxon theows. And as in the Survey the servi are mostly found on the demesne land of the lord, so probably in Saxon times the theows were chiefly the slaves of the manor-house. Most of the farm work on the thane's inland, especially the ploughing, was done no doubt by the services of the villein tenants; but as, in addition to the villein ploughs, there were the great manorial plough teams, so also there were theows doing slave labour of various kinds on the home farm of the lord, and maintained at the lord's expense.

In the bilingual dialogue of Ælfric,194 written in Saxon and Latin late in the tenth century as an educational lesson, in the reply of the 'yrthling' or ploughman to the question put as to the nature of his daily work, a touching picture is given of the work of a theow conscious of his thraldom:— [p166]

Perhaps some day his lord will provide him with an outfit of oxen, give him a yard-land, and make him into a gebur instead of a theow. This at least seems to be his yearning.

We have hitherto spoken only of the manors. Are we therefore to conclude that there was no land extra-manorial?

It may be asked whether 'folkland' was not extra-manorial.

Now in one sense all that belonged to the ancient demesne of the Crown was folkland and extra-manorial. All estates with the villages and towns upon them, which had no manorial lord but the king, [p167] were in the demesne of the Crown, as also were the royal forests.

Formerly, while there were many petty kings in England, and before the kingship had attained its unity and its full growth, i.e. before it had, as we are told by historians, absorbed in itself exclusively the sole representation of the nation, the term folkland was apparently applied to all that was afterwards included in the royal demesne. All that had not become the boc-land or private property either of members of the royal house or of a monastery or of a private person was still folkland. And it would appear that the kings had originally no power to alienate this folkland without the consent of the great men of their witan.

But inasmuch as the royal demesne or folkland included an endless number of manors as well as forest, it cannot properly be said that it was necessarily extra-manorial. More correctly it was in the manor of the king. The king was its manorial lord, and the geburs and cottiers upon it were geneats or villani of the king. The Tidenham and Hysseburne manors were both of them manors of the royal demesne until they were granted by charter to their new monastic owners.

Now, it is clear that in the course of time, after that in a similar way grant after grant had been made of 'ham' after 'ham,' with its little territory—its ager or agellus, or agellulus, as the ecclesiastical writers were wont to describe it in the charters—to the king's thanes or to monasteries, as boc-land or private estate, the number of 'hams' still remaining folkland would grow less and less. [p168]

In the meantime the royal forests were managed by royal foresters under separate laws and regulations of great severity, whilst the royal hams or manors were put under the management of a resident steward, præpositus or villicus—in Saxon 'tun-gerefa,'—or were let out for life as lænland to neighbouring great men or their sons, or to thanes in the royal service.

This granting of life-leases of folkland or hams on the royal demesne seems to have been a usual mode of rewarding special military services, and Bede bitterly complained that the profuse and illegitimate grants which were wheedled out of the king for pretended monastic purposes had already in his time seriously weakened the king's power of using the royal estates legitimately as a means of keeping up his army and maintaining the national defences.195 To be able to provide some adequate maintenance for the thanes, on whose services he relied, was a king's necessity; for well might King Alfred enforce the truth of the philosophy of his favourite Boethius by exclaiming that every one may know how 'full miserable and full unmighty' kings must be who cannot count upon the support of their thanes.196

But from the nature of the case it was inevitable that the area of folkland or royal demesne must constantly be lessened as each succeeding grant increased the area of the boc-land. In other words, to use the later phrase, the tendency was not only for new [p169] manors to be created out of the royal forests and wastes, but also for more and more of the royal manors to pass from the royal demesne into private hands.

Now there is a remarkable passage in one of King Alfred's treatises197 which incidentally throws some light upon this process, and explains the way in which new manors may have been created. He describes how the forest or a great wood provided every [p170] requisite of building, shafts and handles for tools, bay timbers and bolt timbers for house-building, fair rods (gerda) with which many a house (hus) may be constructed, and many a fair tun timbered, wherein men may dwell permanently in peace and quiet, summer and winter, which, writes the king with a sigh, 'is more than I have yet done!' There was, he said, an eternal 'ham' above, but He that had promised it through the holy fathers might in the meantime make him, so long as he was in this world, to dwell softly in a log-hut on lænland ('lænan stoclif' 198), waiting patiently for his eternal inheritance. So we wonder not, he continued, that men should work in timber-felling and in carrying and in building,199 for a man hopes that if he has built a cottage on lænland of his lord, with his lord's help, he may be allowed to lie there awhile, and hunt and fowl and fish, and occupy the læn as he likes on sea and land, until through his lord's grace he may perhaps some day obtain boc-land and permanent inheritance. Then finally he completes his parable by reverting once more to the contrast between 'thissa lænena stoclife' and 'thara ecena hama'—between the log hut on lænland and the permanent freehold 'ham' on the boc-land, or hereditary manorial estate.

It is true that in this passage King Alfred does not suggest distinctly that the lord would make the actual holding of lænland into boc-land, thus converting a clearing in his forest into a new manor for his thane; but, on the other hand, there was a good reason [p171] for this omission, seeing that such a suggestion would have just overreached the point of his parable.

Be this as it may, the vivid little glimpse we get into the modus operandi of the possible growth of a Saxon manorial estate, out of folkland granted first as lænland, and then as boc-land, or out of the woods or waste of an ealdorman's domain, may well be made use of to illustrate the matter in hand.

The typical importance in so many ways of the gyrd, or rod, or virga in the origin and growth of the Saxon 'tun' or 'ham' is worth at least a moment's notice.

The typical site for a new settlement was a clearing in a wood or forest, because of the 'fair rods' which there abound. The clearing was measured out by rods. An allusion to this occurs in Notker's paraphrase of Psa. lxxviii. 55—'He cast out the heathen before them, and divided them an inheritance by line.' The Vulgate which Notker had before him was 'Et sorte divisit eis terram in funiculo distributionis;' and he translated the last clause thus—'teilta er daz lant mit mazseile,'—to which he added, 'also man nu tuot mit RUOTO,' as they now do it with rods, i.e. at St. Gall in the tenth or eleventh century.200

So in England the typical holding in the cleared land of the open fields was called yard-land, or in earlier Saxon a gyrd landes, or in Latin a virgata terræ; yard, gyrd, and virga all meaning rod, and all meaning also in a secondary sense a yard measure. The holdings in the open fields were of yarded or [p172] rooded land—land measured out with a rod into acres four rods wide, each rod in width being therefore a rood, as we have seen.

Again, the whole homestead was called a tun or a worth, because it was tyned or girded with a wattled fence of gyrds or rods. And so, too, in the Gothic of Ulfilas the homestead was a 'gard.' So that in the evident connexion of these words we seem to get confirmation of the hint given by King Alfred of the process of the growth of new manors.

The young thane, with his lord's permission, makes a clearing in a forest, building his log hut and then other log huts for his servants. At first it is forest game on which he lives. By-and-by the cluster of huts becomes a little hamlet of homesteads. He provides his servants with their outfits of oxen, and they become his geburs. The cleared land is measured out by rods into acres. The acres ploughed by the common plough are allotted in rotation to the yard-lands. A new hamlet has grown up in the royal forest, or in the outlying woods of an old ham or manor. In the meantime the king perhaps rewards his industrious thane, who has made the clearing in his forest, with a grant of the estate with the village upon it, as his boc-land for ever, and it becomes a manor, or the lord of the old manor of which it is a hamlet grants to him the inheritance, and the hamlet becomes a subject manor held of the higher lord.

So we seem now to see clearly how new tuns and hams or manors were always growing up century after century, on the royal demesne and on private estates or manors, as in a former chapter it became [p173] clear incidentally how new geburs with fresh yard-lands could be added to the village community, and the strips which made up the yard-lands intermixed with those of their neighbours in the village fields.

We have seen that not only the general description of serfdom contained in the 'Rectitudines,' but also the two examples we have been able to examine of serfdom upon particular manors in Saxon times, testify clearly to the existence of a serfdom upon Saxon manors as complete and onerous as the later serfdom upon Norman manors. And we have seen that, connecting this evidence with that of the laws of King Ine, the proof is clear of the existence of manors and serfdom in the seventh century, i.e. 400 years before the Norman Conquest. There remains to be quoted the still earlier though scanty evidence of the laws of King Ethelbert, A.D. 597–616; which, if genuine, bring us back to the date of the mission of St. Augustine to England.

The evidence of these laws is accidental and indirect, but taken in connexion with that already considered, it seems to show conclusively that the 'hams' and 'tuns' of that early period were already manors. Upon one point at least it is clear. It goes so far as to indicate that they were in the ownership of individuals, and not of free village communities.

[p174] The following passages occur:—

If there be any doubt as to the manorial character of these 'hams' and 'tuns,' it lies not in the point of the single ownership of them, but in other points, whether they were worked and tilled by the owners' slaves, or by a village community in serfdom.

