Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of
England
by F.W. Maitland


Essay One

Domesday Book

    At midwinter in the year 1085 William the Conqueror wore his
crown at Gloucester and there he had deep speech with his wise
men. The outcome of that speech was the mission throughout all
England of 'barons,' 'legates' or 'justices' charged with the
duty of collecting from the verdicts of the shires, the hundreds
and the vills a descriptio of his new realm. The outcome of that
mission was the descriptio preserved for us in two manuscript
volumes, which within a century after their making had already
acquired the name of Domesday Book. The second of those volumes,
sometimes known as Little Domesday, deals with but three
counties, namely Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, while the first
volume comprehends the rest of England. Along with these we must
place certain other documents that are closely connected with the
grand inquest. We have in the so-called Inquisitio Comitatus
Cantabrigiae, a copy, an imperfect copy, of the verdicts
delivered by the Cambridgeshire jurors, and this, as we shall
hereafter see, is a document of the highest value, even though in
some details it is not always very trustworthy.(1*) We have in
the so-called Inquisitio Eliensis an account of the estates of
the Abbey of Ely in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and other counties,
an account which has as its ultimate source the verdicts of the
juries and which contains some particulars which were omitted
from Domesday Book.(2*) We have in the so-called Exon Domesday an
account of Cornwall and Devonshire and of certain lands in
Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire; this also seems to have been
constructed directly or indirectly out of the verdicts delivered
in those counties, and it contains certain particulars about the
amount of stock upon the various estates which are omitted from
what, for distinction's sake, is sometimes called the Exchequer
Domesday.(3*) At the beginning of this Exon Domesday we have
certain accounts relating to the payment of a great geld,
seemingly the geld of six shillings on the hide that William
levied in the winter of 1083-4, two years before the deep speech
at Gloucester.(4*) Lastly in the Northamptonshire Geld Roll,(5*)
we have some precious information about fiscal affairs as they
stood some few years before the survey.(6*)
    Such in brief are the documents out of which, with some small
help from the Anglo-Saxon dooms and land-books, from the charters
of Norman kings and from the so-called Leges of the Conqueror,
the Confessor and Henry I, some future historian may be able to
reconstruct the land-law which obtained in the conquered England
of 1086, and (for our records frequently speak of the tempus
Regis Edwardi) the unconquered England of 1065. The reflection
that but for the deep speech at Gloucester, but for the lucky
survival of two or three manuscripts, he would have known next to
nothing of that law, will make him modest and cautious. At the
present moment, though much has been done towards forcing
Domesday Book to yield its meaning, some of the legal problems
that are raised by it, especially those which concern the time of
King Edward, have hardly been stated, much less solved. It is
with some hope of stating, with little hope of solving, them that
we begin this essay. If only we can ask the right questions we
shall have done something for a good end. If English history is
to be understood, the law of Domesday Book must be mastered. We
have here an absolutely unique account of feudalism in two
different stages of its growth, the more trustworthy, though the
more puzzling, because it gives us particulars and not
generalities.
    Puzzling enough it certainly is, and this for many reasons.
Our task may be the easier if we state some of those reasons at
the outset.
    To say that Domesday Book is no collection of laws or
treatise on law would be needless. Very seldom does it state any
rules in general terms, and when it does so we shill usually find
cause for believing that this rule is itself an exception, a
local custom, a provincial privilege. Thus, if we are to come by
general rules, we must obtain them inductively by a comparison of
many thousand particular instances. But further, Domesday Book is
no register of title, no register of all those rights and facts
which constitute the system of landholdership. One great purpose
seems to mould both its form and its substance; it is a
geld-book.
    When Duke William became king of the English, he found (so he
might well think) among the most valuable of his newly acquired
regalia a right to levy a land-tax under the name of geld or
danegeld. A detailed history of that tax cannot be written. It is
under the year 991 that our English chronicle first mentions a
tribute paid to the Danes;(7*) ?0,000 was then paid to them. In
994 the yet larger sum of ?6,000(8*) was levied. In 1002 the
tribute had risen to ?4,000,(9*) in 1007 to ?0,000;(10*) in
1009 East Kent paid ?,000;(11*) ?1,000 was raised in 1014;(12*)
in 1018 Cnut when newly crowned took ?2,000 besides ?1,000 paid
by the Londoners;(13*) in 1040 Harthacnut took ?1,099 besides a
sum of ?1,048 that was paid for thirty-two ships.(14*) With a
Dane upon the throne, this tribute seems to have become an
occasional war-tax. How often it was levied we cannot tell; but
that it was levied more than once by the Confessor is not
doubtful.(15*) We are told that he abolished it in or about the
year 1051, some eight or nine years after his accession, some
fifteen before his death. No sooner was William crowned than 'he
laid on men a geld exceeding stiff.' In the next year 'he set a
mickle geld' on the people. In the winter of 1083-4 he raised a
geld of 72 pence (6 Norman shillings) upon the hide. That this
tax was enormously heavy is plain. Taking one case with another,
it would seem that the hide was frequently supposed to be worth
about ? a year and there were many hides in England that were
worth far less. But grievous as was the tax which immediately
preceded the making of the survey, we are not entitled to infer
that it was of unprecedented severity. It brought William but
?15 or thereabouts from Dorset and ?10 or thereabouts from
Somerset.(16*) Worcestershire was deemed to contain about 1200
hides and therefore, even if none of its hides had been exempted,
it would have contributed but ?60. If the huge sums mentioned by
the chronicler had really been exacted, and that too within the
memory of men who were yet living, William might well regard the
right to levy a geld as the most precious jewel in his English
crown. To secure a due and punctual payment of it was worth a
gigantic effort, a survey such as had never been made and a
record such as had never been penned since the grandest days of
the old Roman Empire. But further, the assessment of the geld
sadly needed reform. Owing to one cause and another, owing to
privileges and immunities that had been capriciously granted,
owing also, so we think, to a radically vicious method of
compiling the geldable areas of counties and hundreds, the old
assessment was full of anomalies and iniquities. Some estates
were over-rated, others were scandalously under-rated. That
William intended to correct the old assessment, or rather to
sweep it away and put a new assessment in its stead, seems highly
probable, though it has not been proved that either he or his
sons accomplished this feat.(17*) For this purpose, however,
materials were to be collected which would enable the royal
officers to decide what changes were necessary in order that all
England might be taxed in accordance with a just and uniform
plan. Concerning each estate they were to know the number of
geldable units ('hides' or 'carucates') for which it had answered
in King Edward's day, they were to know the number of plough oxen
that there were upon it, they were to know its true annual value,
they were to know whether that value had been rising or falling
during the past twenty years. Domesday Book has well been called
a rate book, and the task of spelling out a land law from the
particulars that it states is not unlike the task that would lie
before any one who endeavoured to construct our modern law of
real property out of rate books, income tax returns and similar
materials. All the lands, all the land-holders of England may be
brought before us, but we are told only of such facts, such
rights, such legal relationships as bear on the actual or
potential payment of geld. True, that some minor purposes may be
achieved by the king's commissioners, though the quest for geld
is their one main object. About the rents and renders due from
his own demesne manors the king may thus obtain some valuable
information. Also he may learn, as it were by the way, whether
any of his barons or other men have presumed to occupy, to
'invade,' lands which he has reserved for himself. Again, if
several persons are in dispute about a tract of ground, the
contest may be appeased by the testimony of shire and hundred, or
may be reserved for the king's audience; at any rate the
existence of an outstanding claim may be recorded by the royal
commissioners. Here and there the peculiar customs of a shire or
a borough will be stated, and incidentally the services that
certain tenants owe to their lords may be noticed. But all this
is done sporadically and unsystematically. Our record is no
register of title, it is no feodary, it is no custumal, it is no
rent roll; it is a tax book, a geld book.
    We say this, not by way of vain complaint against its
meagreness, but because in our belief a care for geld and for all
that concerns the assessment and payment of geld colours far more
deeply than commentators have usually supposed the information
that is given to us about other matters. We should not be
surprised if definitions and distinctions which at first sight
have little enough to do with fiscal arrangements, for example
the definition of a manor and the distinction between a villein
and a 'free man', involved references to the apportionment and
the levy of the land-tax. Often enough it happens that legal
ideas of a very general kind are defined by fiscal rules; for
example, our modern English idea of 'occupation' has become so
much part and parcel of a system of assessment that lawyers are
always ready to argue that a certain man must be an 'occupier'
because such men as he are rated to the relief of the poor. It
seems then a fair supposition that any line that Domesday Book
draws systematically and sharply, whether it be between various
classes of men or between various classes of tenements, is
somehow or another connected with the main theme of that
book-geldability, actual or potential.
    Since we have mentioned the stories told by the chronicler
about the tribute paid to the Danes, we may make a comment upon
them which will become of importance hereafter. Those stories
look true, and they seem to be accepted by modern historians. Had
we been told just once that some large number of pounds, for
example ?0,000, was levied, or had the same round sum been
repeated in year after year, we might well have said that such
figures deserved no attention, and that by ?0,000 our annalist
merely meant a big sum of money. But, as will have been seen, he
varies his figures from year to year and is not always content
with a round number; he speaks of ?1,099 and of ?1,048.(18*) We
can hardly therefore treat his statements as mere loose talk and
are reluctantly driven to suppose that they are true or near the
truth. If this be so, then, unless some discovery has yet to be
made in the history of money, no word but 'appalling' will
adequately describe the taxation of which he speaks. We know
pretty accurately the amount of money that became due when Henry
I or Henry II imposed a danegeld of two shillings on the hide.
The following table constructed from the pipe rolls will show the
sum charged against each county. We arrange the shires in the
order of their indebtedness, for a few of the many caprices of
the allotment will thus be visible, and our table may be of use
to us in other contexts.(18*)


Approximate Charge of a Danegeld of Two Shillings on the Hide in
the Middle of the Twelfth Century

                        ?

Wiltshire               389
Norfolk                 330
Somerset                278
Lincoln                 266
Dorset                  248
Oxford                  242
Essex                   236
Suffolk                 235
Sussex                  210
Bucks                   205
Berks                   202
Gloucester              190
S. Hants                180
Surrey                  177
York                    160
Warwick                 129
N. Hants.               120
Salop                   118
Cambridge               114
Derby & Nottingham      110
Hertford                110
Bedford                 110
Kent                    105
Devon                   104
Worcester               101
Leicester               100
Hereford                 94
Middlesex                85
Huntingdon               71
Stafford                 44
Cornwall                 23
Rutland                  12
Northumberland          100
Cheshire(20*)             0

Total                  5198

    Now be it understood that these figures do not show the
amount of money that Henry I and Henry II could obtain by a
danegeld. They had to take much less. When it was last levied,
the tax was not bringing in ?500, so many were the churches and
great folk who had obtained temporary or permanent exemptions
from it. We will cite Leicestershire for example. The total of
the geld charged upon it was almost exactly or quite exactly
?00. On the second roll of Henry II's reign we find that ?5 7s.
6d. have been paid into the treasury, that ?2 8s. 3d. have been
'pardoned' to magnates and templars, that ?1 8s. 2d. are written
off in respect of waste, and that 16s. 0d. are still due. On the
eighth roll the account shows that ?2 12s. 7d. have been paid
and that ?7 6s. 9d. have been 'pardoned.' No, what our table
displays is the amount that would be raised if all exemptions
were disregarded and no penny forborne. And now let us turn back
to the chronicle and (not to take an extreme example) read of
?0,000 being raised. Unless we are prepared to bring against the
fathers of English history a charge of repeated, wanton and
circumstantial lying, we shall think of the danegeld of
AEthelred's reign and of Cnut's as of an impost so heavy that it
was fully capable of transmuting a whole nation. Therefore the
lines that are drawn by the incidence of this tribute will be
deep and permanent; but still we must remember that primarily
they will be fiscal lines.
    Then again, we ought not to look to Domesday Book for a
settled and stable scheme of technical terms. Such a scheme could
not be established in a brief twenty years. About one half of the
technical terms that meet us, about one half of the terms which,
as we think, ought to be precisely defined, are, we may say,
English terms. They are ancient English words, or they are words
brought hither by the Danes, or they are Latin words which have
long been in use in England and have acquired special meanings in
relation to English affairs. On the other hand, about half the
technical terms are French. Some of them are old Latin words
which have acquired special meanings in France, some are Romance
words newly coined in France, some are Teutonic words which tell
of the Frankish conquest of Gaul. In the one great class we place
scira, hundredum, wapentac, hida, berewica, inland, haga, soka,
saka, geldum, gablum, Scotum, heregeat, gersuma, thegnus,
sochemannus, burus, coscet; in the other comitatus, carucata,
virgata, bovata, arpentum, manerium, feudum, alodium, homagium,
relevium, baro, vicecomes, vavassor, villanus, bordarius,
colibertus, hospes. It is not in twenty years that a settled and
stable scheme can be formed out of such elements as these. And
often enough it is very difficult for us to give just the right
meaning to some simple Latin word. If we translate miles by
soldier or warrior, this may be too indefinite; if we translate
it by knight, this may be too definite, and yet leave open the
question whether we are comparing the miles of 1086 with the
cniht of unconquered England or with the knight of the thirteenth
century. If we render vicecomes by sheriff we are making our
sheriff too little of a vicomte. When comes is before us we have
to choose between giving Britanny an earl, giving Chester a
count, or offending some of our comites by invidious
distinctions. Time will show what these words shall mean. Some
will perish in the struggle for existence; others have long and
adventurous careers before them. At present two sets of terms are
rudely intermixed; the time when they will grow into an organic
whole is but beginning.
    To this we must add that, unless we have mistaken the general
drift of legal history, the law implied in Domesday Book ought to
be for us very difficult law, far more difficult than the law of
the thirteenth century, for the thirteenth century is nearer to
us than is the eleventh. The grown man will find it easier to
think the thoughts of the school-boy than to think the thoughts
of the baby. And yet the doctrine that our remote forefathers
being simple folk had simple law dies hard. Too often we allow
ourselves to suppose that, could we but get back to the
beginning, we should find that all was intelligible and should
then be able to watch the process whereby simple ideas were
smothered under subtleties and technicalities. But it is not so.
Simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety; it is the goal
not the starting point. As we go backwards the familiar outlines
become blurred; the ideas become fluid, and instead of the simple
we find the indefinite. But difficult though our task may be, we
must turn to it.

