Villainage in England
by Paul Vinogradoff


Second Essay: The Manor and the Village Community


Chapter 1

The Open Field System and the Holdings

    My first essay has been devoted to the peasantry of feudal
England in its social character. We have had to examine its
classes or divisions in their relation to freedom, personal
slavery, and praedial serfage. The land system was touched upon
only so far as it influenced such classification, or was
influenced by it.
    But no correct estimate of the social standing of the
peasantry can stop here, or content itself with legal or
administrative definitions. In no degree of society do men stand
isolated, and a description of individual status alone would be
thoroughly incomplete. Men stand arranged in groups for
economical and political cooperation, and these groups are
composed according to the laws of the division and hierarchical
organisation of labour, composed, that is, of heterogeneous
elements, of members who have to fulfil different functions, and
to occupy higher and lower positions. The normal group which
forms as it were the constitutive cell of English mediaeval
society is the manor, and we must try to make out in what way it
was organised, and how it did its work in the thirteenth century,
at the time of fully developed feudalism.
    The structure of the ordinary manor is always the same. Under
the headship of the lord we find two layers of population the
villains and the freeholders; and the territory occupied divides
itself accordingly into demesne land (1*) and 'tributary land'
(if I may use that phrase) of two different classes. The
cultivation of the demesne depends to a certain extent on the
work supplied by the tenants of the tributary land. Rents are
collected, labour supervised, and all kinds of administrative
business transacted, by a set of manorial officers or servants.
The entire population is grouped into a village community which
centres round the manorial court or halimote, which is both
council and tribunal. My investigation will necessarily conform
to this typical arrangement. The holding of the peasant is the
natural starting-point: it will give us the clue to the whole
agrarian system. Next may come that part of the territory which
is not occupied in severalty, but used in common. The agrarian
obligations with regard to the lord and the cultivation of the
demesne land may be taken up afterwards. The position of
privileged people, either servants or freeholders, must be
discussed by itself, as an exceptional case. And, lastly, the
question will have to be put to what extent were all these
elements welded together in the village community, and under the
sway of the manorial court?
    The chief features of the field-system which was in operation
in England during the middle ages have been sufficiently cleared
up by modern scholars, especially by Nasse, Thorold Rogers, and
Seebohm, and there is no need for dwelling at length on the
subject. Everybody knows that the arable of an English village
was commonly cultivated under a three years' rotation of
crops;(2*) a two field system is also found very often;(3*) there
are some instances of more complex arrangements,(4*) but they are
very rare, and appear late-not earlier than the fourteenth
century. Walter of Henley's treatise on farming, which appears to
belong to the first half of the thirteenth, mentions only the
first two systems, and its estimate of the plough-land is based
on them. In the case of a three field rotation a hundred and
eighty acres are reckoned to the plough; a hundred and sixty in a
system of two courses.(5*) We find the same estimate in the
chapters on husbandry and management of an estate which are
inserted in the law-book known as Fleta.(6*) The strips in the
fields belonging to the several tenants were divided by narrow
balks of turf, and when the field lay fallow, or after the
harvest had been removed, the entire field was turned into a
common pasture for the use of the village cattle. The whole area
was protected by an inclosure while it was under crop.
    A curious deviation is apparent in the following instance,
taken from the cartulary of Malmesbury. The Abbey makes an
exchange with a neighbour who has rights of common on some of the
convent's land, and therefore does not allow of its being
cultivated and inclosed (inhoc facere). In return for certain
concessions on the part of the Abbey, this neighbouring owner
agrees that fallow pasture should be turned into arable on the
condition that after the harvest it should return to common use,
as well as the land not actually under seed. Lastly comes a
provision about the villains of the person entering into
agreement with the Abbey: if they do not want to conform to the
new arrangement of cultivation, they will be admitted to their
strips for the purpose of ploughing up or using the fallow.(7*)
The case is interesting in two respects: it shows the intimate
connexion between the construction of the inclosure (inhoc) and
the raising of the crop; the special paragraph about the villains
gives us to understand that something more than the usual
rotation of crops was meant: the 'inhokare' appears in opposition
either to the ordinary ploughing up of the fallow, or in a
general sense to its use for pasture; it seems to indicate
extra-cultivation of such land as ought to have remained
uncultivated. These considerations are borne out by other
documents. In a trial of Edward I's time the 'inheche' is
explained in as many words as the ploughing up of fallow for a
crop of wheat, oats, or barley.(8*) The Gloucester Survey, in
describing one of the manors belonging to the Abbey, arranges its
land into four fields (campi), each consisting of several parts:
the first field is said to contain 174 acres, the second 63, the
third 109, the fourth 69 acres. Two-thirds of the whole are
subjected to the usual modes of cultivation under a three-course
system, and one-third remains for pasture. But out of this last
third, 40 acres of the first field (of 174 acres) get inclosed
and used for crop in one year, and 20 acres of the second in
another.(9*) In this way the ordinary three-course alternation
becomes somewhat more complicated, and it will be hardly too bold
a guess to suppose that such extra-cultivation implied some
manuring of such patches as were deprived of their usual rest
once in three years. In contradiction to the customary
arrangement which did not require any special manuring except
that which was incident to the use of arable as pasture for the
cattle after the harvest, we find plots set apart for more
intense cultivation,(10*) and it is to be noticed that the
reckoning in connexion with them does not start from the division
according to three parts, but supposes a separate classification
in two sections.
    Another fact worth noticing in the Gloucester instance is the
irregular distribution of acres in the 'fields,' and the division
of the entire arable into four unequal parts. The husbandry is
conducted on the three-course system, and still four fields are
mentioned, and there is no simple relation between the number of
acres which they respectively contain (174, 63, 109, 69). It
seems obvious that the expression 'field' (campus) is used here
not in the ordinary sense suggested by such records as
spring-field, winter-field, and the like, but in reference to the
topography of the district. The whole territory under cultivation
was divided into a number of squares or furlongs which lay round
the village in four large groups. The alternation of crops
distributed the same area into three according to a mode not
described by the Survey, and it looks proVable at first glance
that each of the 'fields' (campi) contained elements of all three
courses. The supposition becomes a certainty, if we reflect that
it gives the only possible explanation of the way in which the
twofold alternation of the 'inhoc' is made to fit with the
threefold rotation of crops: every year some of the land in each
campus had to remain in fallow, and could be inclosed or taken
under 'inhoc.' Had the campus as a whole been reserved for one of
the three courses, there would have been room for the 'inhoc'
only every three years.
    I have gone into some details in connexion with this instance
because it presents a deviation from ordinary rules, and even a
deviation from the usual phraseology, and it is probable that the
exceptional use of words depended on the exceptional process of
farming. A new species of arable -- the manured plot under
'inhoc' -- came into use, and naturally disturbed the plain
arrangement of the old-fashioned three courses; the lands had to
be grouped anew into four sections which went under the
accustomed designation of 'fields,' although they did not fit in
with the 'three fields' of the old system. In most cases,
however, our records use the word 'field' (campus) in that very
sense of land under one of the 'courses,' which is out of the
question in the case taken from the Gloucester Cartulary. The
common use is especially clear when the documents want to
describe the holding of a person, and mention the number of acres
in each 'field.' The Abbot of Malmesbury, e.g., enfeoffs one
Robert with a virgate formerly held 'in the fields' by A.,
twenty-one acres in one field and twenty-one in another.(11*) The
charter does not contain any description of campi in the
territorial sense, and it is evident that the expression 'in the
fields' is meant to indicate a customary and well-known husbandry
arrangement. The same meaning must be put on sentences like the
following: -- R.A. holds a virgate consisting of forty-two acres
in both fields.(12*) The question may be raised whether we have
to look for 'both fields' in the winter and springfield of the
three courses rotation, or in the arable and fallow of the two
courses. In the first of these eventualities, the third reserved
for pasture and rest would be left out of the reckoning; it would
be treated as an appurtenance of the land that was in
cultivation. Cases in which the portions in the several fields
are unequal seem to point to the second sense.(13*) It was
impossible to divide the whole territory under cultivation like a
piece of paper: conformation of the soil had, of course, much to
do with the shape of the furlongs and their distribution, and the
courses of the husbandry could not impress themselves on it
without some inequalities and stray remnants. It may happen for
this reason that a man holds sixteen acres in one field and
fourteen in the other. There is almost always, however, a certain
correspondence between the number of acres in each field;
instances of very great disparity are rare, and suppose some
local and special reasons which we cannot trace. Such disparities
seem to point, however, to a rotation according to two courses,
because the fallow of the three courses could have been left out
of the reckoning only if all the parts in the fields were
equal.(14*) I think that a careful inspection of the surveys from
this point of view may lead to the conclusion that the two
courses rotation was very extensively spread in England in the
thirteenth century.
    A most important feature of the mediaeval system of tillage
was its compulsory character. The several tenants, even when
freeholders, could not manage their plots at their own
choice.(15*) The entire soil of the township formed one whole in
this respect, and was subjected to the management of the entire
village. The superior right of the community found expression in
the fact that the fields were open to common use as pasture after
the harvest, as well as in the regulation of the modes of farming
and order of tillage by the township. Even the lord himself had
to conform to the customs and rules set up by the community, and
attempts to break through them, although they become frequent
enough at the close of the thirteenth century, and especially in
the fourteenth, are met by a resistance which sometimes actually
leads to litigation.(16*) The freeholders alone have access to
the courts, but in practice the entire body of the tenantry is
equally concerned. The passage towards more efficient modes of
cultivation was very much obstructed by these customary rules as
to rotation of crops, which flow not from the will and interest
of single owners, but from the decision of communities.
    The several plots and holdings do not lie in compact I
patches, but are formed of strips intermixed with each other. The
so-called open-field system has been treated so exhaustively and
with such admirable clearness by Seebohm, that I need not detain
my readers in order to discuss it at length. I shall merely take
from the Eynsham Cartulary the general description of the arable
of Shifford, Oxon. It consists of several furlongs or areas, more
or less rectangular in shape; each furlong divided into a certain
number of strips (seliones), mostly half an acre or a rood
(quarter acre) in width; some of these strips get shortened,
however (seliones curtae), or sharpened (gorae), according to the
shape of the country. At right angles with the strips in the
fields lie the 'headlands' (capitales), which admit to other
strips when there is no special road for the purpose.(17*) When
the area under tillage abuts against some obstacles, as against a
highway, a river, a neighbouring furlong, the strips are stunted
(buttae). Every strip is separated from the next by balks on even
ground, and linches on the steep slopes of a hill. The holding of
a peasant, free or villain, has been appropriately likened to a
bundle of these strips of different shapes, the component parts
of which lie intermixed with the elements of other holdings in
the different fields of the township. There is e.g. in the
Alvingham Cartulary a deed by which John Aysterby grants to the
Priory of Alvingham in Lincolnshire his villain Robert and half a
bovate of land.(18*) The half-bovate is found to consist of
twelve strips west of Alvingham and sixteen strips east of the
village; the several plots lie among similar plots owned by the
priory and by other peasants. The demesne land of the priory is
also situated not in compact areas, but in strips intermixed with
those of the tenantry, in the 'communal fields' according to the
phraseology of our documents.
    Such a distribution of the arable seems odd enough. It led
undoubtedly to very great inconvenience in many ways: it was
difficult for the owner to look after his property in the several
fields, and to move constantly from one place to another for the
purposes of cultivation. A thrifty husbandman was more or less
dependent for the results of his work on his neighbours, who very
likely were not thrifty. The strips were not always measured with
exactness,(19*) and our surveys mention curious misunderstandings
in this respect: it happens that as much as three acres belonging
to a particular person get mislaid somehow and cannot be
identified.(20*) It is needless to say that disputes among the
neighbours were rendered especially frequent by the rough way of
dividing the strips, and by the cutting up of the holdings into
narrow strips involving a very long line of boundary. And still
the open-field system, with the intermixed strips, is quite a
prevalent feature of mediaeval husbandry all over Europe. It
covers the whole area occupied by the village community; it is
found in Russia as well as in England.
    Before we try to find an explanation for it, I shall call the
attention of the reader to the following tale preserved by an
ancient survey of Dunstable Priory. I think that the record may
suggest the explanation with the more authority as it will
proceed from well-established facts and not from
suppositions.(21*) The story goes back to the original division
of the land belonging to the Wahull manor by the lords de Wahull
and de la Lege. The former had to receive two-thirds of the manor
and the latter one-third: a note explains this to mean, that one
had to take twenty knight-fees and the other ten. The lord de
Wahull took all the park in Segheho and the entire demesne farm
in 'Bechebury'. As a compensation for the surrender of rights on
the part of his fellow parcener, he ordered the wood and pasture
called Northwood to be measured, as also the neighbouring wood
called Churlwood. He removed all the peasants who lived in these
places, and had also the arable of Segheho measured, and it was
found that there were eight hides of villain land. Of these eight
hides one-fourth was taken, and it was reckoned that this fourth
was an equivalent to the one-third of the park and of the demesne
farm, which ought by right to have gone to the lord de la Lege.
On the basis of this estimation an exchange was effected. In the
time of the war (perhaps the rebellion of 1173) the eight hides
and other hides in Segheho were encroached upon and appropriated
unrighteously by many, and for this reason a general revision of
the holdings was undertaken before Walter de Wahull and Hugh de
la Lege in full court by six old men; it was made out to which of
the hides the several acres belonged. At that time, when all the
tenants in Segheho (knights, freeholders, and others) did not
know exactly about the land of the village and the tenements, and
when each man was contending that his neighbours held
unrighteously and more than they ought, all the people decided by
common agreement and in the presence of the lords de Wahull and
de la Lege, that everybody should surrender his land to be
measured anew with the rood by the old men as if the ground had
been occupied afresh: every one had to receive his due part on
consideration of his rights. At that time R.F. admitted that he
and his predecessors had held the area near the castle
unrighteously. The men in charge of the distribution divided that
area into sixteen strips (buttos), and these were divided as
follows: there are eight hides of villain land in Segheho and to
each two strips were apportioned.
    The narrative is curious in many respects. it illustrates
beautifully the extent to which the intermixture of plots was
carried, and the inconveniences consequent upon it. Although the
land had been measured and divided at the time when the lord de
Wahull took the land, everything got into confusion at the time
of the civil war, and the disputes originated not in violence
from abroad but in encroachments of the village people among
themselves: the owners of conterminous strips were constantly
quarrelling. A new division became necessary, and it took place
under circumstances of great solemnity, as a result of an
agreement effected at a great meeting of the tenantry before both
lords. The new distribution may stand for all purposes in lieu of
the original parcelling of the land on fresh occupation. The mode
of treating one of the areas shows that the intermixture of the
strips was a direct consequence of the attempt to equalise the
portions. instead of putting the whole of this area into one lot,
the old men divide it into strips and assign to every great
holding, to every hide, two strips of this area. Many
inconveniences follow for some of the owners, e.g. for the church
which, it is complained, cannot put its plot to any use on
account of its lying far away, and in intermixture with other
people's land. But the guiding principle of equal apportionment
has found a suitable expression.
    We may turn now from the analysis of this case to general
considerations. The important point in the instance quoted was,
that the assignment of scattered strips to every holding depended
on the wish to equalise the shares of the tenants. I think it may
be shown that the treatment adopted in Segheho was the most
natural, and therefore the most widely-spread one. To begin with,
what other form of allotment appears more natural in a crude
state of society? To employ a simile which I have used already,
the territory of the township is not like a homogeneous sheet of
paper out of which you may cut lots of every desirable shape and
size: the tilth will present all kinds of accidental features,
according to the elevation of the ground, the direction of the
watercourses and ways, the quality of the soil, the situation of
dwellings, the disposition of wood and pasture-ground, etc. The
whole must needs be dismembered into component parts, into
smaller areas or furlongs, each stretching over land of one and
the same condition, and separated from land of different quality
and situation. Over the irregular squares of this rough
chess-board a more or less entangled network of rights and
interests must be extended. There seem to be only two ways of
doing it: if you want the holding to lie in one compact patch you
will have to make a very complicated reckoning of all the many
circumstances which influence husbandry, will have to find some
numerical expression for fertility, accessibility, and the like;
or else you may simply give every householder a share in every
one of the component areas, and subject him in this way to all
the advantages and drawbacks which bear upon his neighbours. If
the ground cannot be made to fit the system of allotment, the
system must conform itself to the ground. There can be no
question that the second way of escaping from the difficulty is
much the easier one, and very suitable to the practice of
communities in an early stage of development. This second way
leads necessarily to a scattering and an intermixture of strips.
The explanation is wide enough to meet the requirements of cases
placed in entirely different local surroundings and historical
connexions; the tendency towards an equalising of the shares of
the tenantry is equally noticeable in England and in Russia, in
the far west and in the far east of Europe. In Russia we need not
even go into history to find it operating in the way described;
the practice is alive even now.
    This intermixture of strips in the open fields is also
characteristic in another way: it manifests the working of a
principle which became obliterated in the course of history, but
had to play a very important part originally. It was a system
primarily intended for the purpose of equalising shares, and it
considered every man's rights and property as interwoven with
other people's rights and property: it was therefore a system
particularly adapted to bring home the superior right of the
community as a whole, and the inferior, derivative character of
individual rights. The most complete inference from such a
general conception would be to treat individual occupation of the
land as a shifting ownership, to redistribute the land among the
members of the community from time to time, according to some
system of lot or rotation. The western village community does not
go so far, as a rule, in regard to the arable, at least in the
time to which our records belong. But even in the west, and
particularly in England, traces of shifting ownership, 'shifting
severalty,' may be found as scattered survivals of a condition
which, if not general, was certainly much more widely spread in
earlier times.(22*) The arable is sometimes treated as meadows
constantly are: every householder's lot is only an 'ideal' one,
and may be assigned one year in one place, and next year in
another. The stubborn existence of intermixed ownership, even as
described by feudal and later records, is in itself a strong
testimony to the communal character of early property. The strips
of the several holders were not divided by hedges or inclosures,
and a good part of the time, after harvest and before seed,
individual rights retreated before common use; every
individualising treatment of the soil was excluded by the
compulsory rotation of crops and the fact that every share
consisted of a number of narrow strips wedged in among other
people's shares. The husbandry could not be very energetic and
lucrative under such pressure, and a powerful consideration which
kept the system working, against convenience and interest, was
its equalising and as it were communal tendency. I lay stress on
the fact: if the open-field system with its intermixture had been
merely a reflection of the original allotment, it would have
certainly lost its regularity very soon. People could not be
blind to its drawbacks from the point of view of individual
farming; and if the single strips had become private property as
soon as they ceased to be shifting, exchanges, if not sales,
would have greatly destroyed the inconvenient network. The lord
had no interest to prevent such exchanges, which could manifestly
lead to an improvement of husbandry,. and in regard to his own
strips, he must have perceived soon enough that it would be
better to have them in one compact mass than scattered about in
all the fields. And still the open-field intermixture holds its
ground all through the middle ages, and we find its survivals far
into modern times. This can only mean, that even when the
shifting, 'ideal,' share in the land of the community had given
way to the permanent ownership by each member of certain
particular scattered strips, this permanent ownership did by no
means amount to private property in the Roman or in the modern
sense. The communal principle with its equalising tendency
remained still as the efficient force regulating the whole, and
strong enough to subject even the lord and the freeholders to its
customary influence. By saying this I do not mean to maintain, of
course, that private property was not existent, that it was not
breaking through the communal system, and acting as a dissolvent
of it. I shall have to show by-and-by in what ways this process
was effected. But the fact remains, that the system which
prevailed upon the whole during the middle ages appears directly
connected in its most important features with ideas of communal
ownership and equalised individual rights.
    These ideas are carried out in a very rough way in the
mediaeval arrangement of the holding, which is more complicated
in England than on the continent. According to a very common mode
of reckoning, the hide contains four virgates, every virgate two
bovates, and every bovate fifteen acres. The bovate (oxgang)
shows by its very name that not only the land is taken into
account, but the oxen employed in its tillage, and the records
explain the hide or carucate (23*) to be the land of the
eight-oxen plough, that is so much land as may be cultivated by a
plough drawn by eight oxen. The virgate, or yard-land, being the
fourth part of a hide, corresponds to one-fourth part of the
plough, that is, to two oxen, contributed by the holder to the
full plough-team; the bovate or oxgang appears as the land of one
ox, and the eighth part of the hide.(24*) Such proportions are,
as I said, very commonly found in the records, but they are by no
means prevalent everywhere. On the possessions of Glastonbury
Abbey, for instance, we find virgates of forty acres, and a hide
of 160; and the same reckoning appears in manors of Wetherall
Priory, Westmoreland,(25*) of the Abbey of Eynsham,
Oxfordshire,(26*) and many other places.
    The so-called Domesday of St. Paul's reports,(27*) that in
Runwell eighty acres used to be reckoned to the hide, but in
course of time new land was acquired (for tillage) and measured,
and so the hide was raised to 120 acres. Altogether the
supposition of an uniform acre-measurement of bovates, virgates,
hides, and knights' fees all over England would be entirely
misleading. The oxen were an important element in the
arrangement, but, of course, not the only one. The formation of
the holding had to conform also to the quality of the soil, the
density of the population, etc. We find in any case the most
varying figures. The knight's fee contained mostly four or five
full ploughs or carucates, and still in Lincolnshire sixteen
carucates went to the knight's fee.(28*) The carucate was not
identical with the hide, but carucate and hide alike had
originally meant a unit corresponding to a plough-team. Four
virgates were mostly reckoned to the hide, but sometimes six,
eight, seven are taken.(29*) The yardlands (virgates) or full
lands, as they are sometimes called, because they were considered
as the typical peasant holdings, consist of fifteen, sixteen,
eighteen, twenty-four, forty, forty-eight, fifty, sixty-two,
eighty acres, although thirty is perhaps the figure which appears
more often than any other.(30*) Bovates of ten, twelve, and
sixteen acres are to be found in the same locality.(31*) We
cannot even seize hold of the acre as the one constant unit among
these many variables; the size of the acre itself varied from
place to place. In this way any attempt to establish a normal
reckoning of the holdings will not only seem hazardous, but will
actually stand in contradiction with patent facts.
    Another circumstance seems of yet greater import: even within
the boundaries of one and the same community the equality was an
agrarian one and did not amount to a strict correspondence in
figures. It was obviously impossible to cut up the land among the
holdings in such a way as to make every one contain quite the
same number of acres as the rest. In the Cartulary of Ramsey it
is stated, that in one of the manors the virgate contains
sometimes forty-eight acres and sometimes less.(32*) The
Huntingdon Hundred Rolls mentions a locality where some of the
half-virgates have got houses on their plots and some have
not.(33*) In the Dorsetshire manor of Newton, belonging to
Glastonbury, we find a reduction of the duties of one of the
virgates because it is a small one.(34*) A curious instance is
supplied by the same Glastonbury survey as to the Wiltshire manor
of Christian Malford: one of the virgates was formed out of two
former virgates, which were found insufficient to support two
separate households.(35*)
    This last case makes it especially clear that the object was
to make the shares on the same pattern in point of quality, and
not of mere quantity. It is only to be regretted that manorial
surveys, hundred rolls, and other documents of the same kind take
too little heed of such variations, and consider the whole
arrangement merely in regard to the interests of the landlord.
For this purpose a rough quantitative statement was sufficient.
They give very sparing indications as to the facts underlying the
system of holdings; their aim is to reduce all relations to
artificial uniformity in order to make them a fitter basis for
the distribution of rents and labour services. But very little
attention is required to notice a very great difference between
such figures and reality. In most of the cases, when the virgate
is described in its component parts, we come across
irregularities. Again, each component part is more or less
irregular, because instead of the acres and half-acres the real
ground presents strips of a very capricious shape. And so we must
come to the conclusion, that the hide, the virgate, the bovate,
in short every holding mentioned in the surveys, appears
primarily as an artificial, administrative, and fiscal unit which
corresponds only in a very rough way to the agrarian reality.
    This conclusion coincides with the most important fact, that
the reckoning of acres in regard to the plough-team is entirely
different in the treatises on husbandry from what it is in the
manorial records drawn up for the purpose of an assessment of
duties and payments. Walter of Henley and Fleta reckon 180 acres
to the plough in a three-field system, and 160 in a two-field
system. Now these figures are quite exceptional in surveys,
whereas 120 acres is most usual without any distinction as to the
course of rotation of crops. The relation between the three-field
ploughland of 180 acres and the hide of 120 suggests the
inference that the official assessment started from the
prevalence of the three-field rotation, and disregarded the
fallow. But the inference is hardly sufficient to explain the
facts of the case. The way towards a solution of the problem is
indicated by the terminology of the Ely surveys in the British
Museum. These documents very often mention virgates and full
yardlands of twelve acres de ware; on the other hand, the Court
Rolls from Edward I's time till Elizabeth's, and a survey of the
reign of Edward III, show the virgate to consist of twenty-four
acres.(36*) The virgate de ware corresponds usually to one-half
of the real virgate; I say usually, because in one case it is
reckoned to contain eighteen acres in the place of twenty-four
mentioned in the rolls and the later survey.(37*) Such 'acre
ware' are to be found, though rarely, in other manors besides
those of Ely minster.(38*) The contradiction between the
documents may be taken at first glance to originate in a
difference between the number of acres under actual tillage and
the number of acres comprised in the holding: perhaps the first
reckoning leaves out the fallow. This explanation has been tried
by Mr O. Pell, the present owner of one of the Ely manors he
started it in connexion with an etymology which brought together
'ware' and 'warectum': on this assumption twelve acres appeared
instead of twenty-four, because the fallow of the two-field
system was left out of the reckoning. But this reading of the
evidence does not seem satisfactory. It is one-sided at the
least. Why should the holding from which the 'warectum' has been
left out get its name from the 'warectum'? How is one to explain
either from the two-field or from the three-field system the case
when eighteen 'acre ware' correspond to twenty-four common acres,
or the even more perplexing case when eighteen acres of 'ware' go
to the full land and twelve to half-a-full land?(39*) In fact,
this last instance does not admit of any explanation from natural
conditions, because in the natural course of things twelve will
never come to be one-half of eighteen. Thus we are driven to
assume that the 'ware' reckoning is an artificial one: as such it
could, of course, treat the half-holdings in a different way from
the full holdings. Now the only possible basis for an artificial
distribution seems to be the assessment of rents and labour.
Starting from this assumption we shall have to say that the
virgate 'de wara' represents a unit of assessment in which twelve
really existing acres have been left out of the reckoning. The
assessment stretches only over half the area occupied by the real
holding.
    The conclusion we have come to is corroborated by the meaning
of the word 'wara.' The etymological connexion with warectum is
not sound; the meaning may be best brought out by a comparison
with those instances where the word is used without a direct
reference to the number of acres. We often find the expression
'ad inwaram' in Domesday, and it corresponds to the plain 'ad
gildam Regis'. If a manor is said to contain seven hides ad
inwaram, it is meant that it pays to the king for seven hides,
although there may have been more than seven ploughteams and
ploughlands. Another expression of like import is, 'pro sextem
hidis se defendit erga Regem.' The Burton Cartulary, the earliest
survey after Domesday, employed the word 'wara' in the same
sense.(40*) It is not difficult to draw the inference from the
above-mentioned facts: the etymological connexion for 'wara' is
to be sought in the German word for defence -- 'wehre.' The manor
defends itself or answers to the king for seven hides. The
expression could get other special significations besides the one
discussed: we find it for the poll-tax, by which a freeman
defends himself in regard to the state,(41*) and for the weir,
which prevents the fish from escaping into the river.(42*)
    This origin and use of the term is of considerable.
importance, because it shows the artificial character of the
system and its close connexion with the taxation by the State.
This is a disturbing element which ought to be taken into account
by the side of the agrarian influence. There cannot be the
slightest doubt that the assessment started from actual facts,
from existing agrarian conditions and divisions. The hide, the
yardland, the oxgang existed not only in the geld-rolls, but in
fact and on the ground. But in geld-rolls they appeared with a
regularity they did not possess in real fact; the rolls express
all modifications in the modes of farming and all exemptions, not
in the shape of any qualification or lighter assessment of single
plots, but by way of striking off from the number of these plots,
or from the number of acres in them; the object which in modern
times would be effected by the registration of a 'rateable value'
differing from the 'actual value' was effected in ancient times
by the registration of a 'rateable size' differing from the
'actual size'; lastly, the surveys and rolls of assessment do not
keep time with the actual facts, and often reflect, by their
figures and statistics, the conditions of bygone periods. The
hides of the geld or of the 'wara' tend to become constant and
rigid: it is difficult for the king's officers to alter their
estimates, and the people subjected to the tax try in every way
to guard against novelties and encroachments. The real agrarian
hide-area is changing at the same time because the population
increases, new tenements are formed, and new land is reclaimed.
    We find at every step in our records that the assessment and
the agrarian conditions do not coincide. If a manor has been
given to a convent in free almoign (in liberam et perpetuam
eleemosynam), that is, free from all taxes and payments to the
State, there is no reason to describe it in units of assessment,
and in fact such property often appears in manorial records
without any 'hidation' or reckoning of knight-fees.(43*) The
Ramsey Cartulary tells us that the land in Hulme was not divided
into hides and virgates.(44*) There are holdings, of course, and
they are equal, but they are estimated in acres. When the
hidation has been laid on the land and taxes are paid from it,
the smaller subdivisions are sometimes omitted: the artificial
system of taxation does not go very deep into details. Even if
most part of the land has been brought under the operation of
that system, some plots are left which do not participate in the
common payments, and therefore are said to be 'out of the
hide'.(45*) Such being the case, there can be no wonder that one
of the Ramsey manors answers to the king for ten hides, and to
the abbot for eleven and a-half.(46*)
    It is to be noted especially, that although in a few cases a
difference is made between the division for royal assessment and
for the manorial impositions, in the great majority of cases no
such difference exists, and the duties in regard to the king and
to the lord are reckoned according to the same system of
holdings. On the manors of Ely, for instance, the 12 acreware
(47*) form the basis of all the reckoning of rents and work. And
so if the royal assessment appear with the features of an
artificial fiscal arrangement, the same observation has to be
extended to the manorial assessment; and thus we reach by another
way the same conclusion which we drew from an analysis of the
single holding and of its component parts. No doubt the whole
stands in close relation to the reality of cultivation and
land-holding, but the rigidity, regularity, and correctness of
the system present a necessary contrast to the facts of actual
life. As the soil could not be made to fit into geometrical
squares, even so the population could not remain without change
from one age to the other within the same boundaries. Thus in
course of time the plough-land of 160 and 180 acres, which is the
plough-land of practical farming, appears by the side of the
statutory hide of 120 acres; and so again inside every single
holding there comes up the contrast between its real conformation
and distribution, and the outward form it assumed in regard to
the king, the lord, and the steward.
    The inquiry as to the relation between the holding and the
population on it is, of course, of the utmost importance for a
general estimate of the arrangement. From a formal point of view
the question is soon solved: on the one hand, the holding of the
villain remains undivided and entire; it does not admit of
partition by sale or descent; on the other, the will of the lord
may alter, if necessary, the natural course of inheritance and
possession; the socage tenure is often free from the first of
these limitations, and always free from the second. The
indivisibility of villain tenements is chiefly conspicuous in the
law of inheritance: all the land went to one of the sons if there
were several; very often the youngest inherited; and this custom,
to which mere chance has given the name of Borough English, was
considered as one of the proofs of villainage.(48*) It is
certainly a custom of great importance, and probably it depended
on the fact that the elder brothers left the land at the earliest
opportunity, and during their father's life. Where did they go?
It is easy to guess that they sought work out of the manor, as
craftsmen or labourers; that they served the lord as servants,
ploughmen, and the like; that they were provided with holdings,
which for some reason did not descend to male heirs; that they
were endowed with some demesne land, or fitted out to reclaim
land from the waste. We may find for all these suppositions some
supporting quotation in the records. And still it would be hard
to believe that the entire increase of population found an exit
by these by-paths. If no exit was found, the brothers had to
remain on their father's plot, and the fact that they did so can
be proved, if it needs proof, from documents.(49*) The unity of
the holding was not disturbed in the case; there was no division,
and only the right heir, the estiopamon as they said in Sparta,
had to answer for the services; the lord looked to him and no
further; but in point of fact the holding contained more than one
family, and perhaps more than one household. However this may be,
in regard to the lord the holding remained one and undivided.
This circumstance draws a sharp line between the feudal
arrangement of most counties and that which prevailed in Kent.
The gavelkind or tributary tenure there was subjected to equal
partition among the heirs.
    Let us take a Kentish survey, the Black Book of St.
Augustine's, Canterbury, for instance: it describes the peasant
holdings in a way which differs entirely from other surveys. It
begins by stating what duties lie on each sulung, that is, on the
Kentish ploughland corresponding to the hide of feudal England.
No regular sub-divisions corresponding to the virgates and
bovates are mentioned, and the reckoning starts not from separate
tenements, but from their combination into sulungs.(50*) Then
follow descriptions of the single sulungs, and it turns out that
every one of them consists of a very great number of component
parts, because the progeny of the original holders has clustered
on them, and parcelled them up in very complicated
combinations.(51*) The portions are sometimes so small, that an
independent cultivation of them would have been quite impossible.
In order to understand the description it must be borne in mind
that the fact of the tenement being owned by several different
persons in definite but undivided shares did not preclude farming
in common; while on the other hand, in judging of the usual
feudal arrangement of holdings we must remember that the
artificial unity and indivisibility of the tenement may be a mere
screen behind which there exists a complex mass of rights
sanctioned by morality and custom though not by law. The surveys
of the Kentish possessions of Battle Abbey are drawn up on the
same principle as those of St. Augustine's; the only difference
is, that the individual portions are collected not in sulungs,
but in yokes (juga).(52*)
    And so we have in England two systems of dividing the land of
the peasant, of regulating its descent and its duties. In one
case the tenant-right is connected with rigid holdings descending
to a single heir; in another the tenements get broken up, and the
heirs club together in order to meet the demands of the manorial
administration. The contrast is sharp and curious enough. How is
one to explain, that in conditions which were more or less
identical, the land was sometimes partitioned and sometimes kept
together, the people were dispersed in some instances and kept
together in others?
    Closer inspection will show that however sharp the opposition
in law may have been, in point of husbandry and actual management
the contrast was not so uncompromising. Connecting links may be
found between the two. The Domesday of St. Paul's, for instance,
is compiled in the main in the usual way, but one section of it
-- the description of the Essex manors of Kirby, Horlock, and
Thorpe -- does not differ from the Kentish surveys in anything
but the terminology.(53*) The services are laid on hides, and not
on the actual tenements. Each hide includes a great number of
plots which do not fall in with any constant subdivisions of the
same kind as the virgates and bovates. Some of these plots are
very small, all are irregular in their formation. It happens that
one and the same person holds in several hides. In one word, the
Kentish system has found a way for some unexplained reason into
the possessions of St. Paul's, and we find subjected to it some
Essex manors which do not differ much in their husbandry
arrangements from other properties in Essex, and have no claim to
the special privileges of Kentish soil.
    Once apprised of the possible existence of such inter mediate
forms, we shall find in most surveys facts tending to connect the
two arrangements. The Gloucester Cartulary, for instance,
mentions virgates held by four persons.(54*) The plots of these
four owners are evidently brought together into a virgate for the
purpose of assessing the services. Two peasants on the same
virgate are found constantly. It happens that one gets the
greater part of the land and is called the heir, while his fellow
appears as a small cotter who has to co-operate in the work
performed by the virgate.(55*) Indications are not wanting that
sometimes virgates crumbled up into cotlands, bordlands, and
crofts. The denomination of some peasants in Northumberland is
characteristic enough -- they are 'selfoders,' obviously dwelling
'self-other' on their tenements.(56*) On the other hand, it is to
be noticed that the gavelkind rule of succession, although
enacting the partibility of the inheritance, still reserves the
hearth to the youngest born, a trace of the same junior right
which led to Borough English.
    I think that upon the whole we must say that in practice the
very marked contrast between the general arrangement of the
holdings and the Kentish one is more a difference in the way of
reckoning than in actual occupation, in legal forms than in
economical substance. The general arrangement admitted a certain
subdivision under the cover of an artificial unity which found
its expression in the settlement of the services and of the
relations with the lord.(57*) The English case has its parallel
on the Continent in this respect. In Alsace, for instance, the
holding was united under one 'Trager' or bearer of the manorial
duties; but by the side of him other people are found who
participate with this official holder in the ownership and in the
cultivation.(58*) The second system also kept up the artificial
existence of the higher units, and obvious interests prevented it
from leading to a 'morcellement' of land into very small portions
in practice. The economic management of land could not go as far
as the legal partition. In practice the subdivision was certainly
checked, as in the virgate system, by the necessity of keeping
together the cattle necessary for the tillage. Virgates and
bovates would arise of themselves: it was not advantageous to
split the yoke of two oxen, the smallest possible plough; and
co-heirs had to think even more when they inherited one ox with
its ox-gang of land. The animal could not be divided, and this
certainly must have stopped in many cases the division of land.
When the documents speak of plots containing two or three acres,
it must be remembered that such crofts and cotlands occur also in
the usual system, and I do not see any reason to suppose that the
existence of such subdivided rights always indicated a real
dispersion of the economic unit: they may have stood as a
landmark of the relative rights of joint occupiers. I do not mean
to say, of course, that there was no real basis for the very
great difference which is assumed by the two ways of describing
the tenements. No doubt the hand of the lord lay heavier on the
Essex people than on the Kentish men, their occupation and usage
of the land was more under the control of the lord, and assumed
therefore an aspect of greater regularity and order. Again, the
legal privileges of the Kentish people opened the way towards a
greater development of individual freedom and a certain looseness
of social relations. Still it would be wrong to infer too much
from this formal opposition. In both cases the centripetal and
the centrifugal tendency are working against each other in the
same way, although one case presents the stronger influence of
disruptive forces, and the other gives predominance to the
collective power. In the history of socage and military tenure
the system of unity arose gradually, and without any sudden
break, out of the system of division. The intimate connexion
between both forms is even more natural in peasant ownership,
which had to operate with small plots and small agricultural
capital, and therefore inclined naturally towards the artificial
combination of divided interests. In any case there is no room in
practice for the rigid and consequent operation of either rule of
ownership, and, if so, there is no actual basis for the inference
that the unification of the holding is to be taken as a direct
consequence of a servile origin of the tenement and a sure proof
of it. Unification appears on closer inspection as a result of
economic considerations as well as of legal disabilities, and for
this reason the tendency operated in the sphere of free property
as well as among the villains; among these last it could not
preclude the working of the disruptive elements, but in many
cases only hid them from sight by its artificial screen of rigid
holdings.
    We have seen that the size and distribution of the holdings
are connected with the number of oxen necessary for the tillage,
and its relation to the full plough. The hide appears as the
ploughland with eight oxen, the virgate corresponds to one yoke
of oxen, and the bovate to the single head. it need not be added
that such figures are not absolutely settled, and are to be
accepted as approximate terms, The great heavy plough drawn by
eight or ten oxen is certainly often mentioned in the records,
especially on demesne land.(59*) The dependent people, when they
have to help in the cultivation of the demesne, club together in
order to make up full plough teams.(60*) It is also obvious that
the peasantry had to associate for the tilling of their own land,
as it was very rare for the single shareholder to possess a
sufficient number of beasts to work by himself. But it must be
noticed that alongside of the unwieldy eight-oxen plough we find
much lighter ones. Even on the demesne we may find them drawn by
six oxen. And as for the peasantry, they seem to have very often
contented themselves with forming a plough team of four
heads.(61*) It is commonly supposed by the surveys that the
holder of a yardland joins with one of his fellows to make up the
team. This would mean on the scale of the hide of 120 acres that
the team consists of four beasts.(62*) It happens even that a
full plough is supposed to belong to two or three peasants, of
which every one is possessed only of five acres; in such cases
there can be no talk of a big plough; it is difficult to admit
even a four-oxen team, and probably those people only worked with
one yoke or pair of beasts.(63*) Altogether it would be very
wrong to assume in practice a strict correspondence between the
size of the holding and the parts of an eight-oxen plough. The
observation that the usual reckoning of the hide and of its
subdivisions, according to the pattern of the big team, cannot be
made to fit exactly with the real arrangement of the teams owned
by the peasantry -- this firmly established observation leads us
once more to the conclusion that the system of equal holdings had
become very artificial in process of time and was determined
rather by the relation between the peasants and the manorial
administration than by the actual conditions of peasant life.
Unhappily the artificial features of the system have been made by
modern inquirers the starting point of very far-reaching theories
and suppositions. Seebohm has proposed an explanation of the
intermixture of strips as originating in the practice of
coaration. He argues that it was natural to divide the land
tilled by a mixed plough-team among the owners of the several
beasts and implements. Every man got a strip according to a
certain settled and ever-recurring succession. I do not pretend
to judge of the value of the interesting instances adduced by
Seebohm from Celtic practices, but whatever the arrangement in
Wales or Ireland may have been, the explanation does not suit the
English case. A doubt is cast on it already by the fact that such
a universal feature as the intermixture of strips appears
connected with the occurrence of such a special instrument as the
eight-oxen plough, The intermixture is quite the same in Central
Russia, where they till with one horse, and in England where more
or less big ploughs were used. the doubt increases when we
reflect that if the strips followed each other as parts of the
plough-team, the great owners would have been possessed of
compact plots. Every holder of an entire hide would have been out
of the intermixture, and every virgater would have stood in
conjunction with a sequence of three other tenants. Neither the
one nor the other inference is supported by the facts. The
observation that the peasantry are commonly provided with small
ploughs drawn by four beasts ruins Seebohm's hypothesis entirely.
One would have to suppose that most fields were divided into two
parts, as the majority of the tenements are yardlands with half a
team. The only adequate explanation of the open-field
intermixture has been given above; it has its roots in the wish
to equalise the holdings as to the quantity and quality of the
land assigned to them in spite of all differences in the shape,
the position, and the value of the soil.
    Before I leave the question as to the holdings of the feudal
peasantry, I must mention some terms which occur in different
parts of England, although more rarely than the usual hides and
virgates.(64*) Of the sulung I have spoken already. It is a full
ploughland, and 200 acres are commonly reckoned to belong to it.
The name is sometimes found out of Kent, in Essex for instance.
In Tillingham, a manor of St. Paul's of London, we come across
six hides 'trium solandarum'.(65*) The most probable explanation
seems to be that the hide or unit of assessment is contrasted
with the solanda or sulland (sulung), that is with the actual
ploughland, and two hides are reckoned as a single solanda.
    The yokes (juga) of Battle Abbey (66*) are not virgates, but
carucates, full ploughlands. This follows from the fact that a
certain virgate mentioned in the record is equivalent only to one
fourth of the yoke. In the Norfolk manors of Ely Minster we find
tenmanlands (67*) of 120 acres in the possession of several
copartitioners, participes. The survey does not go into a
detailed description of tenements and rights, and the reckoning
of services starts from the entire combination, as in the Kentish
documents. A commonly recurrent term is wista;(68*) it
corresponds to the virgate: a great wista is as much as
half-a-hide, or two virgates.(69*)
    The terms discussed hitherto are applied to the tenements in
the fields of the village; but besides those there are other
names for the plots occupied by a numerous population which did
not find a place in the regular holdings. There were craftsmen
and rural labourers working for the lord and for the tenants;
there were people living by gardening and the raising of
vegetables. This class is always contrasted with the tenants in
the fields. The usual name for their plots is cote, cotland, or
cotsetland. The so-called ferdel, or fourth part of a virgate, is
usually mentioned among them because there are no ploughbeasts on
it.(70*) Another name for the ferdel is nook.(71*) Next come the
crofters, whose gardens sometimes extend to a very fair size --
as much as ten acres in one enclosed patch.(72*) The cotters
proper have generally one, two, and sometimes as much as five
acres with their dwellings; they cannot keep themselves on this,
as a rule, and have to look out for more on other people's
tenements. A very common name for their plots is
'lundinaria'(73*) 'Mondaylands,' because the holders are bound to
work for the lord only one day in the week, usually on Monday.
Although the absence of plough-beasts, of a part in coaration,
and of shares in the common fields draws a sharp line between
these men and the regular holders, our surveys try sometimes to
fit their duties and plots into the arrangement of holdings; the
cotland is assumed to represent one sixteenth or even one
thirty-second part of the hide.(74*) The Glastonbury Survey of
1189 contains a curious hint that two cottages are more valuable
than one half-virgate: two cotlands were ruined during the war,
and they were thrown together into half a virgate, although it
would have been more advantageous to keep two houses on them,
that is two households.(75*) The bordae mentioned by the
documents are simply cottages or booths without any land
belonging to them.(76*) The manorial police keeps a lookout that
such houses may not arise without licence and service.(77*)
    A good many terms are not connected in any way with the
general arrangement of the holdings, but depend upon the part
played by the land in husbandry or the services imposed upon it.
To mention a few among them. A plot which has to provide cheese
is called Cheeseland.(78*) Those tenements which are singled out
for the special duty of carrying the proceeds of the manorial
cultivation get the name of averlands.(79*) The terms
lodland,(80*) serland (81*) or sharland, are also connected with
compulsory labour. The first is taken from the duty to carry
loads or possibly to load waggons; the second may be employed in
reference to work performed with the sithe or reap-hook. A plot
reserved for the leader of the plough-team, the akerman, was
naturally called akermanland.(82*) Sometimes, though rarely, the
holding gets its name from the money rent it has to pay. We hear
of denerates (83*) and nummates (84*) of land in this connexion.
    All these variations in detail do not avail to modify to any
considerable extent the chief lines on which the medieval system
of holdings is constructed. I presume that the foregoing
exposition has been sufficient to establish the following points:
--
    1. The principle upon which the original distribution
depended was that of equalizing the shares of the members of the
community. This led to the scattering and to the intermixture of
strips. The principle did not preclude inequality according to
certain degrees, but it aimed at putting all the people of one
degree into approximately similar conditions.
    2. The growth of population, of capital, of cultivation, of
social inequalities led to a considerable difference between the
artificial uniformity in which the arrangement of the holdings
was kept and the actual practice of farming and ownership.
    3. The system was designed and kept working by the influence
of communal right, but it got its artificial shape and its legal
rigidity from the manorial administration which used it for the
purpose of distributing and collecting labour and rent.
    4. The holdings were held together as units, not merely by
the superior property of the lord, but by economic
considerations. They were breaking up under the pressure of
population, not merely in the case of free holdings, but also
where the holdings were servile.

