DOMESDAY BOOK AND SOCIAL ENGLAND.* PROFESSOR VINOGRA.DOFF in his successive
treatises on the origins of English institutions is performing a work of vast importance. He and his school are revolutionising our knowledge of mediaeval England. Their massive treatment of our priceless records in the light of foreign material promises to provide a real approach to the social life of England, indeed of Europe, in the eleventh century. We are told that
"No attempt to explain the rise of a landed aristocracy or the mediaeval agrarian system, or the influence of the Danish invasion, or the relative strength of the free or unfree elements of society can succeed unless the materials provided by the Domesday Survey are examined and accounted for. On the other hand, it is not less important to analyse this material in the light provided by later and earlier facts. The Survey is primarily composed of abstracts from notes on early Norman and late Saxon conditions, and the clues to its terminology and statistics must be sought not only in indications provided by itself, but also in the evidence from English, French, and Scandinavian sources in its immediate neighbourhood. In a sense, the Domes- day Inquest became a powerful factor in history ; it led to the definite registration of groups which might otherwise have remained in a rather floating state ; settlements of controversies as to tenure and status were connected with it. But the principal aim of the Survey was not to modify but to record, and therefore it stands in the closest relation to the age which precedes it. Difficult critical problems certainly arise in any attempt to inter- pret Domesday by the help of feudal incidents, or of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish terms, but both methods of interpretation have to be constantly used if we want to get at the realities indicated by the dry abstracts of the Survey itself."
The social realities of the eleventh century are the goal at which all modern students wish to arrive. If we can but reconstruct those realities, the subsequent developments of national life will take on a new aspect, and innumerable problems now shrouded in darkness will become clear. " The importance of the subject and the wealth of information supplied by the existing evidence may justify my attempt to take up a study in which so much has been done by scholars of great name, and especially by one, the greatest of all, who has been lately taken from us." Professor Vinogradoff, in dedicating this elaborate investigation to that scholar, Frederic William Maitland, has emphasised both the import- ance of his subject and the debt under which he lies to the great Cambridge jurist.
Professor Vinogradoff in his work on The Growth of the Manor has already shown us that the roots of the manorial system pierce down as deep as the Celtic and Roman ages of Britain. These ages created a village
organisation of landowners and tenants acting together for agricultural purposes through public meetings and elected officers. The Roman age brought to bear on this society a force that fostered the growth of private property and its concomitant, taxation. The development of private estates was accompanied by local political privileges in the shape of patronage. People looked to the local magnate for protection.
• English Society in the Eleventh Century: Essays in English Mediaeval ,History. By Paul Vinoeradoff, Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence in the University of Oxford. Oxford : at the University Press. [16e. net But, on the other band, the magnate had to grant privileges to the peasantry in order that their work, On . which he depended, should be efficient. The fact that the Colonate made the continuance of agriculture possible after the decay of the Empire shows that landowners, in order to keep the peasantry on the land, gave them substantial -privileges. These Roman forces permeated Celtio Britain, and, helped by the physical presence of the centralising villa and the uniting road, played an important part in determining the ultimate form that Celtic society took after the departure of the Romans and the advent of new Celtic and Scandinavian invaders. Tribal simplicity could never again control the settlements. Individualism and patronage were henceforward determining forces in social and economics development. Patronage assumed in many cases a form that was necessarily territorial. Patrimonial justice naturally developed. into private local jurisdiction. Grants of jurisdic- tion were a frequent gift from the King, or were presumed from continuous use. " Rights of Sake and Soke (cause and suit)" often enough involved the right to try important cases, and then " a Court necessarily grew out of it; it was a kind of chip severed from the block of the public Courts of the hundred, county, or realm, a Court based on the participation of those free men who came under its soke, or had to do suit (soke) to it." By the year 1000 A.D. every Englishman " was supposed to have a jurisdictional lord above him," the King or some other. But militarism also played its part in the formation of manorial society. The attacks of the Danes in the tenth and early eleventh centuries made capacity for arms a matter of the first importance, and it was found that a line of social cleavage was created in this way : the man who could pose at any time as a warrior was recognised as a free man—and it was found in practice that in most Saxon cases this meant the holder of five bides—while the man who was a labourer on the land, and became with difficulty an archer, gradually joined the unfree class. The manor from such sources slowly developed along economic lines, which tended still more to divide the economic unit internally, so that one portion of the land (the demesne) is appropriated to the lord, while the rest is related to the lord by the payment to him of services and rents. Thus before the coming of the Norman we have a manorial system where militarism tends to subjugate labour, and the chief local military personality assumes the lordship over the rural community in which he lives.
The Norman occupation did not oust the existing land law. The title of the new owners was tested by Anglo-Saxon and not by Norman law. The Domesday Survey makes this quite clear. But the Norman atmosphere dominated social life. The children, even, had to speak Anglo-Norman in school. "French law was imported wholesale and. put into practice in every sphere of life." To it we owe trial by jury. But the Danish or Scandinavian influence, as well as the Anglo-Saxon, survived the Conquest. " The fundamental dualism of pre- Conquestual England" must be carefully borne in mind in considering the institutions of the later eleventh century.