The only classes of tenants which are mentioned in the laws of King Ethelbert are the three grades of læts referred to in the following passage:

The word læt is of doubtful meaning in this passage. It might have reference to the Roman læti, or people of conquered tribes deported into Roman provinces at the end of a war; or it might refer to the liti or lidi—the servile tenants mentioned in so many of the early Continental codes. We are not yet in a position to decide. But in any case these læts of King Ethelbert's laws were clearly of a semi-servile class here in Kent, as were the lidi in Frankish Gaul,201 for their 'wergild' was distinctly less than that of the Kentish freemen.202 Whether they were a [p175] different class from the geburs or villani, or identical with them, it is not easy to decide.

The evidence of the earliest Saxon or Jutish laws thus leaves us with a strong presumption, if not actual certainty, that the Saxon ham or tun was the estate of a lord, and not of a free village community, and that it was so when the laws of the Kentish men were first codified a few years after the mission of St. Augustine.

It becomes, therefore, all but impossible that the manorial character of English hams and tuns can have had an ecclesiastical origin. The codification of the laws was possibly indeed the direct result of ecclesiastical influence no less than in the case of the Alamannic, and Bavarian, and Visigothic, and Burgundian, and Lombardic codes. In all these cases the codification partook, to some extent, of the character of a compact between the king and the Church. Room had to be made, so to speak, for the new ecclesiastical authority. A recognised status and protection had to be given to the Church for the first time, and this introduction of a new element into national arrangements was perhaps in some cases the occasion of the codification. This may be so; but at the same time it is impossible that a new system of land tenure can have been suddenly introduced with the new [p176] religion. The property granted to the Church from the first was already manorial. A ham or a tun could not be granted to the Church by the king, or an earl, unless it already existed as a manorial estate. The monasteries became, by the grants which now were showered down upon them, lords of manors which were already existing estates, or they could not have been transferred.

Further, looking within the manor, whether on the royal demesne or in private hands, it seems to be clear that as far back as the evidence extends, i.e. the time of King Ine, the holdings—the yard-lands—were held in villenage, and were bundles of a recognised number of acre or half-acre strips in the open field, handed down from one generation to another in single succession without alteration.

Now let it be fully understood what is involved in this indivisible character of the holding, in its devolution from one holder to another without division among heirs. We have seen that the theory was that as the land and homestead, and also the setene, or outfit, were provided by the lord, they returned to the lord on the death of the holder. The lord granted the holding afresh, most often, no doubt, to the eldest son or nearest relation of the landholder on his payment of an ox or other relief in recognition of the servile nature of the tenure, and thus a custom of primogeniture, no doubt, grew up, which, in the course of generations—how early we do not know—being sanctioned by custom, could not be departed from by the lord. The very possibility of this permanent succession, generation after generation, of a single holder to the indivisible bundle of strips [p177] called a yard-land or virgate, thus seems to have implied the servile nature of the holding. The lord put in his servant as tenant of the yard-land, and put in a successor when the previous one died. This seems to be the theory of it. It was probably precisely the same course of things which ultimately produced primogeniture in the holding of whole manors. The king put in a thane or servant of his (sometimes called the 'king's geneat'), or a monastery put in a steward or villicus to manage a manor. When he died his son may have naturally succeeded to the office or service, until by long custom the office became hereditary, and a succession or inheritance by primogeniture under feudal law was the result. The benefice, or læn, or office was probably not at first generally hereditary; though of course there were many cases of the creation of estates of inheritance, or boc-land, by direct grant of the king. As we have seen from the passage quoted from Bede, the læn of an estate for life was the recognised way in which the king's thanes were rewarded for their services.

Thus it seems that in the very nature of things the permanent equality of the holdings in yard-lands (or double, or half yard-lands), on a manor, was a proof that the tenure was servile, and that the community was not a free village community. For imagine a free village community taking equal lots, and holding these lots, as land of inheritance, by allodial tenure, and with (what seems to have been the universal custom of Teutonic nations as regards land of inheritance) equal division among heirs, how could the equality be possibly maintained? One holder of a yard-land would have seven sons, and another two, and another [p178] one. How could equality be maintained generation after generation? What could prevent the multiplication of intricate subdivisions among heirs, breaking up the yard-lands into smaller bundles of all imaginable sizes? Even if a certain equality could be restored, which is very unlikely, at intervals, by a re-division, which should reverse the inequality produced by the rule of inheritance, what would become of the yard-lands? How could the contents of the yard-land remain the same on the same estate for hundreds of years, notwithstanding the increase in the number of sharers in the land of the free village community?

We may take it, then, as inherently certain that the system of yard-lands is a system involving in its continuance a servile origin. The community of holders of yard-lands we may regard as a community of servile tenants, without any strict rights of inheritance—in theory tenants at the will of their lord, becoming by custom adscripti glebæ, and therefore tenants for life, and by still longer custom gaining a right of single undivided succession by primogeniture, or something very much like it.

Now we know that the holdings were yard-lands and the holders geburs, rendering the customary gafol and week-work to their lords, in the time of King Ine, if we may trust the genuineness of his 'laws.' There was but an interval of 100 years between Ine and Ethelbert; whilst Ine lived as near to the first conquest of large portions of the middle districts of England as Ethelbert did to the conquest of Kent.

The laws of Ethelbert, taken in connexion with the subsequent laws of Ine, and the later actual [p179] instances of Saxon manors which have been examined, form a connected chain, and bring back the links of the evidence of the manorial character of Saxon estates to the very century in which the greater part of the West Saxon conquests took place. The existence of earl's and king's and men's hams and tuns in the year of the codification of the Kentish laws, A.D. 602 or thereabouts, means their existence as a manorial type of estate in the sixth century; and with the exception of the southern districts, the West Saxon conquests were not made till late in the sixth century. Surely there is too short an interval left unaccounted for to allow of great economic changes—to admit of the degeneracy of an original free village community if a widely spread institution, into a community in serfdom. So that the evidence strongly points to the hams and tuns having been manorial in their type from the first conquest. In other words, so far as this evidence goes, the Saxons seem either to have introduced the manorial system into England themselves, founding hams and tuns on the manorial type, or to have found them already existing on their arrival in Britain. There seems no room for the theory that the Saxons introduced everywhere free village communities on the system of the German 'mark,' which afterwards sank into serfdom under manorial lords.

But before we can be in a position to understand what probably happened we must turn our attention to those portions of Britain which were not manorial, and where village communities did not generally exist. They form an integral part of our present England, and English economic history has to do with the [p180] economic growth of the whole people. It cannot, therefore, confine itself to facts relating to one element only of the nation, and to one set of influences, merely because they became in the long run the paramount and overruling ones. And, moreover, the history of the manorial system itself cannot be properly understood without an understanding also of the parallel, and perhaps older, tribal system, which in the course of many centuries it was destined in some districts to overrule and supplant; in others, after centuries of effort, to fail in supplanting.

CHAPTER VI. THE TRIBAL SYSTEM (IN WALES). — I. EVIDENCE OF THE DOMESDAY SURVEY. — II. THE WELSH LAND SYSTEM IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY. — III. THE WELSH LAND SYSTEM ACCORDING TO THE WELSH LAWS. — IV. LAND DIVISIONS UNDER THE WELSH CODES. — V. EARLIER EVIDENCE OF THE PAYMENT OF WELSH GWESTVA, OR FOOD-RENT. — CHAPTER VI. FOOTNOTES.

[p181]

The Saxon land system has now been examined. No feature has been found to be more marked and general than its universally manorial character; that is to say, the Saxon 'ham' or 'tun' was an estate or manor with a village community in villenage upon it. And the services of the villein tenants were of a uniform and clearly defined type; they consisted of the combination of two distinct things—fixed gafol payments in money, in kind, or in labour, and the more servile week-work.

It is needful now to examine the land system beyond the border of Saxon conquest.

A good opportunity of doing this occurs in the Domesday Survey.

The Tidenham manor has already been examined. It afforded a singularly useful example of the Saxon system. Its geographical position, at the extreme south-west corner of England, on the side of Wales, enabled us to trace its history from its probable conquest in 577, or soon after, and to conclude that it remained Saxon from that time to the date of [p182] the Survey; and distinctly manorial was found to be the character of its holdings and services.

Now, the neighbouring land, on the west side of the Wye, was equally remarkable in its geographical position. For as long as Tidenham had been the extreme south-west corner of England, so long had the neighbouring land between the Wye and the Usk been the extreme south-east corner of unconquered Wales.

It was part of the district of Gwent, and it seems to have remained in the hands of the Welsh till Harold conquered it from the Welsh king Gruffydd, a few years only before the Norman Conquest.