NOTES:


1. It should be observed that the word demesne (dominicum) is
constantly used in two different senses, (a) the narrower sense
in which it stands for the land directly occupied and cultivated
by the lord or for his use, and excludes the land held by his
villain tenants, and (b) the wider sense ill which it includes
these villain tenements. The first meaning is that which the word
usually bears in manorial documents, in which the dominicum is
contrasted with the villenagium or bondagium. But in legal
pleadings and documents which state the doctrine of the common
law and the king's courts the villain tenements are part of the
lord's demesne, he is seised of them in his demesne (in dominico
suo). This discrepancy between what I may call the manorial and
the legal uses of the term deserves notice as an indication of
the imperfect adjustment of law to fact. I shall use the term in
its narrower sense.

2. Eynsham Cartulary, MSS. of Christ Church, Oxford, N. 27, f 1,
a: 'Est una cultura nuncupata Shyppelond, et continet in toto
septem acras dimidiam acram et dimidiam rodam, et valet acra 4d.,
et bis successive seminatur.' Inqu. p. mortem 20 Henry III, N. 14
(Record Office): 'Extensio manerii de Remdun (Lincoln). Sunt
ibidem 360 acre terre et faciunt duas carucatas. Et seminata sunt
per annum 240 acre... De waracto per annum 12 d.'

3. Glastonbury Survey of 1189 (Roxburghe Ser.), 99: 'Idem tenet
de dominico tres acras a tempore Henrici episcopi quas colit in
uno anno et altero noll.'

4. Eynsham Cart., I, a: 'Est ibidem prope alia cultura nuncupata
Clayfurlong et continet cum capitali inferiore octo acras unam
rodam tres perticas cum dimidia, et potest ter seminari
successive, videlicet post warectum ordium, anno sequente cum
grosso pulstro et anno tercio cum frumento, et valet acra 8 d....
(Alia cultura) et potest ter seminari ut supra mutato grosso
pulstro in pisas.'

5. Two husbandry treatises were chiefly in use in mediaeval
England. The fourteenth-century MS., Merton College 91, contains
both, and both mention the two systems. (Modus qualiter balliui
et prepositi debent onerari super compotum reddendum et qualiter
manerium custodiri), f 152: 'E la vu les chaumps sunt semez e
parti en deus, le iuernage e le trameys sunt tous semez en un
champ.' -- (Maior husbonderia, otherwise Walter of Henley's
treatise), f 155: 'Si les terres seent partiz en iii, la ulle
partie en le yuernage, lautre partie en le quaremel, e la tierce
partie a warect, donqes est la charrue de terre de xxx acres,
(sic, corr. ixxx)., E si vos terres seent partez en ii, com sont
en plusurs pays, la une partie a yuernage e a quaremel, e lautre
partie a waret, donqes serra la charue de terre de viiixx acres.'
Cf. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, 75.

6. Fleta, ii. 72.

7. Malmesbury Cart. (Rolls Ser.), ii. 186: 'De terris inbladandis
et inhoc faclendis in campis de Brokeneberewe et de Burestone, a
ponte de Julebrocke usque ad Halbrigge de Bremelham, ubi dictus
Ricardus dicebat se habere communam, ita quod nec abbas et
conventus, nec eorum tenentes possint inhoc facere sine consensu
dicti Ricardi, nec pro voluntate sua terras suas ibidem
inbladare... Abbas et conventus concesserunt praedicto Ricardo...
ut cum terrae prenominatae inbladatae fuerint et blada a terris
amota, liberam et plenam communam in praefatis terris una cum
abbate et suis hominibus (habeat) sicut ipse vel praedecessores
sui unquam melius et plenius habere consueverunt.... Ita quod si
de campo predicto in quo factum est inhoc pars quaedam remaneat
inculta sine blado, in eadem parte habebunt predictus Ricardus et
heredes sui communam cum abbate et conventu et suis. Similiter si
villani praedicti Ricardi nolint inhokare terras suas infra
praedictum inhoc sitas, habebunt liberum ingressum et egressum ad
warectandum eas.'

8. Coram Rege, Hill. 3 Edw. I, m. 17, d: 'Item quicumque facit
inheche scilicet excolit warectum frumento, ordeo vel auena,
dabit pro qualibet acra unum denarium, excepta una acra quam
habere debet quietam.' See App. xii.

9. Gloucester Cart. iii. 35, 36: ' Omnes dictae particulae jacent
pro uno campo, summa I74 acre arabiles, etc.... Et de predicto
campo possunt inhokari quolibet secundo anno 40 acre et valet
inde commodum eo anno 10 solidos.... De dictis 63 acris possunt
quolibet secundo anno inhokari 20 acre, et valet inde commodum eo
anno 11 sol. 8 d.... Et est summa totalis omnium acrarum
arabilium 412. Et est summa dictarum acrarum in valore denariorum
9 librae 12 solidi. De quibus subtracta tertia parte pro campo
jacente ad warectum, 64 sol. scilicet, remanent ad extentam
annuam de puro 6 librae 8 sol. et de commodo terrae quae singulis
annis potest inhokari 15 sol. 10d.' -- Cf Minor husbanderia,
Merton Coll. MS. 91, f 152: 'E si li ad Inhom, i deit veer quele
cuture i prent del Inhom, e de quel ble est seme checune cuture,
e tel semail deit il cuiler tut per ly e respondre tut per ly,
hors des autres blees.'

10. Cart. of Boxgrave, Cotton MSS., Claudius, A. vi. p. 2: 'Debet
compostare unam helvam ad frumentum et aliam ad ordeum.' Essex
Court Rolls (Bodleian), 4: 'Milencia Tegulatrix posuit fimos in
communa ad nocumentum custumariorum.' Glastonbury Inquest of 1189
(Roxburghe Ser.), 141: 'A. de N. occupavit quendam mariscum per
concessum Roberti abbatis et illum marliavit et coluit.' Cf
Domesday of St. Paul's (Camden Ser.), 8: ' Dicunt eciam quod
emendatum est manerium in 50 acris marlatis per Willelmum
Thesaurarium ad summam 10 solidorum.' Ib. 21.

11. Malmesbury Cart. (Rolls Ser. ' ii. 27: 'Concessimus...
Roberto filio Roberti... illam virgatam terre quam A. de C.
tenuit in campis, scilicet in uno campo 21 acras et in alio campo
21 acras.'

12. Gloucester Cart., iii. 194: 'Robertus Abovetun tenet unam
virgatam terre continentem 44 acras in utroque campo.'

13. Ramsey Register, Cotton MSS., Galba, E. x. 27, d: 'Radulfus
tenet 11 seliones in uno campo et 5 in alio de vilenagio.,
Worcester Cart. (Camden Ser.), 62, a: 'Henricus clericus tenet
unam virgatam, 16 acras in uno campo et 14 in alio. Item tenet
aliam virgatam similiter. T. T. tenet unam virgatam, 15 acras
excepto dimidio furtendello in uno campo et 11 in alio. O. le E.
tenet unam virgatam 13 a. et 1/2 in uno campo et 12 et dimidiam
in alio. T. le F. tenet unam virgatam, 16 acras in uno campo et
12 in alio.'

14. As in Gloucester Cart., i. 246: 'Ecclesiam Omnium
Sanctorum... cum omnibus pertinenciis suis, videlicet unam
virgatam terrae, undecim acras terrae in campo lucrabili.' Cf
247.

15. Dunstable Cart., Harleian MSS. 1885, f 7, d: 'Postquam buttum
habuimus bis seminatio fuerit et non amplius, quia omnes ceteri
non excolunt ibi terram, sed at pascua reservant.'

16. Eynsham Cart., Christ Church, Oxford, MSS., N. 27, f 74, b:
'Placitum de Haneberge in recordo de banco de termino Sti
Trinitatis anni xliij (Edw. III)... Est quidam hamelettus vocatus
Tilgerdesle infra bundos ville de Eynesham, infra quem hamelettum
tam in vastis quam in terris, pratis et pasturis eiusdem
hameletti iidem Johannes Smyth et omnes alii habent communam cum
omnibus averiis suis tanquam pertinens ad tenementa sua que ipsi
separati tenent in Hanberge, scilicet in vasto et pastura
quolibet anno per totum annum et in terris arabilibus post blada
messa et asportata quousque... resemenentur et quolibet tercio
anno tempore warecti per totum annum eo quod omnes terrae
arabiles infra dictum hamelettum per duos annos continuos debent
seminari et tercio anno warectari, et in pratis post fenum
levatum et asportatum usque ad festum purificacionis beate
Marie.... Et dicunt quod diversis vicibus quibus predictus Abbas
nunc queritur etc. diuerse parcelle terrarum arabilium in
hameletto predicto que tunc temporis warectare debuissent per
predictum abbatem et alios seminate fuerunt per quod ipsi tam in
parcellis illis sic seminatis que tunc temporis warectare
debuerunt quam in aliis vastis, pratis et pascuis hameletti
predicti in communa sua cum aueriis suis prout eis bene licuerit
usi fuerunt... Et predictus abbas non cognoscit quod terre
arabiles infra hamelettum predictum quolibet tercio anno debent
warectari, immo protestando quod eedem terre per tres annos
continuos debent seminari et quarto anno warectari.' The case is
a rather complicated one, because the persons claiming common are
not tenants of the Abbot but of the King. Still, their
pretensions are grounded on the customary order of farming in a
hamlet belonging to the manor of Eynsham, and this is the point
which concerns us. Cf Coram Rege, Pascha, 25 Henry III: 'Abbas...
partitus fuit terras suas in tres partes quae antea partitae
fuerunt in duas partes.' See also Placit. Abbrev. 153. The case
is quoted by Scrutton, Common Fields, 57.

17. Some of these expressions are intcresting. Balk is the O. N.
balkr; gora is the spear.head or its long triangular shape, O. E.
gar, O. N. geirr. These linguistic affinities have been pointed
out to me by Mr. F. York Powell.

18. Alvingham Priory Cart., Laud MSS. 642 (Bodleian), f 12. Cf
Malmesbury Cart. ii. 294; Madox, History of the Exchequer, 258.

19. Eynsham Cart., 5, a: 'I. I. virgatarius... Idem tenet unam
selionem terre apud Blakelond non mensuratam.'

20. Domesday of St. Paul's, 11: 'Laurencius de hospitale dimidiam
virgatam pro 40 denariis; tres acre quas tenuit Laurencius sine
servicio inveniri non possunt.'

21. Dunstable Priory Cart., Harleian MSS. 1885, f 7, d. See
Appendix xiii.

22. Elton, English Historical Review, i, 435.

23. The expressions are not identical, but they ought both to
correspond to the ploughteam.

24. As to all this, see Seebohm, Village Community.

25. Glastonbury Inqu. (Roxburghe Ser.), 144, v. Hide, virgate.

26. Eynsham Cart., 4, a.

27. Domesday of St. Paul's: 'Manerium istud secundum dictum
juratorum continet octo hidas, et hida continet sexcies viginti
acras, set antiqua inquisicio dixit, quod non consuevit continere
nisi quater viginti, quia postmodum exquisite sunt terre et
mensuratae.'

28. Inqu. post mort. 30 Henry III, N. 36: 'Extensio de terris
Roberti de Sancto Georgio (in com. Lincoln.)... tenuit in capite
de domino Rege 20 bovatas terre et dimidiam pro servicio sexte
partis unius feodi militis.... Et Robertus de Drayton tenet 2
bovatas et quartam partem unius bovate terre de dicto Roberto per
forinsecum servicium tantum, unde 16 carucate terre faciunt
feodum militis.'

29. Rot. Hundred. ii. 631, b: '... et ad dictam villam pertinent
sex hide quarum quelibet continet 6 virgatas terre et quelibet
virgata continet 30 acras.' Ramsey Survey, Galba, E. x. 41: 'In
una hydarum istarum... septem virgatae 4 acris minus.' Eynsham
Cart., 21, a: 'Et abbas habet in eodem manerio 4 carucatas terre
et continent 16 virgatas terre in dominico et in villenagio 16
virgatas terre.'

30. Ramsey Cart. (Rolls Ser.), i. 55, 284: 295, 309, 333, 373,
380; Ely Inqu., Claudius, xi. 82, 95, 97, 121, 129, 186;
Gloucester Cart., iii. 128, 142, 145, 196; Coram Rege, Hill. 3
Edw. I, 17, b; Eynsham Cart., II, a; 88, a; Rot. Hundr., ii. 605,
b.

31. Chapterhouse Boxes, A. 4/22, m. 31-33.

32. Ramsey Cart. (Rolls Ser.), i. 354: 'Aliquando 48 acre faciunt
virgatam et aliquando pauciores.'

33. Rot. Hundr., ii. 628, b.

34. Glastonbury Inqu. (Roxburghe Ser.), 134: '... R. de W. unam
virgatam pro 4 solidis pro omni servicio quia terra parva est.'

35. Ibid., 113: 'Super hanc virgatam terre fuerunt olim 2 domus
et pro duabus virgatis computata fuit terra illa, sed quia non
potuerant 2 homines ibi vivere, redacte ille 2 virgate ad unam,
et sicut audierant dicere 7 solidi reddebantur, sed nunquam hoc
viderunt et facit idem servitium quod alii faciunt virgarii.'

36. O C. Pell in the Transactions of the Cambridge Archaeological
Society, vi. 17 sqq., 63 sqq.

37. Ely Inqu., Claudius, C xi. 30, a.

38. Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, Ble 62, N. 750; 3, b. Burton
Cartulary, Transactions of the Staffordshire William Salt
Society, pp. 22, 28.

39. Ely Inqu, 31, b.

40. Burton Cart. (William Salt Ser.), 22, 28. Compare Peoples,
Ranks and Laws, cap. 3 (Schmid, p. 388).

41. Peterborough Cart., Cotton MSS., Faustina, B. iii. 97:
'Libera wara est unus redditus et est talis condicionis quod si
non solvatur... dupplicatibur ill crastino et sic in dies.'

42. Beaulieu Cart., 103: 'Et inveniet hominem ad gurgitem
faciendum et waram.'

43. Rot. Hundr., ii. 323: 'Tenementum quod non est hidatum nec
feodatum.'

44. Ramsey Cart. (Rolls Ser.), i. 401: 'Terrae de Hulmo non sunt
distinctae per hydas vel per virgatas.' 413: 'Nescitur quot
virgatae faciunt hidam, nec quot acrae faciunt virgatam.' Cf 405.
Glastonbury Inqu. (Roxburghe Ser.), 5: '... Nescit quantum
amuntat in hida.'

45. Ramsey Cart. i. 441: 'Terrae quae sunt extra hydam et quae
non dant hydagium.'. 355., Virgatam extra hydam firmarius
appropriavit.' 324: 'Ponere extra hydam.'

46. Ibid. 473: 'Villata defendit, etc. versus Regem pro 10 hydis
et versus abbatem pro 11 hydis et dimidia.'

47. Ely Inqu., Cotton MSS., Claudius, C. xi. 38, b: 'Plena terra
que facit 12 acras de ware.'

48. St. Alban's Formulary, Cambridge Univ., E, e, iv, 20; f 165,
a: 'Item dicunt quod quando predictus Robertus fuerit mortuus
quod dominus habebit melius animal suum pro herieto et carettam
suam ferro ligatam, omnes pullos suos, omnes porculos suos, omnes
pannos Suos laneos, omnia vaSa sua argentea, aenea et ferrea. Et
quod filius suus postnatus habebit terram quam pater suus tenuit
et dabit pro ingressu habendo tantum quantum unus alius extraneus
et faciet eadem seruilia (sic) que et pater suus fecit,' Ramsey
Cart., i, 372: 'Erit dicta terra post mortem patris vel matris
gersummata filio juniori vel propinquiori de sanguine secundum
consuetudinem ville.'

49. Duchy of Lancaster, B.e 62, N, 750, m, 2: 'Siwardus cepit
unam hidam cum dimidia virgata terre et illam tenuit usque ad
obitum uxoris sue; postea venit idem Siwardus et rogauit Hugonem
fratrem suum ut auderet remanere in terra patris sui prenominati,
quia fuit sine terra, Et idem Hugo sibi concessit, saluo iure
suo, Item Siwardus cepit uxorem... de qua habuit Robertum,
Radulfum et Gunnildam. Post obitum dicti Siwardi venit Rogerus
qui fuit filius Hugonis et exigebat terram prenominatam et per
consideracionem curie fuit seisitus in predicta terra, set quia
uxor dicti Siwardi pauper fuit, consideratum sibi fuit ut haberet
iv acras de predicta terra, quantum sibi custodiret. Postea
maritata fuit et revcrtebant predicte acre terre dicto Rogero ut
de jure suo pertinentes ad dictam virgatam terre,' Cf Q. R. Misc,
902/77,

50. Black Book of St. Augustine's, Cotton MSS., Faustina, A. i.
15, a: 'In Taneto sunt 45 sullung 150 acre reddentes gablum
denariorum. In festo Sti Martini videlicet de unoquoque sullung
reddunt de Gabulo 2 solidos 2 denarios, summa quorum facit 25
libras 105 solidos 10 denarios obolum. Ipsi qui tenent predictos
sullung reddunt in equinoctio autumpnae de unoquoque sullung pro
horsarer 16 den. et de 150 acris 12 den. Ipsi idem arant pro
anererthe in purificacione de unoquoque sullung unam acram et 150
acris 3 virgatas. Ipsi idem reddunt in festo Sti Johannis de
unoquoque sullung 2 agnos separabiles et de 150 acris 1 agnum et
valenciam dimidii agni. lpsi idem reddunt in natali de unoquoque
sullung unum ferendel ordei,' etc.

51. Ibid. 60; Suolinga de Ores: 'Heredes Salomonis de Ores tenent
8 acras... Heredes Willelmi de Ores tenent 12 acras... Jacobus
tenet 3 acras et dimidiam perchatam... Thomas filius G. de Hores
tenet 2 acras... Ricardus et Salomon filius Augustini... et
Willelmus filius Ricardi tenent 2 acras et dimidiam,' etc.

52. Augment. Off. Misc. Books, N. 57, f 96, a: 'Johannes Bairot
heredes Hamoni Daniel, heredes Johannis hugheleyn, heredes
Roberti atte mede, heredes Walteri et Willelmi Ram et Gilbertus
le Rome tenent unum jugum et dimidium de Cukulycumbe.'

53. Domesday of St Paul's, 38 sqq. Comp. Ramsey Cart., i. 413.

54. Gloucester Cart., iii. 213: 'Robertus Altegreue, Willelmus
Godere, Johannes Abraham, Isabella relicta Lucae tenent Unam
virgatam, scilicet quilibet eorum unum quarterium et faciunt
conjunctim in omnibus sicut unus virgatarius.' Comp. 59, 201.
Hereford Court Rolls (Bodleian), 3, b: 'T. Hake, Ricardus de
Poluchulle et Muriel filius Galfridi pyoner tenent unam dimidiam
virgatam terre consuetudinarie.'

55. Bury St. Edmund's Cart., Cambridge University, G. g. iv. 4. f
35, a: 'Johannes Knop tenet cotagium et contribuit heredi qui
tenet maiorem partem tenementorum.'

56. Inqu. post mort. 55 Henry III, N. 33: 'Redditarii qui
vocantur self-oders.'

57. Euch. Q. R. Anc. Misc. Court Rolls, xxi. 513/82: 'Dicunt quod
aliquis habens virgatam terre et vendiderit omnes partes excepto
capitati domo et loco focarii, tenentes locum focarii erunt
sectatores curie et alteri non. Similiter de tenentibus dimidiam
virgatam et codsetlestoftes: semper tenentes locum focarii
colligent firmam et erunt liberi de pannagio et de aliis
tallagiis et alteri tenentes partes erunt geldabiles.' (Curia de
Brigstock tenta die veneris proxima ante festum Sancti Andree
Apostoli anno [r. r. Edw. xxvi]).

58. See Hanauer, Les paysans de l'Alsace au Moyen Age.

59. Domesday of St. Paul's, xv. 7,. Gloucester Cartulary, iii.
55, 6I; Cartulary of Christ Church, Canterbury, Add. MSS. 6759,
f. 21, b.

60. Battle Cart. Augm. Off. Books, N. 18, f 7, a: 'Aratra
uertuntur in terram domini.' Ely Inqu., Claudius, C. xi. 38 b, 86
b, etc.

61. Ely Inqu, 72 b; comp. 24, b., Gloucester Cart., iii. 183.

62. Eynsham Reg., 6, b: 'Robertus Tony tenet de domino unam
virgatam terre in bondagium... Idem semel arabit cum vicino
adiuncto.' Ramsey Cart., i. 56. Comp. Q. R. Min. Acc., Ble 513,
N. 97: 'Estimatur quod communiter tres custumarii possunt facere
unam carucam (tenent 20 acras).'

63. Rot. Hundr., ii. 461, b: 'Robertus de Tony habet in
villenagio scil. Reginaldum Toni qui tenet 5 acras... Item si
ipse habeat cum uno vel cum duobus sociis unam carucam, arabit
unam selionem terre domini.' Comp. 462, a. Add. MSS. 6159, f 22,
b: 'W. J. tenet de domino in villenagio unum mesuagium et 10
acras terre.... Et arabit cum caruca sua sive jungat sive non 4
acras.'

64. Black Book of St. Augustine's, 53.

65. Domesday of St. Paul's, 58.

66. Augm. Off. Misc. Books, N. 57, f 65, b. See Cartulary of
Battle Abbey (Camd. Soc.), p. 133.

67. Ely Inqu., 185, a: '... tenent dimidium tenmanland, scilicet
60 acras terre... Al. et M. et eorum participes tenent unum
tenmanland, scilicet 120 acras terre.' The expression may be
corrupted from tunmanland, or else it may be a mark of a
beginning of cultivation in Danish times.

68. Chapter-house Books, A. 4/22, p. 21: 'Custumarii tenent 22
virgatas quas vocant wistas.'

69. Battle Abbey Cart., Augment. Off. Misc. Books, N. 57, f. 27,
a; comp. 15, b.

70. Glastonbury Inqu. (Roxburghe Ser.), 66, 90

71. Worcester Cart., 41, b.

72. Glastonbury Inqu., 67, 70; Rot. Hundr., ii. 404, b.

73. Gloucester Cart., iii. 207.

74. Abingdon Cart., ii. 304: 'In dominio camerae sunt 4 hidae Uno
cotsettel minus.'

75. Glastonbury Inqu., 41: 'Robertus blundus tenet dimidiam
virgatam eodem servicio. Hec terra solet esse divisa in duo
cotsetlanda, set in tempore werre deciderunt, eo ex his duabus
terris facta fuit dimidia virgata. Si esset divisa utilius esset
domino.'

76. Domesday of St. Paul's, 19; Ramsey Cart. ( Rolls Ser.), i.
309

77. Gloucester Cart., iii. 61.

78. Black Book of St. Augustine's, 57.

79. Ibid.

80. Domesday of St. Paul's, 49.

81. Gloucester Cart., ii. 109.

82. Exch. Q. R. Anc. Misc., xxi. 513/82 (Curia de Brigstock,
Friday after Annunciation, 27 Edw. I): 'Ille due dimidie rode
prati... pertinent ad Hakermannislond, et nemo potest habere
seysinanm predictarum sine breui Domini Regis.'

83. Glastonbury Inqu., 2: 'In marisco 110 acras terrae et quoddam
molendinum, et octo deneratas terrae secus molendinum.'

84. Madox, Exch., i. 155, n. 257: 'Duodecim tamen nummatas quas
Ordurcus tenuit... usque ad 10 annos debemus tenere, singulis
annis reddentes ei 12 denarios ad festum Sti Michaelis.'

Chapter 2

Rights of Common

    The influence of the village community is especially.
apparent in respect of that portion of the soil which is used for
the support of cattle. The management of meadows is very
interesting because it presents a close analogy to the treatment
of the arable, and at the same time the communal features are
much more clearly brought out by it. We may take as an instance a
description in the Eynsham Survey. The meadow in Shifford is
divided into twelve strips, and these are distributed among the
lord and the tenantry, but they are not apportioned to any one
for constant ownership. One year the lord takes all the strips
marked by uneven numbers, and the next year he moves to those
distinguished by even numbers.(1*) The tenants divide the rest
according to some settled rotation. Very often lots are drawn to
indicate the portions of the several households.(2*) It must be
added that the private right of the single occupiers does not
extend over the whole year: as in the case of the arable all
inclosures fall after the harvest, so in regard to meadows the
separate use, and the boundaries protecting it, are upheld only
till the mowing of the grass: after the removal of the hay the
soil relapses into the condition of undivided land. The time of
the 'defence' extends commonly to 'Lammas-day'; hence the
expression 'Lammas-meadow' to designate such land. It is hardly
necessary to insist on the great resemblance between all these
features and the corresponding facts in the arrangement of the
arable. The principle of division is supplied by the tendency to
assign an equal share to every holding, and the system of
scattered strips follows as a necessary consequence of the
principle. The existence of the community as a higher organising
unit is shewn in the recurrence of common use after the
'defence,' and in the fact that the lord is subjected to the
common rotation, although he is allowed a privileged position in
regard to it. The connexion in which the whole of these rights
arises is made especially clear by the shifting ownership of the
strips: private right appears on communal ground, but it is
reduced to a minimum as it were, has not settled down to constant
occupation, and assumes its definite shape under the influence of
the idea of equal apportionment. Of course, by the side of these
communal meadows we frequently find others that were owned in
severalty.
    Land for pasture also occurs in private hands and in
severalty, but such cases are much rarer.(3*) Sometimes the
pasture gets separated and put under 'defence' for one part of
the year, and merges into communal ownership afterwards.(4*) But
in the vast majority of cases the pasture is used in common, and
none of the tenants has a right to fence it in or to appropriate
it for his own exclusive benefit. It ought to be noted, that the
right to send one's cattle to the pasture on the waste, the
moors, or in the woods of a manor appears regularly and
intimately connected with the right to depasture one's cattle on
the open fields of the village.(5*) Both form only different
modes of using communal soil. As in the case of arable and meadow
the undivided use cannot be maintained and gets replaced by a
system of equalised shares or holdings, so in the case of pasture
the faculty of sending out any number of beasts retires before
the equalisation of shares according to certain modes of
'stinting' the common. We find as an important manorial
arrangement the custom to 'apportion' the rights of common to the
tenements, that is to decide in the manorial Court, mostly
according to verdicts of juries, how many head of cattle, and of
what particular kind, may be sent to the divers pasture-grounds
of the village by the several holdings. From time to time these
regulations are revised. One of the Glastonbury Surveys contains,
for instance, the following description from the 45th year of
Henry III. Each hide may send to the common eighteen oxen,
sixteen cows, one bull, the offspring of the cows of two years,
two hundred sheep with four rams, as well as their offspring of
one year, four horses and their offspring of one year, twenty
swine and their offspring of one year.(6*) According to a common
rule the only cattle allowed to use the village pasture was that
which was constantly kept in the village, levant e couchant en le
maner. In order to guard against the fraudulent practice of
bringing over strange cattle and thus making money at the expense
of the township, it was required sometimes that the commonable
cattle should have wintered in the manor.(7*)
    These last rules seem at first sight difficult of
explanation: one does not see in what way the bringing in of
strange cattle could damage the peasantry of the village, as
nobody could drive more than a certain number of beasts to the
common, and as the overburdening of it depended entirely on the
excess of this number, and not on the origin of the beasts. And
so one has to look to something else besides the apprehension
that the common would get overburdened, in order to find a
suitable explanation of the rule. An explanation is readily
supplied by the notion that the use of the common was closely
connected with the holding. Strange cattle had nothing to do with
the holding, and were to be kept off from the land of the
community. it is as representatives of a community whose
territory has been invaded that the individual commoners have
cause to complain. In fact, the common pasture, as well as the
meadows, were thought of merely as a portion of the holding. The
arrangements did not admit of the same certainty or rather of the
same kind of determination as the division of the arable, but the
main idea which regulated the latter was by no means cut short in
its operation, if one may say so: it was not bound up with the
exact measurement of arable acres. The holding was the necessary
agricultural outfit of a peasant family, and of this outfit the
means of feeding the cattle were quite as important a part as the
means of raising crops. It is only inaccurately that we have been
speaking of a virgate of 30 acres, and of a ploughland of 180 or
160. The true expression would be to speak of a virgate of 30
acres of arable and the corresponding rights to pasture and other
common uses. And the records, when they want to give something
like a full description, do not omit to mention the
'pertinencia,' the necessary adjuncts of the arable. The term is
rather a vague one, quite in keeping with the rights which,
though tangible enough, cannot be cut to so certain a pattern as
in the case of arable.(8*) And for this reason the laxer right
had to conform to the stricter one, and came to be considered as
appendant to it.
    We have considered till now the different aspects assumed by
common of pasture, when it arises within the manor, and as a
consequence of the arrangement of its holdings. But this is not
the only way in which common of pasture may arise. It may
originate in an express and special grant by the lord either to a
tenant or to a stranger.(9*) it may also proceed from continuous
use from time beyond legal memory.(10*) it must have been
difficult in many cases to prevent strangers from establishing
such a claim by reason of long occupation in some part of a
widely stretching moor or wood pasture.(11*) It was not less
difficult in such cases to draw exact boundaries between
adjoining communities, and we find that large tracts of country
are used as a common pasture-ground by two villages, and even by
more.(12*) Neighbours deem it often advantageous to establish a
certain reciprocity in this respect.(13*) By special agreement or
by tacit allowance lords and tenants intercommon on each other's
lands: this practice extends mostly to the waste only, but in
some cases the arable and meadow are included after the removal
of the crop and of the hay. The procedure of the writ 'quo jure'
was partly directed to regulate these rights and to prevent
people from encroaching wantonly upon their neighbours.(14*) When
land held in one fee or one manor was broken up for some reason
into smaller units, the rights of pasture were commonly kept up
according to the old arrangements.(15*)
    These different modes of treating the pasture present rather
an incongruous medley, and may be classified in several ways and
deduced from divers sources.
    The chief distinctions of modern law are well known: 'Common
Appendant is the right which every freehold tenant of the manor
possesses, to depasture his commonable cattle, levant and
couchant on his freehold tenement anciently arable, on the wastes
of the manor, and originally on all (common) pasture in the
manor. Common appurtenant on the other hand is against common
right, becoming appurtenant to land either by long user or by
grant express or implied. Thus it covers a right to common with
animals that are not commonable, such as pigs, donkeys, goats,
and geese; or a right to common claimed for land not anciently
arable, such as pasture, or land reclaimed from the waste within
the time of legal memory, or for land that is not freehold, but
copyhold.'(16*) Common in gross is a personal right to common
pasture in opposition to the praedial rights. Mr Scrutton has
shown from the Year Books that these terms and distinctions
emerge gradually during the fourteenth century, and appear
substantially settled only in Littleton's treatise. Bracton and
his followers, Fleta and Britton, do not know them. These are
important facts, but they hardly warrant the inferences which
have been drawn from them. The subject has been in dispute in
connexion with discussions as to the free village community.
Joshua Williams, in his Rights of Common,(17*) had assumed common
appendant to originate in ancient customary right bestowed by the
village community and not by the lord's grant; Scrutton argues
that such a right is not recognised by the documents. He lays
stress on the fact, that Bracton speaks only of two modes of
acquiring common, namely, express grant by the lord, and long
usage understood as constant sufferance on the part of the lord
amounting to an express grant. But this is only another way of
saying that Bracton's exposition is based on feudal notions, that
his land law is constructed on the principle 'nulle terre sans
seigneur,' and that every tenement, as well as every right to
common, is considered in theory as granted by the lord of the
manor. It may be admitted that Bracton does not recognise just
that kind of title which later lawyers knew as appendancy, does
not recognise that a man can claim common by showing merely that
he is a freeholder of the manor. Unless he relies on long
continued user, he must rely upon grant or feoffment. But the
distinction between saying 'I claim common because I am a
freeholder of the manor' and saying 'I claim common because I or
my ancestors have been enfeoffed of a freehold tenement of the
manor and the right of common passed by the feoffment,' though it
may be of juristic interest and even of some practical importance
as regulating the burden of proof and giving rise to canons for
the interpretation of deeds, is still a superficial distinction
which does not penetrate deeply into the substance of the law. On
the whole we find that the freeholder of Bracton's time and of
earlier times does normally enjoy these rights which in after
time were described as 'appendant' to his freehold; and it is
well worth while to ask whether behind the general assumptions of
feudal theory there do not lie certain data which, on the one
hand, prepare and explain later terminology, and are connected,
on the other, with the historical antecedents of the feudal
system.
    A little reflection will show that the divisions of later law
did not spring into being merely as results of legal reasoning
and casuistry. indeed, from a lawyer's point of view, nothing can
be more imperfect than a classification which starts from three
or four principles of division seemingly not connected with each
other. Common appendant belongs to a place anciently arable,
common appurtenant may belong to land of any kind; the first is
designed for certain beasts, the second for certain others; one
is bound up with freehold, the other may go with copyhold; in one
case the right proceeds from common law, in the other from
'specialty.' One may reasonably ask why a person sending a cow to
the open fields or to the waste from a freehold tenement can
claim common appendant, and his neighbour sending a cow to the
same fields from a copyhold has only common appurtenant. Or
again, why does a plot of arable reclaimed from the waste confer
common appurtenant, and ancient arable common appendant? Or
again, why are the goats or the swine of a tenement sent to
pasture by virtue of common appurtenant, and the cows and horses
by virtue of common appendant? And, above all, what have the
several restrictions and definitions to do with each other? Such
a series of contrasted attributes defies any attempt to simplify
the rules of the case according to any clearly defined principle:
it seems a strange growth in which original and later elements,
important and secondary features, are capriciously brought
together.
    In order to explain these phenomena we have to look to
earlier and not to later law. What seems arbitrary and discordant
in modern times, appears clear and consistent in the original
structure of the manor.
    The older divisions may not be so definitely drawn and so
developed as the later, but they have the advantage of being
based on fundamental differences of fact. Even when the names and
terms do not appear well settled, the subject-matter arranges
itself according to some natural contrasts, and it is perhaps by
too exclusive study of names and terms that Mr. Scrutton has been
prevented from duly appreciating the difference in substance. He
says of the end of the thirteenth century: 'In the reports about
this time it seems generally to be. assumed that if the commoner
cannot show an especialte or special grant or title, he must show
"fraunc tenement en la ville a ques commune est appendant." Thus
we have the question: -- "Coment clamez vous commune? Com
appendant, ou par especialte,' while Hengham, J. says:
'prescription de terre est assez bon especialte"' (p. 50). This
is really the essence of all the rules regarding common of
pasture, and, what is more, the contrast follows directly from
arrangements which did not come into use in the fourteenth
century, but were in full work at the time of Bracton and long
before it. What is called in later law common appendant, appears
as the normal adjunct to the holding, that is, to a share in the
system of village husbandry. If a bovate is granted to a person,
so much of the rights of pasture as belongs to every bovate in
the village is presumed to be granted with the arable. ' So much
as belongs to every bovate in the village; 'this means, that the
common depends in this case on a general arrangement of the
pasture in the village. Such an arrangement exists in every
place; it is regulated by custom and by the decisions of the
manorial court or halimote, it extends equally over the free and
over the unfree land, over the waste, the moor and wood, and over
the fallow. It admits a certain number and certain kinds of
beasts, and excludes others. Only because such a general
arrangement is supposed to exist, is the right to com mon treated
in so vague a manner; the documents present, in truth, only a
reference to relations which are substantiated in the husbandry
system of the manor. But the right of common may exceed these
lines in many ways: it may be joined to a tenement which lies
outside the manorial system, or a plot freshly reclaimed from the
waste, or to a holding belonging to some other manor. It may
admit a greater number and other kinds of beasts than those which
were held commonable in the usual course of manorial husbandry.
In such cases the right to pasture had to proceed from some
special agreement or grant, and, of course, had to be based on
something different from the ordinary reference to the existing
system of common husbandry. If there was no deed to go by, such a
right could only be established by long use.
    I think that all this must follow necessarily as soon as the
main fact is admitted, that common is normally the right to
pasture of a shareholder of the manor. The objection may be
raised, that such a priori reasoning is not sufficient in the
case, because the documents do not countenance it by their
classification. Would the objection be fair? Hardly, if one does
not insist on finding in Bracton the identical terms used in Coke
upon Littleton. It is true that Bracton speaks of common in
general, and not of common appendant, appurtenant, and in gross,
but the right of common which he treats as normal appears to be
very peculiar on a closer examination of his rules. It is
praedial and not personal; to begin with, it is always thought of
as belonging to a tenement.(18*) What is more, it cannot belong
to a tenement reclaimed from the waste,(19*) and in this way the
requirement of 'ancient arable' is established, that is, the
pasture is considered as one of the rights conceded to the
original shares of a manorial community. The use of the open
field outside the time of reasonable defence (20*) is primarily
meant, and the common pasture appears from this point of view as
one of the stages in the process of common farming. To make up
the whole, the right to common is defined by a 'quantum
pertinet.'(21*) which has a sense only in connexion with the
admeasurement of claims effected by the internal organisation of
the manor. Such is evidently the normal arrangement presupposed
by Bracton's description, and his only fault is, that he does not
distinguish with clearness between the consequences of the normal
arrangement, and of grants or usurpations which supplement and
modify it. It must be remembered that he only gives the
substantive law about common rights in the course of a discussion
of the pleadings in actions 'quo jure' and assizes of pasture. If
we compare with Bracton's text the rules and decisions laid down
in the legal practice of the thirteenth century, we shall find
that the same facts are implied by them. They all suppose a
contrast between 'intrinsec' and 'forinsec' claims to common,
that is between the rights of those who are members of the
manorial group, and the rights, if any, of those who are outside
it, and again a contrast between the normal rights of commoners
and any more extensive rights acquired by special grant or
agreement. Only the freeholders are protected in the enjoyment of
their commons; only the freeholders are protected in the
enjoyment of their tenements; but their claims are based on
arrangements in which the unfree land participates in everything
with the free. It may be added that litigation mostly arises from
the adjustment of 'forinsec' claims under the writ 'Quo jure.'
The intercommoning between neighbours gives rise to a good many
disputes, and is much too frequent to be considered, as it was by
later law, a mere 'excuse for trespassing.'(22*) This common 'pur
cause de vicinage' may be a relic of a time when adjoining
villages formed a part of a higher unit of some kind, of the
Mark, of a hundred, for example. It may be explained also by the
difficulty of setting definite boundaries in wide tracts of moor
and forest. However this may be, its constant occurrence forms
another germ of a necessary contrast between the two classes
which afterwards developed into common appendant and common
appurtenant. It could not be brought under the same rules as
those which flowed from the internal arrangement of the manor. A
special difficulty attended it as to admeasurement: the customary
treatment of other holdings could not in this case serve as a
standard. The very laxity of the principle naturally gave
occasion to very different interpretations and deductions. And so
we are justified in saying, that the chief distinctions of later
law are to be found in their substance in the thirteenth century,
and that although a good deal of confusion occurs in details, the
earlier documents give even better clues than the later to the
reasons which led to the well-known classification.
    Common appendant, if we may use the modern term for the sake
of brevity, is indissolubly connected with the system of
husbandry followed by the village community. A very noticeable
feature of it is, that, in one sense, it towers over the lord of
the manor as well as over the tenants. Of course, legally the
lord is considered as the owner of the waste,(23*) but even from
the point of view of pure law his ownership is restricted by his
own grants. in so much as he has conceded freehold tenements to
certain persons, he is bound by his own deed not to withhold from
these persons the necessary adjuncts of such tenements, and
especially the rights of pasture bound up with them. The free
tenants share with the lord, if he wants to turn his common
pasture to some special and lucrative use; if, for instance,
strangers are admitted to it for money, one part of the proceeds
goes to the tenantry.(24*) Again, the lord may not overburden the
common, and sometimes freeholders try their hand at litigation
against the lord on the ground that he sends his cattle to some
place where they ought not to go.(25*) The point cannot be
overlooked, that the lord of the manor appears subjected to
certain rules set up by custom and common decision in the
meetings of his tenantry. The number and kind of beasts which may
come to the common from his land is fixed, as well as the number
that may come from the land of a cottager.(26*) The freeholders
alone can enforce the rule against him, but it is set up not by
the freeholders, but by the entire community of the manor, and
practically by the serfs more than by the freeholders, because
they are so much more numerous.
    As the common of pasture appears as an outcome of a system of
husbandry set up by the village community, so every change in the
use of the pasture ought in the natural course to proceed from a
decision of this community. Such a change may be effected in one
of two manners: the customary rotation of crops may be altered,
or else a part of the waste may be reclaimed for tillage. In the
first case, a portion of the open arable and meadow, which ought
to have been commonable at a certain time, ceases to be so; in
the second, the right to send cattle to the waste is stinted in
so much as the arable is put under defence, or the land is used
for the construction of dwellings. By the common law the free
tenants alone could obtain a remedy for any transgression in this
respect. I have mentioned already that suits frequently arose
when the old-fashioned rotation of crops was modified in
accordance with the progress of cultivation. As to the right of
approving from the waste, the relative position of lord and
tenants was for a long time debateable, and, as everybody knows,
the lord was empowered to approve by the Statute of Merton of 20
Henry III, with the condition that he should leave sufficient
pasture to his free tenants according to the requirements of
their tenements. The same power was guaranteed by the Statute of
Westminster II against the claims of neighbours. It has been
asked whether, before the Statute of Merton, the lord had power
to enclose against commoners, if he left sufficient common to
satisfy their rights. Bracton's text in the passage where he
treats of the Statute is distinctly in favour of the view that
this legislative enactment did actually alter the common law, and
that previously it was held that a lord could not approve without
the consent of his free-tenants.(27*) Turning to the practice of
the thirteenth-century courts, we find that the lawyers were
rather doubtful as to this point. In a case of 1221 the jurors
declare, that although the defendant has approved about two acres
of land from the waste where the plaintiff had common, this
latter has still sufficient pasture left to him. And thereupon
the plaintiff withdraws.(28*) In 1226 a lord who has granted
pasture everywhere, 'ubique,' and has inclosed part of it,
succumbs in a suit against his tenant, and we are led to suppose
that if the qualification 'ubique' had been absent, his right of
approvement would have been maintained. It must be noticed,
however, that the marginal note in Bracton's Notebook does not
lay stress on the 'ubique,' and regards the decision as contrary
to the law subsequently laid down by the Constitution of
Merton.(29*) In a case of 1292 one of the counsel for the
defendant took it for granted that the Statute of Merton altered
the previously existing common law.(30*) The language of the
Statutes themselves is certainly in favour of such a
construction: in the Merton Constitution it is stated as a fact
that the English magnates were prevented from making use of their
manors,(31*) and the Westminster Statute. Is as positive as to
neighbours; 'multi domini hucusque... impediti extiterunt,' etc.
It seems hardly possible to doubt that the enactments really
represent a new departure, although the way towards it had been
prepared by the collision of interests in open Court. The
condition negatively indicated by the documents in regard to the
time before these enactments cannot be dismissed by the
consideration that the lord would derogate from his grant by
approving. Although a single trial may bear directly on the
relation between the lord and only one of the tenants or a few of
them, every change in the occupation of the land touches all
those who are members of the manorial community. The removal of
difficulties as to approvement was, before the Statute of Merton,
not a question of agreement between two persons, but a question
as to the relative position of the lord and of the whole body of
the tenantry. The lord might possibly settle with every tenant
singly, but it seems much more probable that he brought the
matter, when it arose, before the whole body with which the
management of the village husbandry rested, that is, before the
halimote, with its free and unfree tenants. In any case, the
influence of the free tenants as recognised by the common law was
decisive, and hardly to be reconciled with the usual feudal
notions as to the place occupied by the lord in the community. It
must be noted that even that order of things which came into
being in consequence of the Statute contains an indirect
testimony as to the power of the village community. The Act
requires the pasture left to the free tenants to be sufficient,
and it may be asked at once, what criterion was there of such a
sufficiency, if the number of beasts was not mentioned in the
instrument by which the common was held. Of course, in case of
dispute, a jury had to give a verdict about it, but what had the
jury to go by? It was not the actual number of heads of cattle on
a tenement that could be made the starting-point of calculation.
Evidently the size of the holding, and its relation to other
holdings, had to be taken into account. But if so, then the legal
admeasurement had to conform to the customary admeasurement
defined by the community.(32*) And so again the openly recognised
law of the kingdom had to be set in action according to local
customs, which in themselves had no legally binding force.
    Besides the land regularly used for pasture, the cattle of
the village were sent grazing along the roads (33*) and in the
woods.(34*) These last were mostly used for feeding swine. In
other respects, also, the wood was subjected to a treatment
analogous to that of the pasture land. The right of hunting was,
of course, subjected to special regulations, which have to be
discussed from the point of view of forest law. But, apart from
that right, the wood was managed by the village community
according to certain customary rules. Every tenant had a right to
fell as many young trees as he wanted to keep his house and his
hedges in order.(35*) It sometimes happens, that the lord and the
homage enter into agreement as to the bigger trees, and for every
trunk taken by the lord the tenantry are entitled to take its
equivalent.(36*) Whenever the right had to be apportioned more or
less strictly, the size of the holdings was always the main
consideration.(37*)
    It would be strange to my purpose to discuss the details of
common of estovers, of turbary,(38*) or of fishery. The chief
points which touch upon the problems of social origins are
sufficiently apparent in the subject of pasture. The results of
our investigation may, I think, be summed up under the following
heads: --
    1. Rights of common are either a consequence of the communal
husbandry of the manor, or else they proceed from special
agreement or long use.
    2. The legal arrangement of commons depends on a customary
arrangement, in which free and unfree tenants take equal
part.(39*)
    3. The feudal theory of the lord's grant is insufficient to
explain the different aspects assumed by rights of common, and
especially the opposition between lord and free commoners.