NOTES:

1. Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiae, ed. N. E. Hamilton. When,
as sometimes happens, the figures in this record differ from
those given in Domesday Book, the latter seem to be in general to
more correct, for the arithmetic is better. Also it seems plain
that the compilers of the Domesday had, even for districts
comprised in the Inquisitio, other materials besides those that
the Inquisitio contains. For example, that document says nothing
of some of the royal manors. [Since this note was written, Mr.
Round, Feudal England, pp. 10 ff. has published the same result
after an elaborate investigation.]

2. This is printed in D. B. vol. iv. and given by Hamilton at the
end of his Inq. Com. Cantab. As to the manner in which it was
compiled see Round, Feudal England, 133 ff.

3. The Exon Domesday is printed in D. B. vol. iv.

4. Round, Domesday Studies, i. 91: 'I am tempted to believe that
these geld rolls in the form in which we now have them were
compiled at Winchester after the close of Easter 1084, by the
body which was the germ of the future Exchequer.'

5. Printed by Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, i. 184.

6. Round, Feudal England, 147.

7. Earle, Two Chronicles, 130-1.

8. Ibid. 132-3.

9. Ibid. 137.

10. Ibid. 141.

11. Ibid. 142.

12. Ibid. 151.

13. Ibid. 160-1.

14. Ibid. 167.

15. There is a valuable paper on this subject, A Short Account of
Danegeld [by P. C. Webb] published in 1756.

16. D. B. iv. 26, 489.

17. In 1194 the tax for Richard's ransom seems, at least in
Wiltshire, to have been distributed in the main according to the
assessment that prevailed in 1084; Rolls of the King's Court
(Pipe Roll Soc.) i. Introduction, p. xxiv.

18. The statement in AEthelred, ii. 7 (Schmid, p. 209) as to a
payment of ?2,000 is in a general way corroborative of the
chronicler's large figures.

19. The figures will be given more accurately on a later page.

20 Cheshire pays no geld to the king. This loss is compensated by
a sum which is sometimes exacted from Northumberland.


1. PLAN OF THE SURVEY

    England was already mapped out into counties, hundreds or
wapentakes and vills. Trithings or ridings appear in Yorkshire
and Lincolnshire, lathes in Kent, rapes in Sussex, while leets
appear, at least sporadically in Norfolk.(1*) These provincial
peculiarities we must pass by, nor will we pause to comment at
any length on the changes in the boundaries of counties and of
hundreds that have taken place since the date of the survey.
Though these changes have been many and some few of them have
been large,(2*) we may still say that as a general rule the
political geography of England was already stereotyped. And we
see that already there are many curious anomalies, 'detached
portions' of counties, discrete hundreds, places that are
extra-hundredal,(3*) places that for one purpose are in one
county and for another purpose in another county.(4*) We see also
that proprietary rights have already been making sport of
arrangements which in our eyes should be fixed by public law.
Earls, sheriffs and others have enjoyed a marvellous power of
taking a tract of land out of one district and placing it, or
'making it lie' in another district.(5*) Land is constantly
spoken of as though it were the most portable of things; it can
easily be taken from one vill or hundred and be added to or
placed in or caused to lie in another vill or hundred. This
'notional movability' of land, if we may use such a term, will
become of importance to us when we are studying the formation of
manors.
    For the present, however, we are concerned with the general
truth that England is divided into counties, hundreds or
wapentakes and vills. This is the geographical basis of the
survey. That basis, however, is hidden from us by the form of our
record. The plan adopted by those who fashioned Domesday Book out
of the returns provided for them by the king's commissioners is a
curious, compromising plan. We may say that in part it is
geographical, while in part it is feudal or proprietary. It takes
each county separately and thus far it is geographical; but
within the boundaries of each county it arranges the lands under
the names of the tenants in chief who hold them. Thus all the
lands in Cambridgeshire of which Count Alan is tenant in chief
are brought together, no matter that they lie scattered about in
various hundreds. Therefore it is necessary for us to understand
that the original returns reported by the surveyors did not reach
the royal treasury in this form. At least as regards the county
of Cambridge, we can be certain of this. The hundreds were taken
one by one; they were taken in a geographical order, and not
until the justices had learned all that was to be known of
Staplehow hundred did they call upon the jurors of Cheveley
hundred for their verdict. That such was their procedure we might
have guessed even had we not been fortunate enough to have a copy
of the Cambridgeshire verdicts; for, though the commissioners
seem to have held but one moot for each shire, still it is plain
that each hundred was represented by a separate set of
jurors.(6*) But from these Cambridgeshire verdicts we learn what
otherwise we could hardly have known. Within each hundred the
survey was made by vills.(7*) If we suppose the commissioners
charging the jurors we must represent them as saying, not 'Tell
us what tenants in chief have lands in your hundred and how much
each of them holds,' but 'Tell us about each vill in your
hundred, who holds land in it.' Thus, for example, the men of the
Armingford hundred are called up. They, make a separate report
about each vill in it. They begin by stating that the vill is
rated at a certain number of hides and then they proceed to
distribute those hides among the tenants in chief. Thus, for
example, they say that Abington was rated at 5 hides, and that
those 5 hides are distributed thus:(8*)

                                        hides   virgates

 Hugh Pincerna holds of the bishop of
        Winchester                      2 1/2       1/2
 The king                                 1/2
 Ralph and Robert hold of Hardouin de
        Eschalers                       1         1 1/2
 Earl Roger                                       1
 Picot the sheriff                                  1/2
 Alwin Hamelecoc the bedel holds of the king        1/2

                                        5           0

    Now in Domesday Book we must look to several different pages
to get this information about the vill of Abington, -- to one
page for Earl Roger's land, to another page for Picot's land, and
we may easily miss the important fact that this vill of Abington
has been rated as a whole at the neat, round figure of 5 hides.
And then we see that the whole hundred of Armingford has been
rated at the neat, round figure of 100 hides, and has consisted
of six vills rated at 10 hides apiece and eight vills rated at 5
hides apiece.(9*) Thus we are brought to look upon the vill as a
unit in a system of assessment. All this is concealed from us by
the form of Domesday Book.
    When that book mentions the name of a place, when it says
that Roger holds Sutton or that Ralph holds three hides in
Norton, we regard that name as the name of a vill; it may or may
not be also the name of a manor. Speaking very generally we may
say that the place so named will in after times be known as a
vill and in our own day will be a civil parish. No doubt in some
parts of the country new vills have been created since the
Conqueror's time. Some names that occur in our record fail to
obtain a permanent place on the roll of English vills, become the
names of hamlets or disappear altogether; on the other hand, new
names come to the front. Of course we dare not say dogmatically
that all the names mentioned in Domesday Book were the names of
vills; very possibly (if this distinction was already known) some
of them were the names of hamlets; nor, again, do we imply that
the villa of 1086 had much organization; but a place that is
mentioned in Domesday Book will probably be recognized as a vill
in the thirteenth, a civil parish in the nineteenth century. Let
us take Cambridgeshire by way of example. Excluding the Isle of
Ely, we find that the political geography of the Conqueror's
reign has endured until our own time. The boundaries of the
hundreds lie almost where they lay, the number of vills has
hardly been increased or diminished. The chief changes amount to
this: -- A small tract on the east side of the county containing
Exning and Bellingham has been made over to Suffolk; four other
names contained in Domesday no longer stand for parishes, while
the names of five of our modern parishes -- one of them is the
significant name of Newton -- are not found there.(10*) But about
a hundred and ten vills that were vills in 1086 are vills or
civil parishes at the present day, and in all probability they
then had approximately the same boundaries that they have now.
    This may be a somewhat too favourable example of permanence
and continuity. Of all counties Cambridgeshire is the one whose
ancient geography can be the most easily examined; but wherever
we have looked we have come to the conclusion that the
distribution of England into vills is in the main as old as the
Norman conquest.(11*) Two causes of difficulty may be noticed,
for they are of some interest. Owing to what we have called the
'notional movability' of land, we never can be quite sure that
when certain hides or acres are said to be in or lie in a certain
place they are really and physically in that place. They are
really in one village, but they are spoken of as belonging to
another village, because their occupants pay their geld or do
their services in the latter. Manorial and fiscal geography
interferes with physical and villar geography. We have lately
seen how land rated at five hides was comprised, as a matter of
fact, in the vill of Abington; but of those five hides, one
virgate 'lay in' Shingay, a half-hide 'lay in' Litlington while a
half-virgate 'lay and had always lain' in Morden.(12*) This, if
we mistake not, leads in some cases to an omission of the names
of small vills. A great lord has a compact estate, perhaps the
whole of one of the small southern hundreds. He treats it as a
whole, and all the land that he has there will be ascribed to
some considerable village in which he has his hall. We should be
rash in supposing that there were no other villages on this land.
For example, in Surrey there is now-a-days a hundred called
Farnham which comprises the parish of Farnham, the parish of
Frensham and some other villages. If we mistake not, all that
Domesday Book has to say of the whole of this territory is that
the Bishop of Winchester holds Farnham, that it has been rated at
60 hides, that it has been worth the large sum of ?5 a year and
that there are so many tenants upon it.(12*) We certainly must
not draw the inference that there was but one vill in this tract.
If the bishop is tenant in chief of the whole hundred and has
become responsible for all the geld that is levied therefrom,
there is no great reason why the surveyors should trouble
themselves about the vills. Thus the simple Episcopus tenet
Ferneham may dispose of some 25,000 acres of land. So the same
bishop has an estate at Chilcombe in Hampshire; but clearly the
name Ciltecumbe covers a wide territory for there are no less
than nine churches upon it.(14*) We never can be very certain
about the boundaries of these large and compact estates.
    A second cause of difficulty lies in the fact that in
comparatively modern times, from the twelfth century onwards, two
or three contiguous villages will often bear the same name and be
distinguished only by what we may call their surnames -- thus
Guilden Morden and Steeple Morden, Stratfield Saye, Stratfield
Turgis, Stratfield Mortimer, Tolleshunt Knights, Tolleshunt
Major, Tolleshunt Darcy. Such cases are common; in some districts
they are hardly exceptional. Doubtless they point to a time when
a single village by some process of colonization or subdivision
become two villages. Now Domesday Book seldom enables us to say
for certain whether the change has already taken place. In a few
instances it marks off the little village from the great village
of the same name.(15*) In some other instances it will speak, for
example, of Mordune and Mordune Alia, of Emingeforde and
Emingeforde Alia, or the like, thus showing both that the change
has taken place, and also that it is so recent that it is
recognized only by very clumsy terms. In Cambridgeshire, since we
have the original verdicts, we can see that the two Mordens are
already distinct; the one is rated at ten hides, the other at
five.(16*) On the other hand, we can see that our Great and
Little Shelford are rated as one vill of twenty hides,(17*) our
Castle Camps and Shudy Camps as one vill of five hides.(18*)
Elsewhere we are left to guess whether the fission is complete,
and the surnames that many of our vills ultimately acquire, the
names of families which rose to greatness in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, will often suggest that the surveyors saw
but one vill where we see two.(19*) However, the broad truth
stands out that England was divided into vills and that in
general the vill of Domesday Book is still a vill in after
days.(20*)
    The 'vill' or 'town' of the later middle ages was, like the
'civil parish' of our own day, a tract of land with some houses
on it, and this tract was a unit in the national system of police
and finance.(21*) But we are not entitled to make for ourselves
any one typical picture of the English vill. We are learning from
the ordnance map (that marvellous palimpsest, which under Dr
Meitzen's guidance we are beginning to decipher) that in all
probability we must keep at least two types before our minds. On
the one hand, there is what we might call the true village or the
nucleated village. In the purest form of this type there is one
and only one cluster of houses. It is a fairly large cluster; it
stands in the midst of its fields, of its territory, and until
lately a considerable part of its territory will probably have
consisted of spacious 'common fields.' In a country in which
there are villages of this type the parish boundaries seem almost
to draw themselves.(22*) On the other hand, we may easily find a
country in which there are few villages of this character. The
houses which lie within the boundary of the parish are scattered
about in small clusters; here two or three, there three or four.
These clusters often have names of their own, and it seems a mere
chance that the name borne by one of them should be also the name
of the whole parish or vill.(23*) We see no traces of very large
fields. On the face of the map there is no reason why a
particular group of cottages should be reckoned to belong to this
parish rather than to the next. As our eyes grow accustomed to
the work we may arrive at some extremely, important conclusions
such as those which Meitzen has suggested. The outlines of our
nucleated villages may have been drawn for us by Germanic
settlers, whereas in the land of hamlets and scattered steads old
Celtic arrangements may never have been thoroughly effaced.
Towards theories of this kind we are slowly winning our way. In
the meantime let us remember that a villa of Domesday Book may
correspond to one of at least two very different models or may be
intermediate between various types. It may be a fairly large and
agrarianly organic unit, or it may be a group of small agrarian
units which are being held together in one whole merely, by an
external force, by police law and fiscal law.(24*)
    Two little fragments of 'the original one-inch ordnance map'
will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written
discourse. The one pictures a district on the border between
Oxfordshire and Berkshire cut by the Thames and the main line of
the Great Western Railway; the other a district on the border
between Devon and Somerset, north of Collumpton and south of
Wiveliscombe. Neither is an extreme example. True villages we may
easily find. Cambridgeshire, for instance, would have afforded
some beautiful specimens, for many of the 'open fields' were
still open when the ordnance map of that county was made. But
throughout large tracts of England, even though there has been an
'inclosure' and there are no longer any open fields, our map
often shows a land of villages. When it does so and the district
that it portrays is a purely agricultural district, we may
generally assume without going far wrong that the villages are
ancient, for during at least the last three centuries the
predominant current in our agrarian history has set against the
formation of villages and towards the distribution of scattered
homesteads. To find the purest specimens of a land of hamlets we
ought to go to Wales or to Cornwall or to other parts of 'the
Celtic fringe'; very fair examples might be found throughout the
west of England. Also we may perhaps find hamlets rather than
villages wherever there have been within the historic period
large tracts of forest land. Very often, again, the parish or
township looks on our map like a hybrid. We seem to see a village
with satellitic hamlets. Much more remains to be done before we
shall be able to construe the testimony of our fields and walls
and hedges, but at least two types of vill must be in our eyes
when we are reading Domesday Book.(25*)
    To say that the villa of Domesday Book is in general the vill
of the thirteenth century and the civil parish of the nineteenth
is to say that the areal extent of the villa varied widely from
case to case. More important is it for us to observe that the
number of inhabitants of the villa varied widely from case to
case. The error into which we are most likely to fall will be
that of making our vill too populous. Some vills, especially some
royal vills, are populous enough; a few contain a hundred
households; but the average township is certainly much smaller
than this.(26*) Before we give any figures, it should first be
observed that Domesday Book never enables us to count heads. It
states the number of the tenants of various classes, sochemanni,
villani, bordarii, and the like, and leaves us to suppose that
each of these persons is, or may be, the head of a household. It
also states how many servi there are. Whether we ought to suppose
that only the heads of servile households are reckoned, or
whether we ought to think of the servi as having no households
but as living within the lord's gates and being enumerated, men,
women and able-bodied children, by the head -- this is a
difficult question. Still we may reach some results which will
enable us to compare township with township. By way of fair
sample we may take the Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire, and
all persons who are above the rank of servi we will include under
the term 'the non-servile population'.(27*)