Harold seems to have annexed whatever he conquered between the Wye and the Usk—i.e. in Gwent—to his earldom of Hereford; and after the Norman Conquest it fell into the hands of William FitzOsborn, created by William the Conqueror Earl of Hereford and Lord of Gwent.203

It was he204 who built at Chepstow the Castle of Estrighoiel, the ruins of which still stand on the west bank of the Wye, opposite Tidenham. His son, Roger FitzOsbern, succeeded to the earldom of Hereford and the lordship of Gwent; and, upon his rebellion [p183] and imprisonment, this region of Wales became terra regis, and as such is described in the Domesday Survey, mostly as a sort of annexe to Gloucestershire,205 but partly as belonging to the county of Hereford.206

Nor is Gwent the only district very near to Tidenham whose Welsh history can be traced down to the time of the Domesday Survey. There was another part of ancient Wales, the district of Ergyng, or Archenfield,—which included the 'Golden Valley' of the Dour. It lay, like Gwent—but further north—between the unmistakable boundaries of the Wye and the Usk, and it remained Welsh till conquered by Harold; and this is confirmed by the fact that the district of 'Arcenefelde' is brought within the limits of the Domesday Survey207 as an irregular addition to Herefordshire, just as Gwent was an annexe to Gloucestershire.

Here, then, we have two districts, one to the west and the other to the north of Tidenham, both of which clearly remained Welsh till conquered by Harold a few years before the Norman Conquest, and both of them are described in the Domesday Survey. Further, it so happens that because they had been but recently conquered, and had not yet been added to any English county, and because also their customs differed from those of the neighbouring English manors, the services of their tenants, quite out of ordinary course, are described.

So that, by a convenient chance, we are able to bring together upon the evidence of the Domesday [p184] Survey the land systems of a district which for five hundred years before the Norman Conquest had been the extreme south-east edge of Wales, and of a district which for the same five hundred years had been the extreme south-west corner of Saxon England, beyond the Severn.

We have seen what was the Saxon land system on one side of the Wye, which divided the two districts; let us now see what was the Welsh land system on the other side of the river, so far as it is disclosed in the Survey.

Part of the Welsh district of Gwent is thus described in the Domesday annexe to Gloucestershire:—

Again, a little further on, this entry occurs:—

Passing to the Domesday description of the district of Archenfield, we find a similar record.

The heading of the survey for Herefordshire211 is as follows: 'Hic annotantur terras tenentes in [p185] Herefordscire et in Arcenefelde et in Walis.' And further on212 we learn that—

There are other instances of similar honey rents, e.g.—

The distinctive points in these descriptions of the recently Welsh districts west and north of Tidenham are obviously (1) the prevalence of produce or food rents—honey, cows, sheep, pigs, &c.—honey being the most prominent item; (2) the absence of the word 'manor,' used everywhere else in the survey of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire; (3) the remarkable grouping in the district of Gwent of the 'villas' in batches of thirteen or fourteen, each batch under a separate præpositus. [p186]

It is clear that on the Welsh side of the Wye Welsh instead of Saxon customs prevailed, and that these were some of them.213 So much we learn from these irregular additions of newly conquered Welsh ground to the area of the Domesday Survey.

The meaning of the peculiarities thus indicated will become apparent when the Welsh system has been examined upon its own independent evidence.

There is no reason why, in trying to learn the nature of the Welsh land system, the method followed throughout, of proceeding backwards from the known to the unknown, should not be followed.

It has already been shown that such arable fields as there are in Wales, like the Saxon arable fields, were open fields. They were shown to be divided by turf balks, two furrows wide,214 into strips called erws—representing a day's work in ploughing. The Welsh laws were also found to supply the simplest and clearest solution given anywhere of the reason of the scattering of the strips in the holdings, as well as of the relations of the grades of holdings to the number of oxen contributed by the holders to the common plough team of eight oxen.

In fact, the Welsh codes clearly prove that, as regards arable husbandry, the open field system was the system prevalent throughout all the three districts of Wales. [p187]

But partly from the mountainous nature of the country, and partly from the peculiar stage of economic development through which the Welsh were passing, long after the Norman Conquest they were still a pastoral people. Cattle rather than corn claimed the first consideration, and ruled their habits; and hence the Welsh land system, even in later times, was very different from that of the Saxons.

In fact, the two land systems, though both using an open-field husbandry, were in their main features radically distinct. In those parts of Wales which were unconquered, and therefore uncivilised, till the conquest of Edward I., we look in vain in the early surveys for the manor or estate with the village community in villenage upon it.

The Welsh system was not manorial. Its unit was not a village community on a lord's estate.

As late as the twelfth century Giraldus Cambrensis215 described the houses of the Welsh as not built either in towns or even in villages, but as scattered along the edges of the woods. To his eye they seemed mere huts made of boughs of trees twisted together, easily constructed, and lasting scarcely more than a season. They consisted of one room, and the whole family, guests and all, slept on rushes laid along the wall, with their feet to the fire, the smoke of which found its way through a hole in the roof.216 The Welsh, in fact, being a pastoral people, had two sets of homesteads. In summer their herds fed on the higher ranges of the hills, and in winter in the valleys. So they themselves, following their cattle, had separate [p188] huts for summer and for winter use, as was also the custom in the Highlands of Scotland, and is still the case in the higher Alpine valleys. Giraldus Cambrensis describes the greater part of the land as in pasture and very little as arable; and accordingly the food of the Welsh he describes, just as Cæsar had described it eleven centuries earlier, as being chiefly the produce of their herds—milk, cheese and butter, and flesh in larger proportions than bread.217 The latter was mostly of oats.

The Welsh ploughed for their oats in March and April, and for wheat in summer and winter, yoking to their ploughs seldom fewer than four oxen; and he mentions as a peculiarity that the driver walked backward in front of the oxen, as we found was the custom in Scotland.218

Another marked peculiarity of the Welsh was their hereditary liking and universal training for warlike enterprise. They were soldiers as well as herdsmen; even husbandmen eagerly rushed to arms from the plough.219 Long settlement and the law of division of labour had not yet brought about the separation of the military from the agricultural population of Wales even so late as the twelfth century. And here we come upon traces of their old tribal economy. For the facts that they had not yet attained to settled villages and townships, that they had not yet passed from the pastoral to the agricultural stage, that they were still craving after warfare and wild enterprise—all [p189] these are traces of tribal habits still remaining. And a still clearer mark of the same thing was the stress they laid upon their genealogy. Even the common people (he says) keep their genealogies, and can not only readily recount the names of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but even refer back to the sixth or seventh generation, or beyond them, in this manner: Rhys, son of Gruffydh, son of Rhys, son of Theodor, son of Eineon, son of Owen, son of Howel, son of Cadelh, son of Roderic Mawr, and so on.220

Thus in the twelfth century there were in Wales distinct survivals of a tribal economy. Instead of a system like the Saxons, of village communities and townships, the Welsh system was evidently a tribal system in the later stages of gradual disintegration, tenaciously preserving within it arrangements and customs pointing back to a period when its rules had been in full force.

But the Welsh codes must be further examined before the significance of the Domesday entries can be fully appreciated.

The Welsh version of the ancient laws of Wales contains three several codes: The Venedotian of North Wales, the Dimetian and Gwentian of South Wales. They profess to date substantially from Howel dda, who codified the local customs about the middle of the tenth century. They contain, however, later [p190] additions, and the MSS. are not earlier than the end of the thirteenth century. There is a Latin version of the Dimetian code in MS. of the early part of the thirteenth century, which is especially valuable as giving the received Latin equivalent of the Welsh terms used in the laws. And there are also, apart from these codes, triads of doubtful date, but professing to preserve traditional customs and laws of the Welsh nation before the time of the Saxon conquest of Britain.221

For the present purpose the actual date of a law or custom is not so important as its own intrinsic character. We seek to gain a true notion of the tribal system, and an economically early trait may well be preserved in a document of later date.

There is no reason why we should be even tempted to exaggerate the antiquity of the evidence. The later the survival of the system the more valuable for our purpose. The Saxon and Welsh systems were contemporary systems, and it is best to compare them as such.

It would appear that under this tribal system a district was occupied by a tribe (cenedl) under a petty king (brenhin) or chief.

The tribe was composed of households of free Welshmen, all blood relations; and the homesteads of these households were scattered about on the country side, as they were found to be in the time of Giraldus Cambrensis. They seem to have been grouped into artificial clusters mainly, as we shall see, for purposes of tribute or legal jurisdiction. [p191]

But all the inhabitants of Wales were not members of the tribes. Besides the households of tribesmen of blood relations and pure descent, there were hanging on to the tribes or their chiefs, and under the overlordship of the latter, or sometimes of tribesmen, strangers in blood who were not free Welshmen; also Welshmen illegitimately born, or degraded for crime. And these classes, being without tribal or family rights, were placed in groups of households and homesteads by themselves. If there were any approach to the Saxon village community in villenage upon a lord's estate under Welsh arrangements, it was to be found in this subordinate class, who were not Welshmen, and had no rights of kindred, and were known as aillts and taeogs of the chief on whose land they were settled. Further, as there was this marked distinction between tribesmen and non-tribesmen, so also there was a marked and essential distinction between the free tribe land occupied by the families of free Welsh tribesmen, called 'tir gwelyawg,' or family land, and the 'caeth land' or bond land of the taeogs and aillts, which latter was also called 'tir-cyfrif' or register land, and sometimes 'tir-kyllydus' or geldable land (gafol-land?).222

The main significance of the Welsh system, both as regards individual rights and land usages, turns [p192] on this distinction between the two different classes of persons and the two different kinds of land occupied by them. They will require separate examination.