NOTES:

1. Eynsham Cart. 2, c: 'Est quoddam pratum nuncupatum Clayhurste
et continet de prato et pastura 35 acras dimidiam rodam 13
perticas. Est ibidem ex parte australi una pecia prati et pasture
et continet 10 acras et 7 perticas et nuncupatur twelueacres que
annuatim diuiditur in 12 parcellas per le virgam equales, unde
dominus habet uno anno i, iii, v, vii, ix et xi, heredes Freman
et Walterus le Reue eodem anno habent parcellas ii, iv, vi, viii,
x et xii. Alio anno habet dominus parcellas quas tenentes
habuerunt et tenentes parcellas domini. Et sic annuatim habet
dominus quinque acras, tres perticas et dimidiam perticam.' Cf.
23, c: 'Memorandum quod in prato de Landemede sunt sex parcelle
bundate quarum prima parcella nuncupata Stubbefurlong continet 4
acras et dimidiam rodam et est domini anno incarnacionis Domini
impari et tenencium anno incarnacionis Domini pari. Quandovero
est tenencium, diuiditur per sortem.'

2. A very good instance is supplied by Williams, Rights of
Common, 89, 9o. Cf Birkbeck, Sketch of the Distribution of Land
in England, 19.

3. Gloucester Cart. iii. 67 (Extenta de Berthona Regis): 'De
pastura separabili dicunt quod Rex habet quandam moram quae
continet 4 1/2 acras et valet 4 solidos et potest sustinere 12
boves per nouem menses. Item de pastura inseparabili dicunt quod
Abbas Gloucestriae debet invenire pasturam ad I8 boves domini
Regis, et ad 2 vaccas, et 2 afros, a vigilia Pentecostes quousque
prata sint falcata, levata et cariata.' Exch. Q. R. Treas. of
Rec. 59/69: 'item dicunt quod sunt ibi de pastura separabili 50
acrae et valet acra 3 d.'

4. Eynsham Cart. 3, b: 'Dicunt eciam quod omnia prata pasture
domini et omnes culture non seminate et [que] deberent seminari
sunt separalia per tempus predictum.' 10, b: 'Et sunt dicte
pasture separales quousque blada circumcrescentia asportentur.' A
curious case is the following; ibid., 3, b: 'Dicunt eciam quod
dominus tenetur pratum suum de Langenhurst custodire nec potest
attachiare malefactores in eodem a solis ortu usque ad occasum,
aliis temporibus... licet, et est separale a festo annunciacionis
beate Marie usque gulam Augusti.'

5. Domesday of St. Paul's, 69: 'Non est ibi certa pastura nisi
quando terre dominice quiescunt alternatim inculte.' Cf 59: 'Non
est ibi pastura nisi cum quiescit dominicum per wainnagium...
possunt ibi esse 4 sucs cum uno verre et suis fetibus et 4 vacce
cum suis fetibus si quiescunt pasture dominice alternatim.' Rot.
Hundr. ii. 768, b: 'Item porci eius et aliorum vicinorum suorum
pascent in campis dominicis extra tassum dum bladum domini stat
in campis, et post bladum domini cariatum ibunt in campis per
totum et omnes alie bestie ejus et aliorum vicinorum suorum
pascent per totum in stipulo domini sine imparcamento.'

6. Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS. 1 (Bodleian), f 182, b. Cf f 239,
240: 'Memorandum anni 1243 de amensuratione pasture... dicunt
precise quod ad quamlibet hidatam terre in eadem villa pertinent
16 boues ad terram excolendam, 4 vacce, 4 averia, 50 bidentes et
6 porci... ad unam virgatam terre pertinent 4 boues, et 2 vacce,
et 1 auerium, et 3 porci et 12 bidentes ad tantam terram colendam
et sustinendam.' Leigerbook of Kirkham Priory, Yorkshire, Fairfax
MSS. 7, f 8 a: 'Amensuratio pasture de Sexendale facta anno regni
regis Henrici filii regis Iohannis 36to... qui dicunt per
sacramentum suum quod quelibet bouata terre in Sexendale potest
sustinere duo grossa animalia, 30 oues cum sequela unius anni,
duos porcos sine sequela et 3 aucas cum sequela dimidii anni, ct
non amplius.'

7. In a case of 1233 (Note-book of Bracton, 749) it is
complained, -- 'Cum idem Robertus non possit aliena aueria in
pasturam illam recolligere, scil. hominum alterius religionis,'
etc.

8. Note.book of Bracton, pl. 174: 'Dicunt eciam quod in manerio
de Billingiheie, sicut inquirere possunt, sunt 12 carucate terre
tam in certa terra quam in marisco predicto, scilicet sex
carucate de certa terra et sex carucate in marisco, et in
Northkime sunt sex carucate terre et quatuor bouate tam in certa
terra quam in marisco predicto, set nesciunt aliquam
distinctionem quantum sit in certa terra et quantum in marisco
nec aliquid inquirere potuerunt de metis infra mariscos illos.'

9. Note-book of Bracton, pl. 749: 'Robertus de Spraxtona
summonitus fuit ad warantizandum Abbati de Riuallibus 42 acras
terre et pasturam ad 30 uaccas cum uno tauro et 48 boues et 40
oues cum pertinenciis in Sproxtona que tenet et de eo tenere
clamat, et unde cartam Simonis de S. auunculi sui cuius heres
ipse est habet,' etc.

10. Note-book of Bracton, pl. 818: 'Et Saherus et Matillis per
attornatos suos ueniunt et dicunt quod semper, a conquestu Anglie
usque nunc communicauerunt cum eodem Roberto et antecessoribus
suis in Locke, et idem Robertus et antecessores semper
communicauerunt in terris ipsorum S. et M. in Gaham... et unde
dicunt quod si idem Robertus uelit se retrahere de communa quam
habet in terris ipsorum, ipsi nolunt se retrahere et dicunt quod
semper communicauerunt horn underhorn... Et Robertus uenit et
dicit quod nec ipse nec antecessores unquam communam habuerunt in
Locke nisi post gwerram et per vim etc. scil. post gwerram motam
inter regem S. et homines suos.' Spelman renders the horn
unherhorn by, horn with horn,' but the editor of Bracton's
Note-book thinks, and I believe rightly, that the phrase means a
common for all manner of horned beasts. Brunner has translated it
by, gemeinschaftlich-durcheinander.'

11. Rot. Hundr. ii. 605, e: 'In dicto manerio 1 maguus boscus qui
continet 300 acras in quo quidem bosco homines propinquarum
villarum ut Wardeboys. Wodehirst, Woldhirst, Sti Ivonis,
Niddingworth et Halliwell communicant omnes bestias suos pascendo
cum sokna de Sumersham.' Note book of Bracton, 1194: 'Iuratores
dicunt quod mora illa ampla est et magna et nesciunt aliquas
divisas quantum pertinet ad unam uillam, quantum ad aliam.' In
the case of forest land many villages enjoyed and still enjoy
rights of intercommoning over a wide space. The case of Epping is
the familiar example.

12. Eynsham Cart. 3, b: 'Dicunt eciam quod dominus et villata de
Shyfford intercommunicant cum villatis de Stanlake, Brytlamptone
et Herdewyk a gula Augusti usque festum Sti Martini, cum villatis
vero de Astone Cote et Elcforde a festo Sti Michaelis usque
dictum festum Sti Martini.'

13. Note-book of Bracton, pl. 914: 'Et Thomas venit et dicit quod
nullam communam clamat in Oure, set uerum uult dicere. Certe
diuise et mete continentur inter terram Prioris de Oure et terram
ipsius Thome de Merkwrthe et quamdiu placuit eidem Priori habere
aesiam in terra ipsius Thome in Markwrthe habuit ipse Thomas
aesiam in terra ipsius Prioris de Oure, et si Prior uult
subtrahere se, ipse libenter subtrahet se.'

14. The relation between this writ and the action, quod reddat ei
tantam pasturam, is well illustrated by a case of 1230 (Note-book
of Bracton, pl. 392): 'Ricardus de Willeye et Iohanna de Willeye
summoniti fuerunt ad respondendum Willelmo de Kamuilla quo iure
communam pasture exigunt in terra ipsius W. in Arewe, desicut
idem Willelmus nullam commUnam habet in terris ipsorum Ricardi et
Iohanne, nec ipsi Ricardus et Johanna seruicium faciunt quare
communam habere debeant,' etc...., Et quia Willelmus cognoscit
quod habet communam quantamcumque licet paruam, consideratum est
quod nichil capiat per breue istud et sit in misericordia pro
falso clamore et perquirat sibi per aliud breue sicut per breue
quod reddat ei tantam pasturam,' etc. One may say that the Quo
Jure was an, actio negatoria.'

15. Note-book of Bracton, pl. 561: 'Et quia Simon non potest
dedicere quin terra illa ubi communa est sit de 1 frodo et una
uilla, consideratum est quod ipsa communicet cum eodem Simone in
terra ipsius Simonis,' etc.

16. Scrutton, Commons and Common Fields. 42.

17. Page 37.

18. Bracton, f 223, a: 'Non debet dici communia quod quis
habuerit in alieno... cum tenementum non habeat ad quod possit
communia pertinere, sed potius herbagium dici debet quam
communia, cum hoc posset esse personale quid.'

19. Bracton, f 226, b: 'Item dicere potest quod nulla communia
pertinet ad tale tenementum, quia illud fuit aliquando foresta,
boscus, et locus vastae solitudinis et communia, et iam inde
efficitur assartum, vel redactum est in culturam, et non debet
communia pertinere ad communiam, et ubi omnes de patria solebant
communicare.'

20. Bracton, f 229, a: 'Hoc non erit intelligendum quod omni
tempore, nisi tantum temporibus competentibus, scilicet post
blada asportata et fena levata, vel quando tenementum iacet
incultum et ad waractum.'

21. Bracton, f 228, b: 'Item eodem modo si ita feoffatus fuerit
quis, sine expressione numeri vel generis, sed ita, cum pastura
quantum pertinet ad tantum tenementum in eadem villa. talem ligat
constitutio sicut prius cum expressione: quia cum constet de
quantitate tenementi, de facili perpendi poterit de numero
aueriorum, et etiam de genere, secundum consuetudinem locorum.'

22. Scrutton, 55.

23. Cartulary of Christ Church, Harl. MSS. 1006, p. 3: 'Prior et
conventus est capitalis dominus commune pasture de B.'

24. Ely Cart.. Cotton MSS. Claudius, xi, f iii, a: 'In L. debet
villata communicare cum suis averiis propriis cum domino
Episcopo. Et si dominus voluerit, ibidem possunt habere extranei
bestias pro denariis. Set inde habebunt liberi homines de W.
quemlibet septimum denarium preter decimum.'

25. Registrum cellararii of Bury St. Edmunds, Cambr. Univ., Gg.
iv. 4, f 31, b: 'Et notandum quod inquisitio super calumpnia
Egidii de Neketona clamantis quod abbas non haberet communam
infra precinctum villate de Bertone scribitur in forma (tali),'
etc.

26. Cart. of Christ Church, Canterbury, Add. MSS. 6159. f 21, b:
'Sciendum quod dominus potest habere in communia pasture de bosco
cum aisiamento friscorum et dominicorum domini tempore apto c
bidentes per maius centum.'

27. Bracton, f 228, b: 'Inprimis videndum est qualiter
constitutio illa sit intelligenda, ne male intellecta trahat
utentes ad abusum... non omnes nec in omnibus per constitutionem
restringuntur, et ideo videndum erit utrum feoffati fuerint
large, scilicet per totum, et ubique, et in omnibus locis, et ad
omnia averia et sine numero... tales non ligat constitutio
memorata, quia feoffamentum non tollit licet tollat abusum.'

28. Note-book of Bracton, 1975.

29. Note-book of Bracton, 1881. The marginal note runs: 'Nota
quod nichil includi poterit de forestis et moris licet minimum
quid et quamuis quaerens extra clausum habere possit ad
sufficientiam.' And a little higher the decision is marked as,
contra constitutionem de Merton.'

30. See Scrutton, 63, 64.

31. Bracton, f 227, b: 'Quia multi sunt magnates qui feoffauerunt
milites et libere tenentes suos in maneriis suis de paruis
tenementis, et qui impedlti sunt per eosdem quod commodum suum
facere non possunt de residuo maneriorum suorum.' Reference may
also be made to a note on a Plea Roll of 1221 (printed in L. Q.
R. iv. 230), which shows that some years before the statute the
magnates complained that they were prevented from assarting their
pasture land by the claims of virgaters.

32. This is directly stated by Bracton, f 228, b., vide supra.

33. Cartulary of Christ Church, Canterbury, Addit. MSS. 6159, f
52, b: 'Pastura... de herbagiis cuiusdam vie inter curiam et
ecclesiam de Pritelwelle.' Domesday of St. Paul's, I: 'Nulla est
ibi pastura nisi in boscis et viis.'

34. Rot. Hundr. 613, b: 'Et omnes libere tenentes... communicant
in bosco de A. cum omnibus bestiis suis libere per totum annum.'

35. Eynsham Cart. 10, b: 'Est ibidem unus boscus... cuius valor
non appreciatur pro eo quod minister regis non permittit includi
si fiat copicium, sufficiens tamen est pro housebote et heybote.'
Gloucester Cart. iii. 67: 'De boscis dicunt quod rex habet
quandam costeram bosci de fago juvene quae continet ad
aestimationem 30 acras, unde rex poterit approbare per annum
dimidiam marcam, scilicet in subbosco et virgis ad clausturam, et
meremium ad carucas et alia facienda sine destructione, et ille
boscus est communis omnibus vicinis in herbagio.'

36. Cart. of Christ Church, Canterbury, Add. MSS. 6159, f 28, b:
'Boscus ibi est cuius medietas est ecclesie et medietatem clamant
tenentes illius denne, ut si dominus arborem unam accipiat, ipsi
aliam accipient.'

37. Worcester Cart. (Camden Ser.), 62, b: 'Quaelibet virgata
tenet 3 feorthendels de Bruera, et dimidia virgata I feorthendel
et dimidium.'

38. For instance, Madox, Exch. I, 27, n. 47: 'Habebunt turbas
sufficientes in predicta mora ad focalium fratrum... secundum
quantitatem terrarum suarum in eadem villa.'

39. A very remarkable instance of the way in which rights of
common were divided and arranged between lords and villains is
afforded by the Court Rolls of Brightwaltham. Maitland, Manorial
Rolls, Selden Soc. ii. 172. I shall have to discuss the Case in
the Fifth Chapter of this Essay.

Chapter 3

Rural Work and Rents

    Our best means of judging of the daily work in an English
village of the thirteenth century is to study the detailed
accounts of operations and payments imposed on the tenants for
the benefit of a manorial lord. Surveys, extents, or inquisitions
were drawn up chiefly for the purpose of settling these duties,
and the wealth of material they afford enables us to form a
judgment as to several interesting questions. It tells directly
of the burden which rural workmen had to bear in the
aristocratical structure of society; it gives indirectly an
insight into all the ramifications of labour and production since
the dues received by the lord were a kind of natural percentage
upon all the work of the tenants; the combination of its details
into one whole affords many a clue to the social standing and
history of the peasant classes of which we have been treating.
    Let us begin by a survey of the different kinds of labour
duties performed by the dependent holdings which. clustered round
the manorial centre. Foremost stands ploughing and the operations
connected with it. The cultivation of the demesne soil of a manor
depended largely on the help of the peasantry. By the side of the
ploughs and plough-teams owned by the lord himself, the
plough-teams of his villains are made to till his land, and
manorial extents commonly mention that the demesne portion has to
be cultivated by the help of village customs, 'cum
consuetudinibus villae.'(1*) The duties of every householder in
this respect are reckoned up in different ways. Sometimes every
dependent plough has its number of acres assigned to it, and the
joint owners of its team are left to settle between themselves
the proportions in which they will have to co-operate for the
performance of the duty.(2*) In most cases the 'extent' fixes the
amount due from each individual holder. For instance, every
virgater is to plough one acre in every week. This can only mean
that one acre of the lord's land is reckoned on every single
virgate in one week, without any reference to the fact that only
one part of the team is owned by the peasant. If, for example,
there were four virgaters to share in the ownership of the
plough, the expression under our notice would mean that every
team has to plough four acres in the week.(3*) But the ploughs
may be small, or the virgaters exceptionally wealthy, and their
compound plough team may have to cultivate only three acres or
even less. The lord in this case reckons with labour-weeks and
acres, not with teams and days-work. A third possibility would be
to base the reckoning on the number of days which a team or a
holder has to give to the lord.(4*) A fourth, to lay on the
imposition in one lump by requiring a certain number of acres to
be tilled, or a certain number of days of ploughing.(5*) It must
be added, that the peasants have often to supplement their
ploughing work by harrowing, according to one of these various
systems of apportionment.(6*)
    The duties here described present only a variation of the
common 'week-work' of the peasant, its application to a certain
kind of labour. They could on occasion be replaced by some other
work,(7*) or the lord might lose them if the time assigned for
them was quite unsuitable for work.(8*) There is another form of
ploughing called gafol-earth, which has no reference to any
particular time-limits. A patch of the lord's land is assigned to
the homage for cultivation, and every tenant gets his share in
the work according to the size of his holding. Gafol-earth is not
only ploughed but mostly sown by the peasantry.(9*)
    A third species of ploughing-duty is the so-called averearth.
or grass-earth. This obligation arises when the peasants want
more pasture than they are entitled to use by their customary
rights of common. The lord may grant the permission to use the
pasture reserved for him, and exacts ploughings in return
according to the number of heads of cattle sent to the
pasturage.(10*) Sometimes the same imposition is levied when more
cattle are sent to the commons than a holding has a right to
drive on them.(11*) It is not impossible that in some cases the
very use of rights of common Was made dependent on the
performance of such duties.(12*) A kindred exaction was imposed
for the use of the meadows.(13*) Local variations have, of
course, to be taken largely into account in all such matters: the
distinction between gafol-earth and grass-earth, for instance,
though drawn very sharply in most cases, gets somewhat confused
in others.
    Manorial records mention a fourth variety of ploughing work
under the name of ben-earth, precariae carucarum. This is extra
work in opposition to the common ploughings described
before.(14*) It is assumed that the subject population is ready
to help the lord for the tillage of his land, even beyond the
customary duties imposed on it. It sends its ploughs three or
four times a year 'out of love,' and 'for the asking.' It may be
conjectured how agreeable this duty must have been in reality,
and indeed by the side of its common denominations, as boon-work
and asked-work, we find much rougher terms in the speech of some
districts -- it is deemed unlawenearth and godlesebene.(15*) It
must be said, however, that the lord generally provided food on
these occasions, and even went so far as to pay for such extra
work.
    Other expressions occur in certain localities, which are
sometimes difficult of explanation. Lentenearth,(16*) in the
manors of Ely Minster, means evidently an extra ploughing in
Lent. The same Ely records exhibit a ploughing called Filstnerthe
or Filsingerthe,(17*) which may be identical with the Lentenearth
just mentioned: a fastnyngseed (18*) occurs at any rate which
seem s connected with the ploughing under discussion. The same
extra work in Lent is called Tywe (19*) in the Custumal of
Bleadon, Somersetshire. When the ploughing-work is paid for it
may receive the name of penyearth.(20*) The Gloucester survey
speaks of the extra cultivation of an acre called Radacre, and
the Ely surveys of an extra rood 'de Rytnesse.'(21*) I do not
venture to suggest an explanation for these last terms; and I
need not say that it would be easy to collect a much greater
number of such terms in local use from the manorial records. It
is sufficient for my purpose to mark the chief distinctions.
    All the other labour-services are performed more or less on
the same system as the ploughings, with the fundamental
difference that the number of men engaged in them has to be
reckoned with more than the number of beasts. The extents are
especially full of details in their descriptions of reaping or
mowing corn and grass; the process of thrashing is also
mentioned, though more rarely. In the case of meadows (mederipe)
sometimes their dimensions are made the basis of calculation,
sometimes the number of work-days which have to be employed in
order to cut the grass.(22*) As to the corn-harvest, every
holding has its number of acres assigned to it,(23*) or else it
is enacted that every house has to send so many workmen during a
certain number of days.(24*) If it is said that such and such a
tenant is bound to work on the lord's field at harvest-time with
twenty-eight men, it does not mean that he has to send out such a
number every time, but that he has to furnish an amount of work
equivalent to that performed by twenty-eight grown-up labourers
in one, day. It may be divided into fourteen days' work of two
labourers, or into seven days' of four, and so forth.
    Harvest-time is the most pressing time in the year for rural
work; it is especially important not to lose the opportunity
presented by fine weather to mow and garner in the crop before
rain, and there may be only a few days of such weather at
command. For this reason extra labour is chiefly required during
this season, and the village people are frequently asked to give
extra help in connexion with it. The system of precariae is even
more developed on these occasions than in the case of
ploughing.(25*) All the forces of the village are strained to go
through the task; all the houses which open on the street send
their labourers,(26*) and in most cases the entire population has
to join in the work, with the exception of the housewives and
perhaps of the marriageable daughters.(27*) The landlord treats
the harvesters to food in order to make these exertions somewhat
more palatable to them.(28*) These 'love-meals' are graduated
according to a set system. If the men are called out only once,
they get their food and no drink: these are 'dry requests.' If
they are made to go a second time, ale is served to them
(precariae cerevisiae). The mutual obligations of lords and
tenantry are settled very minutely;(29*) the latter may have to
mow a particular acre with the object of saying 'thanks' for some
concession on the part of the lord.(30*) The same kind of
'requests' are in use for mowing the meadows. The duties of the
peasants differ a great deal according to size of their holdings
and their social position. The greater number have of course to
work with scythe and sickle, but the more wealthy are called upon
to supervise the rest, to ride about with rods in their
hands.(31*) On the other hand, a poor woman holds a messuage, and
need do no more than carry water to the mowers.(32*)
    A very important item in the work necessary for medieval
husbandry was the business of carrying produce from one part of
the country to the other. The manors of a great lord were usually
dispersed in several counties, and even in the case of small
landowners it was not very easy to arrange a regular
communication with the market. The obligation to provide horses
and carts gains in importance accordingly.(33*) These averagia
are laid out for short and long distances, and the peasants have
to take their turn at them one after the other.(34*) They were
bound to carry corn to London or Bristol according to the size of
their holdings.(35*) Special importance was attached to the
carriage of the 'farm,' that is of the products designed for the
consumption of the lord.(36*) In some surveys we find the
qualification that the peasants are not obliged to carry anything
but such material as may be put on the fire, i.e. used in the
kitchen.(37*) In the manor itself there are many carriage duties
to be performed: carts are required for the grain, or for
spreading the dung. The work of loading and of following the
carts is imposed on those who are not able to provide the
implements.(38*) And alongside of the duties of carriage by
horses or oxen we find the corresponding manual duty. The
'averagium super dorsum suum' falls on the small tenant who does
not own either horses or oxen.(39*) Such small people are also
made to drive the swine or geese to the market.(40*) The lord and
his chief stewards must look sharp after the distribution of
these duties in order to prevent wealthy tenants from being put
to light duties through the protection of the bailiffs, who may
be bribed for the purpose.(41*)
    It would be hard to imagine any kind of agricultural work
which is not imposed on the peasantry in these manorial surveys.
The tenants mind the lord's ploughs, construct houses and booths
for him, repair hedges and dykes, work in vineyards, wash and
shear the sheep,(42*) etc. In some cases the labour has to be
undertaken by them, not in the regular run of their services, but
by special agreement, as it were, in consideration of some
particular right or permission granted to them.(43*) Also it
happens from time to time that the people of one manor have to
perform some services in another, for instance, because they use
pasture in that other manor.(44*) Such 'forinsec' labour may be
due even from tenants of a strange lord. By the side of purely
agricultural duties we find such as are required by the political
or judicial organisation of the manor. Peasants are bound to
guard and hang thieves, to carry summonses and orders, to serve
at the courts of the superior lord and of the king.(45*)
    In consequence of the great variety of these labour-services
they had to be reduced to some chief and plain subdivisions for
purposes of a general oversight. Three main classes are very
noticeable notwithstanding all variety the araturae, averagia,
and ianuoperationes. These last are also called hand-dainae or
daywerke,(46*). and the records give sometimes the exact
valuation of the work to be performed during a day in every kind
of labour. Sometimes all the different classes are added up under
one head for a general reckoning, and without any distinction as
to work performed by hand or with the help of horse or ox, Among
the manors of Christ Church, Canterbury,(47*) for instance, we
find at Borle '1480 work-days divided into 44 weeks of labour
from the virgaters, 88 from the cotters, 320 from the tofters
holding small tenements in the fields.' In Bockyng the work-days
of 52 weeks are reckoned to be 3222. It must be added, that when
such a general summing up appears, it is mostly to be taken as an
indication that the old system based on labour in kind is more or
less shaken. The aim of throwing together the different classes
of work is to get a general valuation of its worth, and such a
valuation in money is commonly placed by the side of the
reckoning. The single day-work yields sometimes only one penny or
a little more, and the landlord is glad to exchange this cumbrous
and cheap commodity for money-rents, even for small ones.
    We must now proceed to examine the different forms assumed by
payments in kind and money: they present a close parallel to the
many varieties of labour-service. Thirteenth-century documents
are full of allusions to payments in kind- that most archaic form
of arranging the relations between a lord and his subjects. The
peasants give corn under different names, and for various
reasons: as gavelseed, in addition to the money-rent paid for
their land.(48*) as foddercorn, of oats for the feeding of horses
(49*); as gathercorn, which a manorial servant has to collect or
gather from the several homesteads.(50*) as corn-bole, a best
sheaf levied at harvest-time.(51*) Of other provender supplied to
the lord's household honey is the most common, both in combs and
in a liquid form,(52*) Ale is sometimes brewed for the same
purpose, and sometimes malt and braseum furnished as material to
be used in the manorial farm,(53*) Animals are also given in
rent, mostly sheep, lambs, and sucking-pigs, The mode of
selection is peculiar in some cases. In the Christ Church
(Canterbury) manor of Monckton each sulung has to render two
lambs, and the lord's servant has the right to take those which
he pleases, whereupon the owner gets a receipt, evidently in view
of subsequent compensation from the other co-owners of the
sulung.(54*) If no suitable lamb is to be found, eight pence are
paid instead of it as mail (mala), on one of the estates of
Gloucester Abbey a freeman has to come on St. Peter's and Paul's
day with a lamb of the value of 12d., and besides, 12 pence in
money are to be hung in a purse on the animal's neck.(55*)
Poultry is brought almost everywhere, but these prestations are
very different in their origin. The most common reason for giving
capons is the necessity for getting the warranty of the
lord:(56*) In this sense the receipt and payment of the rent
constitute an acknowledgment on the part of the lord that he is
bound to protect his men, and on the part of the peasant that he
is the lord's villain.  Wood hens' are given for licence to take
a load of wood in a forest; similar prestations occur in
connexion with pasture and with the use of a moor for
turbary.(57*) At Easter the peasantry greet their protectors by
bringing eggs: in Walton, a manor of St. Paul's, London, the
custom is said to exist in honour of the lord, and at the free
discretion of the tenants.(58*) Besides all those things which
may be 'put on the fire and eaten,' rents in kind sometimes take
the shape of some object for permanent use, especially of some
implement necessary for the construction of the plough.(59*)
Trifling rents, consisting of flowers or roots of ginger, are
sometimes imposed with the object of testifying to the lord's
seignory; but the payers of such rents are generally
freeholders.(60*) I need not dwell long on the enumeration of all
the strange prestations which existed during the Middle Ages, and
partly came down to our own time: any reader curious about them
will find an enormous mass of interesting material in Hazlitt's
'Tenures of Land and Customs of Manors.'
    In opposition to labour and rents in kind we find a great
many payments in money. Some of these are said in as many words
to have stept into the place of labour services; of mowing,
carrying, making hedges,(61*) etc. The same may be the case in
regard to produce: barlicksilver is paid instead of barley,
fish-silver evidently instead of fish, malt-silver instead of
malt; a certain payment instead of salt, and so on.(62*) But
sometimes the origin of the money rent is more difficult to
ascertain. We find, for instance, a duty on sheep, which is
almost certainly an original imposition when it appears as
fald-silver. Even so the scythe-penny from every scythe, the
bosing-silver from every horse and cart, the wood-penny, probably
for the use of wood as fuel, must be regarded as original taxes
and not quit-rents or commutation-rents.(63*) Pannage is paid in
the same way for the swine grazing in the woods.(64*) Ward-penny
appears also in connexion with cattle, but with some special
shade of meaning which it is difficult to bring out definitely;
the name seems to point to protection, and also occurs in
connexion with police arrangements.(65*)
    I must acknowledge that in a good many cases I have been
unable to find a satisfactory explanation for various terms which
occur in the records for the divers payments. An attentive study
of local usages will probably lead to definite conclusions as to
most of them.(66*) From a general point of view it is interesting
to notice, that we find already in our records some attempts to
bring all the perplexing variety of payments to a few main
designations. Annual rents are, of course, reckoned out under the
one head of 'census.' Very obvious reasons suggested the
advisability of computing the entire money-proceed yielded by the
estate.(67*) It sometimes happens that the general sum made up in
this way, fixed as it is at a constant amount, is used almost as
a name for a complex of land.(68*) A division of rents into old
and new ones does not require any particular explanation.(69*)
But several other subdivisions are worth notice. The rent paid
from the land often appears separately as landgafol or landchere.
It is naturally opposed to payments that fall on the person as
poll taxes.(70*) These last are considered guaranteed by the as a
return for the personal protection lord to his subjects. Of the
contrast between gafol as a customary rent and mal as a payment
in commutation I have spoken already, and I have only to add now,
that gild is sometimes used in the same sense as mal.(71*)
Another term in direct opposition to gafol is the Latin
donum.(72*) It seems to indicate a special payment imposed as a
kind of voluntary contribution on the entire village. To be sure,
there was not much free will to be exercised in the matter; all
the dependent people of the township had to pay according to
their means.(73*) But the tax must have been considered as a
supplementary one in the same sense as supplementary boon-work.
It may have been originally intended in some cases as an
equivalent for some rights surrendered by the lord, as a mal or
gild, in fact.(74*) In close connexion with the donum we find the
auxilium,(75*) also an extraordinary tax paid once a year, and
distinguished from the ordinary rent. It appears as a direct
consequence of the political subjection of the tenantry.(76*). It
is, in fact, merely an expression of the right to tallage. Our
records mention it sometimes as apportioned according to the
number of cattle owned by the peasant, but this concerns only the
mode of imposition of the duty and hardly its origin.(77*) As I
have said already, the auxilium is in every respect like the
donum. One very characteristic trait of both taxes is, that they
are laid primarily on the whole village, which is made to pay a
certain round sum as a body.(78*) The burden is divided
afterwards between the several householders, and the number of
cattle, and more particularly of the beasts of plough kept on the
holding, has of course to be taken into account more than
anything else. But the manorial administration does not much
concern itself with these details: the township is answerable for
the whole sum.
    It is to be added that the payment is sometimes actually
mentioned as a political one in direct connexion with 'forinsec'
duties towards the king. The burdens which lay on the land in
consequence of the requirements of State and Church appear not
unfrequently in the documents. Among those the scutage and hidage
are the most important. The first of these taxes is so well known
that I need not stop to discuss it. It may be noticed however
that in relation to the dependent people scutage is not commonly
spoken of; the tax was levied under this name from the barons and
the armed gentry, and was mostly transmitted by these to the
lower strata of society under some other name, as an aid or a
tallage. Hidage is historically connected with the old English
Danegeld system, and in some cases its amount is set out
separately from other payments, and the tenants of a manor have
to pay it to the bailiff of the hundred and not to the steward. A
smaller payment called ward-penny is bound up with it, probably
as a substitute for the duty of keeping watch and ward.(79*) In
the north the hidage is replaced by cornage,(80*) a tax which has
given rise to learned controversy and doubt; it looks like an
assessment according to the number of horns of cattle, pro numero
averiorum, as our Latin extents would say. The Church has also an
ancient claim on the help of the faithful; the churchscot of
Saxon times often occurs in the feudal age under the name of
churiset or cheriset.(81*) It is mostly paid in kind, but may be
found occasionally as a money-rent.
    A survey of the chief aspects assumed by the work and the
payments of the dependent people was absolutely necessary, in
order to enable us to understand the descriptions of rural
arrangements which form the most instructive part of the
so-called extents. But every survey of terms and distinctions
(even if it were much more detailed than the one I am able to
present), will give only a very imperfect idea of the obligations
actually laid on the peasantry. It must needs take up the
different species one by one and consider them separately,
whereas in reality they were meant to fit together into a whole.
On the other hand it may create a false impression by enumerating
in systematic order facts which belonged to different localities
and perhaps to different epochs. To keep clear of these dangers
we have to consider the deviations of practical arrangements from
the rules laid down in the books and the usual combinations of
the elements described.
    When one reads the careful notices in the cartularies as to
the number of days and the particular occasions when work has to
be performed for the lord, a simple question is suggested by the
minuteness of detail. What happened when this very definite
arrangement came into collision with some other equally exacting
order? One of the three days of week-work might, for instance,
fall on a great feast; or else the weather might be too bad for
out-of-doors work. Who was to suffer or to gain by such
casualties? The question is not a useless one. The manorial
records raise it occasionally, and their ways of settling it are
not always the same. We find that in some cases the lord tried to
get rid of the inconveniences occasioned by such events, Or at
least to throw one part of the burden back on the dependent
population; in Barling, for instance, a manor of St. Paul's,
London,(82*) of two feasts occurring in one week and even in two
consecutive weeks, one profits to the villains and the other to
the lord; that is to say, the labourer escapes one day's work
altogether. But the general course seems to have been to liberate
the peasants from work both on occasion of a festival and if the
weather was exceptionally inclement.(83*) Both facts are not
without importance: it must be remembered that the number of
Church festivals was a very considerable one in those days.
Again, although the stewards were not likely to be very
sentimental as to bad weather, the usual test of cold in case of
ploughing seems to have been the hardness of the soil -- a
certain percentage of free days must have occurred during the
winter at least. And what is even more to be considered -- when
the men were very strictly kept to their week-work under
unfavourable circumstances, the landlord must have gained very
little although the working people suffered much. The reader may
easily fancy the effects of what must have been a very common
occurrence, when the village householders sent out their ploughs
on heavy clay in torrents of rain. The system of customary work
on certain days was especially clumsy in such respects, and it is
worth notice that in harvest-time the landlords rely chiefly on
boon-days. These were not irrevocably fixed, and could be shifted
according to the state of the weather. Still the week-work was so
important an item in the general arrangement of labour-services
that the inconveniences described must have acted powerfully in
favour of commutation.
    Of course, the passage from one system to the other, however
desirable for the parties concerned, was not to be effected
easily and at once: a considerable amount of capital in the hands
of the peasantry was required to make it possible, and another
necessary requirement was a sufficient circulation of money.
While these were wanting the people had to abide by the old
labour system. The facts we have been discussing give indirect
proof that there was not much room for arbitrary changes in this
system. Everything seems ruled and settled for ever. It may
happen, of course, that notwithstanding the supposed equality
between the economic strength of the, different holdings, some
tenants are unable to fulfil the duties which their companions
perform.(84*) As it was noticed before, the shares could not be
made to correspond absolutely to each other, and the distribution
of work and payments according to a definite pattern was often
only approximate.(85*) Again, the lord had some latitude in
selecting one or the other kind of service to be performed by his
men.(86*) But, speaking generally, the settlement of duties was a
very constant one, and manorial documents testify that every
attempt by the lord to dictate a change was met by emphatic
protests on the part of the peasantry.(87*) The tenacity of
custom may be gathered from the fact that when we chance to
possess two sets of extents following each other after a very
considerable lapse of time, the renders in kind and the
labour-services remain unmodified in the main.(88*) One has to
guard especially against the assumption that such expressions as
'to do whatever he is bid' or 'whatever the lord commands' imply
a complete servility of the tenant and unrestricted power on the
part of the lord to exploit his subordinate according to his
pleasure. Such expressions have been used as a test of the degree
of subjection of the villains at different epochs; it has been
contended, that the earlier our evidence is, the more complete
the lord's sway appears to be.(89*) The expressions quoted above
may seem at first glance to countenance the idea, but an
attentive and extended study of the documents will easily show
that, save in exceptional cases, the earlier records are by no
means harder in their treatment of the peasantry than the later.
The eleventh century is, if anything, more favourable to the
subjected class as regards the imposition of labour-services than
the thirteenth, and we shall see by-and-by that the observation
applies even more to Saxon times. In the light of such a general
comparison, we have to explain the above-mentioned phrases in a
different way. 'Whatever he is bid' applies to the quality and
not to the quantity of the work.(90*) It does not mean that the
steward has a right to order the peasant about like a slave, to
tear him at pleasure from his own work, and to increase his
burden whenever he likes. It means simply that such and such a
virgater or cotter has to appear in person or by proxy to perform
his weekwork of three days, or two days, or four days, according
to the case, and that it is not settled beforehand what kind of
work he is to perform. He may have to plough, or to carry, or to
dig trenches, or to do anything else, according to the bidding of
the steward. A similar instance of uncertainty may be found in
the expression 'without measure'(91*) which sometimes occurs in
extents. It would be preposterous to construe it as an indication
of work to be imposed at pleasure. It is merely a phrase used to
suit the case when the work had to be done by the day and not by
a set quantity; if, for instance, a man had to plough so many
times and the number of acres to be ploughed was not specified.
It is true that such vague descriptions are mostly found in older
surveys, but the inference to be drawn from the fact is simply
that manorial customs were developing gradually from rather
indefinite rules to a minute settlement of details. There is no
difference in the main principle, that the dependent householder
was not to be treated as a slave and had a customary right to
devote part of his time to the management of his own affairs.
    Another point is to be kept well in view. The whole
arrangement of a manorial survey is constructed with the holding
as its basis. The names of virgaters and cotters are certainly
mentioned for the sake of clearness, but it would be wrong to
consider the duties ascribed to them as aiming at the person.
John Newman may be said to hold a virgate, to join with his
plough-oxen in the tillage of twenty acres, to attend at three
boon-days in harvest time, and so forth. It would be misleading
to take these statements very literally and to infer that John
Newman was alone to use the virgate and to work for it. He was
most probably married, and possibly had grown-up sons to help
him; very likely a brother was there also, and even servants,
poor houseless men from the same village or from abroad. Every
householder has a more or less considerable following
(sequela),(92*) and it was by no means necessary for the head of
the family to perform all manorial work in his own person. He had
to appear or to send one workman on most occasions and to come
with all his people on a few days -- the boon-days namely. The
description of the precariae is generally the only occasion when
the extents take this into account, namely, that there was a
considerable population in the village besides those tenants who
were mentioned by name.(93*) I need not point out, that the fact
has an important meaning. The medieval system, in so far as it
rested on the distribution of holdings, was in many respects more
advantageous to the tenantry than to the lord. It was superficial
in a sense, and from the point of view of the lord did not lead
to a satisfactory result; he did not get the utmost that was
possible from his subordinates. The factor of population was
almost disregarded by it, households very differently constituted
in this respect were assumed to be equal, and the tenacity of
custom prevented an increase of rents and labour-services in
proportion to the growth of resource and wealth among the
peasants. Some attempts to get round these difficulties are
noticeable in the surveys: they are mostly connected with the
regulation of boon-works. But these exceptional measures give
indirect proof of the very insufficient manner in which the
question was generally settled.
    The liabilities of the peasantry take the shape of produce,
labour, and money-rents. Almost in every manor all three kinds of
impositions are to be found split up into a confusing variety of
customary obligations. It is out of the question to trace at the
present time, with the help of fragmentary and later material,
what the original ideas were which underlie these complicated
arrangements. But although a reduction to simple guiding
principles accounting for every detail cannot be attempted, it is
easy to perceive that chance and fancy were not everything in
these matters. The several duties are brought together so as to
form a certain whole, and some of the aims pursued in the
grouping may be perceived even now.
    The older surveys often show the operation of a system which
is adapted by its very essence to a very primitive state of
society. It may be called the farm-system, the word farm being
used in the original sense of the Saxon feorm, food, and not in
the later meaning of fixed rent, although these two meanings
appear intimately connected in history. The farm is a quantity of
produce necessary for the maintenance of the lord's household
during a certain period: it may be one night's or week's or one
fortnight's farm accordingly. A very good instance of the system
may be found in an ancient cartulary of Ramsey, now at the
British Museum, which though compiled in the early thirteenth
century, constantly refers to the order of Henry II's time. The
estates of the abbey were taxed in such a way as to yield
thirteen full farms of a fortnight, and each of these was to be
used for the maintenance of the monks through a whole month. The
extension of the period is odd enough, and we do not see its
reason clearly. It followed probably on great losses in property
and income at the time of Abbot Walter. However this may be, the
thirteen fortnights' farms were made to serve all the year round,
and to cover fifty-two weeks instead of twenty-six. A very minute
description of the single farm is given as it was paid by the
manor of Ayllington (i.e. Elton). Every kind of produce is
mentioned: flour and bread, beer and honey, bacon, cheese, lambs,
geese, chicken, eggs, butter, &c. The price of each article is
mentioned in pence, and it is added, that four pounds have to be
paid in money. By the side of the usual farm there appears a
'lent' farm with this distinction, that only half as much bacon
and cheese has to be given as usual, and the deficiency is to be
made up by a money payment. Some of the manors of the abbey have
to send a whole farm, some others only one half, that is one
week's farm, but all are assessed to pay sixteen pence for every
acre to be used as alms for the poor.(94*) This description may
be taken as a standard one, and it would be easy to supplement it
in many particulars from the records of other monastic
institutions. The records of St. Paul's, London, supply
information as to a distribution of the farms at the close of the
eleventh century, which covered fifty-two weeks, six days, and
five-sixths of a day.(95*) The firmae of St. Alban's were
reckoned to provide for the fifty-two weeks of the year, and one
in advance.(96*) The practice of arranging the produce-rents
according to farms was by no means restricted to ecclesiastical
management; it occurs also on the estates of the Crown, and was
probably in use on those of lay lords generally. Every person a
little conversant with Domesday knows the firmae unius noctis, at
which some of the royal manors were assessed.(97*) In the period
properly called feudal, that is in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, the food-revenue had very often become only the
starting-point for a reckoning of money-rents. The St. Alban's
farms, for example, are no longer delivered in kind; their
equivalent in money has taken their place. But the previous state
of things has left a clear trace in the division by weeks.
Altogether it seems impossible to doubt that the original idea
was to provide really the food necessary for consumption. One
cannot help thinking that such practice must have come from the
very earliest times when a Saxon or a Celtic chieftain got his
income from the territory under his sway by moving from one place
to another with his retinue and feeding on the people for a
certain period. This very primitive mode of raising income and
consuming it at the same time may occasionally strike our eye
even in the middle of the thirteenth century. The tenants of the
Abbot of Osulveston in Donington and Byker are bound to receive
their lord during one night and one day when he comes to hold his
court in their place. They find the necessary food and beverage
for him and for his men, provender for his horses, and so forth.
If the abbot does not come in person, the homage may settle about
a commutation of the duties with the steward or the sergeant sent
for the purpose. If he refuses to take money, they must bring
everything in kind.(98*)
    This is an exceptional instance: generally the farm has to be
sent to the lord's residence, probably after a deduction for the
requirements of the manor in which it was gathered. When it had
reached this stage the system is already in decay. It is not only
difficult to provide for the carriage, but actually impossible to
keep some of the articles from being spoilt. Bread sent to
Westminster from some Worcestershire possession of the minster
would not have been very good when it reached its destination.
The step towards money-payments is natural and necessary.
    Before leaving the food-rents we must take notice of one Or
two more peculiarities of this system. It is obvious that it was
arranged from above, if one may use the expression. The
assessment does not proceed in this case by way of an estimate of
the paying or producing strength of each unit subjected to it,
i.e. of each peasant household. The result is not made up by
multiplying the revenue from every holding by the number of such
holdings. The whole reckoning starts from the other end, from the
wants of the manorial administration. The requirements of a night
or of a week are used as the standard to which the taxation has
to conform. This being the case, the correspondence between the
amount of the taxes and the actual condition of the tax-payer was
only a very loose one. Manors of very different size were brought
into the same class in point of assessment, and the rough
distinctions between a whole farm and half-a-farm could not
follow at all closely the variety of facts in real life, even
when they were supplemented by the addition of round sums of
money.
    These observations lead at once to important questions; how
was the farm-assessment distributed in every single manor, and
what was its influence on the duties of the single householder?
It seems hardly doubtful, to begin with, that the food-rent
changed very much in this respect. Originally, when the condition
of things was more or less like the Osulvestone example, the farm
must have been the result of co-operation on the part of all the
householders of a township, who had to contribute according to
their means to furnish the necessary articles. But the farm of
St. Paul's, London, even when it is paid in produce, is a very
different thing. It is the result of a convention with the
firmarius, or may be with the township itself in the place of a
firmarius.(99*) It depends only indirectly on the services and
payments of the peasantry. Part of the flour, bread, beer, etc.,
may come from the cultivation of the demesne lands; another
portion will appear as the proceed of week-work and boon-work
performed by the villains, and only one portion, perhaps a very
insignificant one, will be levied directly as produce. In this
way there is no break between the food-rent system and the
labour-system. One may still exist for purposes of a general
assessment when the other has already taken hold of the internal
arrangement of the manor.
    Most of our documents present the labour arrangement in full
operation. Each manor may be regarded as an organised group of
households in which the central body represented by the lord's
farm has succeeded in subordinating several smaller bodies to its
directing influence. Every satellite has a movement of its own,
is revolving round its own centre, and at the same time it is
attracted to turn round the chief planet, and is carried away in
its path. The constellation is a very peculiar one and most
significant for the course of medieval history. Regarded from the
economic standpoint it is neither a system of great farming nor
one of small farming, but a compound of both. The estate of the
lord is in a sense managed on a great scale, but the management
is bound up with a supply and a distribution of labour which
depend on the conditions of the small tributary households. It
would be impossible now-a-days to say for certain how much of the
customary order of week-work and boon-work was derived from a
calculation of the requirements of the manorial administration,
and how much of it is to be regarded as a percentage taken from
the profits of each individual tenant.(100*) Both elements
probably co-operated to produce the result: the operations
performed for the benefit of the lord were ordered in a certain
way partly because so many acres had to be tilled, so much hay
and corn had to be reaped on the lord's estate; and partly
because the peasant virgaters or cotters were known to work for
themselves in a certain manner and considered capable of yielding
so much as a percentage of their working power. But although we
have a compromise before us in this respect, it must be noted
that the relation between the parts and the whole is obviously
different under the system of labour services from what it was
under the farm-system. It has been pointed out that the food-rent
arrangement was imposed from above without much trouble being
taken to ascertain the exact value and character of the tributary
units subjected to it. This later element is certainly very
prominent in the customary labour-system, which on the whole
appears to be constructed from below. Is it necessary to add that
this second form of subjection was by no means the lighter one?
The very differentiation of the burden means that the
aristocratical power of the landlord has penetrated deep enough
to attempt an exact evaluation of details.
    I have had occasion so many times already to speak of the
process of commutation, that there is no call now to explain the
reasons which induced both landlords and peasants to exchange
labour for money-rents. I have only to say now that the same
remark which applied to the passage from produce 'farms' to
labour holds good as to the passage from labour to money
payments. There is no break between the arrangements. In a
general way the money assessment follows, of course, as the third
mode of settling the relation between lord and tenant, and we may
say that rentals are as much the rule from the fourteenth century
downwards as custumals are the rule in the thirteenth and earlier
centuries. But if we take up the Domesday of St. Paul's of 1222,
or the Glastonbury inquest of 1189, or even the Burton Cartulary
of the early twelfth century, in every one of these documents we
shall find a great number of rent-paying tenants,(101*) and even
a greater number of people fluctuating, as it were, between
labour and rent. In some cases peasants passed directly from the
obligation of supplying produce to the payment of corresponding
rents in money. The gradual exemption from labour is even more
apparent in the records. It is characteristic that the first move
is generally a substitution of the money arrangement with the
tacit or even the expressed provision that the assessment is not
to be considered as permanent and binding.(102*) It remains at
the pleasure of the lord to go back to the duties in kind. But
although such a retrogressive movement actually takes place in
some few cases, the general spread of money payments is hardly
arrested by these exceptional instances.(103*)
    One more subject remains to be discussed. Is there in the
surveys any marked difference between different classes of the
peasantry in point of rural duties?
    An examination of the surveys will show at once that the free
and the servile holdings differ very materially as to services,
quite apart from their contrast, in point of legal protection and
of casual exactions such as marriage fines, heriots, and the
like. The difference may be either in the kind of duties or in
their quantity. Both may be traced in the records. If we take
first the diversities in point of quality we shall notice that on
many occasions the free tenants are subjected to an imposition on
the same occasion as the unfree, but their mode of acquitting
themselves of it is slightly different -- they have, for
instance, to bring eggs when the villains bring hens. The object
cannot be to make the burden lighter; it amounts to much the
same, and so the aim must have been to keep up the distinctions
between the two classes. It is very common to require the free
tenants to act as overseers of work to be performed by the rest
of the peasantry. They have to go about or ride about with rods
and to keep the villains in order. Such an obligation is
especially frequent on the boon-days (precariae), when almost all
the population of the village is driven to work on the field of
the lord. Sometimes free householders, who have dependent people
resident under them, are liberated from certain payments; and it
may be conjectured that the reason is to be found in the fact
that they have to superintend work performed by their labourers
or inferior tenants.(104*) All such points are of small
importance, however, when compared with the general opposition of
which I have been speaking several times. The free and the
servile holdings are chiefly distinguished by the fact that the
first pay rent and the last perform labour.
    Whenever we come to examine closely the reason underlying the
cases when the classification into servile and free is adopted,
we find that it generally resolves itself into a contrast between
those who have to serve, in the original sense of the term, and
those who are exempted from actual labour-service. Being
dependent nevertheless, these last have to pay rent. I need not
repeat that I am speaking of main distinctions and not of the
various details bound up with them. In order to understand
thoroughly the nature of such diversities, let us take up a very
elaborate description of duties to be performed by the peasants
in the manor of Wye, Kent, belonging to the Abbey of
Battle.(105*) Of the sixty-one yokes it contains thirty are
servile, twenty-nine are free, and two occupy an inter mediate
position. The duties of the two chief classes of tenants differ
in many respects. The servile people have to pay rent and so have
the free, but while the first contribute to make up a general
payment of six pounds, each yoke being assessed at seven
shillings and five-pence, the free people have to pay as much as
twenty-three shillings and seven-pence per yoke. Both sets have
to perform ploughings, reapings, and carriage duties, but the
burden of the servile portion is so much greater in regard to the
carriage-work, that the corresponding yokes sometimes get their
very name from it, they are juga averagiantia, while the free
households are merely bound to help a few times during the
summer. Every servile holding has a certain number of acres of
wood assigned to it, or else corresponding rights in the common
wood, while the free tenants have to settle separately with the
lord of the manor. And lastly, the relief for every unfree yoke
is fixed at forty pence, and for every free one is equal to the
annual rent. This comparison of duties shows that the peasants
called free were by no means subjected to very light burdens: in
fact it looks almost as if they were more heavily taxed than the
rest. Still they were exempted from the most unpopular and
inconvenient labour services.
    Altogether, the study of rural work and rents leads to the
same conclusion as the analysis of the legal characteristics of
villainage. The period from the Conquest onwards may be divided
into two stages. In later times, that is from the close of the
thirteenth century downwards, the division between the two great
classes of tenants and tenements, a contrast strictly legal, is
regulated by the material test of the certainty or uncertainty of
the service due, and the formal test of the mode of conveyance.
In earlier times the classification depends primarily on the
economic relation between the manorial centre and the tributary
household, labour is deemed servile, rent held to be free. It is
only by keeping these two periods clearly distinct, that one is
enabled to combine the seemingly conflicting facts in our
surveys. If we look at the most ancient of these documents, we
shall have to admit that a rent-paying holding is free,
nevertheless it would be wrong to infer that when commutation
became more or less general, classification was settled in the
same way. A servile tenement no longer became free because rent
was taken instead of labour; it was still held 'at the will of
the lord,' and conveyed by surrender and admittance. When all
holdings were fast exchanging labour for rent, the old notions
had been surrendered and a new basis for classification found in
those legal incidents just mentioned. The development of copyhold
belongs to the later period, copyhold being mostly a rent-paying
servile tenure. Again, if we turn to the earlier epoch we shall
have to remember that the contrast between labour and rent is not
to be taken merely as a result of commutation. Local distinctions
are fitted on to it in a way which cannot be explained by the
mere assumption that every settlement of a rent appeared in the
place of an original labour obligation. The contrast is
primordial, as one may say, and based on the fact that the labour
of a subject appears directly subservient to the wants and
arrangements of the superior household, while the payment of rent
severs. the connexion for a time and leaves each body to move. In
its own direction till the day when the tributary has to pay
again.
    There can be no doubt also that the more ancient surveys
disclose a difference in point of quantity between free and
servile holdings, and this again is a strong argument for the
belief that free socage must not be considered merely as an
emancipated servile tenancy. Where there has been commutation we
must suppose that the labour services cannot have been more
valuable than the money rent into which they were changed. The
free rent into which labour becomes converted is nothing but the
price paid for the services surrendered by the lord. It must have
stood higher, if anything, than the real value of the labour
exchanged, because the exchange entailed a diminution of power
besides the giving up of an economic commodity. No matter that
ultimately the quit-rents turned out to the disadvantage of the
lord, inasmuch as the buying strength of money grew less and
less. This was the result of a very long process, and could not
be foreseen at the time when the commutation equivalents were
settled. And so we may safely lay down the general rule, that
when there is a conspicuous difference between the burdens of
assessment of free and unfree tenants, such a difference excludes
the idea that one class is only an emancipated portion of the
other, and supposes that it was from the first a socially
privileged one. The Peterborough Black Book, which, along with
the Burton Cartulary, presents the most curious instance of an
early survey, describes the services of socmen on the manors of
the abbey as those of a clearly. privileged tenantry.(106*) The
interesting point is, that these socmen are even subjected to
week-work and not distinguishable from villains so far as
concerns the quality of their services. Nevertheless the contrast
with the villains appears throughout the Cartulary and is
substantiated by a marked difference in point of assessment: a
socman has to work one or two days in the week when the villain
is made to work three or four.
    Three main points seem established by the survey of rural
work and rents.
    1. Notwithstanding many vexatious details, the impositions to
which the peasantry had to submit left a considerable margin for
their material progress. This system of customary rules was
effectively provided against general oppression.
    2. The development from food-farms to labour organisation,
and lastly to money-rents, was a result not of one-sided pressure
on the part of the landlords, but of a series of agreements
between lord and tenants.
    3. The settlement of the burdens to which peasants were
subjected depended to a great extent on distinctions as to the
social standing of tenants which had nothing to do with economic
facts.