                    Armingford Hundred

                            Non-servile
                            population      Servi       Total

 Abingdon                       19              0           19
 Bissingbourn                   35              3           38
 Clapton                        19              0           19
 Croydon                        29              0           29
 Hatley                         18              3           21
 Litlington                     37              6           43
 Melbourn                       62              1           63
 Meldreth                       44              7           51
 Morden                         43             11           54
 Morden Alia                    50              0           50
 Shingay                        18              0           18
 Tadlow                         27              4           31
 Wendy                          12              4           16
 Whaddon                        44              6           50

     Total                     457             45          502

    Here in fourteen vills we have an average of thirty-two
non-servile households for every vill. Now even in our own day a
parish with thirty-two houses, though small, is not extremely
small. But we should form a wrong picture of the England of the
eleventh century if we filled all parts of it with such vills as
these. We will take at random fourteen vills in Staffordshire
held by Earl Roger.(28*)


                            Non-servile
                            population      Servi       Total

 Claverlege                     45              0          45
 Nordlege                        9              0           9
 Alvidelege                     13              0          13
 Halas                          40              2          42
 Chenistelei                    11              0          11
 Otne                            7              1           8
 Nortberie                      20              1          21
 Erlide                          8              2          10
 Gaitone                        16              0          16
 Cressvale                       8              0           8
 Dodintone                       3              0           3
 Modreshale                      5              0           5
 Almentone                       8              0           8
 Metford                         7              1           8

    Total                      200              7         207


    Here for fourteen vills we have an average of but fourteen
non-servile. households and the servi are so few that we may
neglect them. We will next look at a page in the survey of
Somersetshire which describes certain vills that have fallen to
the lot of the bishop of Coutances.(29*)
    Here we have on the average but eleven non-servile households
for each village, and even if we suppose each servus to represent
a household, we have not fourteen households. Yet smaller vills
will be foUnd in Devonshire, many vills in which the total number
of the persons mentioned does not exceed ten and near half of
these are servi. In Cornwall the townships, if townships we ought
to call them, are yet smaller; often we can attribute no more
than five or six families to the vill even if we include the
servi.


                        Non-servile
                        population        Servi        Total
 Winemeresham                   8           3           11
 Chetenore                      3           1            4
 Widicumbe                     21           6           27
 Harpetrev                     10           2           12
 Hotune                        11           0           11
 Lilebere                       6           1            7
 Wintreth                       4           2            6
 Aisecome                      11           7           18
 Clutone                       22           1           23
 Temesbare                      7           3           10
 Nortone                       16           3           19
 Cliveham                      15           1           16
 Ferenberge                    13           6           19
 Cliveware                      6           0            6

    Total                     153          36          189

    Unless our calculations mislead us, the density of the
population in the average vill of a given county varies somewhat
directly with the density of the population in that county; at
all events we cannot say that where vills are populous, vills
will be few. As regards this matter no precise results are
attainable; our document is full of snares for arithmeticians.
Still if for a moment we have recourse to the crude method of
dividing the number of acres comprised in a modern county by the
number of the persons who are mentioned in the survey of that
county, the outcome of our calculation will be remarkable and
will point to some broad truth.(30*) For Suffolk the quotient is
46 or thereabouts; for Norfolk but little larger;(31*) for Essex
61, for Lincoln 67; for Bedford, Berkshire, Northampton,
Leicester, Middlesex, Oxford, Kent and Somerset it lies between
70 and 80, for Buckingham, Warwick, Sussex, Wiltshire and Dorset
it lies between 80 and 90; Devon, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford
are thinly peopled, Cornwall, Stafford, Shropshire very thinly.
Some particular results that we should thus attain would be
delusive. Thus we should say that men were sparse in
Cambridgeshire, did we not remember that a large part of our
modern Cambridgeshire was then a sheet of water. Permanent
physical causes interfere with the operation of the general rule.
Thus Surrey, with its wide heaths, has, as we might expect, but
few men to the square mile. Derbyshire has many vills lying
waste; Yorkshire is so much wasted that it can give us no
valuable result; and again, Yorkshire and Cheshire were larger
than they are now, while Rutland and the adjacent counties had
not their present boundaries. For all this, however, we come to a
very general rule: -- the density of the population decreases as
we pass from east to west. With this we may connect another rule:
land is much more valuable in the east than it is in the west.
This matter is indeed hedged in by many thorny questions; still,
whatever hypothesis we may adopt as to the mode in which land was
valued, one general truth comes out pretty plainly, namely, that,
economic arrangements being what they were, it was far better to
have a team-land in Essex than to have an equal area of arable
land in Devon.
    Between eastern and western England there were differences
visible to the natural eye. With these were connected unseen and
legal differences, partly as causes, partly as effects. But for
the moment let us dwell on the fact that many an English vill has
very few inhabitants. We are to speak hereafter of village
communities. Let us therefore reflect that a community of some
eight or ten householders is not likely to be a highly organized
entity. This is not all, for these eight or ten householders will
often belong to two, three or four different social and economic,
if not legal, classes. Some may be sokemen, some villani,
bordarii, cotarii, and besides them there will be a few servi. If
a vill consists, as in Devonshire often enough it will, of some
three villani, some four bordarii and some two servi, the
'township-moot,' if such a moot there be, will be a queer little
assembly; the manorial court, if such a court there be, will not
have much to do. These men cannot have many communal affairs;
there will be no great scope for dooms or for by-laws; they may
well take all their disputes into the hundred court, especially
in Devonshire where the hundreds are small. Thus of the visible
vill of the eleventh century and its material surroundings we may
form a wrong notion. Often enough in the west its common fields
(if common fields it had) were not wide fields; the men who had
shares therein were few and belonged to various classes. Thus of
two villages in Gloucestershire, Brookthorpe and Harescombe, all
that we can read is that in Brostrop there were two teams, one
villanus, three bordarii, four servi, while in Hersecome there
were two teams, two bordarii and five servi.(32*) Many a
Devonshire township can produce but two or three teams. Often
enough our 'village community' will be a heterogeneous little
group whose main capital consists of some 300 acres of arable
land and some 20 beasts of the plough.
    On the other hand, we must be careful not to omit from our
view the rich and thickly populated shires or to imagine or to
speak as though we imagined that a general theory of English
history can neglect the East of England. If we leave
Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk out of account we are to all
appearance leaving out of account not much less than a quarter of
the whole nation.(33*) Let us make three groups of counties: (1)
a South-Western group containing Devon, Somerset, Dorset and
Wiltshire: (2) a Mid- Western group containing the shires of
Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Salop, Stafford and Warwick: (3)
an Eastern group containing Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk.
The first of these groups has the largest; the third the smallest
acreage. In Domesday Book, however, the figures which state their
population seem to be these:(34*) --

 South-Western Group:       49,155
 Mid-Western Group:         33,191
 Eastern Group:             72,883

    These figures are so emphatic that they may cause us for a
moment to doubt their value, and on details we must lay no
stress. But we have materials which enable us to check the
general effect. In 1297 Edward I levied a lay subsidy of a
ninth.(35*) The sums borne by our three groups of counties were
these: --

                            ?

 South-Western Group:     4,038
 Mid-Western Group:       3,514
 Eastern Group:           7,329



    There is a curious resemblance between these two sets of
figures. Then in 1377 and 1381 returns were made for a
poll-tax.(36*) The number of polls returned in our three groups
were these: --



                            1377        1381

 South-Western Group:    183,842     106,086
 Mid-Western Group:      158,245     115,679
 Eastern Group:          255,498     182,830


    No doubt all inferences drawn from medieval statistics are
exceedingly precarious; but, unless a good many figures have
conspired to deceive us, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were
at the time of the Conquest and for three centuries afterwards
vastly richer and more populous than any tract of equal area in
the West.
    Another distinction between the eastern counties and the rest
of England is apparent. In many shires we shall find that the
name of each vill is mentioned once and no more. This is so
because the land of each vill belongs in its entirety to some one
tenant in chief. We may go further: we may say, though at present
in an untechnical sense, that each vill is a manor. Such is the
general rule, though there will be exceptions to it. On the other
hand, in the eastern counties this rule will become the
exception. For example, of the fourteen vills in the Armingford
hundred of Cambridgeshire there is but one of which it is true
that the whole of its land is held by a single tenant in chief.
In this county it is common to find that three or four Norman
lords hold land in the same vill. This seems true not only of
Cambridgeshire, but also of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln,
Nottingham, Derby, and some parts of Yorkshire. Even in other
districts of England the rule that each vill has a single lord is
by no means unbroken in the Conqueror's day and we can see that
there were many exceptions to it in the Confessor's. A careful
examination of all England vill by vill would perhaps show that
the contrast which we are noting is neither so sharp nor so
ancient as at first sight it seems to be: nevertheless it exists.