Let us first take the free tribesmen ('Uchelwyrs' or 'Breyrs') and their 'family land.'

If the professed triads of Dyvnwal Moelmud may be taken to represent, as they claim to do, the condition of things in earlier centuries, the essential to membership in the cenedl, or tribe, was birth within it of Welsh parents.

Free-born Welshmen were 'tied' together in a 'social state' by the three ties of—

Every free Welshman was entitled to three things:—

The free tribesman's homestead, or tyddyn, consisted of three things:—

And the five free strips, afterwards apparently [p193] reduced to four, of each head of a house—free, possibly, in the sense of their having been freed from the common rights of others over them, as well as being free from charges or tribute—we may probably regard as contained in the tyddyn, or as lying in croft near the homesteads.

The Gwentian, Dimetian, and Venedotian codes all represent the homestead or tyddyn and land of the free Welshman as a family holding. So long as the head of the family lived, all his descendants lived with him, apparently in the same homestead, unless new ones had already been built for them on the family land. In any case, they still formed part of the joint household of which he was the head.226

When a free tribesman, the head of a household, died, his holding was not broken up. It was held by his heirs for three generations as one joint holding; it was known as the holding of 'the heirs of So-and-so.' 227 But within the holding there was equality of division between his sons; the younger son, however, retaining the original tyddyn or homestead, and others having tyddyns found for them on the family land. All the sons had equal rights in the scattered strips and pasture belonging to the holding.228

Thus, in the first generation there was equality between brothers; they were co-tenants in equal [p194] shares of the family holding of which they were co-heirs.

When all the brothers were dead there was, if desired, a re-division, so as to make equality between the co-heirs, who were now first cousins.

When all the first cousins were dead there might be still another re-division, to make equality between the co-heirs, who were now second cousins.

But no one beyond second cousins could claim equality; and if a man died without heirs of his body, and there were no kindred within the degree of second cousins, the land reverted to the chief who represented the tribe.229

The great-grandfather was thus always looked back to as the common ancestor, whose name was still given to the family holding of his co-heirs. The family tie reached from him to his great-grandchildren, and then ceased to bind together further generations.230

We have seen that even in the twelfth century the household all used one couch, extending round the wall of the single room of the house; this couch was called the 'gwely.' The 'tir gwelyawg' was thus the land of the family using the same couch; and the descendants of one ancestor living together were a 'gweli-gordd.' 231 As late as the fourteenth century, in the Record of Carnarvon, the holdings [p195] are still called 'Weles' and 'Gavells.' They are essentially 'family' or tribal holdings.232

And now as to the tenure upon which these holdings of the free tribesmen were held.

It was a free tenure, subject to the obligation to pay Gwestva, or 'food rent,' to the chief, and to some incidents which marked an almost feudal relationship to the chief, viz.:—

(1) The Amobr, or marriage fee of a female.

(2) The Ebediw,233 or death payment (heriot).

(3) Aid in building the king's castles.

(4) Joining his host in his enterprises in the country whenever required, out of the country six weeks only in the year.234

These were the usual accompaniments of free tenure everywhere, and are no special marks of serfdom.

Several homesteads were grouped together in 'maenols' or 'trevs' for the purpose of the payment of the Gwestva, as we shall see by-and-by. This consisted in Gwent, of a horse-load of wheat-flour, an ox, seven threaves of oats, a vat of honey, and 24 pence of silver.235 And as the money value of the Gwestva was always one pound, so that its money equivalent was known as 'the tunc pound,' holdings of family land were spoken of, as late as the fourteenth century, as 'paying tunc' 236—the gwestva, or tunc pound in lieu [p196] of it, being the distinctive tribute of the free tribesmen.

Such was the tenure of the family land, and these were the services of the free tribesmen.

There is no trace here of villenage, or of the servile week-work of the Saxon serf. The tribesmen had no manorial lord over them but their chief, and he was their natural and elected tribal head. So, when Wales was finally conquered, the tunc was paid to the Prince of Wales, and no mesne lord was interposed between the tribesman and the Prince.

Thus the freedom of the free tribesman was guarded at every point.

Turning now to the other class, the aillts or taeogs—who in the Latin translations of the laws are called villani—the key to their position was their non-possession of tribal blood, and therefore of the rights of kindred. They were not free-born Welshmen; though, on the other hand, by no means to be confounded with caeths, or slaves. They must be sworn men of some chieftain or lord, on whose land they were placed, and at whose will and pleasure they were deemed to remain.237 Each of these taeogs had his tyddyn—his homestead, with corn and cattle yard. In his tyddyn he had cattle of his own. In South Wales several of these taeogs' homesteads were grouped together into what was called a taeog-trev. Further, the arable fields of the 'taeog-trev' were ploughed on the open-field system by the taeogs' [p197] common plough team, to which each contributed oxen.

But the distinctive feature of the taeog-trev was that an absolute equality ruled, not between brothers or cousins of one household, as in the case of the family land of the free tribesmen, but throughout the whole trev. Family relationships were ignored. All adults in the trev—fathers and sons, and strangers in blood—took equal shares, with the single exception of youngest sons, who lived with their fathers, and had no tyddyn of their own till the parent's death. This principle of equality ruled everything.238 The common ploughing must not begin till every taeog in the trev had his place appointed in the co-tillage.239 Nor could there be any escheat of land in the taeog-trev to the lord on failure of heirs; for there was nothing hereditary about the holdings. Succession always fell (except in the case of the youngest son, who took his father's tyddyn) to the whole trev.240 When there was a death there was a re-division of the whole land, care, however, being taken to disturb the occupation of the actual tyddyns only when absolutely needful.241

The principle upon which the taeog's rights rested was simply this: where there was no true Welsh blood no family rights were recognised. In the absence of these, equality ruled between individuals; they shared 'per capita,' and not 'per stirpes.'

The land of a taeog-trev was, as already said called 'register land' 242—tir cyfrif. [p198]

There were other incidents marking off the taeog from the free Welshman. He might not bear arms;243 he might not, without his lord's consent, become a scholar, a smith, or a bard, nor sell his swine, honey, or horse.244 Even if he were to marry a free Welsh woman, his descendants till the fourth, and in some cases the ninth degree, remained taeogs. But the fourth or ninth descendant of the free Welsh woman, as the case might be, might at last claim his five free strips, and become the head of a new kindred.245

Even the taeog was, however, under these laws, hardly a serf. With the exception of his duty to assist the lord in the erection of buildings, and to submit to kylch, i.e. to the lord's followers, being quartered upon him when making a 'progress,' and to dovraith, or maintenance of the chief's dogs and servants, there seems to have been no exaction of menial personal services.246

The taeogs' dues, like those of free Welshmen, consisted of fixed summer and winter contributions of food for the chief's table. In Gwent they had to provide in winter a sow, a salted flitch, threescore loaves of wheat bread, a tub of ale, twenty sheaves of oats, and pence for the servants. In summer, a tub of butter and twelve cheeses and bread.247

These tributes of food were called 'dawnbwyds,' gifts of food, or 'board-gifts,' and from these the taeog or register land is in one place in the Welsh laws called tir bwrdd, or 'board-land' (terra mensalia, [p199] or 'mensal land' 248), a term which we shall find again when we come to examine the Irish tribal system.

Lastly, it must not be forgotten that beneath the taeogs, as beneath the Saxon geneat and gebur, were the 'caeths,' or bondmen, the property of their owners,249 without tyddyn and without land, unless such were assigned to them by their lord. These caeths were, therefore, not settled in separate trevs, but scattered about as household slaves in the tyddyns of their masters.

There were, then, these two kinds of holdings—those of the free tribesmen, of 'family land,' and those of the taeogs, of 'register land.' There remains to be considered the system on which the holdings were clustered together.

The principle of this it is not very easy at first to understand, and the difficulty is increased by a confusion of terms between the codes. But there is one fact, by keeping hold of which the system becomes intelligible, viz., that the grouping seems to have been based upon the collective amount of the food-rent. The homesteads, or tyddyns, each containing its four free erws, were scattered over the country side. But they were artificially grouped together for the purpose of the payment of the food-rent, or tunc pound in lieu of it. And by following the group which pays the [p200] 'tunc pound' as the unit of comparison, the at first conflicting evidence falls into its proper place.

In the Venedotian Code the maenol is this unit. In the Dimetian and Gwentian Codes this unit is the trev.