NOTES:

1. Domesday of St. Paul's, 93: 'Potest wainnagium fieri cum 12
bobus et quatuor stottis cum consuetudinibus ville.' 75: 'Item
(juratores) dicunt quod potest fieri wainnagium totius dominici
cum 2 carucis bonis habentibus 20 capita in jugo et 2
herciatoribus cum consuetudinibus operariorum.'

2. Add. MSS. 61 59, f 44, a: '(Leyesdon)... debet quelibet caruca
coniuncta arrare unam acram et habebunt 3 denarios pro acra et
quadrantem.'

3. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189 (Roxburghe Ser.), 64: '(Virgatarius)
a festo Sti Michaelis qualibet ebdomada arat unam acram donec
tota terra domini sit culta.'

4. Ely Inqu., Cotton MSS. Claudius, c. xi. f 185: 'Unusquisque
arabit per tres dies, si habeat sex boves; per duos, si habeat
quatuor boves; per unum, si habeat duos boves; per dimidium, si
habeat unum bovem.'

5. Add. MSS. 6159, f. 53, a: 'Item debent predicte 22 virgate
terre arrare ad frumentum, ad auenam et ad warectum 113 acras et
valent 56 solidos 6 denarios.'

6. Gloucester Cart. iii. 92: 'Et quicquid araverit debet herciare
tempore seminis. Et faciet unam hersuram que vocatur landegginge
et valet 1 den.' iii. 194: 'Et debet herciare quotidle si necesse
fuerit quousque semen domini seminetur, et allocabitur ei pro
operacione manuali, et valet ultra obolum. Et quia non est
numerus certus de diebus herciandis, aestimant juratores 40
dies.'

7. Ramsey Cart. I. 345: 'Qualibet autem septimana, a festo Sti
Michaelis usque ad tempus sarclationis tribus diebus operatur,
quodcunque opus sibi fuerit injunctum; et quarto die arabit unum
sellionem, sive jungatur cum alio, sive non.'

8. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 64: 'A die circumcisionis
similiter, excepta ebdomada Pasche, si possit per gelu, et si
gelu durat per 12 dies, quietus debet esse. Si amplius durat,
restituet araturam.'

9. Add. MSS. 6159, f. 49, b: 'Idem tenentes de predictis 22 et
dimidia (terris) debent arrare ad seysonam frumenti 45 acras de
gable et de qualibet terra 2 acras.' 35, b: 'Gauilherth:
Willelmus de Bergate debet arrare dimidiam acram; Nicholaus de
Jonebrigge et socii ejus unam virgam; heredes Johannis 8 pedes;
Ricardus Cutte 8 pedes... Summa acrarum 25 acre 1 pes. Hec debent
arrare et seminare.'

10. Rot. Hundred. ii. 768, b: 'Item si habeat carucam integram
vel cum sociis conjunctam, illa caruca arabit domino 2 acras
terre ad yvernagium et herciabit quantum illa caruca araverit in
die, et istud servicium appellatur Greserthe, pro quo servicio
ipse W. et omnes alii consuetudinarii habebunt pasturas dominicas
ad diem (sic. corr. a die) ad Vincula Sti Petri usque ad festum
beate Marie in Marcio et prata dominica postquam fenum fuerit
cariatum.'

11. Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS. I, f 44, b: 'Tenens dimidiam
hidam habet 4 animalia in pascius quieta, et si plus
habuerit-arabit et herciabit pro unoquoque dimidiam acram.'

12. Add. MSS. 6159, f 26, b: 'De qualibet caruca arant unam acram
de averherde., et si per negligenciam alicujus remanserit acra
non arata, tunc mittet dominus semen quod sufficiat ad unam acram
ad domum illius et oportebit illum reddere bladum ad mensuram
propinque acre et habebit tum herbagium de acra assignata.' Cart.
of Beaulieu, Cotton MSS. Nero, A. xii, f 102, b: 'Et si habeat
bovem vel vaccam iunctam, arabit pro quolibet virgo dimidiam
acram ad festum Sti Martini sine cibo.' Glastonbury Inqu. of
1189, f. 116: 'De qualibet carruca debent arare ad seminandum 7
acras, et ad warectum 7 acras, ut boves possint ire cum bobus
domini in pastura.'

13. Exch. Q. R. Min. Acc. Bk. 514; T. G. 41, 173: '(Extenta
manerii de Burgo) medwelond... debent arare tantam terram quantum
habent de prato.'

14. Exch. Q. R. Min. Acc. Bk. 513, 97: 'Beinerth: 12 custumarii
arabunt 6 acras terre ad semen yemale. Grasherthe: 12 arabunt cum
quanto iungunt per unum diem ad semen yemale.' Ely Inqu., Cotton
MSS. Claudius, C. xi. f. 30, a: 'Arabit de beneerthe si habeat
carucam integram 3 rodas, et si iungat cum aliis ipse et ille cum
quo iungit assidue arabunt 3 rodas.' Domesday of St. Paul's, 26;
'Et ad precariam carucarum arabit unam rodam scil. quartam partem
acre sine cibo.' Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 98: 'R. de Wttone
tenet dimidiam hidam pro una marca et debet habere ad preces per
annum 12 homines et bis arare ad preces.'

15. Gloucester Cart. iii. 115: 'Johannes Barefoth tenet dimidiam
virgatam terre continentem 24 acras... et debet arare qualibet
secunda septimana a festo Sti Michaelis usque ad festum Beati
Petri ad Vincula uno die... Et praeterea debet quater arare in
terra domini, et vocantur ille arurae Unlawenherþe.' Black Book
of St Augustine's, Cotton MSS. Faustina, A. i. f 44: '... arare
18 acras ad frumentum de godlesebene.'

16. Ely Inqu., Cotton MSS. Claudius, C. xi, f 45, a: 'Preterea
idem arabit de Lentenerþe dimidiam acram.'

17. Ibid., 30, b: 'Item iste cum quanto iungit arabit de
filstnerthe eodem tempore (ante Natale) per unum diem... Item
arabit in quadragesima tres acras et 3 rodas et araturam de
filsingerhe (sic). Item arabit in estate 3 acras et de beneerthe
3 rodas ut in hyeme, set nihil arabit de filsingerþe.'

18. Ibid., 35, a: 'Item per idem tempus arabit (ante Natale)
dimidiam acram pro fastningsede sine cibo et opere si habeat
carucam integram. Et si iungat Cum aliis, tunc iste et socenarii
sui cum quibus iunget arabunt tantum et non amplius.'

19. Custumal of Bleadon, 189.

20. Gloucester Cart. ii. 134: 'Et facit unam aruram que vocatur
peniherþe et valet tres denarii, quia recipiet de bursa domini
quartum denarium.' Cf ii. 162: 'Et praeterea faciet unam aruram
que vocatur yove (yoke?), scil. arabit dimidiam acram, et
recipiet de bursa domini unum denarium obolum, et valet ultra
Unum denarium obolum.'

21. Gloucester Cart. iii. 80: '(Dimidius virgatarius) debet unam
aruram que vocatur radaker, scil. arare unam acram ad semen
yemale, et triturare semen ad eamdem acram, scil. duos bussellos
frumenti.' On iii. 79 we have another reading for the same thing:
'Et arabit unam acram quae vocatur Eadacre et [debet] triturare
semen ad eamdem acram, et valet arura cum trituracione seminis 4
denarios.' What is the right term? -- Ely Inqu., Cotton MSS.
Claudius, C. xi. f 133, a: 'Et arabit qualibet die a festo Sti
Michaelis usque ad gulam Augusti dimidiam rodam, que faciunt per
totum quinque acras... Et praeterea arabit Unam rodam de
Rytuesse.'

22. Add. MSS. 6159, f 53, b: 'Item tota villata de Bocayng debet
falcare 12 acras prati et dimidiam, et valet 4 solidos.'

23. Domesday of St. Paul's, 47: 'Et preter hec unaquaque domus
hide debet metere 3 dimidias acras avene et colligere unum
sellionem fabarum.'

24. Gloucester Cart. iii. 84, 85: 'Ricardus Bissop tenet unum
messuagium et 10 acras terre... (operabitur) in messe domini cum
24 hominibus.'

25. Eynsham Cart. 88, b: 'Idem metet dimidiam acram bladi domini
sine cibo domini et valet opus 4 denarios et vocatur la bene.
Idem faciet cum uno homine beripam sine cibo domini et vocatur
mederipe, et valet opus 4 den.... Idem veniet ad magnam bederipam
domini ad cibum domini cum omnibus famulis suis et ipse
supervidebit operari in propria persona sua. Quod si famulos non
habuerit, tunc operabitur in propria (persona).'

26. Ramsey Cart. i. 488: 'Quaelibet domus habens ostium apertum
versus vicum tam de malmannis quam de cotmannis et operariis
inveniet unum hominem ad louebone.'

27. Ely lnqu., Cotton MSS. Claudius, C. xi. f 38, b: 'Ad
precariam ceruisie inveniet omnem familiam preter uxorem domus et
filiam maritabilem... Quod si voluerint metere propria blada
metent in suis croftis et non alibi.'

28. Domesday of St. Paul's, 75, 76: 'Et falcare dimidiam acram
sumptibus suis et postmodum falcare cum tota villata pratum
domini ita quod totum sit falcatum, et qualibet falx habebit Unum
panem... et ad siccas precarias in autumpno inveniet unum
hominem, et ad precarios ceruisie veniet cum quot hominibus
habuerit ad cibum domini.' Cf 61.

29. Cart. of Battle, Augment Off. Misc. Books, N. 57, f. 36, a:
'Quilibet virgarius... debet invenire ad quemlibet precarium
autumpnalem ad metendum 2 homines et habebunt singuli singulos
panes ponderis 18 librarum cere et duo unum ferchulum carnis
precii unius denarii, si sit dies carnis et potagium ad primum
precarium. Ad secundum uero erit panis medietas de frumento et
medietas ordei et cetera alia ut supra. Ad terciam precariam erit
panis totus de frumento et cetera ut prenotatur. Ad quartam
precariam quod vocatur hungerbedrip quilibet de tenentibus domini
preter Henricum de Chaus inveniet unum hominem ad metendum et
habebunt semel in die cibum, scil. panem et potum et unum
ferculum secundum quod serviens illius loci providere placuerit,
et caseum.'

30. Ely Inqu., Cotton MSS. Claudius, C. xi. 166, b... Metet
dimidiam acram que vocatur þanc alfaker.' The name may possibly
mean, that the peasant earned the gratitude of the lord by
ploughing the half-acre. This construction would be supported by
other instances of, sentimental, terminology. Cf Warwickshire
Hundr. Roll, Q. R. Misc. Books, N. 18, f 94, b: 'Lovebene.'
Cartul. of Okeburn, Al. Prior. 2/2, 17: 'Post precarias
consuetudinarias debet de gratia, ut dicitur, quocienscumque
precatus fuerit, (operare) per unum hominem.' Roch. Custum., ed.
Thorp, 10, b: 'Et pro prato de Dodecote falcando, pro amore, non
pro debito, habebunt unum multonem et unum caseum de 4 d.'

31. Gloucester Cart. i. 110: 'Idem Thomas cum virga sua debet
interesse operationibus quo ad metebederipas.'

32. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 91: 'Editha tenet unam
mesuagium et unam croftam pro 6 d. et fert aquam falcatoribus.'

33. Add. MSS. 6159, f 53, a: 'Item sunt in dicto manerio 22
virgate et debent invenire in proxima septimana post festum Sti
Michaeli, per unum diem a mane usque ad horam meridianam 44
carecta, ad fima domini cariandum.' Domesday of St. Paul's, 62:
'Quod si boves non habuerit vel alia animalia ad arandum faciet
aliud opus quod jussum fuerit et educet 10 plaustra de fimo post
Pascha et habebit dignerium de domino et infra hundredum portabit
unum plaustrum vel duas carectatas.'

34. Ely Inqu., Cotton MSS. Claudius C. xi. 38, b: 'Averagium
secundum turnum vicinorum suorum curtum et longum.'

35. Domesday of St. Paul's, 55: 'Rogerus dives... cum villata ad
firmam portandam Londinium facit quantum requiritur de 20 acris.'
Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, f 97: 'Quater faciet summagium apud
Bristolliam.' Domesday of St. Paul's, 47: 'Preterea debet hida
portare 4 summagia et dimidiam per totum ab horreo domini usque
ad navem ter in anno divisim.'

36. Add. MSS. 6159, f 28, a: 'Item de predictis cotariis
unusquisque habet unum horsacram et de ista acra debet
unusquisque invenire unum equum ad ducendum cum aliis frumentum
de firma ad Cantuariam, et pisas, et sal, et presencia portare.'

37. Black Book of St. Augustine's, Cotton MSS. Faustina, A. I, f
186: 'Nihil debent averare ad tunc, nisi res que sunt ad opus
conventus et que poni debent super ignem.'

38. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, f 65: 'W. Sp. tenet unum fordil
pro 15 den. et operatur quolibet die lune per totum annum et
(debet) ladiare cum alio ferdilario sicut dimidii virgatarii.'
Domesday of St. Paul's, 19: 'Omnes isti (cotarii) debent operari
semel... Debent eciam portare et chariare.'

39. Rot. Hundr. ii. 605, b: 'Et faciet averagium super dorsum
suum ad voluntatem domini.'

40. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, f 71: 'Portat et fugat aucas, et
gallinas, et porcos Glastonie.' Domesday of St. Paul's, 27:
'(Cotarii) isti debent singnlis diebus Lune unam operacionem et
portare et fugare porcos Londoniam.'

41. Gloucester Cart. iii. 218: 'Item, quod nullus prepositus
aliquid ab aliquo recipiat, ut ipsum ad firmam esse permittat vel
ad levem ponat operationem mutando cariagia summagia debita in
operibus manualibus.'

42. See, for instance, Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, pp. 22, 29;
Gloucester Cart. iii. 17; Domesday of St. Paul's. 54.

43. Cart. of Bury St. Edmunds, Harl. MSS. 3977, f 82: '(Debet)
metere pro porcis quilibet dimidiam acram siliginis.'

44. Black Book of St. Augustine's, Cotton MSS. Faustina, A. I, f.
44: 'Aratum hominum de N.' Cartul. of Battle, Augm. Off. Miscell.
Books, N. 18, f 2, a: 'Forinseca servicia... arant... seminant.'

45. Domesday of St. Paul's, 38; '... et furem captum in curia
custodiet et iudicatum suspendet et sparget fimum ad cibum
domini. ' Ibid. 62: 'G. G. tenet 5 acras... (debet) qualibet
septimana 2 opera et sequitur precarias in autumpno... R. H. 5
acras per idem servicium et preterea defendit eas versus regem.'

46. Gloucester Cart. iii. 54: 'Debet a festo Sti Michaelis usque
ad festum Sti Petri ad Vincula qualibet septimana per 4 dies
operari opus manuale cum uno homine, et valet quolibet dieta
obolum.' Glastonbury Inqu. 28: 'Si est ad opus a festo Sti Petri
ad Vincula usque ad festum Sti Michaelis nisi festum intercurrat
qualibet die faciet unam dainam.'

47. Add. MSS. 6159, f 25, a; 53, b.

48. Domesday of St. Paul's, 33: 'Singule virgate debent per
annum... de gavelsed 3 mensuras quarum 7 faciunt mensuram de
Colcester.' Black Book of St. Augustine's, Cotton MSS., Faustina,
A. i, 31, d: 'Sunt praeterea 5 sullungi et 50 acre in eadem
hamietto qui debent bladum de gabulo.'

49. Domesday of St. Paul's, 6: 'Et unum quarterium de auena ad
foddercorn.'

50. Add. MSS. 6159, 26, b: 'Et de gadercorn reddunt de quolibet
swlinge 4 coppas de puro ordeo et de presenti gallum et gallinam
de qualibet domo... quas serviens curie. debet circumeundo
querere.'

51. Ely Inqu., Cotton MSS., Claudius, C. xi. 185. b; Bury St.
Edmunds Cart., Harl. MSS. 3977, f 84, b.

52. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 67 cf 145): 'Henricus Wlde
tenet 25 acras de prato pro stacha mellis. Utilius quod esset in
manu domini.' Gloucester Cart. ii. 128: 'Honilond T. T. tenet 6
acras terre pro 8 lagenis nlellis vel pretio.'

53. Ramsey Cart. i. 300: 'Faciet etiam unam mutam (leg. mittam)
et dimidiam braesii, quam recipiet in curia pro voluntate sua
bene mundatam, et per se ipsum, et illam carriabit apud
Rameseiam. Quae si refutetur, defectum ejus propriis sumptibus in
omnibus supplebit, nisi mensura sibi tradita sit minor.'

54. Add. MSS. 6159, f 26, b: 'De quolibet Swlinge duos agnos
reddunt in estate. Ita quidem quod serviens curie, si invenerit
agnum in sulungis illis qui ei placuerit, accipiat eum
cuiuscumque sit, et ille ad quem pertinebit adquietacionem. Quod
si agnus inventus non fuerit 8 den. dabit quando mala persolvat.'

55. Gloucester Cart. iii. 77: 'Walterus Fremon tenet 6 acras
terrae cum mesuagio et reddit inde per annum die Apostolorum
Petri et Pauli unum multonem pretii 12 den. vel ultra, cum 12
den. circa collum suum ligatis.'

56. Exch. Q. R. Treas. of Rec. 59/69: 'Capones... pro warentia.'

57. Gloucester Cart. iii. 71: 'Propter illam gallinam
conquererunt habere de bosco domini regis unam summam bosci, quae
vocatur dayesen.' Exch. Q. R. Min. Acc. Bk. 513, N. 97:,
Wodehennus... ad Natale.' Suffolk Rolls (Bodleian), 3: 'Dicet
curia quod R. debet facere domino sicut alii custumarii, scil.
oues et gallinas, quia fodit etsi non pascat.' Ely Inqu., Cotton
MSS., Claudius, C. xi, f 52, a: 'Redditus caponum per annum pro
aueriis termino pasche.'

58. Domesday of St. Paul's, 51: 'Et ad pascha ova ad libitum
tenencium et ad honorem domini.'

59. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 35: 'Hoc est accrementum
redditus tempore Roberti; Ordricus pro 4 retiis terre altero anno
1 soccum.' Gloucester Cart. iii. 79: 'Walterus de Hale tenet unam
acram terre et reddit inde per annum unum vomerem ad festum Sti
Michaelis pretii 8 den. pro omni servitio.'

60. Warwickshire Hundr. Roll, Exch. Q. R. Misc. Books, N. 18, f
2, a: 'Per servicium unius radicis gyngibrii... unius rose.'

61. Gloucester Cart. iii. 55: 'Omnes praedicti consuetudinarii...
debent cariare molas, scil. petras molares ad molendinum domini,
vel dabunt in communi 13 den. quadrantem.' Rot. Hundr. ii. 750,
b.., Et modo eorum servicia convertuntur in denariis.'

62. Add. MSS. 6159, f 53, a:, Barlicksilver. Item debet Willelmus
de B. per annum 6 quarteria ordei et 6 quarteria auene.' etc.

63. Roch. Custum. 4, a: 'Dabunt eciam denarlum pro falce quod
anglice dicunt sithpeni.' Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 59: 'Et
dabit 4 stacas et dimidiam frumenti ad consuetudinem et eadem die
1 denarium illi qui colligit fualia.' Ely Reg., Cotton MSS.,
Claudius. C. xi. f 82, b: 'De bosingsiluer 1 denarium ad festum
Sti Martini si habeat equum et carectam.'

64. Add. Charters, 5, 629: '(Stephanus) retraxit et abduxit
porcos suos tempore pannagii.'

65. Rot. Hundr. ii. 453, a: 'Memorandum quod omnes isti
prenominati tam liberi quam villani qui habent bestias precii 30
den. dant domino predicto per annum 1 den. pro quadam
consuetudine que vocatur Wartpenny.'

66. What may be, for instance, the explanation of the
huntenegild, which not unfrequently appears in the records. E.g.
Gloucester Cart. iii. 22: 'Johannes Carpentarius et relicta
Kammock tenent dimidiam virgatam terrae et faciunt idem quod
praescripti, exceptis huntenesilver et gallina.' Add. MSS. 6159,
f 23, a: 'Ricardus atte mere tenet de domino in villenagio 20
acras terre; reddit inde per annum de unthield ad festum
purificacionis 4 sol. 5 den. ob. et ad pascham 6 d. Et ad festum
Sti Michaelis 17 denarios.' The payment is a very important one
and hardly connected with hunting.

67. Domesday of St. Paul's, 140 (Inqu. of 1181): 'Keneswetha...
summa denariorum 10 libre et 7 sol. et obolus.' Cf xx.

68. Battle Cart., Augment. Off. Misc. Books, N. 18, f 5, a: 'Juga
que sunt in sex libris in Wy.'

69. Christ Church Reg., Harl. MSS. 1006, f 56: 'Newerentes.'

70. Domesday of St. Paul's, 83: 'Inferius notati tenentes terras
dant landgablum. Et si habent uxores 2 denarios de havedsot quia
capiunt super dominium boscum et aquam et habent exitum, et si
non habent uxorem vel uxor virum, dabit unum denarium. Galfridus
filius Ailwardi pro terra quondam Theodori cui non attinet 5
denarios landgabuli.' Ramsey Inqu., Cotton MSS., Galba E. x. f
46, b: 'S. de W. dat pro terra sua 16 denarios et 12 denarios pro
se et uxore sua.' Exch. Q. R. Min. Acc. Bk. 587, T. P. R. 8109:
'Denarii... ad existendum in warentia.'

71. Archaeologia, xlvii. 127: '(Soke of Rothley) Gildi hoc est
quietum de consuetudinibus servilibus quae quondam dare
consueverint sicuti Hornchild et hiis similibus.'

72. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 4: '... unam virgatam et
dimidiam et 5 acras pro 5 solidis de gabulo et 7 denariis de
dono.'

73. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 39: 'Omnes simul dant de dono
40 solidos secundum terras quas tenent.' Ibid. 5: 'Debet dare de
dono quantum pertinet de quinque libris.' Ramsey Cart. i. 46: 'De
denariis qui vocantur 20 solidi dat dimidius virgatarius 6
denarios. '

74. Ramsey Cart. i. 440: 'Villa dat 20 solidos, qui dantur quod
cum aliquis in misericordia domini, det ante judicium sex
denarios, et post, si expectct judicium, duodecim denarios, nisi
sit pro furto, vel aliqua maxima transgressione.

75. Gloucester Cart. iii. 78: 'Dicta terra consuevit dare de
auxilio 14 denarios et obolum qui modo allocantur consuetudinario
in solutione octo marcarum.'

76. Exch. Q. R. Treas. Rec. 20/68: 'Item debent domino ad festum
Sti Michaelis auxilium ad placitum suum et ad forinsecum
servitium.'

77. Gloucester Cart. iii. 180: 'Et dabit pro terra 6 denarios ad
auxilium. Dabit etiam auxilium pro averiis suis secundum numerum
eorundem.' iii. 50: 'Et dabit auxilium secundum numerum
animalium.' iii. 208: 'Et si impositum fuerit eidem quod in
taxatione auxilii aliquod animal concelaverit, potest cogi ad
sacramentum praestandum et se super hoc purgandum. Et si per
vicinos suos convictus fuerit super hoc, puniendus est pro
voluntate domini.'

78. Gloucester Cart. iii. 203: '... omnes isti consuetudinarii de
Colne dant in communi ad auxilium 46 solidos 8 denarios.,
Rochester Custumal, 4, a: 'De omnibus decem jugis debent scotare
ad donum domini ville et ad servicium domini Regis.'

79. Domesday of St. Paul's, 64: 'Dicunt quod manerium de Berlinge
defendit se versus regem pro duabus hidis et dimidia...
Reddunt... pro hidagio baillivo hundredi de Reilee 31 denarios et
13 denarios de Wardpeni, de quibus dominicum reddit de 20 acris 2
den. et obolem pro hidagio et 2 denarios pro Wardpeni.'

80. Exch. Esch. Ultra Trentam, 1/49: 'Pro cornagio de feodis
militum 17 sol. 8 den.'

81. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 65: 'In die Sti Martini debet
dimidiam dainam frumenti de cheriset.'

82. Domesday of St. Paul's, 66: 'Beatrix relicta Osberti Casse
tenet 15 acras et a festo Sti Michaelis usque ad Vincula qualibet
septimana debet 3 operaciones nisi festum impedierit; quod si
festum feriabile evenerit in septimana die lune et aliud die
mercurii, unum festum erit ei utile, aliud domino. Quod si festum
evenerit eadem septimana die veneris, addito alio festo in alia
septimana veniente, dividentur illi duo dies inter dominum et
operarium ut supradictum est.'

83. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 64: 'A festo Sti Petri ad
Vincula debent qualibet ebdomada metere uel aliud opus facere
usque ad festum Sti Michaelis nisi festum intercurrat, die lune,
die martis et die mercurii.' Ibid. 62: 'Ab Hoccadei usque ad
festum Sti Johannis qualibet ebdomada arabit dimidiam acram, si
possit propter duritiem.'

84. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 59: 'Willelmus filius Osanore
(tenet) unam virgatam eodem servitio, sed non potest perficere
servitium.'

85. Domesday of St. Paul's, 51: 'Et omnes alii similiter
operabuntur sive plus teneant sive minus, pro racione 5 acrarum.'
Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 104: 'W. de H. tenet unam virgatam
pro dimidia virgata... pro alia viigata facit sicut pro quarta
parte dimidie hide.'

86. Gloucester Cart. iii. 199: 'Et sciendum quod dominus potest
eligere utrum voluerit habere servitium predictum de Johanne
Spere, uel quod duplicet servitium R. de A. inferius inter
akermannos scripti.'

87. Rot. Hundr. ii. 757, a: 'Set isti tenentes memorati ut
asserunt ad alias consuetudines et servitia antiquitus esse
consueverunt.'

88. E.g. a comparison of the inquests contained in the Ramsey
Cartulary published in the Rolls Series with the earlier extents
contained in Cotton MS., Galba, E. x, and with the Hundred Rolls
of Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, will support the opinion
expressed in the text.

89. Seebohm, Village Community.

90. The meaning of the expression may be gathered from the
following extracts from the Ramsey Cartulary, i. 358: 'Die autem
Jovis proxima ante Pascha et die Jovis contra festum Sti
Benedicti quodcunque opus sibi fuerit injunctum operabitur.' Cf
357: 'Et si opus fuerit, faciet hayam in campis, habentem
longitudinem duarum perticarum, et allocabitur ei pro opere unius
diei. Et die quo carriare fenum debet, ducet unam carrectatam
domi de alio feno Abbatis, uel aliud carriagium cum carrecta
faciet, si sibi fuerit injunctum.' 361: 'A gula autem Augusti
usque ad festum Sancti Michaelis qualibet septimana operabitur
per unum diem integrum, qualecunque opus sibi praecipiatur.' 365:
'Et operatur quaelibet virgata a festo Sancti Michaelis usque ad
festum Translationis Sancti Benedicti qualibet septimana tribus
diebus... quodcumque opus praeceptum fuerit; videlicet, si
flagellare oportet, flagellabit infra villam viginti quatuor
garbas de frumento et siligini, de hordeo triginta garbas, de
avena triginta garbas. Extra villam flagellabit de frumento
viginti garbas, de avena viginti quatuor garbas. Nec exibit extra
hundredum ad flagellandum nisi ex gratia. Quodcunque aliud genus
operis. ballivus voluerit; praeterquam in bosco, facere debeat,
operabitur tota die si ubi si secare debeat, operabitur usque ad
nonam; et si pascere eum dominus voluerit, operabitur usque ad
vesperam. Si debeat spinas vel virgas colligere, colliget unum
fesciculum, et portabit usque ad curiam pro opere unius diei. In
quadragesima autem nullum genus operis faciet ad cibum proprium
usque nonam nisi quod herciabit tota die.' It seems quite clear
that the lord has in some cases the choice between different
kinds of work, but the amount to be required is settled once for
all. When we find in the Glastonbury Inquisition of 1189 the
sentence, 'operabitur quodcumque ei praeceptum fuerit sicut
neth,' it means evident, that the peasant's work, whatever it is,
is settled according to the standard of the neat's holding.

91. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 41: 'Et herciat semel sine
mensura aliqua ei assignata cum hoc quod habet in carruca.'

92. Placitorum Abbreviatio, p. 212: 'Alia carta eiusdem eidem
Elie facta et heredibus suis de dicta bovata terre una cum dicto
Rogero villano suo et secta et sequela sua.' Ramsey Cart. i. 355:
'Prior de Sancto Ivone habet ingressum in una virgata terrae per
Henricum de Kylevile, in qua tres sunt mansiones, et unus pro
caeteris facit servitium debitum manerio.'

93. Ramsey Inqu., Cotton MSS., Galba, E. x. f 49: 'Quicumque
acceperit.pro mercede sua 18 denarios debet operari cum domino
suo tribus diebus vel dare unum denarium.' Cf Rot. Hundr. ii.
781, b: 'Servi: Dabit ad exenllium contra Natale 6 panes... et
venit ad prandium domini pro predicto exennio sexta manu si
voluerit.'

94. Cotton MSS., Galba, E. x. f 19. See Appendix xiv.

95. Domesday of St. Paul's, Hale's Introduction, pp. xxxviii,
xxxix.

96. Gesta Abbatum (Rolls Ser.), 74. Cf Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189,
p. 145.

97. See, for instance, the beginning of the description of
Dorsetshire.

98. Exch. Q. R. Min. Acc. Bk. 587, T. P. R. 8109: 'Sciendum quod
tenentes Abbatis de Osoluestone in Donington et Byker cum
pertinentiis fuerunt semel in anno pro voluntate Abbatis ad
curiam suam tenendum ibidem et invenient eidem Abbati et toti
familie sue quam secum duxerit omnia necessaria sufficientia in
adventu suo per unum diem integrum et noctem sequentem, vel
noctem precedentem et diem sequentem in esculentis et poculentis
tam vino quam cervisia, feno et prebenda pro equis eorum et equis
carucariorum salem querencium, una cum candela et ceteris costis
omnimodis inter necessaria computandis. Et si abbas non venerit
facient finem cum celerario si voluerit vel cum alii quem Abbas
nomine Suo miserit ad minus 20 solidis. Et si is qui nomine
Abbatis missus ibidem fuit et finem recusault, procurabitur ut
premittitur. Et si aliquid de necessariis in administrando
defuerit, omnes tenentes qui comestum contribuere debent die
crastino in plena curia super necessariorum defectu per
senescallum calumpniabuntur et graviter amerciabuntur. Et talis
fuit consuetudo ab antiquo et habetur quolibet anno pro certo
redditu, et de quo Petrus de Thedingworth quondam Abbas de
Osoluestone et predecessores sui a tempore quo non extat memoria
sub forma predicta fuerunt seisiti.'

