by Jack Lindsay
In England, we have seen, there was never such a failure of kingly controls as on the continent. Also larger numbers of slaves persisted than in Gaul. There are many references to slaves in the law-codes; the Domesday Book gave some nine per cent of the population as slaves in 1086 and in the eastern counties the proportion rose as high as forty per cent. There were some 25,000 of them. Many of these slaves were part of demesne resources; their typical occupation was that of demesne ploughman or oxherd. Such is the ploughman in Aelfric’s Colloquy:
‘Ploughman, how do you work?’
‘I go out at dawn to drive the oxen to the field, and yoke them to the plough. However hard the winter I dare not stay at home for fear of my lord. Every day I have to plough an acre or more. I have to fill the ox’s bin with hay and give them water and carry the dung outside. Hard work it is because I am not free.’
But some slaves worked outside the demesne and may have been ignored by Domesday commissioners who were more interested in demesne than in tenant holdings; the bordarii may be servi cassati. Before 1066 men, women and children could be reduced to slavery as a punishment (e.g. for a false oath), or sold into slavery because of famine or poverty. Slaves had a low wergild of 40 pence. Far back in Pope Gregory’s days English slaves were being sold in Rome; and there was long a flourishing trade of slaves from Ireland, who were carried to Bristol. This trade was still active in the eleventh century. Kent had three subdivisions of theows. In the thirteenth century the remaining demesne slaves were given holdings as part of their wages for the job.[227] The large-scale persistence of slavery in England was perhaps the result of its relative stability and a conservative attitude to demesne labour.
Above the slaves were the ceorls or churls, the relatively free peasants. Ceorl originally meant husband: man as correlative of wife. By extension it meant the head of a peasant household: its usual sense in the texts. It corresponds to rusticus and its best equivalent in modern English is husbandman.[228] The Rectitudines Singularum Personarum (probably dated to the generation before 1066) divided ceorls into three main groups: geneatas (radknights of Domesday), kotsetlan or cottagers, and geburas. As a class they were weakening, caught between the warriors and the theows; they tended to lose their economic freedom and with it all other freedoms. Any sort of trouble or mishap was liable to drive a man into dependency: illness, heavy taxes, Norse raids, land tax like the Danegeld. Kings rewarded servants or conferred favours by granting out food rents and other dues payable to themselves. Big landowners, especially churchmen, put tenants on their estates on service conditions. Dependent tenures appear in the Laws of Ine of Wessex (668-726), but must have existed much earlier. These laws deal with lords who grant lands to dependents and demand services as well as rent; dependents who have dared to leave their lords must return and pay compensation; men, even free men, incur penalties by working on Sunday without their lords’ consent.[229] The Dialogue of Salomon and Saturn states, ‘A wealthy ceorl may, according to his own inclination, easily choose a mild lord, perhaps a prince; the poor man has no such choice.’[230] The cohesion of the kin-groups, which once gave an individual much protection, had been breaking down, despite its tenacity in certain respects such as the carrying on of blood feuds. One reason was the fact that members settled far apart, so that kindreds ceased more and more to be compact groups; another was the idea that property was alienable, which the church did much to bring in and foster. The limiting of heirs to a certain kin-range grew stronger. By Cnut’s time a man who had satisfactorily carried out the obligations on an estate could give it at death to whom he liked. Formal rules suggest that wife, children and close kin were expected to be the main heirs, but there was much freedom of disposal. After land had been legally sold or given away, the kin lost all claim to it and could not even exercise a right of preemption. These situations differ greatly from those of early Scandinavia.[231]
If the ceorl was free in comparison with the theow, he was not free in any complete way. Alfred in his version of Orosius equates ceorl with libertinus (freedman, who kept obligations to his patron). His laws show that some Wessex ceorls were rich enough to own slaves; these men may have been as free as a man could be in such a world, but there is nothing to suggest that they were typical. The treaty with the Danish King Guthrum equates the East Anglian ceorls with Danish freedmen, the half-free liesengas. In a will drawn up about 950 a woman directs that two men and a woman are to be set free; she leaves to her daughter the rest of the men ‘except the freedmen’, with the livestock. She or her predecessor, it follows, stocked the estate with husbandmen and oxen, both of which remained her property; those not freed might presumably be sold off or moved to some other estate by her daughter. The freedmen passed with the land and thus had security of tenure; but as they gained it by express stipulation they seem to have been very much at their mistress’s disposal.[232]
We must never think that there was ever a simple struggle between nobles and peasantry. War-chiefs and comitatus were present from the start. Ine’s laws show nobles who hold land; and they mention both tax-exempt demesne and land with tenant settlers and no exemptions — here already is the distinction between demesne and peasant land. Alfred’s version of Augustine’s Soliloquies assumes that a follower will hope to live only for a time on ‘land loaned from his lord’, until at last, ‘through the lord’s kindness, he may earn bookland and perpetual possession’.[233] One element of continuity was the village community, which passed through many phases but was always the basic unit of rural organization. Political life in the last resort rested on the village communities. Village meetings, of which we know little, were probably held at first to deal with problems such as allocating work and controlling refractory individuals, and later to assign police duties in a more regular way. Peasants at all stages of dependence and independence were liable to be found in the villages. The leading member of a family might hold a farm and a share in the village field; but around him would be landless kinsmen and farm labourers. From a rough legal viewpoint they were all of much the same status; but their social and economic roles were very different. A ceorl, though in some form of dependence on a lord, was still under the protection of common law. Custom regulated his obligations whether involving geld (money rent), feorm (rent in kind), or labour services. A lord’s estate rarely coincided with a village; persons and lands might be commended to different lords. Peasants with full control of their land and owing only light services to lords were common as sokemen in the Danelaw; but generally peasant status was becoming lower.