    A better known contrast there is. The eastern counties are
the home of liberty.(37*) We may divide the tillers of the soil
into five great classes; these in order of dignity and freedom
are (1) liberi homines, (2) sochemanni, (3) villani, (4)
bordarii, cotarii, etc., (5) servi. The two first of these
classes are to be found in large numbers only in Norfolk,
Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and
Northamptonshire. We shall hereafter see that Cambridgeshire also
has been full of sokemen, though since the Conquest they have
fallen from their high estate. On the other hand, the number of
servi increases pretty steadily as we cross the country from east
to west. It reaches its maximum in Cornwall and Gloucestershire;
it is very low in Norfolk, Suffolk, Derby, Leicester, Middlesex,
Sussex; it descends to zero in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. This
descent to zero may fairly warn us that the terms with which we
are dealing may not bear precisely the same meaning in all parts
of England, or that a small class is apt to be reckoned as
forming part of a larger class. But still it is clear enough that
some of these terms are used with care and express real and
important distinctions.
    Of this we are assured by a document which seems to reproduce
the wording of the instructions which defined the duty of at
least one party of royal commissioners.(38*) We are about to
speak of the mode in which the occupants of the soil are
classified by Domesday Book, and therefore this document deserves
our best attention. It runs thus: -- The King's barons inquired
by the oath of the sheriff of the shire and of all the barons and
of their Frenchmen and of the whole hundred, the priest, reeve
and six villani of every vill, how the mansion (mansio) is
called, who held it in the time of King Edward, who holds it now,
how many hides, how many plough-teams on the demesne, how many
plough teams of the men, how many villani, how many cotarii, how
many servi, how many liberi homines, how many sochemanni, how
much wood, how much meadow, how much pasture, how many mills, how
many fisheries, how much has been taken away therefrom, how much
added thereto, and how much there is now, how much each liber
homo and sochemannus had and has: -- All this thrice over, to wit
as regards the time of King Edward, the time when King William
gave it, and the present time, and whether more can be had thence
than is had now.(39*)
    Five classes of men are mentioned and they are mentioned in
an order that is extremely curious: -- villani, cotarii, servi,
liberi homines, sochemanni. It descends three steps, then it
leaps from the very bottom of the scale to the very top and
thence it descends one step. A parody of it might speak of the
rural population of modern England as consisting of large
farmers, small farmers, cottagers, great landlords, small
landlords. But a little consideration will convince us that
beneath this apparent caprice there lies some legal principle. We
shall observe that these five species of tenants are grouped into
two genera. The king wants to know how much each liber homo, how
much each sochemannus holds; he does not want to know how much
each villanus, each cotarius, each servus holds. Connecting this
with the main object of the whole survey, we shall probably be
brought to the guess that between the sokeman and the villein
there is some broad distinction which concerns the king as the
recipient of geld. May it not be this: -- the villein's lord is
answerable for the geld due from the land that the villein holds,
the sokeman's lord is not answerable, at least he is not
answerable as principal debtor for the geld due from the land
that the sokeman holds? If this be so, the order in which the
five classes of men are mentioned will not seem unnatural. It
proceeds outwards from the lord and his mansio. First it mentions
the persons seated on land for the geld of which he is
responsible, and them it arranges in an 'order of merit.' Then it
turns to persons who, though in some way or another connected
with the lord and his mansio, are themselves tax-payers, and
concerning them the commissioners are to inquire how much each of
them holds. Of course we cannot say that this theory is proved by
the statement that lies before us; but it is suggested by that
statement and may for a while serve us as a working hypothesis.
If this theory be sound, then we have here a distinction of the
utmost importance. For one mighty purpose, the purpose that is
uppermost in King William's mind, the villanus is not a
landowner, his lord is the landowner; on the other hand, the
sochemannus is a landowner, and is taxed as such. We are not
saying that this is a purely fiscal distinction. In legal logic
the lord's liability for the geld that is apportioned on the land
occupied by his villeins may be rather an effect than a cause. A
lawyer might argue that the lord must pay because the occupier is
his villanus, not that the occupier is a villanus because the
lord pays. And yet, as we may often see in legal history, there
will be action and reaction between cause and effect. The geld is
no trifle. Levied at that rate of six shillings on the hide at
which King William has just now levied it, it is a momentous
force capable of depressing and displacing whole classes of men.
In 1086 this tax is so much in everybody's mind that any
distinction as to its incidence will cut deeply into the body of
the law.
    Now this classification of men we will take as the starting
point for our enterprise. If we could define the liber homo,
sochemannus, villanus, cotarius, servus, we should have solved
some of the great legal problems of Domesday Book, for by the way
we should have had to define two other difficult terms, namely
manerium and soca. It would then remain that we should say
something of the higher strata of society, of earls and sheriffs,
of barons, knights, thegns and their tenures, of such terms as
alodium and feudum, of the general theory of landownership or
landholdership. We will begin with the lowest order of men, with
the servi, and thence work our way upwards. But our course cannot
be straightforward. There are so many terms to be explained that
sometimes we shall be compelled to leave a question but partially
answered while we are endeavouring to find a partial answer for
some yet more difficult question.

NOTES:

1. D. B. ii. 109 b.: 'Hundret de Grenehou 14 letis.' 1b. 212 b.
'Hundret et Dim. de Clakelosa de 10 leitis.' Round, Feudal
England, 101.

2. Some of them are mentioned by Ellis, Introduction, i. 34-9.

3. D. B. i. 184 b: 'Haec terra non geldat nec consuetudinem dat
nec in aliquo hundredo iacet': i. 157 'Haec terra nunquam
geldavit nec alicui hundredo pertinet nec pertinuit': i. 357 b
'Hae duae carucatae non siunt in numero alicuius hundredi neque
habent pares in Lincolescyra.'

4. D. B. i. 207 b: 'Jacet in Bedefordscira set geldum dat in
Huntedonscire'; i. 61 b 'Jacet et appreciata est in Gratentun
quod est in Oxenefordscire et tamen dat scotum in Berchescire';
i. 132 b, the manor of Weston 'lies in, Hitchin which is in
Hertfordshirc, but its wara 'lies in' Bedfordshire, i.e. it pays
geld, it 'defends itself' in the latter county; i. 189 b, the
wara of a certain hide 'lies in' Hinxton which is in
Cambridgeshire, but the land belongs to the manor of Chesterford
and therefore is valued in Essex. D. B. i. 178: five hides 'geld
and plead' in Worcestershire, but pay their farm in
Herefordshire.

5. D. B. i. 157 b: 'Has [terras in Oxenefordscire] coniunxit
terrae suae in Glowecestrescire'; i. 209 b 'foris misit de
hundredo ubi se defendebat, T. R. E.'; i. 50 'et misit foras
comitatum et misit in Wiltesire.' See also Ellis, i. 36.

6. See Round, Feudal England, p. 118. Mr Round seems to think
that the commissioners made a circuit through the hundreds. I
doubt they did more than their successors the justices in eyre
were wont to do, that is, they held in the shire-town a moot
which was attended by (1) the magnates of the shire who spoke for
the shire, (2) a jury from every hundred, (3) a deputation of
villani from every township. See the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire
Clamores (i. 375) where we may find successive entries beginning
with (a) Scyra testatur, (b) Westreding testatur, (c) Testatur
wapentac. Strikingly similar entries are found on the eyre rolls.
As Sir F. Pollock (Eng. Hist. Rev. xi. 213) remarks, it is
misleading to speak of the Domesday 'survey'; Domesday inquest
would be better.

7. See Round, Feudal England, p. 44.

8. Inquis. Com. Cantab. 60.

9. See the table in Round, Feudal England, p. 50. I had already
selected this beautiful specimen before Mr Round's book appeared.
He has given several others that are quite as neat.

10. Of course we take no account of urban parishes.

11. Eyton's laborious studies have made this plain as regards
some counties widely removed from each other; still, e.g. in his
book On Somerset, he has now and again to note that names which
appear in D. B. are obsolete.

12. Inq. Com. Cant. 60-1.

13. D. B. i. 31.

14. D. B. i. 41. We shall return to this matter hereafter.

15. A good many cases will be found in Essex and Suffolk.

16. Inq. Com. Cantab. 51, 53.

17. Ibid. 47.

18. Ibid. 29.

19. Maitland, Surnames of English Villages, Archaeological
Review, iv. 233.

20. We do not mean to imply that there were not wide stretches of
waste land which were regarded as being 'extra-villar,' or common
to several vills.

21. Hist. Eng. Law, i. 547.

22. This of course would not be true of cases in which the lands
of various villages were intermixed in one large tract of common
field. As to these 'discrete vills,' see Hist. Eng. Law, i. 549.

23. This name-giving cluster will usually contain the parish
church and so will enjoy a certain pre-eminence. But we are to
speak of a time when parish churches were novelties.

24. See Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Germanen,
especially ii, 119 ff.

25. When the hamlets bear names with such ancient suffixes as
-ton, -ham, -by, -worth, -wick, -thorpe, this of course is in
favour of their antiquity. On the other hand, if they are known
merely by family names such as Styles's, Nokes's, Johnson's or
the like, this, though not conclusive evidence of, is compatible
with, their modernity. Meitzen thinks that in Kent and along the
southern shore the German invaders founded but few villages. The
map does not convince me that this inference is correct.

26. When more than five-and-twenty team-lands or thereabouts are
ascribed to a single place, we shall generally find reason to
believe that what is being described is not a single vill. See
above, p. 36.

27. Inq. Com. Cant. 51 fol. In a few cases our figures will
involve a small element of conjecture.

28. D. B. i. 248. We have tried to avoid vills in which it is
certain or probable that some other tenant in chief had an
estate.

29. D. B. i. 88. We have tried to make sure that no tenant in
chief save the bishop had land in any of these vills, and this we
think fairly certain, except as regards Harptree and Norton.
There are now two Harptrees, East and West, and four or more
Nortons.

30. We take the figures from Ellis, Introduction, ii. 41 7 ff.

31. Very possibly this figure is too low. There is reason to
think that some the free men and sokemen of these counties get
counted twice or thrice over because they hold land under several
different lords. On the other hand Ellis (Introduction, ii. 491)
would argue that the figure is too high. But the words Alii ibi
tenent which occur at the end of numerous entries mean, we
believe, not that there are in this vill other unenumerated
tillers of the soil, but that the vill is divided between several
tenants in chief.

32. D. B. i. 162 b.

33. Ellis's figures are: England 283, 242: the three counties,
72,883.

34. We take these figures from Ellis.

35. Lay Subsidy, 25 Edw. 1. (Yorkshire Archaeological Society),
pp. xxxi-xxxv. Fractions of a pound are neglected.

36. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia, 120-3. The great decrease
between 1377 and 1381 in the number of persons taxed, we must not
try to explain.

37. See the serviceable maps in Seebohm, Village Community, 86.
But they seem to treat Yorkshire unfairly. It has 5.5 per cent of
sokemen.

38. This is found at the beginning of the Inquisitio Eliensis; D.
B. iv. 497; Hamilton, Inquisitio, 97. See Round, Feudal England,
133 ff.

39. We must not hastily draw the inference that every party of
commissioners received the same set of instructions. Perhaps, for
example, carucates, not hides, were mentioned in the instructions
given to those commissioners who were to visit the carucated
counties. Perhaps the non-appearance of servi in Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire may be due to no deeper cause.

                    2. THE SERFS

    The existence of some 25,000 serfs is recorded. In the
thirteenth century servus and villanus are, at least among
lawyers, equivalent words. The only unfree man is the
'serf-villein' and the lawyers are trying to subject him to the
curious principle that he is the lord's chattel but a free man in
relation to all but his lord.(1*) It is far otherwise in Domesday
Book. In entry after entry and county after county the servi are
kept well apart from the villani, bordarii, cotarii. Often they
are mentioned in quite another context to that in which the
villani are enumerated. As an instance we may take a manor in
Surrey;(2*) -- 'In demesne there are 5 teams and there are 25
villani and 6 bordarii with 14 teams. There is one mill of 2
shillings and one fishery and one church and 4 acres of meadow,
and wood for 150 pannage pigs, and 2 stone-quarries of 2
shillings and 2 nests of hawks in the wood and 10 servi.' Often
enough the servi are placed between two other sources of wealth,
the church and the mill. In some counties they seem to take
precedence over the villani; the common formula is 'In dominio
sunt a curucae et b servi et c villani et d bordarii cum e
carucis.' But this is delusive; the formula is bringing the servi
into connexion with the demesne teams and separating them from
the teams of the tenants. We must render it thus -- 'On the
demesne there are a teams and b servi; and there are c villani
and d bordarii with e teams.' Still we seem to see a gently
graduated scale of social classes, villani, bordarii, cotarii,
servi, and while the jurors of one county will arrange them in
one fashion, the jurors of another county may adopt a different
scheme. Thus in their classification of mankind the jurors will
sometimes lay great stress on the possession of plough oxen. In
Hertfordshire we read: -- 'There are 6 teams in demesne and 41
villani and 17 bordarii have 20 teams... there are 22 cotarii and
12 servi.(3*) -- 'The priest, 13 villani and 4 bordarii have 6
teams... there are two cotarii and 4 servi.'(4*) -- 'The priest
and 24 villani have 13 teams... there are 12 bordarii, 16 cotarii
and 11 servi.'(5*) A division is in this instance made between
the people who have oxen and the people who have none; villani
have oxen, cotarii and servi have none; sometimes the bordarii
stand above this line, sometimes below it.
    Of the legal position of the servus Domesday Book tells us
little or nothing; but earlier and later documents oblige us to
think of him as a slave, one who in the main has no legal rights.
He is the theów of the Anglo-Saxon dooms, the servus of the
ecclesiastical canons. But though we do right in calling him a
slave, still we might well be mistaken were we to think of the
line which divides him from other men as being as sharp as the
line which a mature jurisprudence will draw between thing and
person. We may well doubt whether this principle -- 'The slave is
a thing, not a person' -- can be fully understood by a grossly
barbarous age. It implies the idea of a person, and in the world
of sense we find not persons but men.
    Thus degrees of servility are possible. A class may stand, as
it were, half-way between the class of slaves and the class of
free men. The Kentish law of the seventh century as it appears in
the dooms of AEthelbert,(6*) like many of its continental
sisters, knows a class of men who perhaps are not free men and
yet are not slaves; it knows the laet as well as the theów. From
what race the Kentish laet has sprung, and how, when it comes to
details, the law will treat him -- these are obscure questions,
and the latter of them cannot be answered unless we apply to him
what is written about the laeti, liti and lidi of the continent.
He is thus far a person that he has a small wergild but possibly
he is bound to the soil. Only in AEthelbert's dooms do we read of
him. From later days, until Domesday Book breaks the silence, we
do not obtain any definite evidence of the existence of any class
of men who are not slaves but none the less are tied to the land.
Of men who are bound to do heavy labour services for their lords
we do hear, but we do not hear that if they run away they can be
captured and brought back. As we shall see by and by, Domesday
Book bears witness to the existence of a class of buri, burs,
coliberti, who seem to be distinctly superior to the servi, but
distinctly inferior to the villeins, bordiers and cottiers. It is
by no means impossible that they, without being slaves, are in a
very proper and intelligible sense unfree men, that they have
civil rights which they can assert in courts of law, but that
they are tied to the soil. The gulf between the seventh and the
eleventh centuries is too wide to allow of our connecting them
with the laet of AEthelbert's laws, but still our documents are
not exhaustive enough to justify us in denying that all along
there has been a class (though it can hardly have been a large
class) of men who could not quit their tenements and yet were no
slaves. As we shall see hereafter, liberty was in certain
contexts reckoned as a matter of degree; even the villanus, even
the sochemannus, was not for every purpose liber homo. When this
is so, the theów or servus is like to appear as the unfreest of
persons rather than as no person but a thing.