99. See about this point, Hale's Introduction. It is generally
very good on the subject of the farm.

100. Domesday of St. Paul's, 21: 'Potest wainagium fieri cum
tribus caruciis octo capitum cum consuetudinibus villate.'

101. The Templar's Book of 1185 at the Record Office (Q. R. Misc.
Books, N. 16) is already a rental in substance.

102. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 117: 'Nigellus capellanus
tenet unam vir. gatam, sed illa virgata non solet ad operacionem
redigi. Cum dominus voluerit operabitur sicut alie.' Rot. Hundr.
ii. 815, a: '... dabit 8 solidos per annum pro operibus suis qui
solidi poterunt mutari in aliud servicium ad valorem pro
voluntate domini.'

103. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 29: 'G. de P. (tenet) unum
mesuagium et tres acras et dimidiam pro 2 solidis et facit sicut
homines de Mera quando sunt ad gabulum. Hoc tenementum non solet
esse ad opus.' 116: 'Leviva vidua tenet dimidiam hidam; Unam
virgatam tenet eodem servitio; aliam tenet pro gabulo et non
potest ad operationem poni sicut alia.'

104. Bury St. Edmund's Reg., Harl. MSS. 3977, f 82, d: 'Omnes
liberi et non liberi dabunt festivales exceptis illis liberis qui
habent residentes sub illos.' Glastonbury Cart, Wood MSS. i. f
176, b: 'Abbas et conventus remiserunt R. de W.... omnia
carriagia... nec non et illas custodias quae predictus R. et
antecessores sui personaliter facere consueverunt cum virga sua
super bederipas ipsorum... et super arruras precarias que ei
fieri debent in manerio de Pultone.'

105. Custumals of Battle Abbey (Camd. Soc.), p. 122

106. Black Book of Peterborough (Camden Ser.), 164: 'In Scotere
et Scaletoys sunt undecim carrucatae ad geldum Regis et 24
plenarii villani... Plenarii villani operantur duobus diebus in
ebdomada... Et ibi sunt 29 sochemanni et operantur uno die in
ebdomada pertotum annum et in Augusto duobus diebus. Et isti
villani et omnes sochemanni habent 21 carrucas et omnes arant una
vice ad hyvernage et una ad tremeis.'

Chapter 4

The Lord, His Servants and Free Tenants

    Descriptions of English rural arrangements in the age we are
studying always suppose the country to be divided into manors,
and each of these manors to consist of a central portion called
the demesne, and of a cluster of holdings in different tributary
relations to this central portion. Whether we take the Domesday
Survey, or the Hundred Rolls, or the Custumal of some monastic
institution, or the extent of lands belonging to some deceased
lay lord, we shall again and again meet the same typical
arrangement. I do not say that there are no instances swerving
from this beaten track, and that other arrangements never appear
in our records. Still the general system is found to be such as I
have just mentioned, and a very peculiar system it is, equally
different from the ancient latifundia or modern plantations
cultivated by gangs of labourers working on a large scale and for
distant markets, from peasant ownership scattered into small and
self-dependent households, and even from the conjunction between
great property and farms taken on lease and managed as separate
units of cultivation.
    The characteristic feature of the medieval system is the
close connexion between the central and dominant part and the
dependent bodies arranged around it. We have had occasion to
speak in some detail of these tributary bodies -- it is time to
see how the lord's demesne which acted as their centre was
constituted.
    Bracton mentions as the distinguishing trait of the demesne,
that it is set aside for the lord's own use, and ministers to the
wants of his household.(1*) Therefore it is sometimes called in
English 'Board Lands.' The definition is not complete, however;
because all land occupied by the owner himself must be included
under the name of demesne, although its produce may be destined
not for his personal use, but for the market. 'Board lands' are
only one species of domanial land, so also are the 'Husfelds'
mentioned in a charter quoted by Madox.(2*) This last term only
points to its relation to the house, that is the manorial house.
And both denominations are noteworthy for their very
incompleteness, which testifies indirectly to the restricted area
and to the modest aims of domanial cultivation. Usually it lies
in immediate connexion with the manorial house, and produces
almost exclusively for home consumption.
    This is especially true as to the arable, which generally
forms the most important part of the whole demesne land. There is
no exit for a corn trade, and therefore everybody raises corn for
his own use, and possibly for a very restricted local market.
Even great monastic houses hold only 300 or 400 acres in the home
farm; very rarely the number rises to 600, and a thousand acres
of arable in one manor is a thing almost unheard of.(3*)
Husbandry on a large scale appears only now and then in places
where sheep-farming prevails, in Wiltshire for instance.
Exceptional value is set on the demesne when fisheries are
connected with it or salt found on it.(4*)
    The following description of Bockyng in Essex,(5*) a manor
belonging to the Chapter of Christ Church, Canterbury, may serve
as an example of the distribution and relative value of demesne
soil. The cartulary from which it is drawn was compiled in 1309.
    The manorial house and close cover five acres. The grass
within its precincts which may serve as food for cattle is valued
at 8d. a year. Corn is also sold there to the value of 12d. a
year, sometimes more and sometimes less, according to the
quantity sown. The orchard provides fruit and vegetables worth
13s. 4d. a year; the duty levied from the swine gives 6d.
    The pigeon-house is worth 4d.
    Two mills, 7l. Is. 8d
    A fishery, 12d.
    A wood called Brekyng Park, containing 480 acres, and the
brushwood there is worth 40s.
    Grass in the wood 12d., because it grows only in a few
places.
    Pannage duty from the swine, 10s.
    Another wood called Le Flox contains 10 acres, and the
brushwood is worth 6d.
    Pannage from the swine, 6d.
    Grass, 6d.
    Arable, in all fields, 510 acres, the acre being assessed at
6d. all round.
    Each plough may easily till one acre a day, if four horses
and two oxen are put to it.
    Two meadows, one containing eight acres, of which every
single acre yields 4s. a year; the other meadow contains seven
acres of similar value.
    Pasture in severalty -- 30 acres, at 12d. an acre.
    Of these, 16 acres are set apart for oxen and horses, and 14
for cows.
    Some small particles of pasture leased out to the tenants,
4s.
    The prior and the convent are lords of the common pasture in
Bockyng, and may send 100 sheep to these commons, and to the
fields when not under crop. Value 20s.
    As important an item in the cultivation of the home farm as
the soil itself is afforded by the plough-teams. The treatises on
husbandry give very minute observations on their composition and
management. And almost always we find the manorial teams
supplemented by the consuetudines villae, that is by the
customary work performed on different days by the peasantry.(6*)
As to this point the close connexion between demesne and
tributary land is especially clear; but after all that has been
said in the preceding chapter it is hardly necessary to add that
it was not only the ploughing-work that was carried on by the
lord with the help of his subjects.
    As a matter of fact, villages without a manorial demesne or
without some dependence from it are found only exceptionally and
in those parts of England where the free population had best kept
its hold on the land, and where the power of the lord was more a
political than an economical one (Norfolk and Suffolk, Lincoln,
Northumberland, Westmoreland, etc.(7*)). And there are hardly any
cases at all of the contrary, that is of demesne land spreading
over the whole of a manor. Tillingham, a manor of St. Paul's,
London, comes very near it:(8*) it contains 300 acres as home
farm, and only 30 acres of villain land. But as a set-off, a
considerable part of the demesne is distributed to small
leaseholders.
    It must be noted that, as a general rule, the demesne arable
of the manor did not lie in one patch apart from the rest, but
consisted of strips intermixed with those of the community.(9*)
This fact would show by itself that the original system,
according to which property and husbandry were arranged in
manorial groups, was based on a close connexion between the
domanial and the tributary land. We might even go further and
point out that the mere facilities of intercourse and joint work
are not sufficient to account for this intermixture of the strips
of the lord and of the homage. The demesne land appears in fact
as a share in the association of the village, a large share but
still one commensurate with the other holdings. In two respects
this subjection to a higher unit must necessarily follow from the
intermixture of strips: inasmuch as the demesne consists of plots
scattered in the furlongs of the township, it does not
appropriate the best soil or the best situation, but has to
gather its component parts in all the varied combinations in
which the common holdings have to take theirs. And besides this,
the demesne strips were evidently meant to follow the same course
of husbandry as the land immediately adjoining them, and to lapse
into undivided use with such land when the 'defence' season was
over. Separate or private patches exempted from the general
arrangement are to be found on many occasions, but the usual
treatment of demesne land in the thirteenth century is certainly
more in conformity with the notion that the lord's land is only
one of the shares in the higher group of the village community.
    The management of the estate, the collection of revenue, the
supervision of work, the police duties incumbent on the manor,
etc., required a considerable number of foremen and workmen of
different kinds.(10*) Great lords usually confided the general
supervision of their estates to a seneschal, steward or head
manager, who had to represent the lord for all purposes, to
preside at the manorial courts, to audit accounts, to conduct
sworn inquests and extents, and to decide as to the general
husbandry arrangements. In every single manor we find two persons
of authority. The bailiff or beadle was an outsider appointed by
the lord, and had to look to the interests of his employer, to
collect rents and enforce duties, to manage the home farm, to
take care of the domanial cattle, of the buildings, agricultural
implements, etc. These functions were often conferred by
agreement in consideration of a fixed rent, and in this case the
steward or beadle took the name of firmarius.(11*) By his side
appears the reeve, or praepositus, nominated from among the
peasants of a particular township, and mostly chosen by
them.(12*) Manorial instructions add sometimes that no villain
has a right to hold aloof from such an appointment, if it is
conferred on him.(13*) The reeve acts as the representative of
the village community, as well in regard to the lord as on public
occasions. He must, of course, render help to the steward in all
the various duties of the latter. The reeve has more especially
to superintend the performance of labour imposed on the
peasantry. Manorial ploughings, reapings, and the other like
operations are conducted by him, sometimes with the help of the
free tenants in the place. Of the public duties of the reeve we
have had occasion to speak. Four men, acting as representatives
of the village, accompany him.
    Next after the reeve comes, on large estates, the messor, who
takes charge of the harvest, and sometimes acts as collector of
fines imposed for the benefit of the lord.(14*) The akermanni or
carucarii are the leaders of the unwieldy ploughs of the
time,(15*) and they are helped by a set of drivers and boys who
have to attend to the oxen or horses.(16*) Shepherds for every
kind of cattle are also mentioned,(17*) as well as keepers and
warders of the woods and fences.(18*) In the Suffolk manors of
Bury St. Edmund's we find the curious term kurard to designate a
person superintending the hay harvest.(19*)
    By the side of a numerous staff busy with the economic
management of the estate, several petty officers are found to be
concerned with the political machinery of the manor. The duty to
collect the suitors of the hundred and of the county court is
sometimes fulfilled by a special 'turn-bedellus.'(20*) A
'vagiator' (vadiator?) serves writs and distrains goods for
rents.(21*) The carrying of letters and orders is very often
treated as a service imposed on particular tenements. It must be
noted that sometimes all these duties are intimately connected
with those of the husbandry system and imposed on all the
officers of the demesne who own horses.(22*)
    A third category is formed by the house-servants, who divide
among themselves the divers duties of keeping accounts, waiting
on the lord personally, taking charge of the wardrobe, of the
kitchen, etc. The military system and the lack of safety called
forth a numerous retinue of armed followers and guards.
All-in-all a mighty staff of ministeriales, as they were called
in Germany, came into being. In England they are termed sergeants
and servants, servientes. In Glastonbury Abbey there were
sixty-six servants besides the workmen and foremen employed on
the farm.(23*) Such a number was rendered necessary by the grand
hospitality of the monastery, which received and entertained
daily throngs of pilgrims. In Bury St. Edmund's the whole staff
was divided into five departments, and in each department the
employments were arranged according to a strict order of
precedence.(24*)
    The material for the formation of this vast and important
class was supplied by the subject population of the estates. The
Gloucester manorial instruction enjoins the stewards to collect
on certain days the entire grown-up population and to select the
necessary servants for the different callings. It is also enacted
that the men should not be left without definite work, that in
case of necessity they should be moved from one post to the
other,(25*) etc. The requirements of the manorial administration
and of the lord's household opened an important outlet for the
village people. Part of the growing population thus found
employment outside the narrow channel of rural arrangements. The
elder or younger brothers, as it might be, took service at the
lord's court. The husbandry treatises of the thirteenth century
go further and mention hired labourers as an element commonly
found on the estate. We find, for instance, an elaborate
reckoning of the work performed by gangs of such labourers hired
for the harvest.(26*) In documents styled 'Minister's Accounts'
we may also find proof, that from the thirteenth century
downwards the requirements of the lord's estate are sometimes met
by hiring outsiders to perform some necessary kind of work. These
phenomena have to be considered as exceptional, however, and in
fact as a new departure.
    The officers and servants were remunerated in various ways.
Sometimes they were allowed to share in the profits connected
with their charges. The swine-herd of Glastonbury Abbey, for
instance, received one sucking-pig a year, the interior parts of
the best pig, and the tails of all the others which were
slaughtered in the abbey.(27*) The chief scullion (scutellarius)
had a right to all remnants of viands, -- but not of game, -- to
the feathers and the bowels of geese.(28*) Again, all the
household and workmen constantly employed had certain quantities
of food, drink, and clothing assigned to them.(29*) Of one of the
Glastonbury clerks we hear that he received one portion
(liberacio) as a monk and a second as a servant, and that by
reason of this last he was bound to provide the monastery with a
goldsmith.(30*)
    Those of the foremen and labourers of estates who did not
belong to the immediate following of the lord and did not live in
his central court received a gratification of another kind. They
were liberated from the labour and payments which they would have
otherwise rendered from their tenements.(31*) The performance of
the specific duties of administration took the place of the
ordinary rural work or rent, and in this way the service of the
lord was feudalised on the same principle as the king's service
-- it was indissolubly connected with land-holding.
    In manorial extents we come constantly across such exempted
tenements conceded without any rural obligations or with the
reservation of a very small rent. It is important to notice, that
such exemptions, though temporary and casual at first, were
ultimately consolidated by custom and even confirmed by charters.
A whole species of free tenements, and a numerous one, goes back
to such privileges and exemptions granted to servants.(32*) And
so this class of people, in the formation of which unfree
elements are so clearly apparent, became one of the sources in
the development of free society. Such importance and success are
to be explained, of course, by the influence of this class in the
administration and economic management of the estates belonging
to the secular and ecclesiastical aristocracy. It is very
difficult at the present time to realise the responsibility and
strength of this element. We live in a time of free contract,
credit, highly mobilised currency, easy means of communication,
and powerful political organisation. There is no necessity for
creating a standing class of society for the purpose of mediating
between lord and subject, between the military order and the
industrial order. Every feature of the medieval system which
tended to disconnect adjoining localities, to cut up the country
into a series of isolated units, contributed at the same time to
raise a class which acted as a kind of nervous system, connecting
the different parts with a common centre and establishing
rational intercourse and hierarchical relations. The libertini
had to fu1fil kindred functions in the ancient world, but their
importance was hardly so great as that of medieval sergeants or
ministeriales. We may get some notion of what that position was
by looking at the personal influence and endowments of the chief
servants in a great household of the thirteenth century. The
first cook and the gatekeeper of a celebrated abbey were real
magnates who held their offices by hereditary succession, and
were enfeoffed with considerable estates.(33*) In Glastonbury
five cooks shared in the kitchen-fee.(34*) The head of the
cellar, the gatekeeper, and the chief shepherd enter into
agreements in regard to extensive plots of land.(35*) They appear
as entirely free to dispose of such property, and at every step
we find in the cartularies of Glastonbury Abbey proofs of the
existence of a numerous and powerful 'sergeant' class. John of
Norwood, Abbot of Bury St. Edmund's, had to resort to a regular
coup d'état in order to displace the privileged families which
had got hold of the offices and treated them as hereditary
property.(36*) In fact the great 'sergeants' ended by hampering
their lords more than serving them. And the same fact of the rise
of a 'ministerial' class may be noticed on every single estate,
although it is not so prominent there as in the great centres of
feudal life. The whole arrangement was broken by the substitution
of the 'cash nexus' for more ancient kinds of economic
relationship, and by the spread of free agreements: it is not
difficult to see that both these facts acted strongly in favour
of driving out hereditary and customary obligations.
    We have considered the relative position of the unfree
holdings, of the domanial land around which they were grouped,
and of the class which had to put the whole machinery of the
manor into action. But incidentally we had several times to
notice a set of men and tenements which stood in a peculiar
relation to the arrangement we have been describing: there were
in almost every manor some free tenants and some free tenements
that could not be considered as belonging to the regular fabric
of the whole. they had to pay rents or even to perform labour
services, but their obligations were subsidiary to the work of
the customary tenants on which the husbandry of the manorial
demesne leaned for support. From the economic point of view we
can see no inherent necessity for the connexion of these
particular free tenements with that particular manorial unit. The
rent, large or small, could have been sent directly to the lord's
household, or paid in some other manor without any perceptible
alteration in favour of either party; the work, if there was such
to perform, was without exception of a rather trifling kind, and
could have been easily dispensed with and commuted for money.
Several reasons may be thought of to explain the fact that free
tenements are thus grouped along with the villain holdings and
worked into that single unit, the manor. It may be urged that the
division into manors is not merely and perhaps not chiefly an
economic one, but that it reflects a certain political
organisation, which had to deal with and to class free tenants as
well as servile people. It may be conjectured that even from the
economic point of view, although the case of free tenants would
hardly have called the manorial unit into existence, it was
convenient to use that class when once created for the grouping
of villain land and work: why should the free tenants not join
the divisions formed for another purpose but locally within easy
reach and therefore conveniently situated for such intercourse
with the lord as was rendered necessary by the character of the
tenement? Again, the grouping of free tenants may have originated
in a time when the connexion with the whole was felt more
strongly than in the feudal period; it may possibly go back to a
community which had nothing or little to do with subjection, and
in which the free landowners joined for mutual support and
organisation. It is not impossible to assume, on the other hand,
that in many cases the free tenant was left in the manorial group
because he had begun by being an unfree and therefore a necessary
member of it. All such suppositions seem prima facie admissible
and reasonable enough, and at the same time it is clear, that by
deciding in favour of one of them or by the relative importance
assigned to each we shall very materially influence the solution
of interesting historical problems, in order to appreciate
rightly the position of the free tenements in the manor we have
to examine whether these tenements are all of one and the same
kind or not, and this must be done not from the legal standpoint
whence it has already been reviewed, but in connexion with the
practical management of the estate. I think that a survey of the
different meanings which the term bears in our documents must
lead us to recognise three chief distinctions: first there is
free land which once formed part of the demesne but has been
separated from it; then there is the land held by villagers
outside the regular arrangements of the rural community, and
lastly there are ancient free holdings of the same shape as the
servile tenements, though differing from the latter in legal
character. Each class will naturally fall into subdivisions.(37*)
    Under the first head it is to be observed that domanial land
very often lost its direct connexion with the lord's household,
and was given away to dependent people on certain conditions. One
of the questions addressed to the juries by the Glastonbury
inquest of 1189 was prompted by this practice: it was asked what
demesne land had been given out under free agreement or servile
conditions, and whether it was advantageous to keep to the
arrangement or not. One of the reasons which lay at the root of
the process has been already touched upon. Grants of domanial
land occur commonly in return for services rendered in the
administration of the manor: reeves, ploughmen, herdsmen,
woodwards are sometimes recompensed in this manner instead of
being liberated from the duties incumbent on their holding. A
small rent was usually affixed to the plot severed from the
demesne, and the whole arrangement may be regarded as very like
an ordinary lease. An attenuated form of the same thing may be
noticed when some officer or servant was permitted to use certain
plots of domanial land during the tenure of his office. It
happened, for instance, that a cotter was entrusted to take care
of a team of oxen belonging to the lord or obliged to drive his
plough. He might be repaid either by leave to use the manorial
plough on his own land on specified occasions, or else by an
assignment to him of the crop on certain acres of the home
farm.(38*) Such privileges are sometimes granted to villagers who
do not seem to be personally employed in the manorial
administration, but such cases are rare, and must be due to
special reasons which escape our notice.
    It is quite common, on the other hand, to find deficiencies
in the normal holdings made up from the demesne, e.g. a group of
peasants hold five acres apiece in the fields, and one of the set
cannot receive his full share: the failing acres are supplied by
the demesne. Even an entire virgate or half-virgate may be formed
in this way.(39*) Sometimes a plot of the lord's land is given to
compensate the bad quality of the peasant's land.(40*) Of course,
such surrenders of the demesne soil were by no means prompted by
disinterested philanthropy. They were made to enable the
peasantry to bear its burdens, and may-be to get rid of patches
of bad soil or ground that was inconveniently situated.(41*) In a
number of cases these grants of demesne are actual leases, and
probably the result of hard bargains.
    However this might be, we find alongside of the estate farmed
for the lord's own account a great portion of the demesne
conceded to the villagers. The term 'inland,' which ought
properly to designate all the land belonging directly to the
lord, is sometimes applied to plots which have been surrendered
to the peasantry, and so distinguishes them from the regular
customary holdings.(42*) Such concessions of demesne land were
not meant to create freehold tenements. Their tenure was
precarious, the right of resumption was more expressly recognised
in the case of such plots than in that of any other form of rural
occupation, but the rights thus acquired tended to become
perpetual, like everything else in this feudal world; and as they
were founded on agreement and paid for with money rents, their
transformation into permanent tenures led to an increase of free
tenements and not of villainage. We catch a glimpse of the
process in the Domesday of St. Paul's. In 1249 a covenant was
made between the Chapter of the Cathedral and its villagers of
the manor of Beauchamp in Essex: in consequence of the agreement
all the concessions of demesne land which had been made by the
farmers were confirmed by the Chapter. The inquests show that
those who farmed the estates had extensive rights as to the use
of domanial land, but their dealings with the customary tenants
were always open to a revision by the landlords. A confirmation
like this Beauchamp one transferred the plot of demesne land into
the class of free tenements, and created a tenure defensible at
law.(43*) All such facts increase in number and importance with
the increase of population: under its pressure the area of direct
cultivation for the lord is gradually lessened, and in many
surveys we find a sort of belt formed around the home farm by the
intrusion of the dependent people into the limits of the
demesne.(44*) The Domesday of St. Paul's is especially
instructive on this point. Every estate shows one part of the
lord's land in the possession of the peasants; sometimes the
'dominicum antiquitus assisum' is followed by 'terrae de novo
traditae.'(45*)
    A second group of free tenements consists of plots which did
not belong either to the demesne or to the regular holdings in
the fields, but lay by the side of these holdings and were
parcelled out in varying quantity and under various conditions.
We may begin by noticing the growth of leases. There is no doubt
that the lease-system was growing in the thirteenth century, and
that it is not adequately reflected in our documents. An indirect
proof of this is given by the fact, that legal practice was
labouring to discover means of protection for possession based on
temporary agreement. The writ 'Quare ejecit infra terminum'
invented by William Raleigh between 1236 and 1240 protected the
possession of the 'tenant for term of years' who formerly had
been regarded as having no more than a personal right enforceable
by an action of covenant.(46*)
    Manorial extents are sparing in their notices of leases
because their object is to picture the distribution of ownership,
and temporary agreements are beyond their range. But it is not
uncommon to find a man holding a small piece of land for his life
at a substantial rent. In this case his tenure is reckoned
freehold, but still he holds under what we should now call a
lease for life; the rent is a substantial return for the land
that he has hired. That English law should regard these tenants
under leases for life as freeholders, should, that is, throw them
into one great class with tenants who have heritable rights, who
do but military service or nominal service, who are in fact if
not in name the owners of the land, is very remarkable; hirers
are mingled with owners, because according to the great
generalisation of English feudalism every owner is after all but
a hirer. Still we can mark off for economic purposes a class of
tenants whom we may call 'life-leaseholders,' and we can see also
a smaller class of leaseholders who hold for terms of years.(47*)
They often seem to owe their existence to the action of the
manorial bailiffs or the farmers to whom the demesne has been
let. We are told that such and such a person has 'entered' the
tenement by the leave of such and such a farmer or bailiff, or
that the tenement does not belong to the occupier by hereditary
right, but by the bailiff's precept.(48*) Remarks of that kind
seem to mean that these rent-paying plots, liberated from servile
duties, were especially liable to the interference of manorial
officers. Limits of time are rarely mentioned, and leases for
life seem to be the general rule.(49*) The tenure is only in the
course of formation, and by no means clearly defined. One does
not even see, for instance, how the question of implements and
stock was settled -- whether they were provided by the landlord
or by the tenant.
    We feel our way with much greater security in another
direction. The fields of the village contain many a nook or odd
bit which cannot be squeezed into the virgate arrangement and
into the system of work and duties connected with it. These
'subsecivae,' as the Romans would have said, were always
distributed for small rents in kind or in money.(50*) The
manorial administration may also exclude from the common
arrangement entire areas of land which it is thought advantageous
to give out for rent. Those who take it are mostly the same
villagers who possess the regular holdings, but their title is
different; in one case it is based on agreement, in the other on
custom.(51*) Plots of this kind are called forlands.(52*) In
close connexion with them we find the essarts or assarts-land
newly reclaimed from the waste, and therefore not mapped out
according to the original plan of possession and service. The
Surveys often mark the different epochs of cultivation -- the old
and the new essarts.(53*) The documents show also that the spread
of the area under cultivation was effected in different ways;
sometimes by a single settler with help from the lord,(54*) and
sometimes by the entire village, or at any rate by a large group
of peasants who club together for the purpose.(55*) In the first
case there was no reason for bringing the reclaimed space under
the sway of the compulsory rotation of crops or the other
regulations of communal agriculture. In the second, the
distribution of the acres and strips among the various tenants
was proportioned to their holdings in the ancient lands of the
village. The rents on essart land seem very low, and no wonder:
everywhere in the world the advance of cultivation has been made
the starting-point of privileged occupation and light taxation.
The Roman Empire introduced the emphyteusis as a contract in
favour of the pioneers of cultivation, the French feudal law
endowed the hotes (hospites) on newly reclaimed land with all
kinds of advantages. English practice is not so explicit on this
point, but it is not difficult to gather from the Surveys that it
was not blind to the necessity of patronising agricultural
progress and encouraging it by favourable terms.
    Of mol-land I have already spoken in another chapter. I will
only point out now that this class of tenements appears to have
been a very common one. Thirteenth century surveys often describe
certain holdings in two different ways-on the supposition of
their paying rent, and also on that of their rendering
labour-services; when they pay rent they pay so much, when they
supply labour they supply so much. By the side of such holdings,
which are wavering, as it were, between the two systems, we find
the terra assisa or ad censum. This class, to which molland
evidently belongs, is distinguished from free tenure by the fact
that its rent is regarded as a manorial arrangement; there is no
formal agreement and no charter, and therefore no action before
the king's courts to guard against disseisin or increase of
services. In practice the difference is not felt very keenly, and
these tenements gradually came to be regarded as 'free' in every
sense. A characteristic feature of the movement may be noticed in
the terms 'Socagium ad placitum' and 'Socagium villani'.(56*)
These expressions occur in the documents, although they are not
very common. It would be hard to explain them otherwise than from
the point of view indicated just now. The tenement is paying a
fixed and certain rent and therefore socage, but it is not
defended by feoffment and charter. It is not recognised by law,
and therefore it remains at the will of the lord and unfree.(57*)
The grant of a charter would raise it to the legal standing of
free land.
    Every student of manorial documents will certainly be struck
by one well-marked difference between villain tenements and free
tenements as described in the extents and surveys. The tenants in
villainage generally appear arranged into large groups, in which
every man holds, works, and pays exactly as his fellows; so that
when the tenement and services of some one tenant have been
described we then read that the other tenants hold similar
tenements and owe similar services. On the other hand, the
freeholds seem scattered at random without any definite plan of
arrangement, parcelled up into unequal portions, and subjected to
entirely different duties. One man holds ten acres and pays three
shillings for them; another has eight and a half acres and gives
a pound of pepper to his lord; a third is possessed of
twenty-three acres, pays 4s. 6d., and sends his dependants to
three boonworks; a fourth brings one penny and some poultry in
return for his one acre. The regularity of the villain system
seems entirely opposed to the capricious and disorderly phenomena
of free tenure.
    And this fact seems naturally connected with some remarkable
features of social organisation. No wonder that free land is cut
up into irregular plots: we know that it may be divided and
accumulated by inheritance and alienation, whereas villain land
is held together in rigid unity by the fact that it is, properly
speaking, the lord's and not the villain's land. Besides, all the
variations of free tenure which we have discussed hitherto have
one thing in common, they are produced by express agreement
between lord and tenant as to the nature and amount of services
required from the tenant. Whether we take the case of a villain
receiving a few acres in addition to his holding, or that of a
servant recompensed by the grant of a privileged plot, or that of
a peasant confirmed in the possession of soil newly reclaimed
from the waste, or that of a bondman who has succeeded in
liberating his holding from the burdensome labour service of
villainage, in all these instances we come across the same
fundamental notion of a definite agreement between lord and
tenant. And again, the capricious aspect of free tenements seems
well in keeping with the fact that they are produced by separate
and private agreements, by consecutive grants and feoffments,
while the villain system of every manor is mapped out at one
stroke, and managed as a whole by the lord and his steward. This
contrast between the two arrangements may even seem to widen
itself into a difference between a communal organization which is
servile, and a system of freeholding which is not communal. All
these inferences are natural enough, and all have been actually
drawn.
    A close inspection of the Surveys will, however, considerably
modify our first impressions, and suggest conclusions widely
different from those which I have just now stated. The importance
of the subject requires a detailed discussion, even at the risk
of tediousness. I shall take my instances from the Hundred Rolls,
as from a survey which reflects the state of things in central
counties and gives an insight into the organisation of secular as
well as ecclesiastical estates.
    We need not dwell much on the observation that the servile
tenements sometimes display no perfect regularity. Sometimes the
burdens incumbent on them are not quite equal. Sometimes again
the holdings themselves are not quite equal. In Fulborne,
Cambridgeshire, e.g., the villains of Alan de la Zuche are
assessed very irregularly,(58*) although their tenements are
described as virgates and halfvirgates. Of course, the general
character of the virgate system remains unaltered by these
exceptional deviations, which may be easily explained by the
consideration that the social order was undergoing a process of
change. The disruption of some of the villain holdings and the
modification of certain duties are perhaps less strange than the
fact that such alterations should be so decidedly exceptional.
Still, the occurrence of irregularities even within the range of
villainage warns us not to be too hasty in our inferences about
free tenements; it shows, at any rate, that irregularities may
well arise even where there has once been a definite plan, and
that it is worth while to enquire whether some traces of such an
original plan may not still be discovered amidst the apparent
disorder of free tenements.
    And a little attention will show us many cases in which free
tenements are arranged on the virgate system. There is hardly any
need for quotations on this point: the Hundred Rolls of all the
six counties of which we possess surveys, supply an unlimited
number of instances. True, fundamental divisions of land and
service may often be obscured and confused by the existence of
plots which do not fit into the system; but as in the case of
servile tenements we occasionally find irregularities, so in the
case of free tenements we often see that below the superficial
irregularities there lie traces of an ancient plan. The manor of
Ayllington (Elton), Huntingdonshire, belonging to the Abbey of
Ramsey, presents a good example in point.(59*) It is reckoned to
contain thirteen hides and a half, each hide comprising six
virgates, and each virgate twenty-four acres. The actual
distribution of the holdings squares to a fraction with this
computation, if we take into the reckoning the demesne, the free
and the villain tenements. Three hides are in the lord's hand,
one is held by a large tenant, John of Ayllington, eleven
virgates and a half by other freeholders, forty-two virgates and
a half by the villains; the grand total being exactly thirteen
hides. The numerous cotters are not taken into account, and
evidently left 'outside the hides' (extra hidam); this is a very
common thing in the Surveys. If we neglect them, and turn to the
holdings in the 'hidated' portion of the manor, we shall notice
that the greater part of the free tenements are arranged on the
same system as the servile tenements. We find six free tenants
with a virgate apiece, one with half a virgate, three with a
virgate and a half, and three jointly possessed of two virgates.
In contrast with this principal body of tenants stand several
small freeholders endowed with irregular plots reckoned in acres
and so much varying in size that it is quite impossible to
arrange them according to any plan, not to speak of the virgate
system. But these small tenants are all sub-tenants enfeoffed by
the principal freeholders whose own tenements are distributed
into regular agrarian unity. It is easy to see that even when the
stock of free tenancies stood arranged according to a definite
plan, deviations from this plan would easily arise owing to new
feoffments made by the lord out of the demesne land or out of the
waste.(60*) What I am concerned to say is, not that the Hundred
Rolls show a distribution of free holdings quite as regular as
that of the servile tenements, but that amidst all the
irregularities of the freehold plots we frequently come across
unmistakable traces of a system similar to that which prevailed
on villain soil. These traces are not always of the same kind,
and present various gradations. In a comparatively small number
of instances the duties imposed on the shareholders are equal, or
nearly so; much more often the rent and labour rendered by them
to the lord vary a great deal, although their tenements are
equal. The Ayllington instance, quoted above, belongs to the
former class, but the proportionate distribution of duties is
somewhat obscured by the fact that part of them is reckoned in
labour. The normal rent is computed at six shillings per
virgate,(61*) though there are a few noticeable exceptions, but
the duty of ploughing is imposed according to two different
standards, and it is not easy to reduce these to unity. The
freeholders of one group have to plough eight acres per virgate
for the lord, while for the members of the other group the
ploughing work is reckoned in the same way as in the case of the
villains, each placing his team at the disposal of the lord one
day of every week from Michaelmas to the 1st of August, four
weeks being excepted in honour of Christmas, Easter, and
Trinity.(62*) Ravenston, in Buckinghamshire, is a much clearer
example. Twelve villains hold of the Prior of Ravenston twelve
acres each, and their service is worth eighteen shillings per
holding; four villains hold six acres each, and their service is
valued at nine shillings. One free tenant has twelve acres and
pays sixteen shillings; six have six acres each, and pay seven
shillings. There are three other tenants whose duties cannot be
brought within the system.(63*) The portion of Fulborne, in
Cambridgeshire, belonging to Baldwin de Maneriis, may also serve
as an illustration of an almost regular distribution of land and
service among the freeholders.(64*) Instances in which the
duties, although not exactly, are still very nearly equal, are
very frequent. In Radewelle, Bedfordshire, the mean rent of the
six is two shillings per half-virgate, although the villains
perform service to the amount of eight shillings per
virgate.(65*) Bidenham, Bedfordshire, also presents an assessment
of four shillings per free virgate.(66*) In that part of Fulborne
which is owned by Alan de la Zuche the virgates and half-virgates
of the free holders are variously rented; but twelve shillings
per half-virgate is of common occurrence(67*) while in the fee of
Maud Passelewe we find only four and five shillings as the rent
for the half-virgate.(68*) Papworth Anneys exhibits a ferdel of
seven and a half acres, for which ten to twelve shillings are
paid.(69*) As to the cases in which the service varies a great
deal, although the land is held in shares, I need not give
quotations because they are to be found on every page of the
printed hundred Rolls. We may say, in conclusion, that the
process of disruption acts much more potently in the sphere of
free holding than it does in regard to villainage; but that it
has by no means succeeded in destroying all regularity even
there.
    Thus, even among the freeholders, landholding is often what I
shall take leave to call 'shareholding.' Now, whatever ultimate
explanation we may give of this fact, it has one obvious meaning.
That part of the free population which holds in regular shares is
not governed entirely by the rules of private ownership, but is
somehow implicated in the village community. Bovates and virgates
exist only as parts of carucates or hides, and the several
carucates or hides themselves fit together, inasmuch as they
suppose a constant apportionment of some kind. Two sets of
important questions arise from this proposition, both intimately
connected with each other, although they suggest different lines
of enquiry. We may start from an examination of the single
holding, and ask whether its regular shape can be explained by
the requirements of its condition or by survivals of a former
condition. Or again, we may start from the whole and inquire
whether the equality the elements of which we detect is equality
in ownership or equality in service. Let us take up the first
thread of the inquiry.
    How can we account for the occurrence of regular
'shareholding' among the freeholders? Two possibilities have to
be considered: the free character of the tenements may be newly
acquired and the 'shareholding' may be a relic of a servile past;
or, on the other hand, the freehold character of the tenements
may be coeval with the 'shareholding,' and in this latter case we
shall have to admit the existence of freeholds which from of old
have formed an element in the village community. In the first of
these cases again we shall have to distinguish between two
suppositions: -- Servile tenements have become free; this may be
due either to some general measure of enfranchisement, a lord
having preferred to take money rents in lieu of the old labour
services, and these money rents being the modern equivalent for
those old services, or else to particular and occasional
feoffments made in favour of those who, for one reason or
another, have earned some benefit at the lord's hand. To put it
shortly, we may explain the phenomenon either by a process of
commutation such as that which turned 'workland' into 'molland,'
or by special privileges which have exempted certain shares in
the land from a general scheme of villainage; or, lastly, by the
existence of freeholds as normal factors in the ancient village
community.
    Let us test these various suppositions by the facts recorded
in our surveys. At first sight it may seem possible to account
for the freehold virgates by reference to the process which
converted 'workland' into 'molland.' We have seen above that if a
lord began to demand money instead of work, the result might, in
some cases, be the evolution of new tenures which gradually lost
their villain character and became recognised as genuine
freeholds. And no doubt one considerable class of cases can be
explained by this process. But a great many instances seem to
call for some other explanation. To begin with, the mere
acceptance of rent in lieu of labour did not make the tenement a
freehold; servile tenements were frequently put ad censum,(70*)
and it seems difficult to believe that many lords allowed a
commutation of labour for rent to have the effect of turning
villainage into freehold. Another difficulty is found on the
opposite side. What force kept the shares together when they had
become free? Why did they not accumulate and disperse according
to the chances of free development? It may be thought that
custom, and express conditions of feoffment, must have acted
against disruption. I do not deny the possibility, but I say that
it is not easy to explain the very widely diffused phenomenon of
free shareholding by a commutation which tended to break up the
shares and to make them useless for the purposes of assessment.
Still I grant that these considerations, though they should have
some weight, are not decisive, and I insist chiefly on the
following argument.
    The peculiar trait which distinguishes 'molland' is the
transition from labour service to money rent, and the rent is
undoubtedly considered as an equivalent for the right to labour
services which the lord abandons. It must be admitted that in
some cases the lord may have taken less than the real equivalent
in order to get such a convenient commodity as money, or because
for some reason or another he was in need of current coin. Still
I am not afraid to say that, in a general way, commutation
supposes an exchange against an equivalent. Indeed the demand for
money rents was considered rather as increasing than as
decreasing the burden incumbent on the peasantry.(71*) Now,
although it would be preposterous to try and make out in every
single case whether the rent of the free virgate is an adequate
equivalent for villain services or not, there is a very
sufficient number of instances in which a rough reckoning may be
made without fear of going much astray.(72*) And if we attempt
such a reckoning we shall be struck by the number of cases in
which the rent of the free virgate falls considerably short of
what it yielded by the virgate of the villain. We have seen that
in Ravenston, Bedfordshire, the villain service is valued at
eight shillings per virgate, and that the free assessment amounts
only to four shillings. In Thriplow, Cambridgeshire, the villains
perform labour duties valued at 9s. 4d. per bovate, the
freeholders are assessed variously; but there is a certain number
among them which forms, as it were, the stock of that class, and
their average rent is 5s. 6d. per bovate.(73*) In Tyringham,
Buckinghamshire, the villain holding is computed at six acres and
one rood, and its service at five shillings; the free virgates
have a like number of acres and pay various rents, but almost
without exception less than the villains.(74*) In Croxton,
Cambridgeshire, there are customers with twenty acres, and others
with ten acres; the first have to pay ten shillings and to assist
at four boonworks. The free holders are possessed of plots of
irregular size, and their rent is also irregular; but on the
average much lower than that of the customers.(75*) Let it be
noted that the customary tenants have commuted their labour
services into money payments, and. in fact, they are to be
considered as molmen in the first stage of development. Still,
their payments are computed on a different scale from those of
the free.
    In Brandone, Warwickshire, the typical villain, William
Bateman, pays for his virgate 5s. 3d., and sends one man to work
twice a week from the 29th of June until the ist of August, and
thence onward his man has to work two days one week and three
days the next. The free half-virgate merely pays five shillings,
and does suit to the manorial court. This last point makes no
difference, because the villain had to attend the manorial court
quite as regularly as the freeholder, and indeed more regularly ,
because he was obliged to serve on inquests.(76*) In Bathekynton,
Warwickshire, the difference in favour of the free is also
noticeable, but not so great.(77*) And these are by no means
exceptional cases. Nothing is more common than to find free
tenements held by trifling services, and whatever we may think of
single cases, it would be absurd to explain such arrangements in
the aggregate as the results of a bargain between lord and serfs.
It is evident, therefore, that a reference to 'molland,' to a
commutation of labour into rent, does not suit these cases.(78*)
    Can we explain these cases of 'free shareholding' by
feoffments made to favoured persons? We have seen that the lord
used to recompense his servants by grants of land and that he
favoured the spread of cultivation by exacting but a light rent
from newly reclaimed land. Such transactions would undoubtedly
produce free tenements held on very advantageous terms, but still
they seem incapable of solving our problem. Tenements created by
way of beneficial feoffment are in general easily recognised. The
holdings of servants and other people endowed by favour are
always few and interspersed among the plots of the regular
occupiers of the land, be they free or serfs. The 'essarted'
fields are sometimes numerous, but usually cut up into small
strips and as it were engrafted on the original stock of
tenements. Altogether privileged land mostly appears divided into
irregular plots and reckoned by acres and not by shares. And what
we have to account for is a vast number of instances in which
what seem to be some of the principal and original shares in the
land are held freely and by comparatively light services. I do
not think that we can get rid of a very considerable residue of
cases without resorting to the last of the suppositions mentioned
above. We must admit that some of the freeholders in the Hundred
Rolls are possessed of shares in the fields not because they have
emerged from serfdom, but because they were from the first
members of a village community over which the lord's power
spread. it would be very hard to draw absolute distinctions in
special cases, because the terminology of our records does not
take into account the history of tenure and only indicates net
results. But a comparison of facts en bloc points to at least
three distinct sources of the freehold virgates. Some may be due
to commutation, others to beneficial feoffments, but there are
yet others which seem to be ancient and primitive. The traits
which mark these last are 'shareholding' and light rents. The
light rents do not look like the result of commutation, the
'shareholding' points to some other cause than favours bestowed
by the lord.
    We shall come to the same conclusion if we follow the other
line of our inquiry. It may be asked, whether the community into
which the share is made to fit should be thought of primarily as
a community in ownership or a community in assessment, whether
the shares are constructed for the purpose of satisfying equal
claims or for the purpose of imposing equal duties? The question
is a wide one, much wider than the subject immediately in hand,
but it is connected with that subject and some of the material
for its solution must be taken up in the course of our present
inquiry.
    I have been constantly mentioning the assessment of free
tenements, their rents and their labour services. The question of
their weight as compared with villain services has been
discussed, but I have not hitherto taken heed of the varying and
irregular character of these rents and services. But the variety
and irregularity are worthy of special notice. One of the most
fundamental differences between the free and servile systems is
to be found in this quarter. The villains are equalised not only
as regards their shares in the fields, but also as regards their
duties towards the lord; indeed, both facts appear as the two
sides of one thing. The virgate of the villain is quite as much,
if not more, a unit of assessment as it is a share of the soil.
Matters look more complex in the case of free land. As I have
said before, there are instances in which the free people are not
only possessed of equal shares but also are rented in proportion
to those shares. In much the greater number of instances, however
, there is no such proportion. All may hold virgates, but one
will pay more and the other less; one will perform labour duties,
and the other not; one will pay in money, and the other bring a
chicken, or a pound of pepper, or a flower. Whatever we may think
of the gradual changes which have distorted conditions that were
originally meant to be equal, it is impossible to get rid of the
fact that, in regard to free tenements, equal shares do not imply
equal duties or even duties of one and the same kind.
    One of two things, either the shares exist only as a survival
of the servile arrangement out of which the free tenements may
have grown, or else they exist primarily for the purpose not of
assessing duties but of apportioning claims. In stating these
possibilities I must repeat what I said before, that it would be
quite wrong to bring all the observed phenomena under one head. I
do not intend in the least to deny that the freer play of
economic and legal forces within the range of free ownership must
have produced combinations infinitely more varying, irregular and
complicated than those which are to be found in villainage. A
large margin must be allowed for such modifications which
dispersed and altered the duties that were originally
proportioned to shares. But a few simple questions will serve to
show that other elements must be brought into the reckoning. Why
should the disruptive tendency operate so much more against
proportionate assessment than against the distribution into
shares itself; in other words, why are equal tenements so much
commoner than equal rents? If shareholding and equal rents were
indissolubly connected as the two sides of one thing, or even as
cause and effect, why should one hold its ground when the other
had disappeared, and how could the dependent element remain
widely active when the principal one had lost its meaning? If the
discrepancies between rent and shares had been casual, we might
try to explain them entirely by later modifications. But these
discrepancies are a standing feature of the surveys, and it seems
to me that we can hardly escape the inference that shareholding
has its raison d'etre quite apart from the duties owed to the
lord, and in this case we have to look to the communal
arrangement of proprietary rights for its explanation; it was a
means of giving to every man his due. If this principle is
granted, all the observable facts fall into their right places.
One can easily imagine how free holdings came to exist within the
village community in spite of their loose connexion with the
manor. In regard to duties, they were practically outside the
community; not so as to proprietary rights and the agricultural
arrangements proceeding from them, for example such arrangements
as affected the rotation of crops, the use of commons and fallow
pasture, the setting up of hedges, the repair of dykes, etc.
There is no real contradiction between the facts, that in
relation to the lord every free shareholder was, as it were,
bound by a separate and private agreement, while in relation to
the village he had to conform to communal rule.
    This last remark may require some further development. The
striking differences between the duties of the several
freeholders of one manor seem to show that these people were not
enfeoffed by the lord at the same time and under the same
conditions. If A is in every respect a fellow of B, and still has
to pay twice as much as B, it is clear that his relation to the
lord has been settled under different circumstances from those
which governed the settlement of B's position. Now, from the
point of view of later law this meant that the two freeholds were
created each by a special feoffment. But this would be a very
formal and inadequate way of considering the case. Very often the
differences might be produced by subsequent arrangements which,
though not giving rise to new title, destroyed the original
uniformity of condition. Often again we may suspect that the
relation between lord and tenant had its origin not really in a
gift of land made by the former to the latter but in a submission
made by the latter to the former. I make bold to prefer this
view, chiefly on account of those trifling and indeed fictitious
duties which are constantly found in the Surveys.(79*) They can
only have one meaning -- that of 'recognitions'.(80*) Trifling in
themselves, they establish the subordinate relation of one owner
to the other; and although their imposition must be considered
from the formal standpoint of feudal law as the result of a
feoffment, it is clear that their real foundation must often have
been a submission to patronage. The subject is a wide one and
includes all kinds of free tenure, communal as well as other.
When a knight was enfeoffed by a monastery in consideration of
some infinitesimal payment, there might be several reasons for
such a transaction. The abbot may have thought it good policy to
acquire the support of a considerable person, he may have been
forced to give the land and only glad to obtain some recognition,
however trifling, of the gift; or again, he may have made a
beneficial feoffment in return for a sum of ready money paid by
way of gersuma or fine, but he may also have extended his
supremacy over a piece of land which did not belong to him
originally at all. Even in feudal times this could be done by
means of a fictitious lawsuit ending in 'a final concord'; or
even simply by an instrument of quit claim and feoffment without
any suit.(81*) At the time when feudalism was only settling
itself, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this must have
been a common thing, even if we do not take into account the
Saxon practice of 'commendation.' However this may be, the
trifling duties imposed on freeholds lead to the inference that
the agreement between lord and tenant had been made on the basis
of the latter's independent right, and not on that of the lord's
will and power. They testify to a subjection of free people and
not to the liberation of serfs. And as they are found constantly
allied with shareholding, we have to say that they imply manorial
relations superimposed on a community which, if not entirely
free, contained free elements within it. The manorial duties are
more varied and capricious than are the shares just because they
are a later growth.
    I should not like to leave this intricate inquiry without
testing its results by yet another standard. I have been trying
to prove two things : that some of the feudal freeholds are
ancient freeholds, not liberated from servitude but originally
based on the recognised right of the holders; that such ancient
freeholds were included in the communal arrangement of ownership,
although the assessment of their duties was not communal. To what
extent are these propositions supported by an analysis of that
admittedly ancient tenure, the tenure of the socmen? We must look
chiefly to the 'free' socmen; but I may be allowed, on the
strength of the chapter on Ancient Demesne, to take the bond
socmen also into account.
    Let us take the manor of Chesterton, in Cambridgeshire.(82*)
It is royal, but let out in feefarm to the Prior of Barnwell, and
its men make use of the parvum breve de rec to. There is one free
tenant of eighty-eight acres holding de antiquitate and the
Scholars of Merton hold forty-four acres freely. They have
clearly taken the place of some freeman, whether by purchase or
by gift I do not know; they are bound to perform ploughings and
to carry corn. Both tenements are worthy of notice because
charters are not mentioned and still the holdings are set apart
from the rest. In the one case the tenure is expressly stated to
be an ancient one, and presumably the title of the other tenement
is of the same kind. The number of acres is peculiar and points
to some agrarian division of which eighty-eight and forty-four
were fractions or multiples. The bulk of the population are
described as customers. They used to hold half-virgates, it is
said, but some of them have sold part of their land according to
the custom of the manor. And so their tenements have lost their
original regularity of construction, although it seems possible
to fix the average holdings at twelve or fifteen acres. Anyhow,
it is impossible to reduce them to fractions of eighty-eight; for
some reason or another, the reckoning is made on a different
basis. The duties vary a good deal, and it would be even more
difficult to conjecture what the original services may have been
than to make out the size of the virgate.
    The example is instructive in many ways. It is a
stepping-stone from villainage to socage, or rather to socman's
tenure. There can be no question of differences of feoffment. The
manorial power is fully recognised, and on the other hand the
character of ancient demesne is also conspicuous with its
protection of the peasantry. And still the whole fabric is giving
way -- the holdings get dispersed and the service loses its
uniformity. All these traits are a fair warning to those who
argue from the irregularity of free tenements and the inequality
of their rents against the possibility of their development out
of communal ownership. Here is a well-attested village community;
its members hold by custom and have not changed their condition
either for the better or for the worse in point of title. Later
agencies are at work to distort the original arrangement -- a few
steps more in that direction and it would be impossible to make
out even the chief lines of the system. Stanton, in
Cambridgeshire, is a similar case.(83*) I would especially direct
the attention of the reader to the capricious way in which the
services are assessed. And still the titles of the tenants are
the result not of various grants but of manorial custom applied
to the whole community. I repeat, that irregularity in the size
of holdings and in the services that they owe is no proof that
these holdings have not formed part of a communal arrangement or
that their free character (if they have a free character) must be
the result of emancipation; these irregularities are found on the
ancient demesne where there has been no enfranchisement or
emancipation, and where on the other hand the tenants have all
along been sufficiently 'free' to enjoy legal protection in their
holdings.
    If we have to say so much with regard to ancient demesne and
bond socmen, we must not wonder that free socmen are very often
placed in conditions which it would be impossible to reduce to a
definite plan. On the fee of Robert le Noreys, in Fordham,(84*)
we find some scattered free tenants burdened with entirely
irregular rents, four villains holding eighteen acres each and
subjected to heavy ploughing work, three socmen of twenty acres
each paying a rent of 4s. 2d. per holding, and obliged to assist
at reaping and to bring chicken, one socman of nine acres paying
10d., one of seven acres also assessed at 10d., two of eleven
acres paying 15d., etc, it is no cause for wonder that such
instances occur at the end of the thirteenth century. It is much
more wonderful that, in a good many cases, we are still well able
to perceive a great deal of the original regularity. Swaffham
Prior, in Cambridgeshire, is a grand example of an absolutely
regular arrangement in a community of free socmen.(85*) The Prior
of Ely holds it for three hides and has 220 acres on his
home-farm. The rest is divided among sixteen free socmen paying
5s. each and performing various labour services. These services
have been considerably increased by the Prior. Mixed cases are
much more usual -- I mean cases in which the original regularity
has suffered some modifications, though a little attention will
discover traces of the ancient communal arrangement.(86*)
    On the whole, I think that the notices of socmen's tenure in
the Hundred Rolls are especially precious, because they prove
that the observations that we have made as regards freehold
generally are not merely ingenious suggestions about what may
conceivably have happened. There is undoubtedly one weak point in
those observations, which is due to the method which we are
compelled to adopt. It is difficult, if not impossible, to
classify the actual cases which come before us, to say-in this
case freehold is the result of commutation, in that case the lord
has enfeoffed a retainer or a kinsman, while in this third case,
the freehold virgate has always been freehold. The edge of the
inquiry is blunted, if I may so say, by the vagueness of
terminological distinctions, and we must rely upon general
impressions. The socman's tenure, on the contrary, stands out as
a clear case, and a careful analysis of it abundantly verifies
the conclusions to which we have previously come by a more
circuitous route.
    It seems to me that the general questions with which we
started in our inquiry may now be approached with some
confidence. The relation of free tenancies to the manorial system
turns out to be a complex one. The great majority of such
tenements appears as a later growth engrafted on the system when
it was already in decay. Commutation of services, the spread of
cultivation over the waste, and the surrender of portions of the
demesne to the increasing dependent population, must largely
account for the contrast between Domesday and the Hundred Rolls.
But an important residue remains, which must be explained on the
assumption that in many cases the shares of the community were
originally distributed among free people who had nothing or
little to do with manorial work.
    Three conclusions have been arrived at in this chapter.
    1. The home-farm, though the necessary central unit of the
manorial group, did not, as a rule, occupy a large area, and the
break-up of feudalism tended to lessen its extension in favour of
the dependent population.
    2. The peculiar feature of medieval husbandry -- the grouping
of small households round an aristocratic centre -- entailed the
existence of a large class engaged in collecting revenue,
superintending work, and generally conducting the machinery by
which the tributary parts were joined with their centre.
    3. The position of free tenements within the manor may be
ascribed to one of three causes: (a) they have been the tenements
of serfs, but, in consequence either of some general commutation
or of special feoffments, they have become free; or (b) their
connexion with the manor has all along been rather a matter of
jurisdiction than a matter of proprietary right, that is to say,
they form part of the manor chiefly because they are within the
scope of the manorial court; or (c) they represent free shares in
a village community upon which the manorial structure has been
superimposed.