Above the peasants were gesiths or companions, who had left the kindred to serve the king, accepting him as lord and entering under the shield of his peace, and becoming legally and economically dependent on him. Their role was mainly military and they were classified with a higher wergild than the ordinary ceorl: 1200 shillings to his 200. They rose in status by being given grants of land. Their oath had a higher value; their houses were more sacrosanct. Their name fades out during the ninth century; for some time it had been giving way to that of thegn — though in effect there was little difference between gesith and thegn. With both of them what had been an office became an hereditary status. Thegns did both military and administrative work; the magnates’ households needed them as well as did the king’s. There were not many of them in the eleventh century, but they held a lot of land — though the king could make or break them as his servants at will.[234] Peasants, we must recall, were both tenants of a lord and taxpayers of the king. A lord’s motives in letting out his land might be mixed. Some tenants might be asked only to give an oath of loyalty as well as paying the taxes on the land; others to provide various rents and services. The entanglements grew more complex when the king alienated public rights to a landlord.
Probably at the outset estate and village, manor and vill, were all one, and expansion led to the formation of estates covering more than one settlement. In outlying parts lords may well have allowed a fair degree of territorial autonomy.
As sections broke off as separate manors, estate structure could become even more complicated. Further differences in grouping could come about through a lord getting hold of nearby estates and rights. The whole picture would in time be made more involved and tortuous through sales and mortgages, leases and rewards, partitions or accretions through provision for women, inheritance and family arrangements (e.g. by co-heirs), forfeitures, illegal tactics, and pious gifts. Aelfhelm, in a will made 975-1016, left half his estate at Conington (Cambridgeshire), already lessened by four and a half hides he had granted to others, to his wife and daughter ‘to divide between them’, while he left his property at Troston (Suffolk), less a part already given away, to be shared among three brothers. Followers as well as relations had to have their gifts and rewards; such grants could lead to the division of an estate or could alter the structure of a manor. Thus a highly complex pattern of change, breakdown, and conglomeration appears, at work over a long time.[235]
Some suggestive points emerge from an analysis of the Charltons already mentioned: the tuns of ceorls, though karl may have taken over from ceorl in areas open to Danish occupation. Were the ceorls dependent? In Domesday Book many Charltons appear as satellites of other manors; in several cases they are not far from royal seats. So it has been deduced that they were appendages of royal manors, or of manors made up out of the royal domain for the endowment of favoured subjects. But far back the cyninges tun or regia villa, precursor of the royal manor, was a basic unit in the organization of justice and finance. Here the peasants from the surrounding country paid the food rents that kept the king, and often the profits of justice from the hundred courts were rendered here. These tuns seem usually to have had a prison, for Alfred enacts that a pledge-breaker is to be jailed for forty days at the cyninges tun, doing whatever penance the bishop ordains. (During the tenth century they attracted traders on account of their good order.) Sites like Axminster, Wantage and Mansfield were not only administrative centres of districts covering a hundred hides or more, but also heads of farming units (perhaps made up of several villages and hamlets). However, such systems began breaking up early with grants, rewards, and gifts to avid churches. So we meet names that speak of the grantee, e.g. Sibton the tun of Sibba. Yet the king needs a subordinate tun for its food rents and for the services of its ceorls in running the central manor. If the latter has a home farm, slaves will be used there, but the ceorls will be needed for harvests and the like. The tun takes the name of Charlton as the site of the king’s ceorls, working for themselves but also for the king.[236]
There were three kinds of land that could be held: folkland, bookland, loanland. The first was owned outright by custom; it was held by individuals and normally it reverted only to kinsmen; as disputes about it came up in the folk courts, we know little of it. The second was also owned outright, by those who had managed to get a charter for it. The third was held on conditions and was in many ways like the continental benefice or fief. The Church with its desire to hold in perpetuity had brought in the charter or diploma, boc (book), which, couched in a florid Latin influenced by the Celts, conveyed land in terms of the vulgar law of the late Roman empire.