According to the Venedotian Code of North Wales,250

•  4 erws = 1 tyddyn.
•  4 tyddyns = 1 randir.
•  4 randirs = 1 gavael.
•  4 gavaels = 1 trev.
•  4 trevs = 1 maenol.
• 12 maenols and 2 supernumerary trevs = 1 cymwd (or comote).
•  2 cymwds = 1 cantrev (100 trevs).

The cymwd was thus a half-hundred, and each cymwd had its court, and so was the unit of legal jurisdiction. At its head was a maer and a canghellor, the two officers of the chief who had jurisdiction over it.

The twelve maenols in the cymwd were thus disposed:—

Now, it must be admitted that all this singular system, arranged according to strict arithmetical rules, looks very much like a merely theoretical arrangement, plausible on paper but impossible in practice.

It will be found, however, that there is more [p201] probability, as well as reason and meaning in it, than at first sight appears.

In the first place, as regards the twelve maenols making up the cymwd, there is no difficulty; four of them were taeog maenols and eight were free maenols. But there is an obvious difficulty in the description of the contents of each maenol. Taken literally, the description in the Venedotian Code seems to imply that every maenol was composed of four trevs, each of which contained four gavaels composed of four randirs, each of which contained four tyddyns composed of four erws. But in this case the maenol would contain nothing but tyddyns—nothing but homesteads!—there would be no arable and no pasture. This cannot be the true reading. A clue to the real meaning is found in a clause which, after repeating that from each of the eight free maenols in the cymwd the chief has a gwestva yearly, 'that is a pound yearly from each of them,' goes on to say, 'Threescore pence is charged on each trev of the four that are in a maenol, and so subdivided into quarters in succession until each erw of the tyddyn be assessed.' 252

Now, from this statement it may be assumed that there must be some correspondence between the number of pence in the tunc pound and the number of erws in the maenol, otherwise why speak of each erw being assessed? But, according to the foregoing figures, there would be 1,024 erws in the maenol.253 [p202] Each trev, which thus contains 256 erws, is to pay threescore pence. How can 256 erws be divided into quarters till each erw is assessed? Dividing the trev by four we get the gavael of sixty-four erws, and threescore pence divided by four is sixty farthings. It is evident that sixty farthings cannot be divided between sixty-four erws. But if we suppose each trev to contain four homesteads or tyddyns, then the gavael254 of sixty-four erws would be the single holding belonging to a tyddyn or homestead, and the four erws in the actual tyddyn (which are to be free erws) being deducted, then the sixty farthings exactly correspond with the remaining sixty erws forming the holding of land appendant to the tyddyn, and each erw would pay one farthing. We may take it then as possible that each Venedotian maenol contained four trevs, paying sixty pence each, and that each trev was a cluster of four holdings of sixty erws each, in respect of which the holders paid sixty farthings each to the gwestva, holding their actual tyddyns free.

In other words, each of the eight free maenols contained sixteen homesteads, which sixteen homesteads were first classified in groups of four called trevs. Or, to put the case the other way, the eight free maenols, were divided into quarters or trevs, and these trevs again each contained four homesteads.

It is evidently a tribal arrangement, clustering the homesteads numerically for purposes of the payment of gwestva, and probably the discharge of other [p203] public duties, and not a natural territorial arrangement on the basis of the village or township.

Turning now to the Dimetian and Gwentian Codes, according to which the free trev instead of the maenol is the gwestva-paying unit:255 there is first the group of twelve trevs (instead of twelve maenols) under a single maer, and under the name of maenol instead of cymwd; but apparently all the trevs in the group of twelve256 are free trevs. There are other groups of seven taeog-trevs making a taeog-maenol, and the maenol (instead of the cymwd) has its court, and becomes the unit of legal jurisdiction.257

Confining attention to the free maenol, the first thing to notice is that each of the twelve free trevs of which it was composed paid its gwestva, or tunc pound in lieu of it. The trev, therefore, was the gwestva-paying unit.

And as to the interior of the trev we read,—

In this case the 'tunc pound' of 240d. was paid by each trev of 4 randirs, each randir containing 312 erws, and the trev 1,248 erws in all. The trev in South Wales is, therefore, slightly larger than the [p204] Venedotian maenol. Here we are bound by no law that the pence in the gwestva should exactly correspond with the number of erws. But in the other versions the 12 odd erws in the randir are stated to be for 'domicilia,' 259 or buildings, and 12 erws would allow of 3 tyddyns of the requisite 4 erws each.

This fixes for us the number of homesteads or tyddyns in the trev. There were 3 tyddyns to each randir, and 4 randirs to the trev, and so there were 12 tyddyns in each trev, and to each tyddyn there were appendant 100 erws in the arable, pasture, and waste.

The trev which paid its tunc pound of 240d. was thus made up of 12 holdings, each paying a score pence. And as in the Latin version of the Dimetian Laws (p. 825) a score pence is translated uncia argenti, the connexion is at once made clear between the system of grouping the holdings so as to pay the tunc pound, and the monetary system which prevailed in Wales, viz., that according to which 20d. made an ounce, and 12 ounces one pound. The 12 holdings each paying a score of pence, or ounce of silver, made up between them the tunc pound of the trev.

This curious geometrical arrangement or classification of tyddyns and trevs, with an equal area of land to each, is at first sight entirely inconsistent with the division of the family land among the heirs of the holder, inasmuch as the great grandchildren when they divided the original family holding must, one would suppose, have held smaller shares than their great [p205] grandfather. And there is only one answer to this. It would have been so if the tribe, and the families composing it, were permanently fixed and settled on the same land, and pursuing a regular agriculture, with an increasing population within certain boundaries. But the Welsh were still a pastoral people, and, as we shall see when we come to examine the Irish tribal system, while the homesteads and land divisions were fixed, the occupants were shifted about by the chiefs from time to time, each sept, or clan, or family receiving at each rearrangement a certain number of tyddyns or homesteads, according to certain tribal rules of blood relationship of a very intricate character.

This permanence of the geographical divisions and homesteads, and shifting of the tribal households whenever occasion required it, was only possible with a pastoral and scanty population. Long before the fourteenth century the households were settled in their homesteads, geometrical regularity had ceased, and the land was divided and subdivided into irregular fractions. This is the state of things disclosed in the Record of Carnarvon. But in the tenth century, according to the Welsh laws, the old tribal rules were apparently still in force.

Without pretending to have mastered all the details of these obscure tribal arrangements, the point to be noted is that the scattering of the tyddyns all over the country side, and the clustering of them by fours and sixteens, or twelves, into the group which was the unit paying the gwestva or tunc pound, and again into clusters of twelve or thirteen260 under a [p206] maer, as the unit of civil jurisdiction, were obviously distinctive features arising from the tribal holding of land, and that the system was adopted apparently to facilitate the division of the land among the families in the tribe somewhat in the same way as in the open field system the division of the arable land by turf balks into actual erws facilitated the division of the ploughed land among the contributors to the plough team.

Bearing this in mind we may now turn back to the Domesday Survey, and compare its description of the land system of Gwent and Archenfield with the results obtained from the Welsh laws.

In order, however, to make this comparison the Welsh terms must be translated into Latin, otherwise it will be difficult to recognise the trev, and maer, and maenol, and gwestva in the Domesday description.

The before-mentioned Latin version of the Dimetian Code, the MS. of which dates from the early thirteenth century, will do this for us.261

It translates trev, the unit of the tunc pound, by villa. It takes the Welsh word 'maenol' as equivalent to manor, and indeed it did resemble the Saxon and Norman manor in this, that it was the unit of the jurisdiction of each single steward or villicus of the chief. This officer was called in Welsh the maer, which was translated into the Latin præpositus. He did to some extent resemble the English præpositus, but he differed in this—that instead of being set over the 'trev' or 'villata' of a single manor, [p207] the Welsh maer was, as we have seen, set over a number of 'villas' or trevs—thirteen free trevs or seven taeog-trevs, in Gwent—each free trev of which rendered its 'tunc pound' or 'gwestva,' and each taeog or villein-trev its 'dawn-bwyd' of food.

Now, this is precisely what is described in the Domesday Survey of Gwent.

There are four groups of thirteen or fourteen 'villas' or trevs, each group under a 'præpositus' or maer; and these four groups, which were in fact Gwentian 'maenols,' rendered as gwestva a food-rent amounting to 47 sextars of honey, 40 pigs, 41 cows, and 28 shillings for hawks.

In the district of Archenfield the clusters of trevs do not appear, but the food-rents were similar—honey being a marked item throughout.

In the Welsh gwestva, also, honey was an important element. It is mentioned as such in the Welsh codes, and it is conspicuous also in the Domesday Survey both of Gwent and Archenfield.

Its importance is shown by the fact that in the Gwentian Code a separate section was devoted to 'The Law of Bees.' It begins as follows:—'The origin of bees is from Paradise, and on account of the sin of man they came from thence, and they were blessed by God, and, therefore, the mass cannot be without the wax.' 262

The price of a swarm of bees in August was equal to the price of an ox ready for the yoke, i.e. ten or fifteen times its present value, in proportion to the ox.