NOTES:



1. Bracton, iv. 9. 5, f. 263: 'Est autem dominicum quod quis
habet ad mensam suam et proprie, sicut sunt Bordlands Anglice.'

2. Madox, History of the Exchequer, i. 407.., Concessisse unam
virgatam terrae in Husfelds, scilicet 20 acras uno anno et 20
acras alio.'

3. In Beauchamp, a manor of St. Paul's, London, the home farm is
one of the largest. Domesday of St. Paul's, 28: 'In dominico tam
de wainagio veteri quam de novo essarto 676 acre terre arabilis
et de prato 18 acre et de pastura 8 acras [sic] et in magno bosco
bene vestito quinquies 20 acre et in duabus granis Dorile et
Langele 16 acras.'

4. As to the economic aspects of the subject, see Thorold Rogers,
History of Agriculture and Prices; Ashley, Introduction to the
Study of Economic History; and Cunningham, Growth of Industry and
Commerce (2nd ed.).

5. Harl. MSS. 1006, f 2.

6. Ramsey Cart. (Rolls Series), i. 282: 'Quae culture coli
possunt sufficienter cum tribus carucis propriis et consuetudine
carrucarum ville et duabus precariis carucis (corr. carucarum?),
quae consuetudo ad valentiam trium carucarum aestimatur.'
Domesday of St. Paul's, 13, 14: 'Potest ibidem fieri wainagium
cum 5 carucis quarum tres habent 4 boves et 4 equos et due
singule 6 equos cum consuetudinibus villate propter (corr.
praeter?) dominicum de Luffehale et alia quae remota sunt, que
tamen sunt in dispositione firmarii.' Cf Glastonbury Inqu. of
1189, pp. 28, 107.

7. As an instance, Bury St. Edmund's Register, Harl. MSS. 743, f
194: '(Bucham) abbas Sti Edmundi capitalis dominus... tenet in
eadem villa preter homagium liberorum nihil.'

8. Domesday of St. Paul's, 58.

9. Eynsham Inqu., Chapter of Christ Church, Oxford, N. 27, f 5,
a: 'Robertus Clement... tenet de dominicis superius mensuratis
dum domino placet unam selionem apud Weylond atte Wyche, unam
selionem apud Blechemanfurlong, tres seliones in Wellefurlong, et
unam selionem apud Groueacres pro 11 solidis per annum.'

10. It is well known that the second book of Fleta contains a
sketch of the functions of manorial officers. In
thirteenth-century MSS. we find also a special tract on the
matter entitled de Senescalcia. See Cunningham, Growth of
Industry and Commerce (2nd ed.), p. 222. Let it be understood
that I do not attempt an exhaustive survey of the subject, but
only a general indication of its bearings.

11. Domesday of St. Paul's, 122; forms of agreement by which the
manors were let to farm in the twelfth century: 'Haec est
conventio inter capitulum Lundoniensis ecclesiae beati Pauli et
Robertum filium Alwini sacerdotis. Capitulum concedit ei Wicham
manerium suum ad firmam quamdiu vixerit et inde bene servierit.
Primo quidem anno pro 58 solidis et 4d. et pro una parva firma
panis et cervisiae cum denariis elemosine. Deinceps vero singulis
annis pro duabus firmis brevibus panis et cervisiae.'

12. Exch. Q. R. Miscell.: 'Consuetudines de Aysle: memorandum
quod homagium debet eligere prepositum et dominus manerii potest
eum retinere.... Et memorandum quod homines debent habere
pastorem ovilis per electionem curie.'

13. The duty of serving as reeve is therefore often treated as
one of the characteristic marks of serfdom; e.g. Cambr. Univ.,
Gg. iv. 4, f. 26.

14. Harl. MSS. 1006, f. 18: 'Debet esse messor ad frumentum et
amerciamenta domini colligendum.'

15. Shaftesbury Inqu., Harl. MSS. 61, f 60: 'Arator... debet
invenire omnia instrumenta aratri ante rotas.'

16. Ibid., f 54: 'Bubulci et gadince.' Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189:
'Petras bovarius... custodit boves domini et vadit ad aratrum.'

17. 'Hereward,' Glastonbury Inqu., 24, 105, etc.; Domesday of St.
Paul's, 53.

18. Cartul. of Battle (Camden Ser.), f 39, b: 'wodeward.'

19. Bury St. Edmund's Reg., Cambr. Univ., Gg. Iv. 4, f. 322, a:
'Ad istud pertinet tenementum falcacio claustri sed cum falce
lurardi.'

20. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 36: 'Reginaldus thernebedellus
tenet dimidiam virgatam terre et summonet homines ad comitatum et
hundredum.'

21. Ibid., 7; cf. 156.

22. Ely Cart., Cotton MSS., Claudius, C. xi, f 15, d., Debet
namiare cum bedello et ceteris avermannis, (men provided with
horses). Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 31: 'Robertus de Eadwic
sequitur hundredum et comitatum ad suum costum... Custodit preces
arature et messis et debet adjuvare ad namia capienda infra
hundredum et est quietus de pannagio.'

23. Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS., i. f 92, 93; Compoti of
Nicholas de Wedergrave, who had charge of the monastery from the
21st of November, 16 Edward II, till the 12th of March, 16 Edw.
II, as to the liberaciones et couredia servientium: 'Et quod
retinuit et necessarie oportuit retinere in eadem abbathia 60
ministros et servientes pro hospitalitate et aliis obsequiis
faciendis in eadem abbathia.'

24. Bury St. Edmund's Register, Harl. MSS., 743, f. 260:
'Scriptum Johannis Northwold abbatis de quinque servanciis, (A.
D. 1294); f 260, d: '... de minutis officiis.'

25. Gloucester Cart. (Rolls Ser.), iii. 213, 214: 'Hoc intellecto
quod quandocumque placuerit loci ballivo amoveantur ab uno loco
usque ad alium ad commodum domini infra terminum, salvis eisdem
liberationibus et stipendiis prius provisis. Nec aliquis
admittatur ad servitium domini sine saluis plegiis de fideliter
serviendo et de omittenda satisfaciendo. Et moraturi tunc
plaemuniantur quod sibi provideant ad morandum... Item quod
nullus famulus sit in curia cui plenum non deputetur officium.
Ita quod si unum officium suo statui sit insufficiens in alio
suppleatur defectus.'

26. Merton College MSS., 91, f 153: 'Coment hom deyt alower
oueraygnes en feyneson e en aust. Vous purrez bien auer sarcler 3
acres pur un dener e aUer fauche lacre de pre pur 4 deners.... E
vous devez Sauer qe 5 hommes poent bien lyer et syer 2 acres le
iour checune manere de ble qe luns plus e lautre mens... E la ou
les 4 prenent 7 d. ob. le iour e le quint pur ceo qil est lyour
le iour 2 d., donqe devez donner pur lacre 4 den. E pur ceo qen
mouz de pays i ne sevent nient sier par lacre si poet hom sauer
par siours e par les jurnees ceo qil fount. Mesqe vous reteignez
les siours par les eez ceo est a sauer qe 5 hommes ou 5 femmes le
quel qe vous voudrez que home apele 5 home font un eez, e 25
hommes font 5 eez, e poent 25 hommes shyer e lier 10 acres le
iour entiers ouerables.... E si il accunte plus de jurnees qe ne
fiert solon ceste acounte, si ne lor deuez pas alower.'

27. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, 16, 17.

28. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, 14, 15. Cf 13: 'Ernaldus C.
tempore episcopi Henrici habuit de quolibet preposito et quolibet
firmario unum denarium ad natale pro taliis quas inveniet eis et
morsuras candelarum.'

29. Bury St. Edmund's Registrum Album, Canmbr. Univ., Ee. iii.
60, f 169, a: 'Isti habent biscum panem... grangiator, bedellus,
lurard.' Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS., I, f 126: 'Et quod
habeat... quolibet anno de tota vita sua unam robam de secta
armigerorum nostrorum et unam robam competentem vel duas marcas
pro uxore sua.' f 142: 'Concessisse Thome de Panis redditum unius
robe annuatim recipiendi apud Glastoniam de secta armigerorum
nostrorum videlicet quartam partem panni cum furrura agnina
precii 2 solidorum uel duos solidos et si aliquo anno armigeris
nostris robas non dederimus, volumus et concedimus... capiat illo
anno... 20 solidos.' f. 146, d: '... tres panes, videlicet unum
panem uocatum priestlof et alterum panem uocatum bastardlof et
tercium panem uocatum seriauntlof de panetria predicti
abbatis.... Et redditum unius robe... videlicet quartam partem
unius panni de lecta officiariorum cum furrura agnina. Et pro
predicta Aluecia uxore sua unam robam videlicet et octo virgas
panni de secta secundorum clericorum cum furrura de scurellis.'

30. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 3. Cf 16: 'Vinitor habet talem
liberacionem sicut prepositus grangie.'

31. Cellaler's Register of Bury St. Edmund's, Cambr. Univ., Gg.
iv. 4, f 49, b: 'Inquisitio generalis dicit quod omnes gersumarii
debent esse prepositi vel heywardi ad voluntatem domini nec se
excusare possint racione alicuius tenementi ut patet in curia
ibidem tenta anno regis Henrici 54to. Et notandum quod quicumque
est prepositus aule de Bertone magna habebit infra manerium unum
equum sumptibus domini cum una stotte et dimidiam acram ordei de
meliore post terram compostatam et habebit stipulam pisei vel
fabarum sine diminucione. Et si tenet duas terras custumarias
plenas erit quietus pro opcribus suis pro una terra et habebit ad
natale domini 1 den. ad oblacionem, die purificacionis unam
candelam precii quarterii et ad carnipriuium debet participari
Una perna baconis inter omnes famulos curie et ad pascham habebit
1 d. pro oblacione sua.' Eynsham Inqu. 6: 'Et quis eorum fuerit
prepositus manerii, liber erit et quietus de omnibus servitiis et
consuetudinibus quas facit Johannes Mareys predictus, auxiliis,
pannagiis et denario Sti Petri exceptis.'

32. Suffolk Court Rolls (Bodleian), 3: 'Terra debuit custodiam
clauium conuentus.' Ely Inqu., Cotton MSS., Claudius, C. xi. f
26, a: 'Ad idem tenementum pertinet esse coronarium et replegiare
homines episcopi... et facere capciones et disseisinas infra
insulam et extra.' Shaftesbury Cart., Harl, MSS., 61, f 60:
'Iacobus tenet 5 acras et servabit boves excepta pestilencia et
violencia.'

33. Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS., I, f 126: 'Carta abbatis
Galfridi facta Willelmo Pasturel (pistori) de terris et
tenementis in Glastonia:... reddendo inde per annum nobis et
successoribus nostris unam rosam ad festum nativitatis beati
Johannis baptiste pro omni seruicio saluo seruicio regali quantum
pertinet ad tantam terram et salvo nobis et successoriblls
nostris sectis curiarum nostrarum Glastonie sicut alii liberi
eiusdem uille nobis faciunt.' Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 10:
'Galterus portarius tenet tenementum suum scilicet portam
hereditarie cum his pertinentiis.' Shaftesbury Cart., Harl. MSS.,
61, f 90: 'Maria Dei gratia Abbatissa ecclesie Sti Eadwardi...
Cum dilectus noster Thurstanus portarius portam nostram cum
omnibus ad eam pertinentibus toto tempore vite sue libere et
quiete et iure hereditario possedisset et Robertus filius et
heres eius, dum post eum contigit Thomam heredem eiusdem Roberti
post decessum patris eius eo quod minoris esset etatis in
custodiam nostram deuenire... cumque ipsum diucius tenuissemus in
custodia pensatis predecessorum suorum obsequiis qui nobis
fideliter et laudabiliter ministrauerunt... Iura ad ipsum et ad
heredes eius racione custodie dicte porte pertinencia... presenti
pagina duximus exprimenda.'

34. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 13.

35. Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS., I, f. 125: 'Carta Muriclle
Pasturel facta Galfrido Abbati Glastoniensi de tenementis et
redditibus pertinentibus (ad) servanciam de la lauandrie.'

36. Bury St. Edmund's Reg., Harl. MSS., 743, f 270 sqq.: '....
Ita tamen quod nullus obedienciariorum predictorum potestatem
habeat seu auctoritatem conferendi aliquod officium seu
servanciam alicui ad terminum vite nec statum liberi tenementi
alicui in premissis de cetero concedendi, set huiusmodi
seruientes officia predicta necessaria ex collacione predictorum
obedienciariorum habentes ad voluntatem obedienciariorum
predictorum removeantur quociens necesse fuerit (A.D. 1294).'

37. A fourth class would be composed of tenements belonging to
people personally strange to the manor. Such 'forinsec' tenants
were often high and mighty persons who had nothing to do with the
agrarian arrangements of the place. I do not speak of this class,
because its position is evidently an artificial one and of no
importance for the internal organisation of the manor, though
interesting from the legal point of view.

38. Shaftesbury Inqu , Harl. MSS., 61, f. 45, d: 'Bubulci et
Gadinci habent sabbatum per ordinem carucarum donec eorum aretur
terra.' Glastonbury Inqu of 1189, p. 14: 'Habebit etiam Unam
acram in autumpno Uno anno apud Strete et alio anno aliam acram
apud Waltonam.'

39. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1180, p. 46: 'Stephanus fil. B.... de
dominico 2 acras ad implementum terre sue.' Cf 39: '3 acras ad
perficiendum suas 5 acras.' Ibid. 81: 'Norman de Pola dimidiam
virgatam. Totum tenementum suum est de dominico.'

40. Ibid. 39: 'unam acram pro 4d. ad emendacionem terre sue.'

41. Ibid. 27: 'Robertus prepositus unam acram pro quodam soc quam
magister Alured tenuit, et dicunt juratores sic esse utilius quam
esset in cultura, quia longe est a dominico.'

42. Domesday of St. Paul's, p. 118: 'Anno domini 1240 Hugone de
Sto Eadmundo existente custode manerii de bello campo homines
infrascripti tenentes terras de dominico quas vocant inlandes
sine auctoritate capituli augmentaverunt redditum assizum, ut
auctoritas capituli interveniret.'

43. Ibid, p. 121: 'Ricardus A. non feffatus nisi per firmarium
consuevit dare annuatim 4 solidos; de cetero dabit 4 sol. 7 den.
et ob.' Cf 52: 'Subscripti sunt feffati de pasturis et frutectis
usque ad titulum in proximum.' Add. MSS. 6159, f 70: 'Robertus
Cob tenet 5 acras pro 25 d. per capitulum ut sit perpetuum.'
Domesday of St. Paul's, 60: 'Ricardus Wor 13 acras de terra
arabili et unum mariscum 10 acrarum pro 4 sol. et 10 d. et per
cartam capituli.'

44. Ramsay Inqu., Cotton MSS., Galba E. x. fol. 49: 'De nova
purprestura 50 acras.... quas 4 homines de dominico tenent.' Cf
Domesday of St. Paul's, 7. 20.

45. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, 111: 'Homines tenent septem
virgatas terre de dominico de terra superius nominata, in parte
erat liberata in tempore Henrici episcopi et in parte postea cum
7 acris quas Johannes clericus tenet.' Domesday of St. Paul's,
51: 'Tenentes de dominieo antiquitus assiso.' 53: 'Dieunt ecram
quod terre de dominico de novo tradite satis utiliter tradite
sunt.'

46. Bracton, f 220. See F.W. Maitland in the Harvard Law Review,
iii. 173.

47. Rot. Hundr. ii. 336, a: 'In firmariis Johannes clericus tenet
unam dimidiam virgatam terre ad terminum vitae suae pro 6 solidis
per annum pro omni servicio.' Cf 344, 346. Add. MSS. 6159, p. 70:
'Hanc terram tenuit postmodum Thomas de Retendon et cum esset
conventus a capitulo super ingressu in illa eo quod aliquando
dixisset quod tenuit eam in feodo et non posset illud monstrare
et recognovit se non habere ius in illa et reddidit eam quietam
decano et capitulo qui postmodum concesserunt eandem terram cum
manso ipsi Thomae tenendum de ipsis ad vitam suam tantum pro 2
sol. et 6 d. per annum.' Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS., I, 240, a:
'Magister Nicholaus de Malmesburi rector ecclesie de
Cristemalforde... quod cum ego recepissem terram Ricardi de
Leyweye in manerio de Cristemalforde... ad terminum 15 annorum et
uiri religiosi Glastonie se opposuissent dicentes (dicenti?) me
esse infeodatum de terra predicta, presenti scriptura confiteor
me post predictos 18 annos in dicta terra non posse vendicare
feodum nec liberum tenementum.'

48. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 79: 'Johannes clericus... idem
tenet unum cotsetle pro 16 d. pro omni servitio ex presto
firmariorum Reginaldi scilicet de Waltona.' Domesday of St.
Paul's, 94: 'Gilbertus filius N. tenet tres virgatas in quas
Gilbertus avus Suus habuit ingressum per Theodoricum firmarium et
modo reddit pro illis 36 solidos,' etc. Ibid. 40: 'Thomas filius
Godrici 22 acras pro 22 d. cuius medietas quondam Stephani, set
habet cam per Ricardum firmarium.' Ibid. 25: 'Walterus de mora 14
acras pro 4 solidis et 8 d. quondam Elvine, cui non attinet,
cuius ingressus ignoratur.'

49. Warwickshire Hundred Roll, Q. R. Misc. Books, 429, f 13, b:
'Unde Willelmus de Wexton tenet unum cotagium libere ad terminum
vite sue pro 4 solidis metens in autumpno per 1 diem.' A peculiar
case is found in Glastonbury Inqu. of 1 189, p. 69 : 'Godwin
palmer... dimidiam virgatam... ex tempore Roberti Abbatis per
Thomam Cameriarum in cujus custodia fuit tunc manerium.' (Later
hand): 'Iste Godwin dedit Henrico abbati dimidiam marcam et
acrevit gabulum de 12 d. Hec convencio durabit dum dominus Abbas
erit.'

50. Domesday of St. Paul's, 25: 'Robertus filius Roger filii
mercatoris unam acram et dimidiam pro 6 d. Item paruum augmentum
pro 1 d.'

51. Rot. Hundr. i. 451: 'Item Andreas prepositus tenet tantum
terre sicut dictus Goscelinus villanus in omnibus. Et preter hoc
tenet 3 acras pro libra cimini. Item Rogerus Doning facit sicut
dictus Goscelinus in omnibus et debet domino suo pro uno
seillione terre 6 d. per annum. Willelmus Mathew tenet eodem modo
et preter hoc dat domino suo pro una acra 4 capones precii 6
den.'

52. Worcester Cart., 27, a: 'de forlandis. De Thoma de G. pro 5
acris... De acra quam Symon Carpenter tenuit. De Alicia vidua pro
dimidia acra. De J ohanne Roberti pro 4 buttis in crofta,' etc.

53. Domesday of St. Paul's, p. 7 sqq.: '(Kenesworthe) isti tenent
de dominico et de essarto.' 21 sqq.: '(Erdelege) isti tenent de
essarto veteri.' 75: '(Nastox) nova essarta.'

54. Worc. Cart., 13: 'Idem tenet assartum pro medietate fructus
et Prior invenit medietatem seminis.'

55. The essarts of St. Paul, London, are divided into small
portions among the peasantry, and the same men own them who are
possessed of the regular holdings all indications that the
clearing was made according to a general plan and by the whole
village.

56. Worcester Cart., 47, 48: 'de soccagiis et forlandis
villanorum.' Cf 49.

57. A curious species of land tenure is the so-called rofliesland
(rough lease?). Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, 29: 'W. de W. tenet
unum Rofliesland eodem servicio; tota terra est in voluntate
domini.' 65: 'W. tenet 5 acras et filius suus 5 acras; unus eorum
tenet carucam domini, alter fugat boves. Terra quam filius eius
tenet est Rofles.' 66: 'R. fil. A. tenet unum ferdel de
Rofliesland pro 2 solidis pro omni servicio per camerarium.' 90:
'Idem tenet dimidiam virgatam de rofliesland pro duobus solidis,
quod utilius esset edificari.' Cf 164, sub voce Roflesland. The
name is found often in old leases in Wilts and Somerset as a
'Rough lease' or 'Rowlease.' I think the term must indicate one
of those informal agreements of which I speak in the text. See
also Reg. Malmesbur. ii. 9, 10.

58. Rot. Hundr. ii. 437: 'Symon et Petrus... tenent de eodem
Alano unam virgatam terre et solvunt per annum 8 s. et debent
arare tres dimidias acras terre... Adam Swetcoc tantum tenet de
predicto Alano et solvit 9 sol. 3 d. et facit per omnia sicut
predicti Simon et Petrus et tantum plus quod debet metere...
Thomas Alwyne tantum tenet de predicto Alano et solvit 8 s. et
debet arare 3 acras avene et metere duas acras,' etc. Cf. 446,
473.

59. Rot. Hundr. ii. 656.

60. In Sawtrey le Moyne and Sawtrey Beaumeys (659, 660) the free
tenants are partly virgaters and half virgaters, partly holders
of small plots. I need not say that all my quotations are of
cases which might be multiplied to any extent.

61. The undated Survey of the Ramsey Cartulary (ii. 487) has a
different reckoning: 'Item omnes positi ad censum qui tenent
virgatam, vel dimidiam virgatam, dabunt per annum pro virgata
octo solidos, vel pro dimidia virgata quatuor solidos.' There are
several other small discrepancies with the Hundred Roll
description. The document endorsed in the Cartulary seems the
earlier one, and the differences have to be explained in all
probability by some attempt on the part of the Monastery to set
up a higher rent at the time of its compilation. One does not see
the slightest ground for any reduction of the rent in process of
time. Generally speaking, the conditions described in the Hundred
Roll are more irregular than those mentioned in the Cartulary.

62. The Ramsey Cartulary has simply: 'Et virgatarius arabit et
herciabit qualibet septimana per unum diem sicut operarius.'

63. Rot. Hundr. ii. 348.

64. Ib. 443, 444. Isabel, the daughter of William le Frend, is
taken as a typical half-virgater.

65. Rot. Hundr. ii. 326.

66. Ib. ii. 327.

67. lb. ii. 436.

68. Ib. ii. 438.

69. Ib. ii. 473.

70. Rot. Hundr. 470: '(villani) quilibet istorum tenet dimidiam
virgatam terre de predicta Elena de quibus xxx et 1 operantur in
uno anno et alii xxxij operantur in alio anno et in eodem anno
quo operantur dant domine per annum 8d. et alii qui non operantur
dant per annu quilibet dimidius virgatarius 2s. 10d. et auxilium
Vicecomitis 1d. obolum et quilibet dat obolum, quadrantem ad
festum St. Michaelis.'

71. Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, vol. i. 95: A
reeve complains that Richer Jocelin's Son and Richard Reeve and
his wife have insulted him, by saying among other things'... quod
cepisse debuit munera de divitibus ne essent censuarii et
pauperes ad censum posuisse debuit.'

72. It might perhaps be objected that the difference in favour of
the free people ought to be explained by a depreciation of money
which in process of time lowered the value of quit rents. But the
explanation would hardly suit the age in which the Hundred Rolls
were compiled. The phenomenon mentioned in the text may be
observed in all the Cartularies, and there is no reason to think
that the free rents which occur in them are already antquated
survivals of agreements which had lost their economic sense.

73. Rot. Hundr. ii. 542.

74. Ib. 348.

75. Ib. 508.

76. Exch. Q. R. Misc. Books, N 29, f 11 a.

77. Exch. Q. R. Misc. Books, N 29, f. 12: 'Idem Thomas habet
ibidem 12 villanos tenentes 4 virgatas terre et dimidiam in
villenagio, unde Johannes Aylind tenet dimidiam virgatam terre
pro 5s. 8d. faciens fenum domini per Unum diem cum uno homine,
metens blada eiusdem domini per 1 diem eum Uno homine, etc. Idem
Thomas habet ibidem 11 liberos tenentes 11 virgatas terre et
dimidiam. Unde Willelmus en la Nurne tenet dimidiam virgatam et 4
acras terre pro 4 solidis faciens sectam ad curiam de Bathekynton
bis per annum pro omni demanda.'

78. Bodekesham, Cambs. (R. H. ii. 487), is probably a case of
molland. The often-quoted instance of Ayllington is doubtful,
although the Ramsey Cartulary speaks of the liber tenentes as
malmanni. The expression was probably in use for all rent-paying
people, although properly a designation of those who had commuted
their services. See Appendix XV.

79. R. H. ii. 349, 350: 'In Weston, Bucks, the service of the
villain virgater is estimated at 5s. 2d.... Elyas Clericus tenet
dim. virgatam et reddit Johanni de Patishull 1d. Willelmus fil.
Willelmi de Ravenestone tenet dim. virgatam de eodem feodo et
reddit per annum 1 d. Thomas Acpelard tenet dimidiam virgatam
terre et reddit dicto Willelmo de Nodaris 3 d. Stephanus Elys
tenet dimidiam virgatam et solvit eodem Willelmo 2d. Thomas
Thebaud tenet dimidiam virgatam et reddit eidem Willelmo 1d....
Item Robertus le Cobeler tenet dimidiam virgatam terre et solvit
eodem 1 libram cimini. Omnes isti prescripti dant per annum
forinsecum et scutagium domino Willelmo de Nodaris quando
currit.' Cf Torrington, Bucks, R. H. ii. 352.

80. R. H. ii. 713 (Stanton, Oxon.): 'ad alternacionem cujuslibet
domini de Stanton debet recognoscere eundem dominum de uno
spervario et dabit dimidiam marcam eidem domino.'

