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23 chapters
PREFACE.
PREFACE.
The greater part of what is in this book was written in order that it might be included in the History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. which was published by Sir Frederick Pollock and me in the year 1895. Divers reasons dictated a change of plan. Of one only need I speak. I knew that Mr Round was on the eve of giving to the world his Feudal England , and that thereby he would teach me and others many new lessons about the scheme and meaning of Domesday Book. That I was well advised i
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ADDENDUM.
ADDENDUM.
p. 347, note 794. Instances of the periodic reallotment of the whole land of a vill, exclusive of houses and crofts, seem to have been not unknown in the north of England. Here the reallotment is found in connexion with a husbandry which knows no permanent severance of the arable from the grass-land, but from time to time ploughs up a tract and after a while allows it to become grass-land once more. See F. W. Dendy, The Ancient Farms of Northumberland, Archaeologia Aeliana, Vol. xvi. I have to t
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ESSAY I. DOMESDAY BOOK.
ESSAY I. DOMESDAY BOOK.
Domesday Book and its satellites. 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 c
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§ 1. Plan of the Survey.
§ 1. Plan of the Survey.
The geographical basis. 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 [22] . 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
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§ 2. The Serfs.
§ 2. The Serfs.
The serfs in Domesday Book. 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 [61] . It is far otherwise in Domesday Book. In entry after entry and county after county the servi are kept well apart from the villani , bordar
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§ 3. The Villeins.
§ 3. The Villeins.
The boors or coliberts. 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 shi
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§ 4. The Sokemen.
§ 4. The Sokemen.
The sochemanni and liberi homines . Now of a large part of England we may say that all the occupiers of land who are not holding ‘manors [238] ’ will belong to some of those classes of which we have already spoken. They will be villeins, bordiers, cottiers, ‘boors’ or serfs. Here and there we may find a few persons who are described as liberi homines . In some of the western counties, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Shropshire, there are rachenistres or radmans ; between the Ribble and the Mers
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§ 5. Sake and soke.
§ 5. Sake and soke.
Sake and soke. We may best begin our investigation by recalling the law of later times. In the thirteenth century seignorial justice, that is, justice in private hands, has two roots. A certain civil jurisdiction belongs to the lord as such; if he has tenants enough to form a court, he is at liberty to hold a court of and for his tenants. This kind of seignorial justice we call specifically feudal justice. But very often a lord has other and greater powers than the feudal principle would give hi
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§ 6. The Manor.
§ 6. The Manor.
What is a manor? This brings us face to face with a question that we have hitherto evaded. What is a manor? The word manerium appears on page after page of Domesday Book, but to define its meaning will task our patience. Perhaps we may have to say that sometimes the term is loosely used, that it has now a wider, now a narrower compass, but we can not say that it is not a technical term. Indeed the one statement that we can safely make about it is that, at all events in certain passages and certa
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§ 7. Manor and Vill.
§ 7. Manor and Vill.
Manorial and non-manorial vills. After what has now been said, it is needless to repeat that in Domesday Book the manerium and the villa are utterly different things [547] . In a given case the two may coincide, and throughout a great tract of England such cases were common and we may even say that they were normal. But in the east this was not so. We may easily find a village which taken as a whole has been utterly free from seignorial domination. Orwell in Cambridgeshire will be a good example
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§ 8. The Feudal Superstructure.
§ 8. The Feudal Superstructure.
The higher ranks of men. It remains that we should speak very briefly of the higher ranks of men and the tenure by which they held their land. Little accurate information can be extorted from our record. The upper storeys of the old English edifice have been demolished and a new superstructure has been reared in their stead. It is not the office of Domesday Book to tell us much even of the new nobility, of the services which the counts and barons are to render to the king in return for their han
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§ 9. The Boroughs.
§ 9. The Boroughs.
Borough and village. Dark as the history of our villages may be, the history of the boroughs is darker yet; or rather, perhaps, the darkness seems blacker because we are compelled to suppose that it conceals from our view changes more rapid and intricate than those that have happened in the open country. The few paragraphs that follow will be devoted mainly to the development of one suggestion which has come to us from foreign books, but which may throw a little light where every feeble ray is u
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ESSAY II. ENGLAND BEFORE THE CONQUEST.
ESSAY II. ENGLAND BEFORE THE CONQUEST.
Object of this Essay. No one can spend patient hours in examining the complex web disclosed by Domesday Book without making some theories, at least some guesses, about the political, social and economic threads of which that web has been woven. But if we here venture to fashion and state a few such theories or such guesses, it is with no hope that they will be a complete explanation of old English history. For, in the first place, we are to speak mainly of the things of the law, of legal ideas a
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§ 1. Book-land and the Land-book.