Honey had, in fact, two uses, besides its being the [p208] substitute for the modern sugar—one for the making of mead, which was three times the price of beer; the other for the wax for candles used in the chief's household, and on the altar of the mass.263 The lord of a taeog had the right of buying up all his honey;264 and in North Wales, according to the Venedotian Code, all the honey of the king's aillts or taeogs was reserved for the court.265 The mead brewer was also an important royal officer in all the three divisions of Wales.

It is not surprising, then, that the tribute of honey, which formed so important a part of the Welsh gwestva, should be retained as an item in the tribute of the trevs of Gwent after their conquest by Harold.

From the combined evidence of the Domesday Survey and the 'Ancient Laws of Wales,' the fact has now been learned that in the eleventh century, as it had done previously probably for 400 years, the river Wye separated by a sharp line the Saxon land, on which the manorial land system prevailed, from the Welsh land, on which the Welsh tribal land system prevailed. On the one side of the river, at the date of the Survey, clusters of scattered homesteads of free Welshmen contributed food-rents in the form of gwestva to the conqueror of their chief, and taeogs their dawn-bwyds. On the other side the villata of geneats and geburs, besides paying gafol, performed servile week-work upon the demesne lands of the lord of the [p209] village or manor. It may be well, however, to seek for some earlier evidence of the payment of gwestva on the Welsh side of the river.

Documentary evidence of the manorial system on the Saxon side was forthcoming as early as the seventh century, in the laws of King Ine. How far back can documentary evidence be traced of the Welsh system?

In the possession of the church of Llandaff there was long preserved an ancient MS. of the Gospels in Latin, called the Book of St. Chad.266 This MS. appears to date back to the eighth century. And it was for long the custom to enter on its margin a record of solemn compacts sworn upon it, as in the similar case of the Book of Deer. It thus happens to contain (inter alia) two short records of grants to the church of St. Teilo (or Llandaff). One of these gifts is as follows:267—

'This writing showeth that Ris and the family of Grethi gave to God and St. Teilo, Treb guidauc. . . and this is its census: 40 loaves and a wether sheep in summer; and in winter, 40 loaves, a hog, and 40 dishes of butter. . . .'

Another is in these words:—

'This writing showeth that Ris and Hirv . . . . gave Bracma as far as Hirmain Guidauc, from the desert of Gelli Irlath as far as Camdubr, its "hichet" [food-rent?], 3 score loaves and a wether sheep, [p210] and a vessel of butter. And then follow the witnesses.' 268

Rhys ap Ithael, the donor in these two cases, was king of the district of Glewyssig in the middle of the ninth century, about the time of Alfred the Great. Now, a king or chief would hardly be likely to transfer to the church of Llandaff a free trev and the gwestva paid therefrom. This would have involved the severance of free members of the tribe from the tribe, to put them under an ecclesiastical lordship. We should expect then to find that the Trev 'Guidauc' was a taeog-trev on the chief's own land, and according to the description given in the grants, the census corresponds not with the gwestva of a free trev under the Welsh laws, but with the 'dawn-bwyd' of the taeog-trev.

The food tribute in these grants was divided into summer and winter payments, and so, as we have seen, were the dawn-bwyds of the taeogs in the Welsh laws; the scores of loaves, the sow, the wether sheep, and the tubs of butter, correspond also with the food-gifts from the taeog-trevs, as described in the laws, though with varying quantities.269

These grants in the margin of the Book of St. Chad may, therefore be taken as evidence that the system of food-rents was prevalent in Wales in the middle of the ninth century.

There is still earlier evidence of the prevalence of the system of food-rents where we should little expect to find it, viz., in the laws of King Ine. Ine being King of Wessex, and Wessex shading off as it [p211] were into the old British districts both south and east of the Severn, it was but natural that some old Welsh or British customs should have survived in certain places; as Walisc men here and there survived amongst the conquering English. These Welshmen were allowed under Ine's laws to hold half-hides and hides of land. We have only to examine the Domesday Survey for Gloucestershire and Herefordshire to find traces even at that date of survivals of Welsh and Saxon customs in exceptional cases, even outside those districts which had only just been conquered.

In some places where Saxon customs had long prevailed a little community of Welshmen remained under Welsh customs. In other places the customs were partly Welsh and partly English.270 [p212]

In precisely the same way survivals such as these must have existed in King Ine's time. There must have been then, as 400 years afterwards, at the date of the Survey, places in Wessex where Welshmen predominated and Welsh customs survived. There must have been, in other words, manors which paid Welsh gwestva instead of Saxon services. There is a remarkable passage in King Ine's laws which can only be thus explained. On the same page, and in the next paragraph but two to the law about the yard-land set to 'gafol' and to 'weorc,'271 there is a clause apparently out of place, which begins abruptly with this heading: 'Æt x. hidum to fostre.' 272 In the Latin version this is rendered 'De x. hides ad corredium.' 273 Now, there is a passage in a charter of Louis VII. of France, anno 1157, given by Du Cange under the word 'Corredium,' in which certain 'villas' are freed from the exaction of 'quædam convivia, quæ vulgo Coreede vel Giste vocantur.' This definition of corredium and of 'giste,' as a contribution of food exacted from tenants, corresponds exactly to the Welsh 'gwestva.' And the Saxon word fostre also means food. So that this heading to the passage in question may be translated—'from x. hides paying gwestva.' And so interpreted the following list [p213] becomes perfectly intelligible, for it describes what the gwestva consisted of.

• From 10 hides—
  • x. dolia of honey.
  • ccc. loaves.
  • xii. amphora of Welsh ale.
  • xxx. of clear [do.]
  • ii. oxen or x. wethers,
  • x. geese.
  • xx. hens.
  • x. cheeses.
  • A full amphora of butter.
  • v. salmons of xx. pounds weight.
  • c. eels.

Now, if the system of gwestva payment or food-rent described in this passage of the laws of King Ine be evidence of the survival of the Welsh custom after the Saxon conquest, it is at the same time equally clear documentary evidence of the seventh century that the system of gwestva or food-rents was prevalent outside Wales in the west of Britain before the Saxon conquest.274

CHAPTER VII. THE TRIBAL SYSTEM ( continued ). — I. THE TRIBAL SYSTEM IN IRELAND AND SCOTLAND. — II. THE TRIBAL SYSTEM IN ITS EARLIER STAGES. — III. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE TRIBAL AND AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY OF THE WEST AND SOUTH-EAST OF BRITAIN WAS PRE-ROMAN, AND SO ALSO WAS THE OPEN-FIELD SYSTEM. — CHAPTER VII. FOOTNOTES.

[p214]

The Welsh evidence brings us back to a period parallel with the Saxon era marking the date of King Ine's laws. The Welsh land system was then clearly distinguished from the Saxon by the absence of the manor with its village community in serfdom, and by the presence instead of it of the scattered homesteads (tyddyns) of the tribesmen and taeogs, grouped together for the purpose of the payment to the chief of the food-rents, or their money equivalents.

Further light may possibly be obtained from observation of the tribal system in a still earlier economic stage, though at a much later date, in Ireland.

Now, first—without going out of our depth as we might easily do in the Irish evidence—it may readily be shown, sufficiently for the present purpose, that the system of land divisions, or rather of the grouping of homesteads into artificial clusters with arithmetical precision, was prevalent in Ireland outside the Pale as late as the times of Queen Elizabeth and [p215] James I., when an effort was made to substitute English for Irish customs and laws.

There are extant several surveys of parts of Ireland of that date in which are to be recognised arrangements of homesteads almost precisely similar to those of the Welsh Codes. And further, the names of the tenants being given, we can see that they were blood relations like the Welsh tribesmen, with a carefully preserved genealogy guarding the fact of their relationship and consequent position in the tribe.

The best way to realise this fact may be to turn to actual examples.

According to an inquisition275 made of the county of Fermanagh in 1 James I. (1603), the county was found to be divided into seven equal baronies, the description of one of which may be taken as a sample.

This exactly corresponds with the arrangement for the purposes of the gwestva of the Welsh tyddyns in groups of 4 and 16, as in the Venedotian Code. [p216]

There is also a Survey of County Monaghan in 33 Elizabeth277 (1591), in which the names of the holders of the tates in each bailebiatagh, or group of 16, are given. Thus, again, to take a single example,—

A fresh survey of the same district was made by Sir John Davies in 1607;278 the record for this same bailebiatagh is as follows:—

Now, by comparison it will be seen that at both dates there were sixteen tates in the bailebiatagh, and that the holders were evidently blood relations. In some cases the name of a son takes the place of his father (the genealogy being kept up), and in others new tenants appear.