81. See e. g. Ramsey Cartul. i. 138, 142.

82. R. H. ii. 402, 403.

83. R. H. ii. 466. Cf 609.

84. R. H. ii. 502.

85. R. H. ii. 484, 485.

86. R. H. 469, 470, 475.


Chapter 5

The Manorial Court


    The communal organisation of the village is made to subserve
the needs of manorial administration. We feel naturally inclined
to think and to speak of the village community in opposition to
the lord and to notice all points which show its self-dependent
character. But in practice the institution would hardly have
lived such a long life and played such a prominent part if it had
acted only or even chiefly as a bulwark against the feudal owner.
Its development has to be accounted for to a great extent by the
fact that lord and village had many interests in common. They
were natural allies in regard to the higher manorial officers.
The lord had to manage his estates by the help of a powerful
ministerial class, but there was not much love lost between
employers and administrators, and often the latent antagonism
between them broke out into open feuds. If it is always difficult
to organise a serviceable administration, the task becomes
especially arduous in a time of undeveloped means of
communication and of weak state control. It was exceedingly
difficult to audit accounts and to remove bad stewards. The
strength and self-government of the village group appeared, from
this point of view, as a most welcome help on the side of the
owner.(1*) He had practically to surrender his arbitrary power
over the peasant population and their land, he had to conform to
fixed rules as to civil usage, manorial claims and distribution
of territory; but the common standards established by custom did
not only hamper his freedom of disposition, they created a basis
on which he could take his stand above and against his stewards.
He had precise arrangements to go by in his supervision of his
ministers, and there was something more than his own interest and
energy to keep guard over the maintenance of these forms: the
village communities were sure to fight for them from beneath. The
facilities for joint action and accumulation of strength derived
from communal self-government vouched indirectly for the
preservation of the chief capital invested by the lord in the
land: it was difficult for the steward to destroy the economic
stays of the villainage.
    There are many occasions when the help rendered by the
village communities to the lord may be perceived directly. I need
hardly mention the fact that the surveys, which form the chief
material of our study, were compiled in substance by sworn
inquests, the members of which were considered as the chief
representatives of the community, and had to give witness to its
lore. The great monastic and exchequer surveys do not give any
insight into the mode of selection of the jurors: it may he
guessed with some probability that they were appointed for the
special purpose, and chosen by the whole court of the manor. In
some cases the ordinary jurors of the court, or chief pledges,
may have been called upon to serve on the inquest. There is
another point which it is impossible to decide quite
conclusively, namely, whether questions about which there was
some doubt or the jurors disagreed were referred to the whole
body of the court. But, although we do not hear of such instances
in our great surveys, it is surely an important. indication that
the extant court-rolls constantly speak of the whole court
deciding questions when the verdict of ordinary jurors seemed
insufficient. And such reserved cases were by no means restricted
to points of law; very often they concerned facts of the same
nature as those enrolled in the surveys.(2*)
    On a parallel with the stewards and servants appointed by the
lord, although in subordination to them, appear officers elected
by the village. As we have seen, the manorial beadle was matched
by the communal reeve, and a like contrast is sometimes found on
the lower degrees.(3*) In exceptional cases the lord nominates
the reeve, although he still remains the chief representative of
village interests and the chief collector of services. But in the
normal course the office was elective, and curious intermediate
forms may be found. For instance, the village selects the
messarius (hayward), and the lord may appoint him reeve.(4*) This
is a point, again, which shows most clearly the intimate
connexion between the interests of the lord and those of the
village. The peasants become guarantors for the reeve whom they
chose. A formula which comes from Gloucester Abbey requires, that
only such persons be chosen as have proved their capacity to
serve by a good conduct of their own affairs: all shortcomings
and defects are to be made good ultimately by the rural community
that elected the officer, and no excuses are to be accepted
unless in cases of exceptional hardship.(5*) The economic tracts
of the thirteenth century state the same principle in even a more
explicit manner.
    From the manorial point of view the whole village is
responsible for the collection of duties. There are payments
expressly imposed on the whole. Such is the case with the yearly
auxilium or donum. The partition of these between the
householders is naturally effected in a meeting of the
villagers.(6*) Most services are laid on the virgaters
separately. But they are all held answerable for the regularity
and completeness with which every single member of the community
performs his duties. As to free holdings, it is sometimes noticed
especially to what extent they are subjected to the general
arrangement: whether they participate with the rest in payments,
and whether the tenants have to work in the same way as the
villains.(7*) Very often the documents point out that such and
such a person ought to take part in certain obligations but has
been exempted or fraudulently exempts himself, and that the
village community has to bear a relative increase of its
burdens.(8*) A Glastonbury formula orders the steward to make
inquiries about people who have been freed from the performance
of their services in such a way that their responsibility has
been thrown on the village.(9*)
    But it would be very wrong to assume that the rural community
could act only in the interest of the lord. Its solidarity is
recognised in matters which do not concern him, or even which
call forth an opposition between him and the peasantry.
    I have already spoken of the curious fact that the village is
legally recognised as a unit, separated from the manor although
existing within it. When the reeve and the four men attend the
sheriff's tourn or the eyre, they do not represent the lord only,
but also the village community. Part of their expenses are borne
by the lord and part by their fellow villagers.(10*) The
documents tell us of craftsmen who have to work for the village
as well as for the lord.(11*) On a parallel with services due to
the landowner, we find sometimes kindred services reserved for
the village community.(12*) If a person has been guilty of
misdemeanours and is subjected to a special supervision, this
supervision applies to his conduct in regard both to the lord and
to the fellow villagers.(13*) No doubt the relations of the
village to its lord are much more fully described in the
documents than the internal arrangement of the community, but
this could not be otherwise in surveys compiled for the use of
lords and stewards. Even the chance indications we gather as to
these internal arrangements are sufficient to give an insight
into the powerful ties of the village community.
    Indeed, the rural settlement appears in our records as a
'juridical person.' The Court Rolls of Brightwaltham, edited for
the Selden Society by Mr Maitland, give a most beautiful example
of this. The village of Brightwaltham enters into a formal
agreement with the lord of the manor as to some commons. it
surrenders its rights to the lord in regard to the wood of
Hemele, and gets rid in return of the rights claimed by the lord
in Estfield and in a wood called Trendale.(14*) Nothing can be
more explicit: the village acts as an organised community; it
evidently has free disposition as to rights connected with the
soil; it disposes of these rights not only independently of the
lord, but in an exchange to which he appears as a party. We see
no traces of the rightless condition of villains which is
supposed to be their legal lot, and a powerful community is
recognised by the lord in a form which bears all the traits of
legal definition. in the same way the annals of Dunstable speak
of the seisin of the township of Toddington,(15*) and of a
feoffment made by them on behalf of the lord.
    I have only to say in addition to this summing up of the
subject, that the quasi-legal standing of the villains in regard
to the lord appears with special clearness when they stand
arrayed against him as a group and not as single individuals. We
could guess as much on general grounds, but the self-dependent
position assumed by the 'communitas villanorum' of Brightwaltham
is the more interesting, that it finds expression in a formal and
recorded agreement.
    We catch a glimpse of the same phenomenon from yet another
point of view. It is quite common to find entire estates let to
farm to the rural community settled upon them.(16*) In such cases
the mediation of the bailiff might be dispensed with; the village
entered into a direct agreement with the lord or his chief
steward and undertook a certain set of services and payments, or
promised to give a round sum. Such an arrangement was profitable
to both parties. The villains were willing to pay dearly in order
to free themselves from the bailiff's interference with their
affairs; the landowner got rid of a numerous and inconvenient
staff of stewards and servants; the rural life was organised on
the basis of self-government with a very slight control on the
part of the lord. Such agreements concern the general management
of manors as well as the letting of domain land or of particular
plots and rights.(17*) Of course there was this great
disadvantage for the lord, that the tie between him and his
subjects was very much loosened by such arrangements, and
sometimes he had to complain that the conditions under which the
land was held were materially disturbed under the farmership of
the village. It is certain, that in a general way this mode of
administration led to a gradual improvement in the social status
of the peasantry.
    One great drawback of investigations into the history of
medieval institutions consists in the very incomplete manner in
which the subject is usually reflected in the documents. We have
to pick up bits of evidence as to very important questions in the
midst of a vast mass of uninteresting material, and sometimes
whole sides of the subject are left in the shade, not by the
fault of the inquirer, but in consequence of disappointing gaps
in the contemporary records. Even conveyancing entries,
surrenders, admittances, are of rare occurrence on some of the
more ancient rolls, and the probable reason is, that they were
not thought worthy of enrolment.(18*) As for particulars of
husbandry they are almost entirely absent from the medieval
documents, and it is only on the records of the sixteenth and yet
later centuries that we have to rely when we look for some direct
evidence of the fact that the manorial communities had to deal
with such questions.(19*)
And so our knowledge of these institutions must be based largely
on inference. But even granting all these imperfections of the
material, it must be allowed that the one side of manorial life
which is well reflected in the documents -- the juridical
organisation of the manor -- affords very interesting clues
towards an understanding of the system and of its origins.
    Let us repeat again, that the management of the manor is by
no means dependent on capricious and one-sided expressions of the
lord's will. On the contrary, every known act of its life is
connected with collegiate decisions. Notwithstanding the absolute
character of the lord with regard to his villains taken
separately, he is in truth but the centre of a community
represented by meetings or courts. Not only the free, but also
the servile tenantry are ruled in accordance with the views and
customs of a congregation of the tenants in their divers classes.
There can be no doubt that the discretion of the lord was often
stretched in exceptional cases, that relations based on moral
sense and a true comprehension of interests often suffered from
violence and encroachment. But as a general rule, and with
unimportant exceptions, the feudal system is quite as much
characterised by the collegiate organisation of its parts as by
their monarchical exterior. The manorial courts were really
meetings of the village community under the presidency of the
lord or of his steward.
    It is well known that later law recognises three kinds of
seignorial courts: the Leet, the Court Baron, and the Customary
Court. The first has to keep the peace of the King, the others
are concerned with purely manorial affairs. The Leet appears in
possession of a police and criminal jurisdiction in so far as
that has not been appropriated by the King's own tribunals-its
parallel being the sheriff's tourn in the hundred. The Court
Baron is a court of free tenants entrusted with some of the
conveyancing and the petty litigation between them, and also with
the exercise of minor franchises. The Customary Court has in its
charge the unfree population of the manor. In keeping with this
division the Court Baron consists according to later theory of a
body of free suitors which is merely placed under the presidency
of the steward, while in the Customary Court the steward is the
true and only judge, and the copyholders, customary tenants or
villains, around him are merely called up as presenters.
    The masterly investigations of Mr Maitland, from which any
review of the subject must start, have shown conclusively, that
this latter doctrine, as embodied in Coke, for instance, draws
distinctions and establishes definitions which were unknown to
earlier practice. The Leet became a separate institution early
enough, although its name is restricted to one province --
Norfolk -- even at the time of the Hundred Rolls.(20*) The
foundation of the court was laid by the frank-pledge system and
the necessity of keeping it in working order. We find the Leet
Court sometimes under the names 'Curia Visus franci plegii,' or
'Visus de borchtruning',(21*) and it appears then as a more
solemn form of the general meeting. It is held usually twice a
year to register all the male population from twelve years
upwards, to present those who have not joined the tithings, and
sometimes to elect the heads or representatives of these
divisions -- the 'Capitales plegii,'(22*) Sometimes the tithing
coincides with the township, is formed on a territorial basis, as
it were, so that we may find a village called a tithing.(23*)
This leads to the inference, that the grouping into tens was but
an approximate one, and this view is further supported by the
fact that we hear of bodies of twelve along with those of
ten.(24*)
    As to attending the meeting, a general rule was enforced to
that effect, that the peasantry must attend in person and not by
reason of their tenure.(25*) But as it was out of the question to
drive all the men of a district to the manorial centres on such
days, exceptions of different kinds are frequent.(26*) Besides
the women and children, the personal attendants of the lord get
exempted, and also shepherds, ploughboys. and men engaged in
driving waggons laden with corn. Servants and aliens were
considered as under the pledge of the person with whom they were
staying.
    The aim of its whole arrangement was to ensure the
maintenance of peace, and therefore everybody was bound on
entering the tithing to swear, not only that he would keep the
peace, but that he would conceal nothing which might concern the
peace.(27*) It is natural that such a meeting as that held for
the view of frank-pledge should begin to assume police duties and
a certain criminal jurisdiction. Mr Maitland has shown how, by
its intimate connexion with the sheriff's tourn, the institution
of frank-pledge was made to serve the purpose of communal
accusation in the time of Henry II. The Assize of Clarendon
(1166) gave the impulse in regard to the Sheriff's Court, and
private lords followed speedily on the same line, although they
could not copy the pattern in all its details, and the system of
double presentment described by Britton and Fleta proved too
cumbersome for their small courts with only a few freeholders on
them. In any case the jurisdiction of the Court Leet is
practically formed in the twelfth century, and the Quo Warranto
inquiries of the thirteenth only bring out its distinctions more
clearly.(28*)
    The questions as to the opposition between Court Baron and
Customary Court are more intricate and more important. Mr
Maitland has collected a good deal of evidence to prove that the
division did not exist originally, and that we have before us in
the thirteenth century only one strictly manorial court, the
'halimotum.' I may say, that I came to the same conclusion myself
in the Russian edition of the present work quite independently of
his argument. Indeed a somewhat intimate acquaintance with the
early Court Rolls must necessarily lead to this doctrine. If some
distinctions are made, they touch upon a difference between
ordinary meetings and those which were held under exceptional
circumstances and attended by a greater number of Suitors than
usual. The expression 'libera curia' which meets us sometimes in
the documents is an exact parallel with that of 'free gallows,'
and means a court held freely by the lord and not a court of free
men. Mr Maitland adds, that he has found mention of a court of
villains and one of knights, but that he never came across a
court of barons in the sense given in later jurisprudence to the
term 'Court Baron.' Here I must put in a trifling qualification
which does not affect his main position in the least. The
Introduction to the Selden Society's second volume, which is our
greatest authority on this subject, mentions a case when the
halimot was actually divided on the principle laid down by Coke
and later lawyers generally. I mean the case of Steyning, where
the Abbot holds a separate court for free tenants and another for
his villains. The instance belongs to the time of the Edwards,
but it is marked as an innovation and a bad one.(29*) It shows,
however, that the separation of the courts was beginning to set
in. The Steyning case is not quite an isolated one. I have found
in the Hundred Rolls the expression Sockemanemot to designate a
court attended by free sokemen,(30*) and it may be suggested that
the formation of the so-called Court Baron may have been
facilitated by the peculiar constitution and customs of those
courts where the unfree element was almost entirely absent. The
Danish shires and Kent could not but exercise a certain influence
on the adjoining counties. However this might be, the general
rule is, undoubtedly, that no division is admitted, and that all
the suitors and affairs are concentrated in the one manorial
court -- the halimot.
    It met generally once every three weeks, but it happens
sometimes that it is called together without a definite limit of
time at the pleasure of the lord.(31*) Cases like that of the
manors of the Abbey of Ramsey, in which the courts are summoned
only twice a year, are quite exceptional, and in the instance
cited the fact has to be explained by the existence of an upper
court for these estates, the court of the honour of
Broughton.(32*) The common suitors are the peasants living within
the manor -- the owners of holdings in the fields of the manor.
In important trials, when free men are concerned, or when a thief
has to be hanged, suitors are called in from abroad -- mostly
small free tenants who have entered into an agreement about a
certain number of suits to the court.(33*) These foreign suitors
appear once every six weeks, twice a year, for special trials
upon a royal writ, for the hanging of thieves,(34*) etc. The duty
of attending the court is constantly mentioned in the documents.
It involved undoubtedly great hardships, expense, and loss of
time: no wonder that people tried to exempt themselves from it as
much as possible.(35*) Charters relating to land provide for all
manner of cases relating to suit of court. We find it said, for
instance, that a tenant must make his appearance on the next day
after getting his summons, even if it was brought to him at
midnight.(36*) When a holding was divided into several parts, the
most common thing was that one suit remained due from the
whole.(37*) All these details are by no means without importance,
because they show that fiscal reasons had as much to do with the
arrangement of these meetings as real interests: every court gave
rise to a number of fines from suitors who had made default.
    The procedure of the halimot was ruled by ancient custom. All
foreign elements in the shape of advocates or professional
pleaders were excluded. Such people, we are told by the manorial
instructions, breed litigation and dead-letter formalism, whereas
trials ought to be conducted and judged according to their
substance.(38*) Another ceremonial peculiarity of some interest
concerns the place where manorial courts are held. It is certain
that the ancient gemóts were held in the open air, as Mr Gomme
shows in his book on early folk-mots. And we see a survival of
the custom in the meeting which used to be held by the socmen of
Stoneleigh on Motstowehill.(39*) But in the feudal period the
right place to hold the court was the manorial hall. We find
indeed that the four walls of this room are considered as the
formal limit of the court, so that a man who has stept within
them and has then gone off without sufficient reason is charged
with contempt of court.(40*) Indeed, the very name of 'halimot'
can hardly be explained otherwise than as the moot held in the
hall.(41*) The point is of some interest, because the hall is not
regarded as a purely material contrivance for keeping people
protected against the cold and the rain, but appears in close
connexion with the manor, and as its centre and symbol.
    We hear very little of husbandry arrangements made by the
courts,(42*) and even of the repartition of duties and
taxes.(43*) Entries relating to the election of officers are more
frequent,(44*) but the largest part of the rolls is taken up by
legal business of all sorts.
    The entire court, and sometimes a body of twelve jurors,
present those who are guilty of any offence or misdemeanour.
Ploughmen who have performed their ploughing on the lord's land
badly, villains who have fled from the fee and live on strange
soil, a man who has not fulfilled some injunction of the lord, a
woman who has picked a lock appended to the door of her cottage
by a manorial bailiff, an inveterate adulterer who loses the
lord's chattels by being fined in the ecclesiastical courts --
all these delinquents of very different kinds are presented to be
punished, and get amerced or put into the stocks, according to
the nature of their offences. It ought to be noticed that an
action committed against the interests of the lord is not
punished by any one-sided act of his will, or by the command of
his steward, but treated as a matter of legal presentment. The
negligent ploughman is not taken to task directly by the bailiff
or any other overseer, but is presented as an offender by his
fellow-peasants, and according to strict legal formality. On the
other hand, the entries are worded in such a way that the part
played by the court is quite clear only as to the presenting of
misdeeds, while the amercement or punishment is decreed in some
manner which is not specified exactly. We read, for instance, in
a roll of the Abbey of Bec how 'the court has presented that
Simon Combe has set up a fence on the lord's land. Therefore let
it be abated.... The court presented that the following had
encroached on the lord's land, to wit, William Cobbler, Maud
Robins, widow (fined 12d.), John Shepherd (fined 12s.)...
Therefore they are in mercy.'(45*) Who has ordered the fence to
be thrown down, and who has imposed the fines on the delinquents?
The most natural inference seems to be that the penal ties were
imposed by the lord or the presiding officer who represented him
in the court. But it is by no means impossible that the court
itself had to decide on the penalty or the amount of the
amercement after first making the presentment as to the fact. Its
action would merely divide itself into two independent decisions.
Such a procedure would be a necessity in the case of a free
tenant who could not be fined at will; and there is nothing to
show that it was entirely different in regard to the servile
tenantry. When the lord interferes at pleasure this is noted as
an exceptional feature.(46*) It is quite possible, again, that
the amercement was imposed on the advice or by a decision of
certain suitors singled out from the rest as persons of special
credit, as in a case from the same manorial rolls of Bec.(47*) It
is hardly necessary to draw very precise conclusions, as the
functions of the suitors do not appear to have been sharply
defined. But for this very reason it would be wrong to speak of
the one-sided right of the lord or of his representative to
impose the penalty.
    The characteristic mixture of different elements which we
notice in the criminal jurisdiction of the manorial court may be
seen also if we examine its civil jurisdiction. We find the
halimot treating in its humble region all the questions of law
which may be debated in the courts of common law. Seisin,
inheritance, dower, leases, and the like are discussed, and the
pleading, though subject to the custom of the manor, takes very
much the shape of the contentions before the royal judges. Now
this civil litigation is interesting from two points of view: it
involves statements of law and decisions as to the relative value
of claims. In both respects the parties have to refer to the body
of the court, to its assessors or suitors. The influence of the
'country' on the judgment goes further here than in the Common
Law Courts, because there is no independent common law to go by,
and the custom of the manor has generally to be made out by the
manorial tenants themselves. And so a party 'puts himself on his
country', not only in order to decide some issue of fact, but
also in regard to points of customary law. Inquisitions are made
and juries formed quite as much to establish the jurisprudence of
the court as to decide who has the better claim under the said
jurisprudence. Theoretically it is the full court which is
appealed to, but in ordinary cases the decision rests with a jury
of twelve, or even of six. The authority of such a verdict goes
back however to the supposed juridical sense or juridical
knowledge of the court as a body. Now it cannot be contested that
such an organisation of justice places all the weight of the
decision with the body of the suitors as assessors. The presiding
officer and the lord whom he represents have not much to do in
the course of the deliberation. If we may take up the comparison
which Mr Maitland has drawn with German procedure,(48*) we shall
say that the 'Urtheilfinder' have all the best of it in the trial
as against the 'Richter.' This 'Richter' is seemingly left with
the duties of a chairman, and the formal right to draw up and
pronounce a decision which is materially dependent on the ruling
of the court. But a special reserve of equity is left with the
lord, and in consequence of its operation we find some decisions
and sentences altered, or their execution postponed.(49*) I have
to endorse one more point of Mr Maitland's exposition, namely,
his view of the presentment system as of a gradual modification
of the original standing of the manorial suitors as true
assessors of the court. Through the influence of the procedure of
royal courts, on the one hand, of the stringent classifications
of the tenantry in regard to status on the other, the presenters
were gradually debased, and legal learning came to maintain that
the only judge of a customary court was its steward. But a
presentment of the kind described in the manorial rolls vouches
for a very independent position of the suitors, and indeed for
their prevalent authority in the constitution of the tribunal.
    The conveyancing entries, although barren and monotonous at
first sight, are very important, in so far as they show, better
perhaps than anything else, the part played by the community and
by its testimony in the transmission of rights. It has become a
common-place to argue that the practice of surrender and
admittance characterises the absolute ownership that the lord has
in the land held in villainage, and proceeds from the fact that
every holder of servile land is in truth merely an occupier of
the plot by precarious tenure. Every change of occupation has to
be performed through the medium of the lord who 're-enters' the
tenement, and concedes it again as if there had been no previous
occupation at all and the new tenant entered on a holding freshly
created for his use. None the less, a theory which lays all the
stress in the case on the surrender into the hand of the lord,
and explains this act from the point of view of absolute
ownership, is wrong in many respects.
    To begin with the legal transmission of a free holding,
although the element of surrender has as it were evaporated from
it, it is quite as much bound up with the fiction of the absolute
ownership of the lord as is the surrender and admittance of
villains and copyholders. The ceremony of investiture had no
other meaning but that of showing that the true owner re-entered
into the exercise of his right, and every act of homage for land
was connected with an act of feoffment which, though obligatory,
first by custom and then by law, was nevertheless no mere
pageant, because it gave rise to very serious claims of service
and casual rights in the shape of wardship, marriage, and the
like. The king who wanted to be everybody's heir was much too
consequent an exponent of the feudal doctrine, and his successors
were forced into a gentler practice. But the fiction of higher
ownership was lurking behind all these contentions of the upper
class quite as much as behind the conveyancing ceremonies of the
manorial court. And in both cases the fiction stretched its
standard of uniformity over very different elements: allodial
ownership was modified by a subjection to the 'dominium
directum,' on the one hand; leases and precarious occupation were
crystalised into tenure, on the other. It is not my object to
trace the parallel of free and peasant holding in its details,
but I lay stress on the principle that the privileged tenure
involved the notion of a personal concession quite as much as did
the base tenure, and that this fundamental notion made itself
felt both in conveyancing formalities and in practical claims.
    I am even inclined to go further: it seems to me that the
manorial ceremony of surrender and admittance, as considered from
the point of view of legal archaeology, may have gone back to a
practice which has nothing to do with the lord's ownership,
although it was ultimately construed to imply this notion. The
tenant enfeoffed of his holding on the conditions of base tenure
was technically termed tenant by copy of court roll or tenant by
the rod -- par la verge. This second denomination is connected
with the fact that, in cases of succession as well as in those of
alienation, the holding passed by the ceremonial action of the
steward handing a rod to the person who was to have the land.
Now, this formality looks characteristic enough; it is exactly
the same as the action of the 'salman' in Frankish law where the
transmission of property is effected by the handing of a rod
called 'festuca.' The important point is, that the 'salman' was
by no means a representative of lordship or ownership', but the
necessary middleman prescribed by customary law, in order to give
the transaction its consecration against all claims of third
persons. The Salic law, in its title 'de affatomire,' presents
the ceremony in a still earlier stage: when a man wants to give
his property to another, he has to call in a middleman and
witnesses; into the hands of this middleman he throws a rod to
show that he relinquishes all claim to the property in question.
The middleman then behaves as owner and host, and treats the
witnesses to a meal in the house and on the land which has been
entrusted to him. The third and last act is, that this
intermediate person passes on the property to the donee
designated by the original owner, and this by the same formal act
of throwing the rod.(50*) The English practice has swerved from
the original, because the office of the middleman has lapsed into
the hands of the steward. But the Characteristic handing of the
rod has well preserved the features of the ancient
'laisuwerpitio' ('the throwing on to the bosom'), and, indeed, it
can hardly be explained on any other supposition but that of a
survival of the practice. I beg the reader to notice two points
which look decisive to me: the steward when admitting a tenant
does not use the rod as a symbol of his authority, because he
does not keep it -- he gives it to the person admitted. Still
more, in the surrender the rod goes from the peasant-holder to
the steward. Can there be a doubt that it symbolises the plot of
land, or rather the right over the plot, and that in its passage
from hand to hand there is nothing to show that the steward as
middleman represents absolute ownership, while the peasants at
both ends are restricted to mere occupation on sufferance?(51*)
Is it necessary to explain that these ceremonial details are not
trifles from a historical point of view? Their arrangement is not
a matter of chance but of tradition, and if later generations use
their symbols mechanically, they do not invent them at haphazard.
Symbols and ceremonies are but outward expressions of ideas, and
therefore their combinations are ruled by a certain logic and are
instinct with meaning. In a sense their meaning is deeper and
more to be studied than that supplied by theories expressed in so
many words: they give an insight into a more ancient order of
things. It may be asked, in conclusion, why a Frankish form
should be found prevalent in the customary arrangement of the
English manorial system? The fact will hardly appear strange when
we consider, firstly, that the symbolical acts of investiture and
conveyancing were very similar in Old English and Old Frankish
law,(52*) and that many practices of procedure were imported into
England from France, through the medium of Normandy. It is
impossible at the present date to trace conclusively the
ceremonies of surrender and admittance in all their varieties and
stages of development, but the most probable course of progress
seems to have been a passage from symbolical investiture in the
folk-law of free English ceorls through the Frankish practice of
'affatomire,' to the feudal ceremony of surrender and admittance
by the steward.
    And now let us take up the second thread of our inquiry into
the manorial forms of conveyancing. A tenant by the verge is also
a tenant by copy of court roll. The steward who presided at the
court had to keep a record of its proceedings, and this record
had a primary importance for the servile portion of the
community. While the free people could enter into agreements and
perform legal acts in their own name and by charter, the villains
had to content themselves with ceremonial actions before the
court. They were faithful in this respect to old German
tradition, while the privileged people followed precedents which
may be ultimately traced to a Roman origin. The court roll or
record of manorial courts enabled the base tenant to show, for
instance, that some piece of land was his although he had no
charter to produce in proof of his contention. And we find the
rolls appealed to constantly in the course of manorial
litigation.(53*) But the rolls were nothing else than records of
actions in the court and before the court. They could actually
guide the decision, but their authority was not independent; it
was merely derived from the authority of the court. For this
reason the evidence of the rolls, although very valuable, was by
no means indispensable. A claimant could go past them to the
original fount, that is, to the testimony of the court. And here
we must keep clear of a misconception suggested by a first-sight
analysis of the facts at hand. It would seem that the verdict of
neighbours, to which debateable claims are referred to in the
manorial courts, stands exactly on a par with the verdicts of
jury men taken by the judges of the Royal Courts. This is not so,
however. It is true that the striving of manorial officers to
make the procedure of halimotes as much like the common law
procedure as possible, went far to produce similarity between
forms of actions, presentments, verdicts and juries, in both sets
of tribunals. But nevertheless, characteristic distinctions
remained to show that the import of some institutions brought
near each other in this way was widely different. I have said
already that the peasant suitors of the halimote are appealed to
on questions of law as well as on questions of fact. But the most
important point for our present purpose is this: the jurors
called to substantiate the claim of a party in a trial are mere
representatives of the whole court. The testimony of the court is
taken indirectly through their means, and very often resort is
had to that testimony without the intermediate stage of a jury.
Now this is by no means a trifle from the point of view of legal
analysis. The grand and petty juries of the common law are means
of information, and nothing more. They form no part of the
tribunal, strictly speaking; the court is constituted by the
judges, the lawyers commissioned by the king, who adopt this
method in investigating the facts before them, because a
knowledge of the facts at issue, and an understanding of local
conditions surrounding them, is supposed to reside naturally in
the country where the facts have taken place.(54*) Historically
the institution is evolved from examinations of witnesses and
experts, and has branched off in France into the close formalism
of inquisitorial process. The manorial jury, on the other hand,
represents the court, and interchanges with it.(55*) For this
reason, we may speak directly of the court instead of treating of
its delegates. And if the verdict of the court is taken, it is
not on account of the chance knowledge, the presumable
acquaintance of the suitors with facts and conditions, but as a
living remembrance of what took place before this same court, or
as a re-assertion of its power of regulating the legal standing
of the community. The verdict of the suitors is only another form
of the entry on the rolls, and both are means of securing the
continuity of an institution and not merely of providing
information to outsiders. Of course, claims may not be always
reduced to such elementary forms that they can be decided by a
mere reference to memory, the memory of the constituted body of
the court. A certain amount of reasoning and inference may be
involved in their settlement, a set of juridical doctrines is
necessary to provide the general principles of such reasoning.
And in both respects the manorial court is called upon to act. It
is considered as the repositary of legal lore, and the exponent
of its applications. This means that the court is, what its name
implies, a tribunal and not a set of private persons called upon
to assist a judge by their knowledge of legal details or material
facts.(56*)
    The whole exposition brings us back to a point of primary
importance. The title by which land is held according to manorial
custom is derived from communal authority quite as much as from
the lord's grant. Without stepping out of the feudal evidence
into historical inquiry, we find that civil arrangements of the
peasantry are based on acts performed through the agency of the
steward, and before the manorial court, which has a voice in the
matter and vouches for its validity and remembrance. The 'full
court' is noticed in the records as quite as necessary an element
in the conveyancing business as the lord and his steward,
although the legal. theory of modern times has affected to take
into account only these latter.(57*) Indeed, it is the part
assumed by the court which appears as the distinctive, if not the
more important factor. A feoffment of land made on the basis of
free tenure proceeds from the grantor in the same way as a grant
on the conditions of base tenure; freehold comes from the lord,
as well as copyhold. But copyhold is necessarily transferred in
court, while freehold is not. And if we speak of the presentment
of offences through the representatives of townships, as of the
practice of communal accusation, even so we have to call the
title by which copyhold tenure is created a claim based on
communal testimony.
    All the points noticed in the rolls of manors held at common
law are to be found on the soil of ancient demesne, but they are
stated more definitely there, and the rights of the peasant
population are asserted with greater energy. Our previous
analysis of the condition of ancient demesne has led us to the
conclusion, that it presents a crystallisation of the manorial
community in an earlier stage of development than in the ordinary
manor, but that the constitutive elements in both cases are
exactly the same. For this reason, every question arising in
regard to the usual arrangements ought to be examined in the
light of the evidence that comes from the ancient demesne.
    We have seen that it would be impossible to maintain that
originally the steward was the only judge of the manorial
tribunal; the whole court with its free and unfree suitors
participates materially in the administration of justice, and its
office is extended to questions of law as well as to issues of
fact. On the other hand, it was clear that the steward and the
lord were already preparing the position which they ultimately
assumed in legal theory, that in the exercise of their functions
they were beginning to monopolise the power of ultimate decision
and to restrict the court to the duty of preliminary presentment.
The same parties are in presence in the court of ancient demesne,
but the right of the suitors has been summed up by legal theory
in quite the opposite direction. The suitors are said to be the
judges there; legal dogmatism has set up its hard and fast
definitions, and drawn its uncompromising conclusions as if all
the historical facts had always been arrayed against each other
without the possibility of common origins and gradual
development. Is it necessary to say that the historical reality
was very far from presenting that neat opposition? The ancient
demesne suitors are villains in the main, though privileged in
many respects, and the lord and steward are not always playing
such a subordinate part that one may not notice the transition to
the state of things that exists in common law manors. It is
curious, anyhow, that later jurisprudence was driven to set up as
to the ancient demesne court a rule which runs exactly parallel
to the celebrated theory that there must be a plurality of free
tenants to constitute a manor. Coke expresses it in the following
way: 'There cannot be ancient demesne unless there is a court and
suitors. So if there be but one suitor, for that the suitors are
the judges, and therefore the demandant must sue at common law,
there being a failure of justice within the manor.'(58*) We shall
have to speak of this rule again when treating of classes in
regard to manorial organisation. But let us notice, even now,
that in this view of the ancient demesne court the suitors are
considered as the cardinal element of its constitution. The same
notion may be found already in trials of the fourteenth and even
of the thirteenth century. A curious case is reported in the Year
Books of 11/12 Edw. III.(59*) Herbert of St. Quentyn brought a
writ of false judgment against John of Batteley and his wife, the
judgment having been given in the court of Cookham, an ancient
demesne manor. The suitors, or suit-holders as they were called
there, sent up their record to the King's Bench, and many things
were brought forward against the conduct of the case by the
counsel for the plaintiff, the defendant trying to shield himself
by pleading the custom of the manor to account for all unusual
practices. The judges find, however, that one point at least
cannot be defended on that ground. The suitors awarded default
against the plaintiff because he had not appeared in person
before them, and had sent an attorney, who had been admitted by
the steward alone and not in full court. Stonor, C. J., remarks,
'that it is against law that the person who holds the court is
not suffered to record an attorney for a plea which will be
discussed before him.' The counsel for the plaintiff offer to
prove that the custom of the manor did not exclude an attorney
appointed before the steward, on condition that the steward
should tell it to the suitors in the next court after receiving
him. The case is interesting, not merely because it exhibits the
suit-holders in the undisputed position of judges, but also
because it shows the difficulties created by the presence of the
second element of the manorial system, the seignorial element,
which would neither fit exactly into an entirely communal
organisation nor be ousted from it.(60*) The difficulty stands
quite on the same line with that which meets us in the common law
manor, where the element of the communal assessors has been
ultimately suppressed and conjured away, as it were, by legal
theory. The results are contradictory, but on the same line, as I
say. And the more we go back in time, the more we find that both
elements, the lord and the community, are equally necessary to
the constitution of the court. In the thirteenth century we find
already that the manorial bailiffs are made responsible for the
judgment along with the suitors and even before them.(61*)
    The rolls of ancient demesne manors present a considerable
variety of types, shading off from an almost complete
independence of the suitors to forms which are not very different
from those of common law manors. Stoneleigh may be taken as a
good specimen of the first class.
    The manor was divided into six hamlets, and every one of
these consisted of eight virgates of land which were originally
held by single socmen; although the regularity of the arrangement
seems to have been broken up very soon in consequence of increase
of population, extension of the cultivated area, and the sale of
small parcels of the holdings. The socmen met anciently to hold
courts in a place called Motstowehill, and afterwards in a house
which was built for the purpose by the Abbot. The way in which
the Register speaks of the ad mission of a socman to his holding
is very characteristic: 'Every heir succeeding to his father
ought to be admitted to the succession in his fifteenth year, and
let him pay relief to the lord, that is, pay twice his rent. And
he will give judgments with his peers the socmen; and become
reeve for the collection of the lord's revenue, and answer to
writs and do everything else as if he was of full age at common
law.' The duty and right to give judgment in the Court of
Stoneleigh is emphatically stated on several occasions, and
altogether the jurisdictional independence of the court and of
its suitors is set before us in the smallest but always
significant details. If somebody is bringing a royal close writ
of right directed to the bailiffs of the manor it cannot be
opened unless in full court. When the bailiff has to summon
anybody by order of the court he takes two socmen to witness the
summons. Whenever a trial is terminated either by some one's
default in making his law or by non-defence the costs are to be
taxed by the court. The alienation of land and admittance of
strangers are allowed only upon the express consent of the
court.(62*) In one word, every page of the Stoneleigh Register
shows a closely and powerfully organised community, of which the
lord is merely a president.
    The rolls of King's Ripton are not less explicit in this
respect. People are fined for selling land without the licence of
the court, for selling it 'outside the court.'(63*) The judgment
depends entirely on the verdict given by the community of suitors
or its representatives the jurors. When the parties rely on some
former decision, arrangement, or statement of law, they appeal to
the rolls of the court, which, as has been said already, present
nothing else but the recorded jurisprudence of the body of
suitors.(64*) The extent of the legal self-government of this
little community may be well seen in the record of a trial in
which the Abbot of Ramsey, the lord of the manor, is impleaded
upon a little writ of right by one of his tenants.(65*) But it is
hardly necessary to dwell on so normal an event. I should like to
take up for once the opposite standpoint, and to show that in
these very communities on the ancient demesne elements are
apparent which have thrived and developed in ordinary manors to
such an extent as to obscure their self-government. In the Rolls
of King's Ripton we might easily notice a number of instances in
which the influence of the lord makes itself felt directly or
indirectly through the means of his steward. We come, for
instance, on the following forms of pleading: An action of dower
is brought, and the defendants ask that the laws and customs
hitherto used in the court should be observed in regard to them
-- they have a right to three summonses, three distraints, and
three essoins, and if they make default after that, the land
ought to be taken into the lord's hand, when, but only if it is
not replevied in the course of fifteen days, it will be lost for
good and all. All these demands are granted by the steward, with
whom the decision, at least formally, rests.(66*) Again, when we
hear that the whole court craves leave to defer its judgment till
the next meeting, it is clear that it rests with the steward to
grant this request.(67*) We may find now and then a consideration
for the interests of the lord which transcends the limits of mere
formal right, as in a case where a certain Margery asks the
court, without any writ of right or formal action, that an
inquest may be held as to a part of her messuage which is
detained in the hands of the Abbot, although she performs the
service due for it. The inquest is held, and apparently ends in
her favour, but she is directed at the same time to go and speak
with the lord about the matter. Ultimately she gets what she
wants after this private interview.(68*) The proceedings are
irregular and interesting: the usual forms of action are
disregarded; a verdict is given, but the material decision is
left with the lord, and is to be sought for by private
intercession. Quite close to this entry we find an instance which
is in flagrant contradiction with such a considerate treatment of
all parties. The jurors of the court are called upon to decide a
question of testament and succession. They say that none of them
was present when the testament was made, and that they know
nothing about it, and will say nothing about it. 'And so leaving
their business undone, and in great contempt of the lord and of
his bailiffs, they leave the court. And therefore it is ordered
that the bailiffs do cause to be levied a sum of 40s to the use
of the lord from the property of the said jurors by distress
continued from day to. day.'(69*) This case may stand as a good
example both of the sturdy self-will which the peasantry
occasionally asserted in their dealings with the lord, and of the
opportunities that the lord had of asserting his superiority in a
very high-handed manner.
    But we need not even turn to any egregious instances in which
the lord's power is thus displayed. The usual forms of surrender
are there to show that, as regards origins, we have the same
thing here as in ordinary manors, although the peculiarities of
the ancient demesne have brought forward the features of communal
organisation in a very marked way, and have held the element of
lordship in check.
    We have seen that there was only one halimot in the
thirteenth and the preceding centuries, and that the division
into customary court and court baron developed at a later time.
We have seen, secondly, that this halimot was a meeting of the
community under the presidency of the steward, and that the
relative functions of community and steward became very distinct
only in later days. It remains to be seen how far the fundamental
class division between free tenants and villains affected the
management of the court. As there was but one halimot and not
two, both classes had to meet and to act concurrently in it. The
free people now and then assert separate claims: a chaplain wages
his law on the manor of Brightwaltham that he did not defame the
lord's butler, but when he gets convicted by a good inquest of
jurors of having broken the lord's hedges and carried away the
lord's fowls, he will not justify himself of these trespasses and
departs in contempt, doubtless because he will not submit to the
judgment of people who are not on a par with him.(70*)
Freeholders object to being placed on ordinary juries of the
manor,(71*) although they will serve as jurors on special
occasions, and as a sort of controlling body over the common
presenters.(72*) Amercements are sometimes taxed by free
suitors.(73*) But although some division is apparent in this way,
and the elements for a separation into two distinct courts are
gathering, the normal condition is one which does not admit of
any distinction between the two classes. We come here across the
same peculiarity that we have seen in police and criminal law,
namely, that the fundamental line of civil condition seems
disregarded. Even when a court is mainly composed of villains,
and in fact called curia villanorum, some of its suitors may be
freeholders.(74*) Even in a court composed of free people, like
that of Broughton, there may be villains among them.(75*) The
parson, undoubtedly a free man, may appear as a villain in some
rolls.(76*) Altogether, the fact has to be noticed as a very
important one, that whatever business the freeholders may have
had in connexion with the manorial system, this business was
transacted by courts which consisted chiefly of servile
tenants.(77*) In fact the presenting inquests, on which the free
tenants refused to serve, would not be prevented by their
composition from attainting these free tenants.
    This seems strange and indeed anomalous. One point remains to
be observed which completes the picture: although the great
majority of the thirteenth century peasantry are mere villains,
although on some manors we hardly distinguish freeholders, there
is a legal requirement that there should be at least a few
freeholders on every manor. Later theory does not recognise as a
manor an estate composed only of demesne land and copyhold.
Freeholds are declared to be a necessary element, and should they
all escheat, the manor would be only a reputed one.(78*) We have
no right to treat this notion as a mere invention of later times.
it comes forward again and again in the shape of a rule, that
there can be no court unless there are some free tenants to form
it. The number required varies. In Henry VIII's reign royal
judges were contented with two. In John's time as many as twelve
were demanded, if a free outsider was to be judged. The normal
number seems to have been four, and when the record of the
proceedings was sent up to the King's tribunal four suitors had
to carry it. The difference between the statement of Coke and the
earlier doctrine lies in the substitution of the manor for the
court. Coke and his authorities, the judges of Henry VIII's
reign, speak of the manor where the older jurisprudence spoke of
the court. Their rule involves the more ancient one and something
in addition, namely, the inference that if there be no court
baron there is no manor. Now this part of the doctrine, though
interesting by itself, must stand over for the present. Let us
simply take the assertion that free suitors are necessary to
constitute a court, and apply it to a state of things when there
was but one strictly manorial court, the halimot. In 1294 it is
noted in the report of a trial that, 'in order that one may have
a court he must have at least four free tenants, without
borrowing the fourth tenant.'(79*) Now a number of easy
explanations seem at hand: four free tenants at least were
necessary, because four such tenants were required to take the
record up to the king's court and to answer for any false
judgment; a free tenant could protest against being impleaded
before unfree people; some of the franchises could not be
exercised unless there were free suitors to form a tribunal. But
all these explanations do not go deep enough: they would do very
well for the later court baron, but not for the halimot. It is
not asserted that free suitors are necessary only in those cases
where free tenants are concerned -- it is the court as such which
depends on the existence of such free suitors, the court which
has largely, if not mostly, to deal with customary business, and
consists to a great extent of customary tenants. And, curiously
enough, when the court baron disengages itself from the halimot,
the rule as to suitors, instead of applying in a special way to
this court baron, for which it seems particularly fitted, extends
to the notion of the manor itself, so that we are driven to ask
why the manor is assumed to contain a certain number of free
tenants and a court for them. Why is its existence denied where
these elements are wanting? Reverting to the thirteenth century,
we have to state similar puzzling questions: thus if one turns to
the manorial surveys of the time, the freehold element seems to
be relatively insignificant and more or less severed from the
community; if one takes up the manorial rolls, the halimot is
there with the emphatically expressed features and even the name
of a court of villains; but when the common law is concerned,
this same tribunal appears as a court of freeholders. The manors
of the Abbey of Bec on English soil contained hardly any
freeholders at all. Had the Abbey no courts? Had it no manors
from the standpoint of Coke's theory? What were the halimots
whose proceedings are recorded in the usual way on its manorial
rolls? In presence of these flagrant contradictions I cannot help
thinking that we here come across one of those interesting points
where the two lines of feudal doctrine do not meet, and where
different layers of theory may be distinguished.
    Without denying in the least the practical importance of such
notions as that which required that one's judges should be one's
peers, or of such institutions as the bringing up of the manorial
record to the King's Court, I submit that they must have
exercised their influence chiefly by calling forth occasions when
the main principle had to be asserted. Of course they could not
create this principle: the idea that the halimot was a communal
court constituted by free suitors meeting under the presidency of
the steward, must have existed to support them. That idea is
fully embodied in the constitution of the ancient demesne
tribunal, where the suitors were admitted to be the judges,
although they were villains, privileged villains and nothing
else. Might we not start from the original similarity between
ancient demesne and ordinary manors, and thus explain how the
rule as to the necessary constitution of the manorial court was
formed? It seems to me a mere application of the higher rule that
a court over free people must contain free people, to a state of
things where the distinction between free and unfree was not
drawn at the same level as in the feudal epoch, but was drawn at
a lower point. We have seen that a villain was in many respects a
free man; that he was accepted as such in criminal and police
business; that he was free against everybody but his lord in
civil dealings; that the frank-pledge system to which he belonged
was actually taken to imply personal freedom, although the
freeholders ultimately escaped from it. I cannot help thinking
that a like transformation of meaning as in the case of
frank-pledge did take place in regard to the free suitors of the
manorial court. The original requirement cannot have concerned
freeholders in the usual legal sense, but free and lawful men,
'worthy of were and wite' -- a description which would cover the
great bulk of the villains and exclude slaves and their progeny.
When the definitions of free holding and villainage got to be
very stringent and marked, the libere tenentes assumed a more and
more overbearing attitude and got a separate tribunal, while the
common people fell into the same condition as the progeny of
slaves. In a word, I think that the general movement of social
development which obliterated the middle class of Saxon ceorls or
customary free tenants (leaving only a few scattered indications
of its existence) made itself felt in the history of the manorial
court by the substitution of exceptional freeholders for the free
suitors of the halimot. Such a substitution had several results:
the diverging history of the ancient demesne from that of the
ordinary manorial courts, the elevation of the court baron, the
growth of the notion that in the customary court the only judge
was the steward. One significant little trait remains to be
observed in this context. it has been noticed (80*) that care
seems to be taken that there should be certain Freemen or
Franklains in every manor. The feature has been mentioned in
connexion with the doctrine of free suitors necessary to a court.
But these people are by no means free tenants; in the usual legal
sense they are mostly holding in villainage, and their freedom
must be traced not to the dual division of feudal times, but to
survivals of the threefold division which preceded feudalism, and
contrasted slave, free ceorl, and military landowner.
    Before concluding this chapter I have to say a few words upon
those forms of the manorial court which appear as a modification
of the normal institution. Of the ancient demesne tribunal I have
already spoken, but there are several other peculiar formations
which help to bring out the main ideas of manorial organisation,
just because they swerve from it in one sense or another. Mr
Maitland has spoken so well of one of these variations, that I
need not do anything more than refer the reader to his pages
about the Honour and its Court.(81*) He has proved that it is no
mere aggregate of manors, but a higher court, constructed on the
feudal principle, that every lord who had free tenants under him
could summon them to form a court for their common dealings. It
ought to be observed, however, that the instance of Broughton,
though its main basis is undoubtedly this feudal doctrine, still
appears complicated by manorial business, which is brought in by
way of appeal and evocation, as well as by a mixture between the
court of the great fief and the halimot of Broughton.
    A second phenomenon well worth consideration is the existence
in some parts of the country of a unit of jurisdiction and
management which does not fall in with the manor, -- it is called
the soke, and comprises free tenantry dispersed sometimes over a
very wide area. A good example of this institution is given by Mr
Clark's publication on the Soke of Rothley in Lincolnshire.(82*)
We need not go into the details of the personal status of the
tenants, they clearly come under the description of free sokemen.
Our present concern is that they are not simply arranged into the
manor of Rothley as usual, but are distinguished as forming the.
soke of this manor. They are rather numerous -- twenty-three --
and come to the lord's court, but their services are trifling as
compared with those of the customers, and their possessions are
so scattered, that there could be no talk of their joining the
agrarian unit of the central estate. What unites them to the
manor is evidently merely jurisdiction, although in feudal theory
they are assumed to hold of the lord of Rothley. But they are set
apart as forming the soke, and this shows them clearly to be
subjected to jurisdiction rather than anything else. It is
interesting to note such survivals in the thirteenth century, and
within the realm of feudal law the case of Rothley is of course
by no means the only one.(83*) If we contrast this exceptional
appearance of the soke outside the manor with the normal
arrangement by which all the free tenants are fitted into the
manor, we shall come to the conclusion that originally the
element of jurisdiction over freeholders might exist separately
from the management of the estate, but that in the general course
of events it was merged into the estate and formed one of the
component elements of the manorial court. The case of Rothley is
especially interesting because the men of the soke or under the
soke do not go to a court of their own, but simply join the
manorial meetings. If they are still kept apart, it is evident
that their relation to the court, and indeed to the manor, was
what made them distinct from everybody else. In short, to state
the difference in a pointed form, the other people were tenants
and they were subjects.
    One more point remains to be noticed. In order to make it
clear we must by way of exception start from the arrangements of
a later epoch than that which we have been discussing. The manor
of Aston and Cote, which may have been carved out with several
others from the manor of Bampton, presents a very good instance
of a village meeting which does not coincide with the manorial
divisions, and appears constructed on the lines of a village
community which has preserved its unity, although several manors
have grown out of it. It was stated by the lord of the manor of
Aston and Cote in 1657, that 'there hath been a custom time out
of mind that a certain number of persons called the Sixteen, or
the greater part of them, have used to make orders, set
penalties, choose officers, and lot meadows, and do all such
things as are usually performed or done in the courts baron of
other manors.' All the details of this case are interesting, but
we need not go into them, because they have been set out with
sufficient care in the existing literature, and summed up by Mr
Gomme in his book on the Village Community.(84*) It is the main
point which we must consider. Here is an assembly meeting to
transact legal and economic business, which acts on the pattern
of manorial courts. And if not a manorial court, what is it? I
think it is difficult to escape the conclusion that it is a
meeting of the village community outside the lines of manorial
division. The supposition that it represents the old manor of
Bampton, to which Aston, Cote, Bampton Pogeys, Bampton Priory are
subordinated, is entirely insufficient to explain the case,
because then we should not have had to recognise new manors in
the fractions which were detached from Bampton, and there would
have been no call to speak of a peculiar assembly assuming the
competence of a court baron -- we should have had the manorial
court and the lord of Bampton, and not the Sixteen to speak of.
The fact is patent and significant. It shows by itself that there
may have been cases where the village community and the manor did
not coincide, and the village community had the best of it.
    The first proposition does not admit of doubt. It was of
quite common occurrence that the land of one village should be
broken up between several manors, although its open field system
and all its husbandry arrangements remained undivided. The
question arises, how was that system to work? There could be
express agreement between the owners;(85*) ancient custom and the
interference of manorial officers chosen from the different parts
could help on many occasions. But it is impossible to suppose, in
the light of the Bampton instance, that meetings might not
sometimes exist in such divided villages which took into their
hands the management of the many economic questions arising out
of common husbandry: questions about hedges, rotation of crops,
commonable animals, usage as to wood, moor, pasture, and so
forth. A diligent search in the customs of manors at a later
period, say in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, must
certainly disclose a number of similar instances. Our own
material does not help us, because it passes over questions of
husbandry, and touches merely jurisdiction, ownership, and
tenant-right. And so we must restrict ourself to notice the
opening for an inquiry in that direction.
    Such an inquiry must also deal with the converse possibility,
namely, the cases in which the manor is so large that several
village units fit into it. We may find very frequently in some
parts of the country large manors which are composed of several
independent villages and hamlets.(86*) On large tracts of land
these villages would form separate open field groups. Although
the economic evidence is not within our reach in early times, we
have indications of separate village meetings under the manorial
court even from the legal point of view taken by the court-rolls.
In several instances the entries printed in the second volume of
the Selden Society publications point to the action of townships
as distinct from the manorial court, and placed under it. In
Broughton a man distrained for default puts himself on the
verdict of the whole court and of the township of Hurst, both
villains and freemen, that he owes no suit to the court of
Broughton, save twice a year and to afforce the court. Be it
noted that the court of Hurst is distinguished from the township,
which appears subordinated to it, probably because there were
other townships in the manor of Hurst. At the same time the
township is called upon to act as an independent unit in the
matter. Even so in the rolls of Hemingford, the township which
forms the centre of the manor and gives its name to it, is
sometimes singled out from the rest of the court as an organised
corporation.(87*) When township and tithing coincided, as in the
case of Brightwaltham, the tithing gets opposed to the general
court in the same way.(88*) Altogether the corporate unity of
townships is well perceivable behind the feudal covering of the
manor. Mr Maitland says with perfect right, 'the manor was not a
unit in the governmental system; the county was such a unit, so
was the hundred. So again was the vill, for the township had many
police duties to perform; it was an amerciable, punishable unit;
not so the manor, unless it coincided with the vill.'(89*) And
then he proceeds to suggest that the true explanation of the
manor is that it represents an estate which could be and was
administered as a single economic and agrarian whole. I am unable
to follow him entirely as to this last point, because it seems
pretty clear that the open field arrangements followed the
division into townships, and not those into manors. From the
point of view of the services, of the concentration of duties of
the tenantry in regard to the lord, the manor was a whole, and
for this very reason it was a whole as regards geldability, but
this is only one side of the economic structure of society, the
upper side, if one may be allowed to say so. The arrangement of
actual cultivation is the other side, and it is represented by
the township with its communal open fields. Now in a great many
cases the estate and the community fitted into each other; and of
these instances there is no need to speak any further. But if
both did not fit, the agrarian unity is the township and not the
manor. The open field system appears in this connexion as outside
the manor, and proceeding from the rural community by itself.
    Let us sum up the results obtained in this chapter.
    1. The village communities contained in the manorial system
are organised on a system of self-government which affords great
help to the lord in many ways, but certainly limits his power
materially, and reduces him to the position of a constitutional
ruler.
    2. The original court of the manor was one and the body of
its suitors was one. The distinction between courts for free
tenants and customary courts grows up very gradually in the
fourteenth century, and later.
    3. The steward was not the only judge of the halimot. The
judgment came from the whole court, and its suitors, without
distinction of class, were necessary judicial assessors.
    4. The court of ancient demesne presents the same elements as
the ordinary halimot, although it lays greater stress on the
communal side of the organisation.
    5. The conveyancing entries on the rolls do not prove the
want of right on the part of the peasant holders. On the
contrary, they go back to very early communal practice.
    6. The rule which makes the existence of the manor dependent
on the existence of free suitors is derived from the conception
of the court as a court of free and lawful men, taking in
villains and excluding slaves.
    7. The manor by itself is the estate; the rural community and
the jurisdiction of the soke are generally fused with it into one
whole; but in some cases the two latter elements are seen
emerging as independent growths from behind the manorial
organisation.