§ 1. Book-land and the Land-book.
The lands of the churches. Now these charters or land-books are, with hardly any exceptions, ecclesiastical title-deeds. Most of them are deeds whereby lands were conveyed to the churches; some are deeds whereby lands were conveyed to men who conveyed them to the churches. Partial, one-sided and in details untrustworthy though the testimony that they bear may be, there is still one general question that they ought to answer and we ought to ask. Domesday Book shows us many of the churches as the
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§ 2. Book-land and Folk-land.
§ 2. Book-land and Folk-land.
What is folk-land? With ‘book-land’ is contrasted ‘folk-land.’ Therefore of folk-land a few words must be said. What is folk-land? A few years ago the answer that historians gave to this question was this: It is the land of the folk, the land belonging to the folk. Dr Vinogradoff has argued that this is not the right answer [904] . His argument has convinced us; but, as it is still new, we will take leave to repeat it with some few additions of our own. Folk-land in the texts. The term ‘folk-lan
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NOTE. The Ángild Clause.
NOTE. The Ángild Clause.
As we have said above, (p. 274), there are certain charters in which the clause of immunity makes mention of the ángild ( pretium pro pretio, singulare pretium ). We will here collect the obscure texts in which this difficult term occurs. First, however, we will call attention to a passage in Domesday’s account of Worcestershire (D. B. i. 175 b), which throws some light on the matter. Westminster Abbey holds 200 hides and Pershore Abbey holds 100 hides. ‘The county says that the church of Persho
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§ 4. Book-land and Loan-land.
§ 4. Book-land and Loan-land.
The book and the gift. We can not say that from the first the gift of book-land establishes between the donee and the royal donor any such permanent relation as that which in later times is called tenure. What the king gives he apparently gives for good and all. In particular, a gift of land to a church is ‘an out and out gift’; nay more, it is a dedication. Still, even within the sphere of piety and alms, we sometimes find the notion that in consequence of the gift the donee should do something
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§ 5. The Growth of Seignorial Power.
§ 5. The Growth of Seignorial Power.
Subjection of free men. We now return to our original theme, the subjection to seignorial power of free land-holders and their land, for we now have at our command the legal machinery, which, when set in motion by economic and social forces, is capable of effecting that subjection. Let us suppose a village full of free land-holders. The king makes over to a church all the rights that he has in that village, reserving only the trinoda necessitas and perhaps some pleas of the crown. The church now
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§ 6. The Village Community.
§ 6. The Village Community.
The village community. We have argued for an England in which there were many free villages. It remains for us to say a word of the doctrines which would fill England with free landowning village communities. Here we enter a misty region where arguments suggested by what are thought to be ‘survivals’ and inferences drawn from other climes or other ages take the place of documents. We are among guesses and little has as yet been proved. The popular theory. A popular theory teaches us that land be
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ESSAY III. THE HIDE.
ESSAY III. THE HIDE.
What was the hide? What was the hide? However unwilling we may be to face this dreary old question, we can not escape it. At first sight it may seem avoidable by those who are interested in the general drift of national life, but have no desire to solve petty problems or face unnecessary difficulties. The history of weights and measures, some may say, is probably very curious and no doubt is worth study; but we, who shall be amply satisfied if we understand the grand movements and the broad trai
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§ 1. Measures and Fields.
§ 1. Measures and Fields.
Permanence and change in agrarian history. At the present moment there is no need for arguments which insist upon the immutable character of ancient agrarian arrangements. If we take up a map of a common field drawn in the eighteenth century, the lines that we see upon it are in the main very old. The scheme seems fashioned for the purpose of resisting change and compelling the men of one age to till the land as their fathers tilled it. Nothing but an unanimous agreement among those who are not
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§ 2. Domesday Statistics.
§ 2. Domesday Statistics.
Domesday’s three statements. As a general rule the account given by Domesday Book of any manor contains three different statements about it which seem to have some bearing upon the subject of our present inquiry. ( A ) It will tell us that the manor is rated to the geld at a certain number of units, which units will in Kent be solins or sulungs and yokes ( iuga ), in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Norfolk and Suffolk carucates and bovates (but bovates are,
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§ 3. Beyond Domesday.
§ 3. Beyond Domesday.
The hide beyond Domesday. We have now seen a good deal of evidence which tends to prove that the hide has had for its model a tenement comprising 120 acres of arable land or thereabouts. Some slight evidence of this we have seen on the face of the Anglo-Saxon land-books [1616] . A little more evidence pointing in the same direction we have seen in the manorial extents of a later day [1617] . And now we have argued that the fiscal hide of the Conqueror’s day is composed of 120 (fiscal) acres. Fro
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