There is also reason to suppose that these tates were family homesteads (like the tyddyns of the Welsh 'family land'), with smaller internal divisions, and embracing a considerable number of lesser households. The fact that one person only is named as holding the tate, or the two tates, as the case may be, suggests that he is so named as the common ancestor or head of the chief household representing all the belongings to the tate. Within the tate the subdivision of land seems to have been carried to an indefinite extent. The following extract from Sir John Davies' report will probably give the best account of the actual and, to his eye, somewhat confused condition of things within the tates, as he found them. It relates to the county of Fermanagh, and is in the form of a letter to the Earl of Salisbury, dated 1607:279— [p218]

Sir John Davies, in the same report, also gives a graphic description of the difficulty he had in [p219] obtaining from the aged Brehon of the district the roll on which were inscribed the particulars of the various holdings, including those on the demesne or mensal land of the chief.282

It is difficult to form a clear conception of what the tribes, septs, and families were, and what were their relations to one another. But for the present purpose it is sufficient to understand that a sept consisted of a number of actual or reputed blood relations, bearing the same family names, and bound together by other and probably more artificial ties, such as common liability for the payment of eric, or blood fines.

A curious example of what is virtually an actual sept is found in the State Papers of James I.

In 1606 a sept of the 'Grames,' under their chief 'Walter, the gude man of Netherby,' being troublesome on the Scottish border, were transplanted from Cumberland to Roscommon; and in the schedule to the articles arranging for this transfer, it appears that the sept consisted of 124 persons, nearly all bearing the surname of Grame. They were divided into families, seventeen of which were set down as possessed of 20l. and upwards, four of 10l. and upwards, six of the poorer sort, six of no abilities, while as dependants there were four servants of the name of Grame, and about a dozen of irregular hangers on to the sept.283

The sept was a human swarm. The chief was the Queen Bee round whom they clustered. The territory occupied by a whole sept was divided [p220] among the inferior septs which had swarmed off it. And a sort of feudal relation prevailed between the parent and the inferior septs.

There can probably, on the whole, be no more correct view of the Irish tribal system in its essence and spirit than the simple generalisation made by Sir John Davies himself, from the various and, in some sense, inconsistent and entangled facts which bewildered him in detail.284

First, as regards the chiefs, whether of tribes or septs, and their demesne lands, he writes:285—

Next, as to tribesmen and their inferior tenancies:—

These two Irish customs (Sir John Davies continues) made all their possessions uncertain, being shuffled and changed and removed so often from one to another, by new elections and partitions, 'which uncertainty of estates hath been the true cause of desolation and barbarism in this land.' [p221]

These were obviously the main features of an earlier stage of the tribal system than we have seen in Wales. It was the system which fitted easily into the artificial land divisions and clusters of homesteads. And this method of clustering homesteads, in its turn, not only facilitated, but even made possible those frequent redistributions which mark this early stage of the tribal system.

The method of artificial clustering was apparently widely spread through Ireland, as we found it in the various divisions of Wales.

It also was ancient; for according to an early poem, supposed by Dr. Sullivan286 to belong 'in substance though not in language to the sixth or seventh century,' Ireland was anciently divided into 184 'Tricha Céds' (30 hundreds [of cows]), each of which contained 30 bailes (or townlands); 5,520 bailes in all.

The baile or townland is thus described:—

The poem describes the bailes (or townlands) as divided into 4 quarters, i.e. a quarter for each of the 4 herds of 75 cows each.

The poem further explains that the baile or townland was equal to 12 'seisrighs' (by some translated 'plough-lands'), and that the latter land measure is 120 acres,287 making the quarter equal to three 'seisrighs' [p222] or 360 acres. But this latter mode of measurement is probably a later innovation introduced with the growth of arable farms. The old system was division into quarters, and founded on the prevalent pastoral habits of the people. In the earliest records Connaught is found to be divided into ballys, and the ballys into quarters, which were generally distinguished by certain mears and bounds.288 The quarters were sometimes called 'cartrons,' but in other cases the cartron was the quarter of a quarter, i.e. a 'tate.' O'Kelly's county in 1589 was found to contain 66512 quarters of 120 acres each.289

Lastly, it may be mentioned that in the re-allotment of the lands in Roscommon to the sept of the Grames on their removal from Cumberland each family of the better class was to receive a quarter of land containing 120 acres.290

The evidence as regards Scotland is scanty, but Mr. Skene, in his interesting chapter on 'the tribe in Scotland,' has collected together sufficient evidence to show that the tribal organisation in the Gaelic districts was closely analogous to that in Ireland.291

There are also indications that the Isle of Man was anciently divided into ballys and quarters.292 [p223]

The old tribal division of the ballys into 'quarters' and 'tates' has left distinct and numerous traces in the names of the present townlands in Ireland.

Annexed is an example of an ancient bally divided into quarters. It is taken from the Ordnance Survey of county Galway. Two of the quarters, now townlands, still bear the names of 'Cartron' and 'Carrow,' or 'Quarter,' as do more than 600 townlands in various parts of Ireland.293 This example will show that the quarters were actual divisions.

Scattered over the bally were the sixteen 'tates' or homesteads, four in each quarter; and in some counties—Monaghan especially—they are still to be traced as the centres of modern townlands, which bear the names borne by the 'tates' three hundred years ago, as registered in Sir John Davies' survey. There is still often to be found in the centre of the modern townland the circular and partly fortified enclosure294 where the old 'tate' stood, and the lines of the present divisions of the fields often wind themselves round it in a way which proves that it was once their natural centre.

Moreover, the names of the 'tates' still preserved in the present townlands bear indirect witness to the [p224] reality of the old tribal redistributions and shiftings of the households from one 'tate' to another. They seldom are compounded of personal names. They generally are taken from some local natural feature. The homestead was permanent. The occupants were shifting.

Again, an example taken from the Ordnance Survey—from county Monaghan—will most clearly illustrate these points, and help the reader to appreciate the reality of the tribal arrangements.

In the survey of the barony of 'Monoughan' 295 made in 1607, the 'half ballibetogh called Correskallie' is described as containing eight 'tates,' the Irish names of which are recorded. They are given below, and an English translation of the names is added296 in brackets to illustrate their peculiar and generally non-personal character.

A reduced map of this ancient 'half-ballibetogh,' as it appears now on the large Ordnance Survey, is appended, in which the names of the old 'tates' appear, with but little change, in the modern townlands. The remains of the circular enclosures [p225] marking the sites of the old 'tates' are still to be traced in one or two cases. The acreage of each townland is given on the map in English measures. It will be remembered that in Monaghan 60 Irish acres were allotted to each tate instead of the usual 30.

Example of an ancient 'Bally' or 'Townland' still divided into 'Quarters' which are now called 'Townlands,' taken from sheet 103 of the Ordnance Survey of Co. Galway.
Map of the 'Half-bally' of Correskallie Co. Monaghan.

See Larger: Bally
Half-bally
Go to: List of Illustrations

This evidence will be sufficient to prove that the arithmetical clustering of the homesteads was real, and that, as in Wales, so in Ireland, under the tribal system the homesteads were scattered over the country, and not grouped together in villages and towns.297

Passing to the methods of agriculture, it is obvious, that, even in a pastoral state, the growth of corn cannot be wholly neglected. We have seen that in Wales there was agriculture, and that, so far as it extended, the ploughing was conducted on an open-field system, and by joint-ploughing.

It was precisely so also in Ireland, and it had been from time immemorial.

It is stated in the 'Book of the Dun Cow' (Lebor na Huidre), compiled in the seventh century by the Abbot of Clanmacnois, known to us in an Irish MS. of the year 1100, that 'there was not a ditch, nor fence, nor stone wall round land till came the period of the sons of Aed Slane [in the seventh century], but only smooth fields.' Add to this the passage pointed out by Sir H. S. Maine298 in the 'Liber Hymnorum' (a MS. probably of the eleventh century), viz.— [p226]

Taking those two passages together, and noting that the word for 'ridges' (immaire) is the same word (imire, or iomair299) now used in Gaelic for a ridge of land, and that the recently remaining system of strips and balks in Ireland and Scotland is still known as the 'run-rig' system, it becomes clear that whatever there was of arable land in any particular year lay in open fields divided into ridges or strips.

There are, further, some passages in the Brehon Laws which show that at least among the lower grades of tribesmen there was joint-ploughing. And this arose not simply from 'joint-tenancy' of undivided land by co-heirs,300 but from the fact that the tribesmen of lower rank only possessed portions of the requisites of a plough,301 just as was the case with Welsh tribesmen and the Saxon holders of yard-lands.