    In the second place, we may guess that from a remote time
there has been in the condition of the theów a certain element of
praediality. The slaves have not been worked in gangs nor housed
in barracks.(7*) The servus has often been a servus casatus, he
has had a cottage or even a manse and yardland which de facto he
might call his own. There is here no legal limitation of his
master's power. Some slave trade there has been; but on the whole
it seems probable that the theów has been usually treated as
annexed to a tenement. The duties exacted of him from year to
year have remained constant. The consequence is that a free man
in return for a plot of land may well agree to do all that a
theów usually does and see in this no descent into slavery. Thus
the slave gets a chance of acquiring what will be as a matter of
fact a peculium. In the seventh century the church tried to turn
this matter of fact into matter of law. 'Non licet homini,' says
Theodore's Penitential, 'a servo tollere pecuniam, quam ipse
labore suo adquesierit.'(8*) We have no reason for thinking that
this effort was very strenuous or very successful, or that the
law of the eleventh century allowed the servus any proprietary
rights; and yet he might often be the occupier of land and of
chattels with which, so long as he did his customary services,
his lord would seldom meddle.
    In the third place, we may believe that for some time past
police law and punitive law have been doing something to conceal,
if not to obliterate, the line which separates the slave from
other men. A mature jurisprudence may be able to hold fast the
fundamental principle that a slave is not a person but a thing,
while at the same time it both limits the master's power of
abusing his human chattel and guards against those dangers which
may arise from the existence of things which have wills, and
sometimes bad wills, of their own. But an immature jurisprudence
is incapable of this exploit. It begins to play fast and loose
with its elementary notions. It begins to punish the criminous
slave without being quite certain as to how far it is punishing
him and how far it is punishing his master. Confusion is easy,
for if the slave be punished by death or mutilation, his master
will suffer, and a pecuniary mulct exacted from the slave is
exacted from his master. Learned writers have come to the most
opposite opinions as to the extent to which the Anglo-Saxon dooms
by their distribution of penalties recognize the personality of
the theów. But this is not all. For a long time past the law has
had before it the difficult problem of dealing with crimes and
delicts committed by poor and economically dependent free men,
men who have no land of their own, who are here to-day and gone
to-morrow, 'men from whom no right can be had.' It has been
endeavouring to make the lords answerable to a certain extent for
the misdeeds of their free retainers. If a slave is charged with
a crime his master is bound to produce him in court. But the law
requires that the lord shall in very similar fashion produce his
free 'loaf eater,' his mainpast, nay, it has been endeavouring to
enforce the rule that every free man who has no land of his own
shall have a lord bound to produce him when he is accused. Also
it has been fostering the growth of private justice. The lord's
duty of producing his men, bond and free, has been becoming the
duty of holding a court in which his men, free and bond, will
answer for themselves. How far this process had gone in the days
of the Confessor is a question to which we shall return.(9*)
    For all this, however, we may say with certainty that in the
eleventh century the servi were marked off from all other men by
definite legal lines. What is more, we may say that every man who
was not a theów was in some definite legal sense a free man. This
sharp contrast is put before us by the laws of Cnut as well as by
those of his predecessors. If a freeman works on a holiday, he
pays for it with his healsfang; if a theównian does the like, he
pays for it with his hide or his hide-geld.(10*) Equally sharp is
the same distinction in the Leges Henrici, and this too in
passages which, so far as we know, are not borrowed from
Anglo-Saxon documents. For many purposes 'aut servus aut liber
homo' is a perfect dilemma. There is no confusion whatever
between the villani and the servi. The villani are 'viles et
inopes personae' but clearly enough they are liberi homines. So
also in the Quadripartitus, the Latin translation of the ancient
dooms made in Henry I's reign, there is no confusion about this
matter; the theówman becomes a servus, while villanus is the
equivalent for ceorl. The Norman writers still tell how according
to the old law of the English the villanus might become a thegn
if he acquired five hides of land;(11*) at times they will put
before us villani and thaini or even villani and barones as an
exhaustive classification of free men.(12*)
    Let us learn what may be learnt of the servus from the Leges
Henrici. Every man is either a liber homo or a servus.(13*) Free
men are either two-hundred-men or twelve-hundredmen; perhaps we
ought to add that there is also a class of six-hundred-men.(14*)
A serf becomes such either by birth or by some event, such as a
sale into slavery, that happens in his lifetime.(15*) Servile
blood is transmitted, from father to child; some lords hold that
it is also transmitted by mother to child.(16*) If a slave is to
be freed this should be done publicly, in court, or church or
market, and lance and helmet or other the arms of free men should
be given him, while he should give his lord thirty pence, that is
the price of his skin, as a sign that he is henceforth 'worthy of
his hide.' On the other hand, when a free man falls into slavery
then also there should be a public ceremony. He should put his
head between his lord's hands and should receive as the arms of
slavery some bill-hook or the like.(17*) Public ceremonies are
requisite, for the state is endangered by the uncertain condition
of accused criminals; the lords will assert at one moment that
their men are free and at the next moment that these same men are
slaves.(18*) The descent of a free man into slavery is treated as
no uncommon event; the slave may well have free kinsfolk.(19*)
But, to come to the fundamental rule, the villanus, the meanest
of free men, is a two-hundred-man, that is to say, if he be slain
the very substantial wergild of 200 Saxon shillings or ? must be
paid to his kinsfolk,(20*) while a man-bót of 30 shillings is
paid to his lord.(21*) But if a servus be slain his kinsfolk
receive the comparatively trifling sum of 40 pence while the lord
gets the man-bót of 20 shillings.(22*) That the serf's kinsfolk
should receive a small sum need not surprise us. Germanic law has
never found it easy to carry the principle that the slave is a
chattel to extreme conclusions; but the payment seems trifling
and half contemptuous; at any rate the life of the villein is
worth the life of twenty-four serfs.(23*) Then again, it is by no
means certain that a lord cannot kill his serf with impunity.
'If,' says our text, 'a man slay his own serf, his is the sin and
his is the loss': -- we may interpret this to mean that he has
sinned but sinned against himself.(24*) Then again, for the evil
deeds of his slave the master is in some degree responsible. If
my slave be guilty of a petty theft not worthy of death, I am
bound to make restitution; if the crime be a capital one and he
be taken handhaving, then he must 'die like a free man.'(25*) If
my slave be guilty of homicide, my duty is to set him free and
hand him over to the kindred of the slain, but apparently I may
purchase his life by a sum of 40 shillings, a sum much less than
the wer of the slain man.(26*) We must not be too hard on the
owners of delinquent slaves. There are cases, for example, in
which, several slaves having committed a crime, one of them
chosen by lot must suffer for the sins of all.(27*) Our author is
borrowing from the laws of several different centuries and does
not arrive at any neat result; nor must we wonder at this, for
the problems presented to jurisprudence by the crimes and delicts
of slaves are very intricate. Then again, we have the rule that
if free men and serfs join in a crime, the whole guilt is to be
attributed to the free: he who joins with a slave in a theft has
no companion.(28*) On the whole, though the slave is likely to
have as a matter of fact a peculium of his own, a peculium out of
which he may be able to pay for his offences and even perhaps to
purchase his liberty,(29*) the servus of our Leges seems to be in
the main a rightless being. We look in vain for any trace of that
idea of the relativity of servitude which becomes the core of
Bracton's doctrine.(30*) At the same time we observe that many,
perhaps most, of the rules which mark the slavish condition of
the serf are ancient rules and rules that are becoming obsolete.
In the twelfth century the old system of wer and bót is already
vanishing, though an antiquarian lawyer may yet try to revivify
it. When it disappears altogether before the new law, which holds
every grave crime to be a felony, and punishes almost every
felony with death,(31*) many grand differences between the
villein and the serf will have perished. The gallows is a great
leveller.
    If now we recur to the days of the Conquest, we cannot doubt
that the law knew a definite class of slaves, and marked them off
by many distinctions from the villani and cotarii, and even from
the coliberti. Sums that seem high were being paid for men whose
freedom was being purchased.(32*) At Lewes the toll paid for the
sale of an ox was a halfpenny; on the sale of a man it was
fourpence.(33*) In later documents we may sometimes see a
distinction well drawn. Thus in the Black Book of Peterborough,
compiled in 1127 or thereabouts, we may read how on one of his
manors the abbot has eight herdsmen (bovarii), how each of them
holds ten acres, has to do labour services and render loaves and
poultry. And then we read that each of them must pay one penny
for his head if he be a free man (liber homo), while he pays
nothing if he be a servus.(34*) This is a well-drawn distinction.
Of two men whose economic position is precisely the same, the one
may be free, the other a slave, and it is the free man, not the
slave, who has to pay a head-penny. Now when the Conqueror's
surveyors, or rather the jurors, call a man a servus they are, so
it seems to us, thinking rather of his legal status than of his
position in the economy of a manor. At any rate we ought to
observe that the economic stratification of society may cut the
legal stratification. We are accustomed perhaps to suppose that
while the villani have lands that are in some sense their own,
while they support themselves and their families by tilling those
lands, the servus has no land that is in any sense his own, but
is fed at his lord's board, is housed in his lord's court, and
spends all his time in the cultivation of his lord's demesne
lands. Such may have been the case in those parts of England
where we hear of but few servi; those few may have been inmates
of the lord's house and have had no plots of their own. But such
can hardly have been the case in the south-western counties; the
servi are too many to be menials. Indeed it would seem that these
servi sometimes had arable plots, and had oxen, which were to be
distinguished from the demesne oxen of their lords -- not indeed
as a matter of law, but as a matter of economic usage.(35*) It is
plain that the legal and the economic lines may intersect one
another; the menial who is fed by the lord and who must give his
whole time to the lord's work may be a free man; the slave may
have a cottage and oxen and a plot of arable land, and labour for
himself as well as labouring for his lord. Hence a perplexed and
uncertain terminology: -- the servus who has land and oxen may be
casually called a villanus,(36*) and we cannot be sure that no
one whom our record calls a servus has the wergild of a free man.
Nor can we be sure that the enumeration of the servi is always
governed by one consistent principle. In the shires of
Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester we read of numerous ancillae
-- in Worcestershire of 677 servi and 101 ancillae(37*) -- and
this may make us think that in this district all the able-bodied
serfs are enumerated, whether or no they have cottages to
themselves.(38*) We may strongly suspect that the king's
commissioners were not much interested in the line that separated
the villani from the servi, since the lord was as directly
answerable for the geld of any lands that were in the occupation
of his villeins as he was for the geld of those plots that were
tilled for him by his slaves. That there should have been never a
theów in all Yorkshire and Lincolnshire is hardly credible, and
yet we hear of no servi in those counties.

    This being so, we encounter some difficulty if we would put
just the right interpretation on a remarkable fact that is
visible in Essex. The description of that county tells us not
only how many villani, bordarii and servi there are now, but also
how many there were in King Edward's day, and thus shows what
changes have taken place during the last twenty years. Now on
manor after manor the number of villeins and bordiers, if of them
we make one class, has increased, while the number of servi has
fallen. We take 100 entries (four batches of 25 apiece) and see
that the number of villani and bordarii has risen from 1486 to
1894, while the number of servi has fallen from 423 to 303. We
make another experiment with a hundred entries. This gives the
following result: --

                    1066    1086
    Villani         1273    1247
    Bordarii         810    1241
    Servi            384     312

    This decrease in the number of servi seems to be pretty
evenly distributed throughout the county.(39*) We shall not
readily ascribe the change to any mildheartedness of the lords.
They are Frenchmen, and in all probability they have got the most
they could out of a mass of peasantry made malleable and
manageable by the Conquest. We may rather be entitled to infer
that there has been a considerable change in rural economy. For
the cultivation of his demesne land the lord begins to rely less
and less on the labour of serfs whom he Reeds, more and more upon
the labour of tenants who have plots of their own and who feed
themselves. From this again we may perhaps infer that the labour
services of the villani and bordarii are being augmented. But at
any rate it speaks ill of their fate, that under the sway of
foreigners, who may fairly be suspected of some harshness and
greed, their inferiors, the true servi, are somewhat rapidly
disappearing. However, it is by no means impossible that with a
slavery so complete as that of the English theów the Normans were
not very familiar in their own country.(40*)

NOTES:

1. Hist. Eng. Law, i. 398.

2. D. B. i. 34, Limenesfeld.

3. D. B. i. 132 b, Hiz.

4. D. B. i. 132 b, Waldenei.

5. D. B. i. 136, Sandone.

6. AEthelb. 26.

7. Tacitus, Germ. c. 25: 'Caeteris servis non in nostrum morem,
descriptis per familiam ministeriis, utuntur. Suam quisque sedem,
suos penates regit. Frumenti modum dominus aut pecoris aut vestis
ut colono iniungit, et servus hactenus paret.'

8. Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, iii. 202.

9. See on the one hand Maurer, K. U. i. 410, on the other a
learned essay by Jastrow, Zur strafrechtlichen Stellung der
Sklaven, in Gierke's Untersuchungen zur Deutsche Geschichte, vol.
i. Maurer holds that the Anglo-Saxon slave is in the main a
chattel, that e.g. the master must answer for the delicts of his
slave in the same way that the owner answers for damage done by
his beasts, and that this liability can be clearly marked off
from the duty of the lord of free retainers who is merely bound
to produce them in court. Jastrow, on the contrary, thinks that
even at a quite early time the Anglo-Saxon slave is treated as a
person by criminal law; he has a wergild; he can be fined; his
trespasses are never compared to the trespasses of beasts; the
lord's duty, if one of his men is charged with crime, is much the
same whether that man be free or bond. Any theory involves an
explanation of several passages that are obscure and perhaps
corrupt.

10. Cnut, ii. 45-6.

11. Schmid, Appendix v. (Of Ranks); Pseudoleges Canuti, 60
(Schmid, p. 431).

12. Leg. Hen. 76 sect. 7: 'Differentia tamen weregildi multa est
in Cantia villanorum et baronum.'

13. Ibid. 76 sect. 2.

14. Ibid. 76 sect. 3.

15. Ibid. 76 sect. 3.

16. Ibid. 77; see Hist. Eng. Law, i. 405.

17. Ibid. 78 sect. 2. The difficult strublum we leave untouched.

18. Ibid. 78 sect. 2 from Cnut, ii. 20. On this see Jastrow's
comment, op. cit. p. 80.

19. Ibid. 70 sect. 5.

20. Ibid. 70 sect. 1; 76 sect. 4.

21. Ibid. 69 sect. 2.

22. Leg. Hen. 70 sect. 4: 'Si liber servum occidat similiter
reddat parentibus 40 den. et duas mufflas et unum pullum [al.
billum] mutilatum.' The mufflae are thick gloves. Compare Ancient
Laws of Wales, i. 239, 511; injured he receives a saraad; the
bondman has no galanas (wergild) but if 'the saraad of a bondman
is twelve pence, six for a coat for him, three for trousers, one
for buskins, one for a hook and one for a rope, and if he be a
woodman let the hook-penny be for an axe.' If we read billum
instead of pullum the English rule may remind us of the Welsh.
His hedger's gloves and bill-hook are the arms appropriate to the
serf, 'servitutis, arma'. cf. Leg. Hen. 78 sect. 2. As to the
man-bót see Liebermann, Leg. Edwardi, p. 71.

23. In Leg. Hen. 81 sect. 3 (a passage which seems to show that
by his master's favour even the servus may sometimes sue for a
wrong done to him) we have this sum: -- villanus: cothsetus:
servus:: 30: 15: 6.

24. Ibid. 75 sect. 4: 'suum peccatum est et dampnum.' See also 70
sect. 10, an exceedingly obscure passage.

25. Ibid. 59 sect. 23.

26. Ibid. 70 sect. 5; but for this our author has to go back as
far as Ine.

27. Ibid. 59 sect. 25.

28. Leg. Hen. 59 sect. 24; 85 sect. 4: 'Solus furatur qui cum
servo furatur.'

29. Ibid. 78 sect. 3; 59 sect. 25.

30. Hist. Eng. Law, i. 398, 402.

31. Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 457.

32. See Bath manumissions, Kemble, Saxons, i. 507 ff. Sometimes a
pound or a half-pound is paid.

33. D. B. i. 26.

34. Chron. Petrob. 163.

35. D. B. i. 105 b, Devon: 'Rolf tenet de B[alduino] Boslie...
Terra est 8 carucis. In dominio est 1 caruca et dimidia et 7
servi cum 1 caruca.' D. B. iv. 265; 'Balduinus habet 1 mansionem
quae vocatur Bosleia... hanc possunt arare 8 carrucae et modo
tenet eam Roffus de Balduino. Inde habet R. 1 ferdinum et 1
carrucam et dimidiam in dominio et villani tenent aliam terram et
habent ibi 1 carrucam. Ibi habet R. 7 servos.' In the Exeter
record these seven serfs seem to get reckoned as being both servi
and villani. So in the account of Rentis, D. B. iv. 204-5, the
lord is said to have one quarter of the arable in demesne and two
oxen, while the villani are said to have the rest of the arable
and one team; but the only villani are 8 coliberti and 4 servi.

36. See p. 59, note 2.

37. Ellis, Introduction, ii. 504-6.

38. See, for example, the following Herefordshire entry, D. B. i.
180 b: 'In dominio sunt 2 carucae et 4 villani et 8 bordarii et
prepositus et bedellus. Inter omnes habent 4 carucas. Ibi 8 inter
servos et ancillas et vaccarius et daia.'

39. Mr Round has drawn attention to the great increase of
bordarii: Antiquary (1882) vi. 9. In the second of our two
experiments the cases were taken from the royal demesne and the
lands the churches. The surveys of Norfolk and Suffolk profess to
enumerate the various classes of peasants T. R. E.; but commonly
each entry reports that there has been no change. Without saying
that we disbelieve these reports, we nevertheless say that a
verdict which asserts that things have always (semper) been as
they now are may easily be the outcome of nescience.

40. Hist. Eng. Law, i. 53-4.


            3. THE VILLEINS

    Next above the servi we see the small but interesting class
of buri, burs or coliberti. Probably it was not mentioned in the
writ which set the commissioners their task, and this may well be
the reason why it appears as but a very small class. It has some
900 members; still it is represented in fourteen shires:
Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon,
Cornwall, Buckingham, Oxford, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford,
Warwick, Shropshire -- in short, in the shires of Wessex and
western Mercia. Twice over our record explains a piece of rare
good fortune -- that buri and coliberti are all one.(1*) In
general they are presented to us as being akin rather to the
servi than to the villani or bordarii, as when we are told, 'In
demesne there is one virgate of land and there are 3 teams and 11
servi and 5 coliberti, and there are 15 villani and 15 bordarii
with 8 teams.'(2*) But this rule is by no means unbroken;
sometimes the coliberti are separated from the servi and a
precedence over the cotarii or even over the bordarii is given
them. Thus of a Wiltshire manor it is written, 'In demesne there
are 8 teams and 20 servi and 41 villani and 30 bordarii and 7
coliberti and 74 cotarii have among them all 27 teams.'(3*) Again
of a Warwickshire manor, 'There is land for 26 teams; in demesne
are 3 teams and 4 servi and 43 villani and 6 coliberti and 10
bordarii with 16 teams.'(4*) A classification which turns upon
legal status is cut by a classification which turns upon economic
condition. The colibertus we take to be an unfreer man (how there
come to be degrees of freedom is a question to be asked by and
by) than the cotarius or the bordarius, but on a given manor he
may be a more important person, for he may have plough beasts
while the cotarius has none; he may have two oxen while the
bordarius has but an ox.
    In calling him a colibertus the Norman clerks are giving him
a foreign name, the etymological origin of which is very
dark;(5*) but this much seems plain, that in the France of the
eleventh century a large class bearing this name had been formed
out of ancient elements, Roman coloni and Germanic liti, a class
which was not rightless (for it could be distinguished from the
class of servi, and a colibertus might be made a servus by way of
punishment for his crimes) but which yet was unfree, for the
colibertus who left his lord might be pursued and recaptured.(6*)
As to the Englishman upon whom this name is bestowed we know him
to be a gebúr, a boor, and we learn something of him from that
mysterious document entitled 'Rectitudines Singularum
Personarum.(7*) His services, we are told, vary from place to
place; in some districts he works for his lord two days a week
and during harvest-time three days a week; he Pays gafol in
money, barley, sheep and poultry; also he has ploughing to do
besides his week-work; he pays hearthpenny; he and one of his
fellows must between them feed a dog. It is usual to provide him
with an outfit of two oxen, one cow, six sheep, and seed for
seven acres of his yardland, and also to provide him with
household stuff; on his death all these chattels go back to his
lord. Thus the boor is put before us as a tenant with a house and
a yardland or virgate, and two plough oxen. He will therefore
play a more important part in the manorial economy than the
cottager who has no beasts. But he is a very dependent person;
his beasts, even the poor furniture of his house, his pots and
crocks, are provided for him by his lord. Probably it is this
that marks him off from the ordinary villanus or 'townsman,' and
brings him near the serf. In a sense he may be a free man. We
have seen how the law, whether we look for it to the code of Cnut
or to the Leges Henrici, is holding fast the proposition that
every one who is not a theówman is a free man, that every one is
either a liber homo or a servus. We have no warrant for denying
to the boor the full wergild of 200 shillings. He pays the
hearthpenny, or Peter's penny, and the document that tells us
this elsewhere mentions this payment as the mark of a free
man.(8*) And yet in a very true and accurate sense he may be
unfree, unfree to quit his lord's service. All that he has
belongs to his lord; he must be perpetually in debt to his lord;
he could hardly leave his lord without being guilty of something
very like theft, a abstraction of chattels committed to his
charge. Very probably if he flies, his lord has a right to
recapture him. On the other hand, so dependent a man will be in a
very strict sense a tenant at will. When he dies not only his
tenement but his stock will belong to the lord; like the French
colibert he is mainmortable. At the same time, to one familiar
with the cartularies of the thirteenth century the rents and
services that this boor has to pay and perform for his virgate
will not appear enormous. If we mistake not, many a villanus of
Henry III's day would have thought them light. Of course any such
comparison is beset by difficulties, for at present we know all
too little of the history of wages and prices. Nevertheless the
intermediation of this class of buri or coliberti between the
serfs and the villeins of Domesday Book must tend to raise our
estimate both of the legal freedom and of the economic welfare of
that great mass of peasants which is now to come before us.(9*)
    That great mass consists of some 108,500 villani, some 82,600
bordarii, and some 6,800 cotarii and coscets.(10*) Though in
manor after manor we may find representatives of each of these
three classes, we can see that for some important purpose they
form but one grand class, and that the term villanus may be used
to cover the whole genus as well as to designate one of its three
species. In the Exon Domesday a common formula, having stated the
number of hides in the manor and the number of teams for which it
can find work, proceeds to divide the land and the existing teams
between the demesne and the villani -- the villani, it will say,
have so many hides and so many teams. Then it will state how many
villani, bordarii, cotarii there are. But it will sometimes fall
out that there are no villani if that term is to be used in its
specific sense, and so, after having been told that the villani
have so much land and so many teams, we learn that the only
villani on this manor are bordarii.(11*) The lines which divide
the three species are, we may be sure, much rather economic than
legal lines. Of course the law may recognise them upon
occasion,(12*) but we cannot say that the bordarius has a
different status from that of the villanus. In the Leges both
fall under the term villani; indeed, as hereafter will be seen,
that term has sometimes to cover all men who are not servi but
are not noble. Nor must we suppose that the economic lines are
drawn with much precision or according to any one uniform
pattern. Of villani and bordarii we may read in every county;
cotarii or coscets in considerable numbers are found only in
Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset,
Berkshire, Hertford and Cambridge, though they are not absolutely
unknown in Buckingham, in Devon, in Hereford, Worcester,
Shropshire, Yorkshire. We cannot tell how the English jurors
would have expressed the distinction between bordarii and
cotarii, for while the cot is English, the borde is French. If we
are entitled to draw any inference from the distribution of the
cottiers, it would be that the smallest of small tenements were
to be found chiefly along the southern shore; but then there are
no cotarii in Hampshire, plenty in Sussex, Surrey, Wiltshire and
Dorset. Again, in the two shires last mentioned some distinction
seems to be taken between the coscets and the cotarii, the former
being superior to the latter.(13*) Two centuries later we find a
similar distinction among the tenants of Worcester Priory. There
are cotmanni whose rents and services are heavier, and whose
tenements are presumably larger than those of the cotarii, though
the difference is not very great.(14*)
    The vagueness of distinctions such as these is well
illustrated by the failure of the term. bordarius (and none is
more prominent in Domesday Book) to take firm root in this
country.(15*) The successors of the bordarii seem to become in
the later documents either villani with small or cottiers with
large tenements. Distinctions which turn on the amount of land
that is possessed or the amount of service that is done cannot be
accurately formulated and forced upon a whole country. Perhaps in
general we may endow the villanus of Domesday Book with a virgate
or quarter of a hide, while we ascribe to the bordarius a less
quantity and doubt whether the cotarius usually had arable land.
But the survey of Middlesex, which is the main authority,
touching this matter, shows that the villanus may on occasion
have a whole hide,(16*) that is four virgates, and that often he
has but half a virgate; it shows us that the bordarius, though
often he has but four or five acres, may have a half virgate,
that is as much as many a villanus;(17*) it shows us that the
cotarius may have five acres, that is as much as many a
bordarius,(18*) though he will often have no more than a
croft.(19*) In Essex we hear of bordarii who held no arable
land.(20*) Nor dare we lay down any stern rule about the
possession of plough beasts. It would seem as if sometimes the
bordarius had oxen, while sometimes he had none.(21*) The
villanus might have two oxen, but he might have more or less. We
may find that in Cornwall a single team of eight is forthcoming
where there are(22*)