NOTES:

1. A good specimen of the accusations which might be made against
a manorial agent is afforded by the Court-rolls of the Abbey of
Ramsey. Seld. Soc. ii. p. 95.

2. Seld. Soc. ii. 22: 'Et dicit curia quod tenementum et una acra
servilis condicionis sunt et una acra libere.'

3. Coram Rege, Pascha 9 Edw. I, 34, 6: 'Messarius abbatis et
messarius villate.'

4. Okeburn Inqu. 56 (Add. MSS. 24316): 'Eligere debent unum
messarium de se ipsis et domini de ipso electo poterunt facere
prepositum.'

5. G1oucester Cart. iii. 221: 'Prepositus eligetur per
communitatem halimoti qui talrin eligant qui ad suam terram
propriam excolendum et cetera bona sua discrete et circumspecte
tractanda idoneus merite notatur et habeatur, pro cuius
drfectibus et abmittendis totum halimotum respondeat, nisi ubi
urgens necessitas aut causa probabilis illud halimotum coram loci
ballivo rationabilem praetendere poterit excusationem.' Cf Walter
of Henley, ed. Lamond, pp. 10, 64, 66.

6. Seld. Soc. ii. 12: 'Nicholaus filius sacerdotis... et Robertus
de Magedone... in misericordia quia contradixerunt tallagium quod
positum fuit super eos per vicinos suos.' Glastonb. Inqu. of
1189, p. 33: 'Totum manerium reddit de dono 73 solidos et 4 den.
sicut homines ville illud statuunt.'

7. Ramsey Cart. i. 401: 'Sunt in scot et in lot et in omnibus cum
villata.' Spalding Priory Reg., Cole MSS. xliii. p. 283: 'Libere
tenens tacit fossa tum maris et omnes communas ville secundum
quantitatem bouatae.'

8. Ramsey Cart. i. 398: 'Henricus le Freman solebat esse in
communa villatae, ut in tallagio et similibus. Nulla inde facit.'
p. 394 (a villager does not pay his part of the tallage), 'quod
quidem tallagium tota villata et ad magnum ipsorum gravamen
hucusque persolvit.'

9. Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS. i. f III: 'Si nul soit enfraunchi
de ses ouvrages dont la ville est le plus charge.'

10. Add. MSS. 6159, f 25, b: 'Dominus debet invenire duos homines
sumptibus suis coram eisdem justiciariis et villata de Rode
sumptibus suis tres homines invenient. Et hoc per consuetudinem a
tempore quo non extat memoria ut dicitur.' Cf Domesday of St.
Paul's, 15: 'Alanus filius Alexandri de Cassingburne tres
virgatas pro 20 solidis et preter haec 10 acras de villata et 10
de dominico propter sectam sire et hundredi quam modo non facit.'

11. Custumal of Bleadon, 257: 'Invenit fabrum pro ferdello domino
et toti villae.'

12. Shaftesbury Cart., Harl. MSS. 61, f. 63: 'Ibit ad scotaliam
domine sicut ad scotaliam vicinorum.'

13. Ramsey Cart. i. 425: 'Ponitur in respectu quousque videatur
quomodo se gerat versus dominum abbatem et suos vicinos.'

14. Seld. Soc. ii. 172: 'Ad istam curiam venit tota communitas
villanorum de Bristwalton et de sua mera et spontaneavoluntate
sursum reddidit domino totum jus et clamium quod idem villani
habere clamabant racione commune in bosco domini qui vocatur
Hemele et landis circumadjacentibus, ita quod nec aliquid juris
vel clamii racione commune in bosco predicto et landis
circumadjacentibus exigere, vendicare vel habere poterint in
perpetuum. Et pro hac sursum reddicione remisit eis dominus de
sua gracia speciali communam quam habuit in campo qui vocatur
Estfeld,' etc.

15. Annals of Dunstable (Annales Monast.) iii. 379, 380: 'Et
prior dicit, quod praedicta tenementa aliquo tempore fuerunt in
seisina hominum villate de Thodingdone, qui quidem homines,
unanimi voluntate et assensu, feofaverunt praedictum Simonem,
praedecessorem praedicti prioris, de praedictis tenementis,
tenendum eidem Simoni et successoribus suis in perpetuum. Jurati
dicunt... quod praedicta tenementa aliquo tempore fuerunt in
seisina praedictorum hominum villatae de Thodingdone et quod
omnes illi, qui aliquid habuerunt in praedictis duabus placiis
terrae, congregati in uno loco ad quandam curiam apud Thodingdone
tentam, unanimi assensu concesserunt praedicto Symoni, quondam
priori de Dunstaple, praedecessori prioris nunc, praedictas
placeas terrae, cum pertinentiis, tenendum eidem et successoribus
suis in perpetuum, reddendo inde eisdem hominibus et eorum
haeredibus per annum sex denarios temporibus falcacionis prati.'

16. Madox, Firma Burgi, 54, f.: '... statim visis litteris capiat
in manum Regis maneria de Cochame et Bray, quae sunt in manibus
hominum prae dictorum maneriorum, et salvo custodiat, ita quod
deinceps Regi possit respondere de firma praedictorum maneriorum
ad scaccarium.' 54, g: 'Miramur quamplurimum quod 30s. quos
monachi de Lyra de elemosyna nostra constituta singulis annis per
manus ballivorum villae vestrae, antequam predietam villam
caperitis ad firmam recipere.' Cf Exch. i. 407, a, 412, b; Rot.
Hundr. ii. 134: 'Benmore juxta Langport fuit de dominico domini
Regis pertinens ad Sumerton ubi omnes homines domini Regis de
Sumerton, Sutton, Puttem et Merne solebant communicare cum
omnimodis averiis suis, set per negligenciam villanorum de
Sumertone qui manerium tunc temporis ad firmam tenuerunt et
Henricus de Urtiaco vetus eandem moram sibi appropriavit.'

17. Gloucester Cart. iii. 181: 'Omnes isti villani tenent de
dominio quoddam pratum quod vocatur Hay continens 23 acras et
reddunt inde per annum 23 solidos 3 denarios.'

18. Cf. Prof Maitland's Introduction to the rolls of the Abbey of
Ramsey. Seld. Soc. ii. 87.

19. See the record of proceedings in the Court of the manor of
Hitchin, printed by Mr Seebohm at the end of. his volume on the
'Village Community.'

20. Introduction to Seld. Soc. ii. p. xvi.

21. Add. MSS. 6159, f 54, a: 'Visus de borchtruning.'

22. Gloucester Cart. iii. 221; Malmesbury Cart. ii. 17. Cf.
Kovalevsky, 'History of police administration in England'
(Russian), 137.

23. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 101: 'De tidinga Estone 5
solidos vel placita que orientur.' Cf Maitland, Introduction to
Seld. Soc. ii. pp. xxx, xxxiii.

24. Rot. Hundr. ii. 461, b: 'Et predicti Radulfus et Robertus
habent suas duodenas.'

25. Y.B. 21-22 Edw. I, 399: 'Presence a vewe de franc pledge
demande par la reson de la persone, non de la tenure.'

26. Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS. i. f 100, b: 'Predictus Abbas
consensit quod omnes homines eorum de predictis villis qui
fuerint duodecim annorum et amplius faciant sectam ad predictum
hundredum bis in annis perpetuum... exceptis omnibus bercariis,
carrucariis predictarum villarum et carrectariis cuiuscumque
hominis fuerint et omnibus aliis hominibus tam de predictis
villis quam aliunde qui sunt de manupastis ipsius abbatis qui
nullam sectam facient ad predictum hundredum nisi ibidem fuerint
implacitati vel alios implacitent.'

27. Glastonbury Cart., Wood MSS. i. f. 112: '... ne soit a Iapeis
le roi come tere tenaunt en diseine ou en fraunche pleivine.' f
III: 'Serment de ceux qui entrent en diseine... ne celeras chose
qe apent a la pei le roi de engleterre.'

28. Introduction to Seld. Soc. ii. p. xviii.

29. Seld. Soc. ii. p. lxx.

30. Rot. Hundr. ii. 143: 'Ermoldus de Boys dominus de AsYnton
solebat facere sectam ad Boxford ad Sockomanemot pro terra
Ricardi Serle in Cornerche, nunc illa secta subtracta per 4
annos.' The expression 'frankhalimote' occurs often, but it is
evidently an equivalent to 'libera curia,' and interchanges with
'liberum manerium.' See Rot. Hundr. ii. 69, 74, 127.

31. Eynsham Inqu., Christ Church MSS. 15, a: 'Curia debet ibi
tencri si dominus voluerit.'

32. Seld. Soc. ii. 49, etc.

33. Beaulieu Cart., Harl. MSS. 748, f 113: 'De sectatoribus
intrinsecis... et qui habent terram in campis ... et ad
forciamentum curie omnes predicti tam liberi quam alii cum 12
burgensibus vel pluribus venient ad curiam per racionabilem
summonicionem.' Glastonb. Cart., Wood MSS. i. 101, d: 'Ipse et
heredes et homines sui de Acforde facient bis in anno sectam ad
hundredum abbatis de Nywentone et ad afforciamentum curie.'

34. Rot. Hundr. ii. 710, a; Ramsey Cart. i. 491.

35. Warwick Hundred Roll, Exch. Q. R. Misc. Books, 29, p. 10:
'Quidam de tenentibus dicunt quod nunquam fecerunt sectam.'

36. Gloucester Cart. iii. 208.

37. Chapterhouse Box 152, No. 14: 'Hereditas de qua una secta
debetur.'

38. Ramsey Cart. i. 412: 'Prohibitum est in plena curia, ne quis
ducat placitatores in curiam abbatis ad impediendum vel
prorogandum judicium domini Abbatis.' Gesta Abbatum (St.
Alban's), 455: 'Non permittatur quod in halimotis adventicii
placitatores partes cum sollemnitate sustineant sed communiter
per bundos (i.e. bondos) de curia veritas inquiratur, sine
callumnia verborum.'

39. Stoneleigh Reg. f 75: 'Curia de Stonle ad quam sokemanni
faciebant sectam solebat ab antiquo teneri super montem iuxta
villam de Stonle vocatam Motstowehull, ideo sic dictum quia ibi
placitabant sed postquam abbates de Stonle habuerunt dictam
curiam et libertatem pro aysiamento tenencium et sectatorum
fecerunt domum curie in medio ville de Stonle.'

40. Selden Soc. ii. p. 67.

41. Introduction to Seld. Soc. vol. ii. p. 76.

42. The Durham halimot books (Surtees Society) supply some
instances.

43. Glastonbury Inqu. of 1189, p. 33: 'De dono 73 solidos sicut
homines ville illud statuunt.'

44. Selden Soc. ii. 36, 168.

45. Selden Society, vol. ii. 6, 7, 8.

46. Ibid. 31: 'Johannes Smert... Henricus Coterel maritavit se
sine licencia domini, ideo distringantur ad faciendum voluntatem
domini.'

47. Ibid. p. 44: 'Postea taxata fuit dicta misericordia per
Rogerum de Suhtcote, Willelmum de Scaccario, Hugonem de Cumbe
liberos sectatores curie usque ad duas marcas.'

48. Introduction to Seld. Soc. ii. p. lxv.

49. Ibid. pp. 163, 166.

50. Comp. Heussler, Institutionen des deutschen Privatrechts, i.
215; ii. 622; but I cannot agree with him as the ceremony being
employed only where there was to be a 'donatio mortis causa.' In
connexion with this the part played by the Salman is
misunderstood, as it seems to me.

51. The court rolls of Common Law manors do not think it
necessary to give the particulars about the transmission of the
rod. But the description of the practice at Stoneleigh, which,
though ancient demesne, presents manorial customs of the same
character as those followed on ordinary estates, leaves no doubt
as to the course of the proceedings. See above the passage quoted
on pp. 113-6. Comp. a parallel ceremony as to freehold, Madox.
Formulare, p. 54. The instance has been pointed out to me by Prof
Maitland.

52. See Pollock, Land-laws, 199, 2O8 (2nd ed.).

53. Seld. Soc. ii. 33; insertion of a lease in the roll. , p. 35:
'Lis conquievit inter ipsos ita quod concordati fuerunt in hac
forma de voluntate domini et in plena curia ita videlicet quod
predictus Willelmus de Baggemere concessit, remisit et quietum
clamavit pro se et heredibus suis... et hoc paratus est
verificare per recordum rotulorum seu 12 juratores ejusdem curie
per voluntatem domini et senescalli.' p. 166: 'Et sciatis quod si
haberem ad manus rotulos curie tempore Willelmi de Lewes ego
vobis certificarem et vobis monstrarem multa mirabilia non
opportune facta.'

54. These points have been conclusively settled by the masterly
investigations of Brunner, Zeugen- und Inquisitions beweis
(Abhandlungen der Wiener Akademie) and Entstehung der
Schwurgerichte.

55. Seld. Soc. ii. 41: 'Quod talis sit consuetudo manerii et quod
dicta Augnes sic venit in plena curia cum marito suo et totum jus
et clamium quod haberet vel aliquo modo habere poterit in toto
vel in parte hujus burgagii in manus domini ad opus ejusdem R.
reddidit ponit super curiam... Et 12 juratores curie,' etc.

56. I do not mean to say that the analytical distinctions which
we make between fact and law, between presenters to a tribunal
and assessors of a tribunal, were clearly perceived or
consequently carried out in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.
On the contrary there was a good deal of confusion in details,
and the instinctive logic of facts had more to do in dividing and
settling institutions than conscious reasoning. Juries and
assizes of the Royal Courts might be called upon incidentally to
decide legal questions, but, in the aggregate, there can be
hardly a doubt that the sworn inquests before the Royal judges
were working to provide the Courts with a knowledge of local
facts and perhaps conditions, while the manorial court gave legal
decisions.

57. Seld. Soc. ii. 41: 'Et 12 juratores curie... dicunt super
sacramentum suum quod predicta Agnes venit in plena curia et
totum jus et clamium quod aliquo modo habere potuit in dicto
burgagio in manus domini reddidit.' 42: 'Et juratores... dicunt
super sacramentum suum quod Juliana per quam dicta Matildis petit
hujusmodi messuagium nunquam fuit seisita de ipso mesuagio, set
Willelmus Ponfrayt maritus ipsius Juliane, unde secundum
Consuetudinem manerii Juliana post mortem W. mariti sui nichil
poterit clamare nisi dotem in huiusmodi mesuagium nisi fuerit in
plena curia una cum marito suo de huiusmodi perquisito conjunctim
seisita.' Cf p. 40: 'Unde Willelmus pro premissis in plena curia
recordatis et inrotulatis dat domino 10 solidos.'

58. 4 Inst. 270, cap. 58.

59. Y.B. 11/12 Edw. III (Rolls Ser.), p. 325, sqq.: '... les
suters de Cokam firent venir plein record... les suiters
agarderent seisine de terre... il firent faux judgement...
Stonore: Cest usage est molt encontre la ley, qe cesti qe doit
tenir les plees ne poet pas recorder un attourne en ple qe serra
plede devant lui mesme. Trew: Nous voloms averer qe les usages
sont tiels, qe le seneschal de la court poet resceivir un
attourne, issint qil dei entre les suiters coment il ad resceu un
tiel attourne en tiel ple a la proschein court apres la resceite,
et vous dions qe cesti Adam qe respondi par attourne fut resceu
attourne en la manere.' Cf Lysons, Magna Brit. i. 266. Y.B. 3
Edw. III. 29: 'Rob. le W. porta Son brief de faux judgement
devers un home et Sa feme, et apres le record avowe par les
suters de la court de Bloxham... les suters agarderent qe Robert
et ses plegis fuerent in le mercie, et quod narratio sua fuit
iniqua, et recordarent un nonsuit la ou la partie fust en court,
per qe nous prioms qe cel record soit revers.' Viner, Abr. ii. A.
5, O. 6.

60. Y.B. 11/12 Edw. III (Rolls Ser.), p. 517: 'Trew. Le brief
suppose qe le defendant tint le ple et qil fut baillif, ou
seuters tenent le ple qe ont record; jugement de bref. Et non
allocetur, quia ipse tenet curiam et ei dirigitur breve.'

61. Note Book of Bracton, pl. 1122: 'Preceptum fuit ballivis de
Kingestona quod in plena curia sua de Kingestona recordari
facerent loquelam... et recordum venire facerent per quatuor qui
recordo illi interfuerunt, etc.... Ideo balliui inde sine die et
Radulfus in misericordia.' 834: 'Preceptum fuit vicecomiti quod
preciperet balliuis manerii Domini Regis de Haueringes quod
recordari facerent in curia domini Regis de Haueringes loquelam
que fuit in eadem curia per breve domini Regis... unde predicte
Agnes et Dyonisia queste fuerunt falsum sibi factum fuisse
iudicium in eadem curia et quod diligenter inquirerent qui
fuerunt illi de maneriis Domini Regis de Writele, Neuport et
Hatfeuld qui interfuerunt predicto iudicio faciendo simul cum
hominibus Dolnini Regis de Haueringes et illos venire facerent
aput Aueringe ad diem quem predicti homines et balliui Haueringe
predicti loquelam recordari facerent, ita quod tam predicti
ballivi et homines de Haueringe quam predicti homines de
predictis maneriis recordum illud haberent coram justiciariis
aput Westmonasterium per 4 legales homines de manerio de
Aueringes et 6 de maneriis de Writele, de Neuport et de
Hatfeuldia ex illis qui recordo illi interfuerunt....
Consideratum est quod illi de predictis maneriis falsum fecerunt
iudicium et ideo omnes de manerio in misericordia preter
Willelmum Dun... qui noluerunt consentire judicio.'

62. Stoneleigh Reg., f 75: 'Item si aliquis deforciatur de
tenemento suo et tulerit breve Regis clausum ballivis manerii
versus deforciantes, dictum breve non debet frangi nisi in
curia... Item quando ballivus aliquem summoneat ex precepto
curie, tunc assumet secum duos sokemannos quos voluerit pro
testanda summonicione predicta... Item qualitercumque placitum
terminetur in curia sive in deficiendo in lege vadiata sive per
non defensionem dampna sunt semper taxanda per curiam... Item
debent sokemanni respondere per 12 coram justiciariis et
coronatore domini Regis. Et ipsi dabunt iudicia eurie de
Stonle... Item nullus adiudicabitur tenens terre nisi qui a curia
tenens acceptatur per fidelitatem et alias consuetudines licet
tenens extra curiam aliquem feoffaverit per cartam vel sine
carta.'

63. Selden Soc. ii. 122: 'Capiatur in manum domini quarta pars
unius rode prati jacens in Smalemade quam Rogerus Greylong
vendidit Nicholao le Neuman sine licencia curie.' Cf 112:
'Praesentatum est quod Hugo Graeleng solvit sursum extra curiam
ad opus Thome Aspelon de Broucton liberi unam portionem cuiusdam
mesuagii... Ideo preceptum quod capiatur in manum domini.'

64. We hear constantly such phrases as the following: 'Quod
iuncta est secum vocat rotulos ad warrantum ; ponit se super
rotulos.' But we have also: 'Et partes pecierunt quod inquiratur
per villatam que dixit quod sufficientem duxit sectam. Postea
testificatum fuit per totam villatam quod dictus Nicolaus
tenebatur dicto Bartholomeo in predictis 5d.' (Seld. Soc. ii.
118). In one case the party relies on the evidence of the
Register of Ramsey (p. 111), which was compiled, of course, on
the basis of sworn inquests held in the different manors.

65. Seld. Soc. ii. 112.

66. Augment. Court Rolls, Portf xxiii. No. 94, m. 3: 'Quod quidem
per senescallum concessum est eisdem' (the entry is omitted in Mr
Maitland's publication).

67. Seld. Soc. ii. III.

68. Augment. Court Rolls, Portf xxiii. No. 94, m. 25 v. (the
entry is not in the Selden volume): 'Margeria que fuit uxor
Nicholai de Aula de Kingesripton venit et petit unum parvum
mesuagium existens in manu domini quod quondam fuit de mesuagio
Suo proprio et quod ipsa Margeria singulis annis defendit versus
dominum Abbatem, unde petit quod ius suum super hoc inquiratur
per bonam inquisicionem. Que venit et dicit... Et ideo preceptum
eidem quod inde habeat colloquium cum domino. Et postea colloquio
habito cum domino concessum est ei quod pacifice habeat faciendo
seruicia inde debita et consueta.'

69. Selden Soc. ii. 127.

70. Selden Soc. ii. 173.

71. Ibid. 94: 'Reginaldus fil. Benedicti injuste dedicit esse
unus de 12 jurator ibus allegando libertatem... Dicunt eciam quod
Willelmus de Bernewell injuste allegat libertatem propter quam
contradicit esse unus de juratis.' Cf Cor. Rege incerti anni
Johann. 5: Predecessores sui et ipse tenuerunt liberum tcnementum
et quod quidam ex juratis sunt consuetudinarii monialium.' Cor.
Rege Pascha, 9 Edw. I, 34, b: '(Amerciamentum sochemanni) per
pares vel per liberos de curia et vicinos ad curiam venientes.'

72. Hereford Rolls (Bodleian), 12: 'Compertum per libere tenentes
quod custumarii falso presentant... ideo custumarii in
misericordia.' Rot. Hundr. ii. 469: 'Quatuor homines et
prepositus presentabant defaltas predictis liberis hominibus et
ipsi liberi presentabant ballivis.'

73. Seld. Soc. ii. 44.

74. Introduction to Seld. Soc. ii. p. lxx.

75. Seld. Soc. ii. 67.

76. Ibid. 164.

77. See as to all this Mr Maitland's Introduction to the Selden
volume (ii), pp lxix, lxx.

78. Introd. to Selden Soc. ii. p. lxi, and following. Comp. Coram
Rege, 27 Henry III, 2: 'Dicunt quod non est aliquis liber homo in
eodem manerio nisi Willelmus filius Radulfi qui respondet infra
corpus comnitatus.'

79. Y.B. 21-22 Edw. I, 526 (Rolls Series).

80. Comp. Mr Maitland in his often-quoted Introduction, p. lxxi.

81. Introduction to Seld. Soc. ii. p. lxvi.

82. Archaeologia, vol. 47, p. 27, and following.

83. Rot. Hundr., Cartulary of Ramsey, i.

84. Gomme, Village Community, 162, etc.

85. Cart. of Malmesbury (Rolls Ser.), ii, 221.

86. A very good case in point is presented by Hitchin, because
the boundaries and the jurisdiction of the manor comprise a great
number of villages and hamlets which managed their open fields
quite independently of the central township of Hitchin, and could
not but do so, as they lay quite apart and a good way from it, as
may be seen on the Ordnance Map. And still the manor comprises,
the township of Hitchin and the hamlet of Walsworth, the lesser
manors of the Rectory of Hitchin, of Moremead, otherwise
Charlton, and of the Priory of the Biggin, being comprehended
within the boundaries of the said manor of Hitchin, which also
extends into the hamlets of Langley and Preston in the said
parish of Hitchin, and into the parishes of Ickleford, Ipolitts,
Kimpton, Kingswalden, and Offley.' (Seebohm, Village Community,
443, 444:) As Mr Seebohm tells me, the con. trast between the
central portion, that of the township, managed in one open field
system, and the outlying parts, is probably reflected in the
curious denominations of the manor as Portman and Foreign. It is
well known how frequently our surveys mention hamlets; in many
cases these annexes of townships arc so widely scattered, that it
would be impossible to suppose one open field system for them.

87. Seld. Soc. ii. 68, 90.

88. lbid. 162, I66.

89. Introd. to Seld. Soc. ii. p. xxxix.


Chapter 6

The Manor and the Village Community

Conclusions

    If we look at the village life of mediaeval England, not for
the purpose of dissecting it into its constitutive elements, but
in order that we may detect the principles that hold it together
and organise it as a whole, we shall be struck by several
features which make it quite unlike the present arrangement of
rural society. Even a casual observer will not fail to perceive
the contrast which it presents to that free play of individual
interests and that undisputed supremacy of the state in political
matters, which are so characteristic of the present time. And on
the other hand there is just as sharp a contrast between the
manorial system and a system of tribal relationships based on
blood relationship and its artificial outgrowths; and yet again
it may be contrasted with a village community built upon the
basis of equal partnership among free members. It is evident, at
the same time, that such differences, deep though they are,
cannot be treated as primordial and absolute divisions. All these
systems are but stages of development, after all, and the most
important problem concerning them is the problem of their origins
and mutual relations. The main road towards its solution lies
undoubtedly through the demesne of strictly historical
investigation. Should we succeed in tracing with clearness the
consecutive stages of the process and the intermediate links
between them, the most important part of the work will have been
done. This is simple enough, and seems hardly worth mentioning.
But things are not so plain as they look.
    To begin with, even a complete knowledge of the sequence of
events would not be sufficient since it would merely present a
series of arrangements following upon each other in time and not
a chain of causes and effects. We cannot exempt ourselves from
the duty of following up the investigation by speculations as to
the agencies and motives which produced the changes. But even
apart from the necessity of taking up ultimately what one may
call the dynamic thread of the inquiry, there is considerable
difficulty. In obtaining a tolerably settled sequence of general
facts to start with. Any one who has had to do with such studies
knows how scanty the information about the earlier phenomena is
apt to be, how difficult it is to distinguish between the main
forms and the variations which mediate and lead from one to
another. The task of settling a definite theory of development
would not have been so arduous, and the conflicting views of
scholars would not have suggested such directly opposite results,
if the early data had not been so scattered and so ambiguous. The
state of the existing material requires a method of treatment
which may to some extent supplement the defects in the evidence.
The later and well-recorded period ought to be made to supply
additional information as to the earlier and imperfectly
described ones. It is from this point of view that we must once
more survey the ground that we have been exploring in the
foregoing pages.
    The first general feature that meets our eye is the
cultivation of arable on the open-field system: the land tilled
is not parcelled up by enclosures, but lies open through the
whole or the greater part of the year; the plot held and tilled
by a single cultivator is not a compact piece, but is composed of
strips strewn about in all parts of the village fields and
intermixed with patches or strips possessed by fellow villagers.
Now, both facts are remarkable. They do not square at all with
the rules and tendencies of private ownership and individualistic
husbandry. The individual proprietor will naturally try to fence
in his plot against strangers, to set up hedges and walls that
would render trespassing over his ground difficult, if not
impossible. And he could not but consider intermixture as a
downright nuisance, and strive by all means in his power to get
rid of it. Why should he put up with the inconvenience of holding
a bundle of strips lying far apart from each other, more or less
dependent because of their narrowness on the dealings of
neighbours, who may be untidy and unthrifty? Instead of having
one block of soil to look to and a comparatively short boundary
to maintain, every occupier has a number of scattered pieces to
care for, and neighbours, who not only surround, but actually cut
up, dismember, invade his tenement. The open-field system stands
in glaring contradiction with the present state of private rights
in Western Europe, and no wonder that it has been abolished
everywhere, except on some few tracts of land kept back by
geographical conditions from joining the movement of modern
civilisation. And even in mediaeval history we perceive that the
arrangement does not keep its hold on those occasions when the
rights of individuals. are strongly felt: it gives way on the
demesne farm and on newly reclaimed land.
    At the same time, the absence of perpetual enclosures and the
intermixture of strips are in a general way quite prevalent at
the present time in the East of Europe. What conditions do they
correspond to? Why have nations living in very different climates
and on very different soils adopted the open-field system again
and again in spite of all inconveniences and without having
borrowed it from each other?
    There is absolutely nothing in the manorial arrangement to
occasion this curious system. It is not the fact that peasant
holdings are made subservient to the wants of the lord's estate,
that can explain why early agriculture is in the main a culture
of open fields and involves a marvellous intermixture of rights.
The absence of any logical connexion between these two things
settles the question as to historical influence. The open-field
arrangement is, I repeat it, no lax or indifferent system, but
stringent and highly peculiar. And so it cannot but proceed from
some pressing necessity.
    It is evidently communal in its very essence. Every trait
that makes it strange and inconvenient from the point of view of
individualistic interests, renders it highly appropriate to a
state of things ruled by communal conceptions. It is difficult to
prevent trespasses upon an open plot, but the plot must be open,
if many people besides the tiller have rights over it, pasture
rights, for instance. It involves great loss of time and
difficulty of supervision to work a property that lies in thirty
separate pieces all over the territory of a village, but such a
disposition is remarkably well adapted for the purpose of
assigning to fellow villagers equal shares in the arable. It is
grievous to depend on your neighbours for the proceeds and
results of your own work, but the tangled web of rights and
boundaries becomes simple if one considers it as the management
of land by an agricultural community which has allotted the
places where its members have to work. Rights of common usage,
communal apportionment of shares in the arable, communal
arrangement of ways and times of cultivation -- these are the
chief features of open-field husbandry, and all point to one
source -- the village community. It is not a manorial
arrangement, though it may be adapted to the manor. If more proof
were needed we have only to notice the fact, that open-field
cultivation is in full work in countries where the manor has not
been established, and in times when it has not as yet been
formed. We may take India or tribal italy as instances.
    The system as exhibited in England is linked to a division
into holdings which gives it additional significance. The holding
of the English peasant is distinguished by two characteristic
features: it is a unit which as a rule does not admit of
division; it is equal to other units in the same village. There
is no need to point out at length to what extent these features
are repugnant to an individualistic order of things. They belong
to a rural community. But even in a community the arrangement
adopted seems peculiar. We must not disregard some important
contradictions. The holdings are not all equal, but are grouped
on a scale of three, four, five divisions -- virgates, bovates,
and cotlands for instance. And the question may be put: why
should an artificial arrangement contrived for the sake of
equality start from a flagrant inequality which looks the more
unjust, because instead of those intermediate quantities which
shade off into each other in our modern society we meet with
abrupt transitions? A second difficulty may be found in the
unchangeable nature of the holding. The equal virgates are in
fact an obstacle to a proportionate repartition of the land among
the population, because there is nothing to insure that the
differences of growth and requirements arising between different
families will keep square with the relations of the holdings. In
one case the family plot may become too large, in another too
scanty an allowance for the peasant household working and feeding
on that plot. And ultimately, as we have seen, the indivisible
nature of the holding looks to some extent like an artificial
one, and one that is more apparent than real. Not to speak of
that provincial variation, the Kentish system of gavelkind, we
notice that even in the rest of England large units are breaking
into fractions, and that very often the supposed unity is only a
thin covering for material division. Why should it be kept up
then?
    Such serious contradictions and incongruities lead us
forcibly to the conclusion that we have a state of transition
before us, an institution that is in some degree distorted and
warped from its original shape. In this respect the manorial
element comes strongly to the fore. The rough scale of holdings
would be grossly against justice for purely communal purposes,
but it is not only the occupation of land, but also the incidence
of services that is regulated by it. People would not so much
complain of holding five acres instead of thirty, if they had to
work and to pay six times less in the first case. Again, a
division of tenements fixed once and for all in spite of changes
in the numbers and wants of the population, looks anything but
convenient. At the same time the fixed scheme of the division
offers a ready basis for computing rents and assessing labour
services. And for the sake of the lord it was advisable to
preserve outward unity even when the system was actually breaking
up: for dealings with the manorial administration virgates
remained undivided, even when they were no longer occupied as
integral units.
    Although the holdings are undoubtedly made subservient to the
wants of the manor, it would be going a great deal too far to
suppose that they were formed with the primary object of meeting
those wants. If we look closer into the structure we find that it
is based on the relation between the plough-team and the arable,
a relation which is more or less constant and explains the
gradations and the mode of apportionment. The division of the
land is no indefinite or capricious one, because the land has to
be used in certain quantities, and smaller quantities or
fractions would disarrange the natural connexion between the soil
and the forces that make it productive. The society of those days
appears as an agricultural mass consisting not of individual
persons or natural families, but of groups possessed of the
implements for tilling the land. Its unit of reckoning is not the
man, but the plough-beast. As the model plough-team happens to be
a very large one, the large unit of the hide is adopted. Lesser
quantities may be formed also, but still they correspond to
aliquot parts of the full team of eight oxen. Thus the possible
gradations are not so many or so gentle as in our own time, but
are in the main the half plough-land, the virgate, and the
oxgang. What else there is can be only regarded as subsidiary to
the main arrangement: the cotters and crofters are not tenants in
the fields, but gardeners, labourers, craftsmen, herdsmen, and
the like. If the country had not been mainly cultivated as
ploughland, but had borne vines or olives or crops that required
no cumbersome implements, but intense and individualistic labour,
one may readily believe that the holdings would have been more
compact, and also more irregular.
    The principles of coaration give an insight into the nature
of these English village communities. They did not aim at
absolute equality; they subordinated the personal element to the
agricultural one, if we may use that expression. Not so much an
apportionment of individual claims was effected as an
apportionment of the land to the forces at work upon it. This
observation helps us to get rid of the anomalies with which we
started: the holding was united because an ox could not be
divided; the plots might be smaller or larger, but everywhere
they were connected with a scheme of which the plough-team was
the unit. An increasing population had to take care of itself,
and to try to fit itself into the existing divisions by family
arrangements, marriage, adoption, reclaiming of new land,
employment for hire, by-professions, and emigration. The manorial
factor comes in to make everYthing artificially regular and
rigid.
    If we examine the open-field system and its relation to the
holdings of individual peasants, we see, as it were, the
framework of a peasant community that has swerved from the path
of its original development. The gathering of scattered and
intermixed strips into holdings points to practices of division
or allotment: these practices are the very essence of the whole,
and they alone can explain the glaring inconveniencies of
scattered ownership coupled with artificial concentration. But
redivision of the arable is not seen in the documents of our
period. There is no shifting of strips, no changes in the
quantities allotted to each family. Everything goes by heredity
and settled rules of family property, as if the husbandry was not
arranged for communal ownership and re-allotment. I should like
to compare the whole to the icebound surface of a northern sea:
it is not smooth, although hard and immoveable, and the hills and
hollows of the uneven plain remind one of the billows that rolled
when it was yet unfrozen.
    The treatment of the arable gives the clue to all other sides
of the subject. The rights of common usage of meadow and pasture
carry us back to practices which must have been originally
applied to arable also. When one reads of a meadow being cut up
into strips and partitioned for a year among the members of the
community by regular rotation or by lot, one does not see why
only the grass land should be thus treated while there is no
reallotment of the arable plots. As for the waste, it does not
even admit of set boundaries, and the only possible means of
apportioning its use is to prescribe what and how many heads of
cattle each holding may send out upon it. The close affinity
between the different parts of the village soil is especially
illustrated by the fact, that the open-field arable is treated as
common through the greater part of the year. Such facts are more
than survivals, more than stray relics of a bygone time. The
communal element of English mediaeval husbandry becomes
conspicuous in the individualistic elements that grow out of it.
    The question has been asked whether we ought not to regard
these communal arrangements as derived from the exclusive right
of ownership, and the power of coercion vested in the lord of the
soil. I think that many features in the constitution of the
thirteenth century manor show its gradual growth and
comparatively recent origin. The so-called manorial system
consists, in truth, in the peculiar connexion between two
agrarian bodies, the settlement of villagers cultivating their
own fields, and the home-estate of the lord tacked on to this
settlement and dependent on the work supplied by it. I take only
the agrarian side, of course, and do not mention the political
protection which stands more or less as an equivalent for the
profits received by the lord from the peasantry. And as for the
agrarian arrangement, we ought to keep it quite distinct from
forms which are sometimes confused with it through loose
terminology. A community paying taxes, farmers leasing land for
rent, labourers without independent husbandry of their own, may
be all subjected to some lord, but their subjection is not
manorial. Two elements are necessary to constitute the manorial
arrangement, the peasant village and the home farm worked by its
help.
    If we turn now to the evidence of the feudal period, we shall
see that the labour-service relation, although very marked and
prevalent in most cases, is by no means the only one that should
be taken into account. In a large number of cases the relation
between lord and peasants resolves itself into money payments,
and this is only another way of saying that the manorial group
disaggregates itself. The peasant holding gets free from the
obligation of labouring under the supervision of the bailiff, and
the home estate may be either thrown over or managed by the help
of hired servants and labourers.
    But alongside of these facts, testifying to a progress
towards modern times, we find survivals of a more ancient order
of things, quite as incompatible with manorial husbandry. Instead
of performing work on the demesne, the peasantry are sometimes
made to collect and furnish produce for the lord's table and his
other wants. They send bread, ale, sheep, chicken, cheese, etc.,
sometimes to a neighbouring castle and sometimes a good way off.
When we hear of the firma unius noctis, paid to the king's
household by a borough or a village, we have to imagine a
community standing entirely by itself and taxed to a certain
tribute, without any superior land estate necessarily engrafted,
upon it; a home farm may or may not be close by, but its
management is not dependent on the customary work of the vill
(consuetudines villae), and the connexion between the two is
casual. The facts of which I am speaking are certainly of rare
occurrence and dying out, but they are very interesting from a
historical point of view, they throw light on a condition of
things preceding the manorial system, and characterised by a
large over-lordship exacting tribute, and not cultivating land by
help of the peasantry.
    We come precisely to the same conclusion by another way. The
feudal landlord is represented in the village by his demesene
land, and by the servants acting as his helpers in
administration. Now, the demesne land is often found intermixed
with the strips of the peasantry. This seems particularly fitted
for a time when the peasantry did not collect to work on a
separate home farm, but simply devoted one part of the labour on
their own ground to the use of the lord. What I mean is, that if
a demesne consisted of, say, every fifth acre in the village
fields, the teams of four virgaters composing the plough would
traverse this additional acre after going over four of their own
instead of being called up under the supervision of the bailiff,
to do work on an independent estate. The work performed by the
peasants when the demesne is still in intermixture with the
village land, appears as an intermediate stage between the
tribute paid by a practically self-dependent community, and the
double husbandry of a manorial estate linked to a village.
    Another feature of transition is perceivable in the history
of the class of servants or ministers who collect and supervise
the dues and services of the peasants. The feudal arrangement is
quite as much characterised by the existence of these middlemen
as modern life by the agreements and money dealings which have
rendered it useless. In the period preceding the manorial age we
see fewer officers, and their interference in the life of the
community is but occasional. The gathering of tribute, the
supervision of a few labour duties in addition, did not require a
large staff of ministers. It was in the interest of the lord to
dispense as much as possible with their costly help, and to throw
what obligations there were to be performed on the community
itself. It seems to me that the feudal age has preserved several
traces of institutions belonging to that period of transition.
The older surveys, especially the Kentish ones, show a very
remarkable development of carriage duties which must have been
called forth by the necessity of sending produce to the lord's
central halls or courts, while the home farms were still few and
small. The riding bailiffs appear in ancient documents in a
position which is gradually modified as time goes on. They begin
by forming a very conspicuous class among the tenants, in fact
the foremost rank of the peasantry. These radmen, radulfs,
rodknights, riders, are privileged people, and mostly rank with
the free tenants, but they are selected from among the villagers,
and very closely resemble the hundredors, whose special duties
have kept up their status among the general decay. In later
times, in the second half of the thirteenth century and in the
fourteenth, it would be impossible to distinguish such a class of
riding tenants. They exist here and there, but in most cases
their place has been taken by direct dependents of the lord.
Besides, as the home-farm has developed on every manor, their
office has lost some of the importance it had at a time when
there was a good deal of business to transact in the way of
communicating between the villages and the few central courts to
which rents had to be carried. And, lastly, I may remind the
reader of the importance attached in some surveys to the
supervision of the best tenants over the rest at the boon works.
The socmen, or free tenants, or holders of full lands, as the
case may be, have to ride out with rods in their hands to inspect
the people cutting the corn or making hay. These customs are
mostly to be found in manors with a particularly archaic
constitution. They occur very often on ancient demesne. And I
need hardly say that they point to a still imperfect development
of the ministerial class. The village is already set to work for
the lord, but it manages this work as much as possible by itself,
with hardly any interference from foreign overseers.
    One part of the village population is altogether outside the
manorial labour intercourse between village and demesne. The
freeholders may perform some labour-services, but the home-farm
could never depend on them, and when such services are mentioned,
they are merely considered as a supplement to the regular duties
of the servile holders. At the same time, the free tenants are
members of the village community, engrained in it by their
participation in all the eventualities of open field life, by
their holdings in the arable, by their use of the commons. This
shows, again, that the manorial element is superimposed on the
communal, and not the foundation of it. I shall not revert to my
positive arguments in favour of the existence of ancient freehold
by the side of tenements that have become freehold by exemption
from servile duties. But I may be allowed to point out in this
place, that negatively the appearance of free elements among the
peasantry presents a most powerful check to the theory of a
servile origin of the community: it throws the burden of proof on
those who contend for such an origin as against the theory of a
free village feudalized in process of time.
    In a sense the partizans of the servile community are in the
same awkward position in respect to the manorial court. Its body
of suitors may have consisted to a great extent of serfs, but
surely it must have contained a powerful free admixture also,
because out of serfdom could hardly have arisen all the
privileges and rights which make it a constitutional
establishment by the side of the lord. The suitors are the judges
in litigation, the conveyancing practice proceeds from the
principle of communal testimony, and in matters of husbandry,
custom and self-government prevail against any capricious change
or unprecedented exaction. And it has to be noticed that the will
and influence of the lord is much more distinct and overbearing
in the documents of the later thirteenth and of the fourteenth
century, than in the earlier records; one more hint, that the
feudal conception of society took some time to push back older
notions, which implied a greater liberty of the folk in regard to
their rulers.
    Whichever way we may look, one and the same observation is
forced upon us: the communal organisation of the peasantry is
more ancient and more deeply laid than the manorial order. Even
the feudal period that has formed the immediate subject of our
study shows everywhere traces of a peasant class living and
working in economically self-dependent communities under the
loose authority of a lord, whose claims may proceed from
political sources and affect the semblance of ownership, but do
not give rise to the manorial connexion between estate and
village.