The general scheme of this book is an analysis of "the principal legal institutions of the age in their bearing on the constitution of society," and this involves treatment, on the one hand, of government and society, and, on the other, of laud and people. Government and society may be regarded from the point of view of military. organisation, including " mer- cenaries and national levies " and feudal service ; or from the point of view of jurisdiction, the public jurisdiction of the county and the hundred and the private franchises such as grants of Sake and Soke; or from the point of view. of taxa- tion, which, developing at an earlier date here than on the Continent, shows us the early concentration of political energy in England. State revenues in the eleventh century consisted of customary payments in kind and money, ordinary land- taxes, and the extraordinary impositions such as the danegeld, and (later) scutage and carucage. Dauegeld, the tax the local incidence of which it was the business of the Domesday Survey to determine, had the effect of crystallising the manorial system, since it made the classes who had a difficulty in paying the tax dependent. on the richer classes who could help them to pay. The demesne lands (since they supplied the King with men) were free from this tax, and this tended to bring the outlying lands which were subject to the geld under the demesne lord. The email free, men were thus gradually crushed out of existence, and the Conquest completed
this work. This free class of small men arose again later but under new economic conditions of trade and Governmental control that destroyed the feudal system.
The Conquest was in many ways the beginning of a new order of things. It created in all cases a new root of title, which consisted in proving "grant and livery," or by pro- ducing the title of the Saxon "antecessor" of the Norman holder. The Conquest checked alienation, for all land-holding having become tenurial, the lord's consent was necessary to each alienation. The man who could go with his land where he liked was only of importance after the Conquest as an explanation of questions of the attachment of plots of land to particular manors. The theory that " mere personal com- mendation did not amount to a dependence of the land" was not able long to survive. Patronage and clientship, which we have traced right back into Roman times, had become at last a real relationship based on land tenure. Moreover, the very forms of tenure (which were developing freely before
the Conquest) became fixed, and were mere " varieties of one main feudal group." The feudal nexus gave every estate a lord, a burden of service, a fixed place in the economy of the State.
The chapter on " Husbandry " takes us into the actual life of the people. " Villages were more common than single farms or small hamlets in the greater part of the country." "The single farm occurs in forest districts. It appears sometimes as an isolated homestead among the woods." We may speak of " a cluster of 2-5 homesteads, on an average, as of a hamlet, while a cluster of six or more homesteads would form a village." Geographical considerations account for many scattered dwellings and settlements in Derbyshire and Wales; but they also occur in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, normally the home of big villages such as Calthorp. Derbyshire, how- ever, mostly presents villages of moderate size, eight to sixteen households, with shares in the fields and appendant cottages; while Essex gives us large villages as the character- istic type of settlement. Professor Vinogradoff's account of the prevailing system of champion farming—the open- field system—is chiefly taken from the entries of the old English charters as to boundaries. The arrangement of shares and holdings is directly related to this champion system.
It is most fascinating to follow the references to invaluable, because rare, bay-meadows, to wild pasture-lands, to wood- lands used as pasture, by reason of the scattered "mast," for swine and cattle. We hardly realise to-day how vast was the area of the country covered by woods. Part of those districts was, of course, highly preserved forest-land, but the rest was in the common use of the lord and tenantry of the manors. In these woods were dens clearances where men and animals could move with ease. These were specially numbered and guarded. Waste land—land uncultivated by reason of neglect or war—was too common. The greater part of Yorkshire at one time lay waste. When we turn to the people on the land, it is not easy to distinguish in fact between the various classes, even between free men and unfree men. It was always possible to point out the pre-Conquestual thane, for, rich or poor, he was an armed man who held his holding by military service. The class of small thanes were mercilessly depressed at the Conquest, and they probably sank into the ranks of socmen or villains. But the free thanes must be compared with the free men whose liberty was personal and not related to a freehold. It was difficult to distinguish between these classes, and difficult, again, to dis- tinguish both classes from serfs and slaves who were rising in the social scale. Again, who could distinguish in practice between the free man and the socman, or free peasant under the jurisdiction of a lord ? The man under Soke probably repre- sented a Danish element, but, like the small free man, he rapidly sank into the class of villains. Within twenty years of the Conquest the villains numbered a hundred thousand households out of a total of about two hundred and forty thousand households noted in the Great Survey. They were landowners, and were taxed to the geld. That fact is clear enough, though it is difficult to determine definitely the servile and the free element in their position. Their mixed origin no doubt accounts for this. The Bordarii were a class of lesser villains,—poorer peasants of the same stock provided with holdings. The last class was the serfs or Semi, some twenty-five thousand in all, a class who possessed no holdings as of right, but who helped to work the land.
Slavery, however, died out rapidly enough, and the smaller- peasant class was largely recruited from the freed men.
It is difficult to give in a review any adequate idea of the- value of this monumental work, which reconstructs in a very wonderful way the social life of the eleventh century. It is, possible at last to feel that we are in positive touch with the nation that William the Conqueror subdued and transformed. In accomplishing such a task Professor Vinogradoff has- carried Maitland's work noticeably forward.
Previous page