There can be little doubt, therefore, that we must picture the households of tribesmen occupying the four 'tates' in each 'quarter' as often combining to produce the plough team, and as engaged to some extent in joint-ploughing. [p227]

At first, what little agriculture was needful would be, like the Welsh 'coaration of the waste,' the joint-ploughing of grass land, which after the year's crop, or perhaps three or four years' crop, would go back into grass.302 But it would seem from the passage quoted above, that the whole quarter of normally 120 Irish acres was at first divided into 'ridges'—possibly Irish acres—to facilitate the allotment among the households not only of that portion which was arable for the year, but also of the shares in the bog and the forest. No doubt originally there was plenty of mountain pasture besides the thirty, or sometimes sixty scattered acres or ridges allotted in [p228] 'run-rig' to each 'tate' or household. In the seventh century, as we have seen, the complaint was made that the pressure of population had reduced the shares to twenty-seven ridges instead of thirty.

Finally, when we examine in the Highlands of Scotland as well as in Ireland the still remaining custom known as the 'Rundale' or 'run-rig' system, whereby a whole townland or smaller area is held in common by the people of the village, and shared among them in rough equality by dividing it up into a large number of small pieces, of which each holder takes one here and another there; we see before us in Scotland as in Ireland a survival of that custom of scattered ownership which belonged to the open-field system all the world over; whilst we mark again the absence of the yard-land, which was so constant a feature of the English system. The method is even applied to potato ground, where the spade takes the place of the plough; and thus instead of the strip, or acre laid out for ploughing, there is the 'patch' which so often marks the untidy Celtic townland.

Existing maps of townlands, whilst showing very clearly the practice still in vogue of subdividing a holding by giving to each sharer a strip in each of the scattered parcels of which the old holding consisted, hardly retain traces of the ancient division of the whole 'quarter' into equal ridges or acres. But they show very clearly the scattered ownership which has been so tenaciously adhered to, along with the old tribal practice of equal division among male heirs. An example of a modern townland is annexed, which will illustrate these interesting points. The confusion it presents will also illustrate the inherent [p229] incompatibility in a settled district of equal division among heirs with anything like the yard-land, or bundle of equal strips handed down unchanged from generation to generation.

Example of divisions and holdings in a Townland on the Run-rig system, Extracted from Report of Devon Commission, see Lord Dufferin's 'Irish Emigration & Tenure.'

This townland contains 205 acres now occupied in 422 lots, by 29 tenants 3 of whose scattered holdings are shown in different colors.

See Larger.
Go to: List of Illustrations

Mr. Skene, in his interesting chapter on the 'Land Tenure in the Highlands and Islands,' 303 has brought together many interesting facts, and has drawn a vivid picture of local survivals of farming communities pursuing their agriculture on the run-rig system, and holding their pasture land in common. And the traveller on the west coast of Scotland cannot fail to find among the crofters many examples of modified forms of joint occupation in which the methods of the run-rig system are more or less applied even to newly leased land at the present time.

Thus whilst the tribal system seems to be the result mainly of the long-continued habits of a pastoral people, it could and did adapt itself to arable agriculture, and it did so on the lines of the open field system in a very simple form, extemporised wherever occasion required, becoming permanent when the tribe became settled on a particular territory.

Returning now to the main object of the inquiry we seem, in the perhaps to some extent superficial and too simple view taken by Sir John Davies of the Irish tribal arrangements, to have found what we sought—to have got a glimpse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of an earlier stage in the working of the tribal system than we get in Wales nearly 1,000 years earlier. In this stage the land in theory was still in tribal ownership, its redistribution among the tribesmen [p230] was still frequent, and arable agriculture was still subordinate to pasture. Lastly, the arithmetical clustering of the homesteads was the natural method by which the frequent redistributions of the land were made easy; while the run-rig form of the open-field system was the natural mode of conducting a co-operative and shifting agriculture.

But whilst gaining this step, and resting upon it for our present purpose, we must not be blind to the fact that in another way the Irish system had become more developed and more complex than the Welsh.

Sir John Davies sometimes dwells upon the fact that the chief was in no true sense the lord of the county, and the tribesmen in no true sense the freeholders of the land. The land belonged to the tribe. But, as we have seen, he found also that, as in Wales, the chiefs and sub-chiefs had, as a matter of fact, rightly or wrongly, gradually acquired a permanent occupation of a certain portion of land—so many townlands—which, using the English manorial phrase, he speaks of as 'in demesne.' Upon these the chief's immediate followers, and probably bondservants, lived, like the Welsh taeogs, paying him food-rents or tribute very much resembling those of the taeogs.

This land, as we have seen, he calls 'mensal land,' probably translating an Irish term; and we are reminded at once of the Welsh taeog-land in the Register trevs, which also, from the gifts of food, was called in one of the Welsh laws 'mensal land.'

Further, besides these innovations upon the ancient simplicity of the tribal system, there had evidently, and perhaps from early times, grown up artificial relationships, founded upon contract, or even [p231] fiction, which, so to speak, ran across and complicated very greatly the tribal arrangements resting upon blood relationship. This probably is what makes the Brehon laws so bewildering and apparently inconsistent with the simplicity of the tribal system as in its main features it presented itself to Sir John Davies.

The loan of cattle by those tribesmen (Boaires) who had more than enough to stock their proper share of the tribe land to other tribesmen who had not cattle enough to stock theirs, in itself introduced a sort of semi-feudal, or perhaps semi-commercial dependence of one tribesman upon another. Tribal equality, or rather gradation of rank according to blood relationship, thus became no doubt overlaid or crossed by an actual inequality, which earlier or later developed in some sense into an irregular form of lordship and service. Hence the complicated rules of 'Saer' and 'Daer' tenancy. There were perhaps also artificial modes of introducing new tribesmen into a sept without the blood relationship on which the tribal system was originally built. These complications may be studied in the Brehon laws, as they have been studied by Sir Henry Maine and Mr. Skene, and the learned editors of the 'Laws' themselves; but, however ancient may be the state of things which they describe, they need not detain us here, or prevent our recognising in the actual conditions described by Sir John Davies the main features of an earlier stage of the system than is described in the ancient Welsh laws.

The comparison of the Gaelic and Cymric tribal systems has shown resemblances so close in leading [p232] principles, that we may safely seek to obtain from some of the differences between them a glimpse into earlier stages of the tribal system than the Welsh evidence, taken alone, would have opened to our view.

Two powerful influences had evidently already partially arrested the tribal system in Wales, and turned it as it were against its natural bent into fixed and hardened grooves, before it assumed the shape in which it appears in the Welsh laws. These two powerful influences were (1) Roman rule and (2) Christianity. Their first action was to some extent exercised singly and apart, though concurrently in point of time. But their separate influences were afterwards surpassed and consolidated by the remarkable combination of them both which was presented in the ecclesiastical system.

The influences of Christianity, and of the later ecclesiastical system, were powerfully exerted in Ireland also; but the Irish tribal system differed from the Welsh in its never having passed directly under Roman imperial rule.

The Brehon laws of Ireland perhaps owe their form and origin to the necessity of moulding the old traditional customs to the new Christian standard of the ecclesiastics, under whose eye the codification was made. So, also, the Welsh laws of Howell the Good, and the Saxon laws of Ine and his successors, all reflect and bear witness to this influence, and had been no doubt moulded by it into softer forms than had once prevailed. At least the harshest thorns which grew, we may guess, even rankly upon the tribal system, must, we may be sure, have been already removed before our first view of it. [p233]

In fact, nearly all the early codes, whether those of Ireland, Wales, or England, or those of German tribes on the Continent, bear marks of a Christian influence, either directly impressed upon them by ecclesiastical authorship and authority, or indirectly through contact with the Roman law, which itself in the later edicts contained in the Codes of Theodosius and Justinian had undergone evident modification in a Christian sense.

So far as the Welsh tribal system is concerned, it is quite clear that whatever had been the influence upon it of direct Roman imperial rule and early Christianity, it submitted to a second and fresh influence in the tenth century.

This appears when we consider the avowed motives and object of Howell the Good in making his code. Its preface recites that he 'found the Cymry perverting the laws and customs, and therefore summoned from every cymwd of his kingdom six men practised in authority and jurisprudence; and also the archbishop, bishops, abbots, and priors, imploring grace and discernment for the king to amend the laws and customs of Cymru.' It goes on to say that, 'by the advice of these wise men, the king retained some of the old laws, others he amended, others he abolished entirely, establishing new laws in their place;' special pains being taken to guard against doing anything 'in opposition to the law of the Church or the law of the Emperor.' 304

Finally, it is stated in the same preface that Howell the Good went to Rome to confirm his laws by papal [p234] authority, A.D. 914, and died A.D. 940. It may be added that the reference to the 'law of the Emperor' was no fiction, for 'Blegewryd, Archdeacon of Llandav, was the clerk, and he was a doctor in the law of the Emperor and in the law of the Church.'

In connexion with this ecclesiastical influence there is a curious exception which proves the rule, in the refusal of Howell the Good to give up the tribal rule of equal division among sons, which lay at the root of the tribal system, and to introduce in its place the law of primogeniture.

And so tenaciously was this tribal rule adhered to that even Edward I., after his conquest of Wales, was obliged for the sake of peace to concede its continuance to the Welsh, insisting only that none but lawful sons should share in the inheritance.306