             3 villani, 4 bordarii, 2 servi
             2 "        2 "         3 "
             0 "        5 "         2 "
             1 "        5 "         1 "
             2 "        5 "         4 "
             2 "        3 "         1 "
             3 "        6 "         3 "

In some Gloucestershire manors every villein seems to have a full
plough team.(23*) Merely economic grades are essentially
indefinite. Who could have defined a 'cottage' in the eleventh
century? Who can define one now?(24*)
    In truth the vast class of men that we are examining must
have been heterogeneous to a high degree. Not only were some
members of it much wealthier than others, but in all probability
some were economically subject to others. So it was in later
days. In the thirteenth century we may easily find a manor in
which the lord is paying hardly any wages. He gets nearly all his
agricultural work done for him by his villeins and his cottiers.
Out of his cottiers however he will get but one day's work in the
week. If then we ask what the cottiers are doing during the rest
of their time, the answer surely must be that they are often
working as hired labourers on the villein's virgates, for a
cottier cannot have spent five days in the week over the tillage
of his poor little tenement. It is a remarkable feature of the
manorial arrangement that the meanest of the lord's nativi are
but rarely working for him. Thus if we were to remove the lord in
order that the village community might be revealed, we should
still see not only rich and poor, but employers and employed,
villagers and 'undersettles.'
    Now all these people are in a sense unfree, while yet in some
other sense they are free. Let us then spend a short while in
discussing the various meanings that freedom may have in a legal
classification of the sorts and conditions of men. When we have
put out of account the rightless slave, who is a thing, it still
remains possible to say that some men are unfree, while others
are free, and even that freedom is a matter of degree. But we may
use various standards for the measurement of liberty.
    Perhaps in the first place we shall think of what German
writers call Freizügigkeit, the power to leave the master whom
one has been serving. This power our ancestors would perhaps have
called 'fare-worthiness.'(25*) If the master has the right to
recapture the servant who leaves his service, or even if he has
the right to call upon the officers of the state to pursue him
and bring him back to his work, then we may account this servant
an unfree man, albeit the relation between him and his master has
been created by free contract. Such unfreedom is very distinct
from rightlessness. As a freak of jurisprudence we might imagine
a modern nobleman entitled to reduce by force and arms his
fugitive butler to well-paid and easy duties, while all the same
that butler had rights against all the world including his
master, had access to all courts, and could even sue for his
wages if they were not punctually paid. If we call him unfree,
then freedom will look like a matter of degree, for the master's
power to get back his fugitive may be defined by law in divers
manners. May he go in pursuit and use force? Must he send a
constable or sheriff's officer? Must he first go to court and
obtain a judgment, 'a decree for specific performance' of the
contract of service? The right of recapture seems to shade off
gradually into a right to insist that a breach of the contract of
service is a criminal offence to be punished by fine or
imprisonment. 
    Then, again, there may seem to us to be more of unfreedom in
the case of one who was born a servant than in the case of one
who has contracted to serve, though we should note that one may
be born to serve without being born rightless. 
    More to the point than these obvious reflections will be the
remark that in the thirteenth century we learn to think of
various spheres or planes of justice. A right good in one sphere
may have no existence in another. The rights of the villeins in
their tenements are sanctioned by manorial justice; they are
ignored by the king's courts. Here, again, the ideas of freedom
and unfreedom find a part to play. True that in the order of
legal logic freedom may precede royal protection; a tenure is
protected because it is free; still men are soon arguing that it
is free because it is protected, and this probably discloses an
idea which lies deep:(26*) -- the king's courts, the national
courts, are open to the free; we approach the rightlessness of
the slave if our rights are recognized only in a court of which
our lord is the president. 
    The thirteenth century will also supply us with the notion
that continuous agricultural service, service in which there is a
considerable element of uncertainty, is unfree service. Where
from day to day the lord's will counts for much in determining
the work that his tenants must do, such tenants, even if they be
free men, are not holding freely. But uncertainty is a matter of
degree, and therefore unfreedom may easily be regarded as a
matter of degree.(27*)
    Then, again, in the law books of the Norman age we see
distinct traces of a usage which would make liber or liberalis an
equivalent for our noble, or at least for our gentle. The common
man with the wergild of 200 shillings, though indubitably he is
no servus, is not liberalis homo.(28*)
    Lastly, in our thirteenth century we learn that privileges
and exceptional immunities are 'liberties' and 'franchises.' What
is our definition of a liberty, a franchise? A portion of royal
power in the hands of a subject. In Henry III's day we do not say
that the Earl of Chester is a freer man, more of a liber homo,
than is the Earl of Gloucester, but we do say that he has more,
greater, higher liberties.
    Therefore we shall not be surprised if in Domesday Book what
we read of freedom, of free men, of free land is sadly obscure.
Let us then observe that the villanus both is and is not a free
man.
    According to the usual terminology of the Leges, everyone who
is above the rank of a servus, but below the rank of a thegn, is
a villanus. The villanus is the non-noble liber homo. All those
numerous sokemen of the eastern counties whom Domesday ranks
above the villani, all those numerous liberi homines whom it
ranks above the sokemen, are, according to this scheme, villani
if they be not thegns. And this scheme is still of great
importance, for it is the scheme of bót and wer. By what have
been the most vital of all the rules of law, all these men have
been massed together; each of them has a wer of two hundred
shillings.(29*) This, we may remark in passing, is no trivial
sum, though the shillings are the small Saxon shillings of four
pence or five pence. There seems to be a good deal of evidence
that for a long time past the ox had been valued at 30 pence, the
sheep at 5 pence.(30*) At this rate the ceorl's death must be
paid for by the price of some twenty-four or thirty oxen. The
sons of a villanus who had but two oxen must have been under some
temptation to wish that their father would get himself killed by
a solvent thegn. Very rarely indeed do the Leges notice the
sokeman or mention liberi homines so as to exclude the villani
from the scope of that term.(31*) Domesday Book also on occasion
can divide mankind into slaves and free men. It does so when it
tells us that on a Gloucestershire manor there were twelve servi
whom the lord had made free.(32*) It does so again when it tells
us that in the city of Chester the bishop had eight shillings if
a free man, four shillings if a serf, did work upon a
festival.(33*) So in a description of the manor of South Perrott
in Somerset we read that a certain custom is due to it from the
manor of 'Cruche' (Crewkerne), namely that every freeman must
render one bloom of iron. We look for these free men at 'Cruche'
and see no one on the manor but villani, bordarii, coliberti and
servi.(34*) Of the Count of Mortain's manor of Bickenhall it is
written that every free man renders a bloom of iron at the king's
manor of Curry; but at Bickenhall there is no one above the
condition of a villanus.(35*) Other passages will suggest that
the villanus sometimes is and sometimes is not liber homo. On a
Norfolk manor we find free villeins, liberi villani.(36*)
    For all this, however, there must be some very important
sense in which the villanus is not free. In the survey of the
eastern counties he is separated from the liberi homines by the
whole class of sochemanni. 'In this manor,' we are told, 'there
was at that time a free man with half a hide who has now been
made one of the villeins.(37*) At times the word francus is
introduced so as to suggest for a moment that, though the villein
may be liber homo, he is not francus.(38*) But this suggestion,
even if it be made, is not maintained, and there are hundreds of
passages which implicitly deny that the villein is liber homo.
But then these passages draw the line between freedom and
unfreedom at a point high in the legal scale, a point far above
the heads of the villani. At least for the main purposes of
Domesday Book the free man is a man who holds land freely. Let us
observe what is said of the men who have been holding manors. The
formula will vary somewhat from county to county, but we shall
often find four phrases used as equivalent, 'X tenuit et liber
homo fuit,' 'X tenuit ut liber homo,' 'X tenuit et cum terra sua
liber fuit,' 'X tenuit libere.'(39*) But this freeholding implies
a high degree of freedom, freedom of a kind that would have
shocked the lawyers of a later age.
    With some regrets we must leave the peasants for a while in
order that we may glance at the higher strata of society. We may
take it as certain that, at least in the eyes of William's
ministers, the ordinary holder of a manor in the time of the
Confessor had been holding it under (sub) some lord, if not of
(de) some lord. But then the closeness of the connexion between
him and his lord, the character of the relation between lord, man
and land, had varied much from case to case. Now these matters
are often expressed in terms of a calculus of personal freedom.
But let us begin with some phrases which seem intelligible
enough. The man can, or he cannot, 'sell or give his land'; he
can, or he cannot, 'sell or give it without the licence of his
lord';(40*) he can sell it if he has first offered it to his
lords; he can sell it on paying his lord two shillings.(41*) This
seems very simple: -- the lord can, or (as the case may be)
cannot, prevent his tenant from alienating the land; he has a
right of preemption or he has a right to exact a fine when there
is a change of tenants. But then come phrases that are less in
harmony with our idea of feudal tenure. The man cannot sell his
land 'away from' his lord,(42*) he cannot give or sell it
'outside' a certain manor belonging to his lord,(43*) or, being
the tenant of some church, he cannot 'separate' his land from the
church,(44*) or give or sell it outside the church.(45*)
    We have perhaps taken for granted under the influence of
later law that an alienation will not impair the lord's rights,
and will but give him a new instead of an old tenant. But it is
not of any mere substitution such as this that these men of the
eleventh century are thinking. They have it in their minds that
the man may wish, may be able, utterly to withdraw his land from
the sphere of his lord's rights. Therefore in many cases they
note with some care that the man, though he can give or sell his
land, cannot altogether put an end to such relation as has
existed between this land and his lord. He can sell, but some of
the lord's rights will 'remain,' in particular the lord's 'soke'
over the land (for the present let us say his jurisdiction over
the land) will remain.(46*) The purchaser will not of necessity
become the 'man' of this lord, will not of necessity owe him any
servitium or consuetudo, but will come under his
jurisdiction.(47*) Interchanging however with these phrases,(48*)
we have others which seem to point to the same set of
distinctions, but to express them in terms of personal freedom.
The man can, or else he cannot, withdraw from his lord, go away
from his lord, withdraw from his lord's manor; he can or he
cannot withdraw with his land; he can or cannot go to another
lord, or go wherever he pleases.(49*) Some of these phrases will,
if taken literally, seem to say that the persons of whom they are
used are tied to the soil; they cannot leave the land, or the
manor, or the soke. Probably in some of these cases the bond
between man and lord is a perpetual bond of homage and fealty,
and if the man breaks that bond by refusing the due obedience or
putting himself under another lord, he is guilty of a wrong.(50*)
But of pursuing him and capturing him and reducing him to
servitude there can be no talk. Many of these persons who 'cannot
recede' are men of wealth and rank, of high rank that is
recognized by law, they are king's thegns or the thegns of the
churches, they are 'twelve-hundred men.'(51*) However, it is not
the man's power to leave his lord so much as the power to leave
his lord and take his land with him that these phrases bring to
our notice; or rather the assumption is made that no one will
want to leave his lord if he must also leave his land behind him.
And then this power of taking land from this lord and bringing it
under another lord is conceived as an index of personal freedom.
Thus we read: 'These men were so free that they could go where
they pleased.'(52*) and again, 'Four sokemen held this land, of
whom three were free, while the fourth held one hide but could
not give or sell it.'(53*) Not that no one is called a liber homo
unless he has this power of 'receding' from his lord; far from
it; all is a matter of degree; but the free man is freer if he
can 'go to what lord he pleases,' and often enough the phrases 'X
tenuit et liber homo fuit,' 'X tenuit libere,' 'X tenuit ut liber
homo' seem to have no other meaning than this, that the occupant
of the land enjoyed the liberty of taking it with him
whithersoever he would. Therefore there is no tautology in saying
that the holder of the land was a thegn and a free man, though of
course there is a sense, there are many senses, in which every
thegn is free.(54*) All this talk of the freedom that consists in
choosing a lord and subjecting land to him may well puzzle us,
for it puzzled the men of the twelfth century. The chronicler of
Abingdon abbey had to explain that in the old days a free man
could do strange things.(55*)
    Comparisons may be instituted between the freedom of one free
man and that of another: -- 'Five thegns held this land of Earl
Edwin and could go with their land whither they would, and below
them they had four soldiers, who were as free as
themselves.'(56*) A high degree of liberty is marked when we are
told that, 'The said men were so free that they could sell their
land with soke and sake wherever they would.'(57*) But there are
yet higher degrees of liberty. Of Worcestershire it is written,
'When the king goes upon a military expedition, if anyone who is
summoned stays at home, then if he is so free a man that he has
his sake and soke and can go whither he pleases with his land, he
with all his land shall be in the king's mercy.'(58*) The free
man is the freer if he has soke and sake, if he has jurisdiction
over other men. Exceptional privileges, immunities from common
burdens, are already regarded as 'liberties.' This is no new
thing; often enough when the Anglo-Saxon land books speak of
freedom they mean privilege.
    The idea of freedom is equally vague and elastic if, instead
of applying it to men, we apply it to land or the tenure of land.
Two bordarii are now holding a small plot; 'they themselves held
it freely in King Edward's day.'(59*) Here no doubt there has
been a fall; but how deep a fall we cannot be sure. To say that a
man's land is free may imply far more freedom than freehold
tenure implies in later times; it may imply that the bond between
him and his lord, if indeed he has a lord, is of a purely
personal character and hardly gives the lord any hold over the
land.(60*) But this is not all. Perfect freedom is not attained
so long as the land owes any single duty to the state. Often
enough -- but exactly how often it were no easy task to tell --
the libera terra of our record is land that has been exempted
even from the danegeld; it is highly privileged land.(61*) Let us
remember that at the present day, though the definition of free
land or freehold land has long ago been fixed, we still speak as
though free land might become freer if it were 'free of land-tax
and tithe rent-charge.'
    If now we return to the villanus and deny that he is liber
homo and deny also that he is holding freely, we shall be saying
little and using the laxest of terms. There are half-a-dozen
questions that we would fain ask about him, and there will be no
harm in asking them, though Domesday Book is taciturn.
    Is he free to quit his lord and his land, or can he be
pursued and captured? No one word can be obtained in answer to
this question. We can only say that in Henry II's day the
ordinary peasant was regarded by the royal officials as
ascriptitius; the land that he occupied was said to be part of
his lord's demesne; his chattels were his lord's.(62*) But then
this was conceived to be, at least in some degree, the result of
the Norman Conquest and subsequent rebellions of the
peasantry.(63*) To this we may add that in one of our sets of
Leges, the French Leis of William the Conqueror, there are
certain clauses which would be of great importance could we
suppose that they had an authoritative origin, and which in any
case are remarkable enough. The nativus who flies from the land
on which he is born, let none retain him or his chattels; if the
lords will not send back these men to their land the king's
officers are to do it.(64*) On the other hand, the tillers of the
soil are not to be worked beyond their proper rent; their lord
may not remove them from their land so long as they perform their
right services.(65*) Whether or no we suppose that in the
writer's opinion the ordinary peasant was a nativus (of nativi
Domesday Book has nothing to say) we still have law more
favourable to the peasant than was the common law of Bracton's
age: -- a tiller who does his accustomed service is not to be
ejected; he is no tenant at will.
    Hereafter we shall show that the English peasants did suffer
by the substitution of French for English lords. But the question
that we have asked, so urgent, so fundamental, as it may seem to
us, is really one which, as the history of the Roman coloni might
prove, can long remain unanswered. Men may become economically so
dependent on their lords, on wealthy masters and creditors, that
the legal question whether they can quit their service has no
interest. Who wishes to leave his all and go forth a beggar into
the world? On the whole we can find no evidence whatever that the
men of the Confessor's day who were retrospectively called
villani were tied to the soil. Certainly in Norman times the
tradition was held that according to the old law the villanus
might acquire five hides of land and so 'thrive to
thegn-right.'(66*)
    Our next question should be whether he was subject to
seignorial justice. This is part of a much wider question that we
must face hereafter, for seignorial justice should be treated as
a whole. We must here anticipate a conclusion, the proof of which
will come by and by, namely, that the villanus sometimes was and
sometimes was not the justiciable of a court in which his lord or
his lord's steward presided. All depended on the answer to the
question whether his lord had 'sake and soke.' His lord might
have justiciary rights over all his tenants, or merely over his
villani, or he might have no justiciary rights, for as yet 'sake
and soke' were in the king's gift, and the mere fact that a lord
had 'men' or tenants did not give him a jurisdiction over them.
    With this question is connected another, namely, whether the
villani had a locus standi in the national courts. We have seen
six villani together with the priest (undoubtedly a free man) and
the reeve of each vill summoned to swear in the great
inquest.(67*) One of the most famous scenes recorded by our book
is that in which William of Chernet claimed a Hampshire manor on
behalf of Hugh de Port and produced his witnesses from among the
best and eldest men of the county; but Picot, the sheriff of
Cambridgeshire, who was in possession, replied with the testimony
of villeins and mean folk and reeves, who were willing to support
his case by oath or by ordeal.(68*) Again, in Norfolk, Roger the
sheriff claimed a hundred acres and five villani and a mill as
belonging to the royal manor of Brainfort, and five villani of
the said manor testified in his favour and offered to make
whatever proof anyone might adjudge to them, but the half-hundred
of Ipswich testified that the land belonged to a certain church
of St Peter that Wihtgar held, and he offered to deraign
this.(69*) Certainly this does not look as if villani were
excluded from the national moots. But a rule which valued the
oath of a single thegn as highly as the oath of six ceorls would
make the ceorl but a poor witness and tend to keep him out of
court.(70*) The men who are active in the communal courts, who
make the judgments there, are usually men of thegnly rank; but to
go to court as a doomsman is one thing, to go as a litigant is
another.(71*)
    We may now approach the question whether, and if so in what
sense, the land that the villanus occupies is his land.
Throughout Domesday Book a distinction is sedulously maintained
between the land of the villeins (terra villanorum) and the land
that the lord has in dominio. Let us notice this phrase. Only the
demesne land does the lord hold in dominio, in ownership. The
delicate shade of difference that Bracton would see between
dominicum and dominium is not as yet marked. In later times it
became strictly correct to say that the lord held in demesne (in
dominico suo) not only the land which he occupied by himself or
his servants, but also the lands held of him by villein
tenure.(72*) This usage appears very plainly in the Dialogue on
the Exchequer. 'You shall know,' says the writer, 'that we give
the name demesnes (dominica) to those lands that a man cultivates
at his own cost or by his own labour, and also to those which are
possessed in his name by his ascriptitii; for by the law of his
kingdom not only can these ascriptitii be removed by their lords
from the lands that they now possess and transferred to other
places, but they may be sold and dispersed at will; so that
rightly are both they and the lands which they cultivate for the
behalf of their lords accounted to be dominia.'(73*) Far other is
the normal, if not invariable, usage of Domesday Book. The terrae
villanorum, the silvae villanorum, the piscariae villanorum, the
molini villanorum -- for the villeins have woods and fisheries
and mills -- these the lord does not hold in dominio.(74*) Then
again the oxen of the villeins are carefully distinguished from
the oxen of the demesne, while often enough they are not
distinguished from the oxen of those who in every sense are free
tenants.(75*) Now as regards both the land and the oxen we seem
put to the dilemma that either they belong to the lord or else
they belong to the villeins. We cannot avoid this dilemma, as we
can in later days, by saying that according to the common law the
ownership of these things is with the lord, while according to
the custom of the manor it is with the villeins, for we believe
that a hall-moot, a manorial court, is still a somewhat
exceptional institution.
    On the whole we can hardly doubt that both in their land and
in their oxen the villeins have had rights protected by law. Let
us glance once more at the scheme of bót and wer that has been in
force. A villein is slain; the manbót payable to his lord is
marked off from the much heavier wergild that is payable to his
kindred. If all that a villein could have belonged to his lord
such a distinction would be idle.
    Still we take it that for one most important purpose the
villein's land is the lord's land: -- the lord must answer for
the geld that is due from it. Not that the burden falls
ultimately on the lord. On the contrary, it is not unlikely that
he makes his villeins pay the geld that is due from his demesne
land; it is one of their services that they must 'defend their
lord's inland' against the geld. But over against the state the
lord represents as well the land of his villeins as his own
demesne land. From the great levy of 1084 the demesne lands of
the barons had been exempted,(76*) but no doubt they had been
responsible for the tax assessed on the lands held by their
villani. We much doubt whether the collectors of the geld went
round to the cottages of the villeins and demanded here six pence
and there four pence; they presented themselves at the lord's
hall and asked for a large sum. Nay, we believe that very often a
perfectly free tenant paid his geld to his lord, or through his
lord.(77*) Hence arrangements by which some hides were made to
acquit other hides; such, for example, was the arrangement at
Tewkesbury; there were fifty hides which had to acquit the whole
ninety-five hides from all geld and royal service.(78*) And then
it might be that the lord, enjoying a special privilege, was
entitled to take the geld from his tenants and yet paid no geld
to the king; thus did the canons of St Petroc in Cornwall(79*)
and the monks of St Edmund in Suffolk.(80*) But as regards lands
occupied by villeins, the king, so it seems to us, looks for his
geld to the lord and he does not look behind the lord. This is no
detail of a fiscal system. A potent force has thus been set in
motion. He who pays for land -- it is but fair that he should be
considered the owner of that land. We have a hint of this
principle in a law of Cnut: -- 'He who has "defended" land with
the witness of the shire is to enjoy it without question during
his life and on his death may give or sell it to whom he
pleases.'(81*) We have another hint of this principle in a story
told by Heming, the monk of Worcester: -- in Cnut's time but four
days of grace were given to the landowner for the payment of the
geld; when these had elapsed, anyone who paid the geld might have
the land.(82*) It is a principle which, if it is applied to the
case of lord and villein, will attribute the ownership of the
land to the lord and not to the villein.
    And then we would ask: What services do the villeins render?
A deep silence answers us, and as will hereafter be shown, there
are many reasons why we should not import the information given
us by the monastic cartularies, even such early cartularies as
the Black Book of Peterborough, into the days of the Confessor.
No doubt the villeins usually do some labour upon the lord's
demesne lands. In particular they help to plough it. A manor, we
can see, is generally so arranged that the ratio borne by the
demesne oxen to the demesne land will be smaller than that borne
by the villeins' oxen to the villeins' land. Thus, to give one
example out of a hundred, in a Somersetshire manor the lord has
four hides and three teams, the villeins have two hides and three
teams.(83*) But then the lord gets some help in his agriculture
from those who are undoubtedly free tenants. The teams of the
free tenants are often covered by the same phrase that covers the
teams of the villeins.(84*) Radknights who are liberi homines
plough and harrow at the lord's court.(85*) The very few entries
which tell us of the labour of the villeins are quite
insufficient to condemn the whole class to unlimited, or even to
very heavy work. On a manor in Herefordshire there are twelve
bordiers who work one day in the week.(86*) On the enormous manor
of Leominster there are 238 villani and 85 bordarii. The villani
plough and sow with their own seed 140 acres of their lord's land
and they pay 11 pounds and 52 pence.(87*) On the manor of
Marcle,which also is in Herefordshire, there are 36 villani and
10 bordarii with 40 teams. These villani plough and sow with
their own seed 80 acres of wheat and 71 of oats.(88*) At
Kingston, yet another manor in the same county, 'the villani who
dwelt there in King Edward's day carried venison to Hereford and
did no other service, so says the shire.(89*) On one
Worcestershire manor of Westminster Abbey 10 villeins and 10
bordiers with 6 teams plough 6 acres and sow them with their own
seed; on another 8 villeins and 6 bordiers with 6 teams do the
like by 4 acres.(90*) This is light work. Casually we are told of
burgesses living at Tamworth who have to work like the other
villeins of the manor of Drayton to which they are attached,(91*)
and we are told of men on a royal manor who do such works for the
king as the reeve may command;(92*) but, curiously enough, it is
not of any villeins but of the Bishop of Worcester's riding men
(radmanni) that it is written 'they do whatever is commanded
them'.(93*)
    With our thirteenth century cartularies before us, we might
easily underrate the amount of money that was already being paid
as the rent of land at the date of the Conquest. In several
counties we come across small groups of censarii, censores,
gablatores who pay for their land in money, of cervisarii and
mellitarii who bring beer and honey. Renders in kind, in
herrings, eels, salmon are not uncommon, and sometimes they are
'appreciated', valued in terms of money. The pannage pig or the
grass swine, which the villeins give in return for mast and
herbage, is often mentioned. Throughout Sussex it seems to be the
custom that the lord should have 'for herbage' one pig from every
villein who has seven pigs.(94*) But money will be taken instead
of swine, oxen or fish.(95*) The gersuma, the tailla, the
theoretically free gifts of the tenants, are sums of money. But
often enough the villanus is paying a substantial money rent. We
have seen how at Leominster villeins plough and sow 140 acres for
their lord and pay a rent of more than ?1.(96*) At Lewisham in
Kent the Abbot of Gand has a manor valued at ?0; of this ? is
due to the profits of the port while two mills with 'the gafol of
the rustics' bring in ? 12s.(97*) Such entries as the following
are not uncommon -- there is one villein rendering 30d.(98*) --
there is one villein rendering 10s(99*) -- 46 cotarii with one
hide render 30 shillings a year(100*) -- the villeins give 13s 4d
by way of consuetudo.(101*) No doubt it would be somewhat rare to
find a villein discharging all his dues in money -- this is
suggested when we are told how on the land of St Augustin one
Wadard holds a large piece 'de terra villanorum' and yet renders
no service to the abbot save 30s a year.(102*) At least in one
instance the villeins seem to be holding the manor in farm, that
is to say, they are farming the demesne land and paying a rent in
money or in provender.(103*) We dare not represent the stream of
economic history as flowing uninterruptedly from a system of
labour services to a system of rents. We must remember that in
the Conqueror's reign the lord very often had numerous serfs
whose whole time was given to the cultivation of his demesne. In
the south-western counties he will often have t