[237] By the time of Edward the Confessor the charter had given way to the writ in the royal court. Land which the king granted could not be reclaimed, unless a thegn-owner neglected his duties such as fyrd-service or deserted in battle. The system was spreading from the church to the laity — though for the church it meant land capable of being held for ever, and for the layman it meant land that could be alienated or bequeathed. From the eighth century boc-land had been given to the thegns. But the charter was not itself the grant, which was made ceremonially, by symbolic gesture and word of mouth. As in Germanic custom law every gift needed a counter-gift; the formulas of Roman law no doubt obscured the fact that a return was expected: prayers and masses from the church, a price or services from the layman.[238] Disputes about it bypassed the folk courts and went straight to king and witan. As usual in the feudal world, even outright ownership was not absolute; the land was liable to be burdened with some service or other. And there was heriot, paid to the lord on a tenant’s death by the heir in money, horses or arms, but remitted if a man fell in battle. For boc-land, however, the emphasis was not on services or dues, though it involved the burdens common to all land: maintenance of bridges and fortifications, and military duties. The charter or grant did not create the duties, which were linked with all landowning; but by the eleventh century the Rectitudines could consider that a thegn held his land in return for military services.
Leases, traced back to the late seventh century, multiplied in the period before the conquest. The church, wanting land for perpetuity, hated giving things away on the same terms; and anyway it could not give lands for which it was in effect a trustee. Yet it had to reward servants and thegns, and so it used loanland, which was a sort of benefice. Thus land could be lent to servants or leased for rent in money or kind, and life interests could be created in land for widows, younger children, and such dependents. Religious houses granted leases to household retainers, cnihts, and thegns in return for personal services or for taking over common burdens due to the king — of which military service was the most important. In the terms of Anglo-Norman lawyers the land was burdened with both intrinsic and forinsec services. No doubt laymen also used leases, but we lack evidence. The extant leases (of churchland) are mostly for three lives, but could cover shorter times. Within the stated period leaseland could be inherited or bequeathed; but failure to carry out the entailed services could mean the loss of the land.
Land could change hands a lot, often begetting confusions and lawsuits. In a charter dealing with Hurstbourne (Hampshire) we find the lordship passing from the Wessex king to an ealdorman, then to a church in Berkshire, then back to the king. It stayed in royal hands half a century, though from 858 under promise of finally coming to the Old Minster. In Alfred’s reign the minster gained possession; but with all the stress of war and tribute the clergy had to borrow money from the king and repay him by handing back the usufruct. Ten hides at Stoke were detached and entrusted to a thegn or royal reeve. Alfred was now dead; Hurstbourne and Stoke were to be reunited and at long last the minster would get permanent possession. But in the bustle of a new reign the transfer took several months; perhaps the witan was called in, as the matter is described as contentious, settled not without trouble, elucabratim. The charter shows a wish to close up every loophole.[239]
Land, we saw, was burdened with military obligations. Much argument has gone on as to whether we can then equate such land with the Norman military fief. The landed nobles were certainly bound to answer the king’s call and serve him in war, or else to lose their land. The tenure had its military aspect, but this aspect was not made the explicitly defined basis on which the grant was made. The thegns had to fight, but their main function was administrative. Thegnship was a status. A merchant who voyaged three times over-sea, or a priest attending the king, might be promoted to it. If a thegn broke with his lord or gave his land away, he still had his military duties. Since England, an island, did not have to meet enemies on horseback in large battles, specialization had gone less far than in France. A thegn would be better armed than a ceorl in the fyrd, but there was no such gap as between mounted knight and footsoldier in Normandy. The thegn did not have to buy, rear, or train destriers. Thus England with its high degree of tribal-national integration did not find itself driven to explicit fief feudalism; but the general concept of land-ownership involving military obligations was as alive there as anywhere else.[240]
We see then that England had developed a relatively stable society, with broad class distinctions based ultimately on a man’s relation to land. Inside the main divisions there was much differentiation; but the strong tribal basis, with power concentrated in the hands of the king, who was seen as the war-chief, prevented the gesiths or companions developing into barons such as we have seen in Normandy. The later earldoms indeed suggest great bar
onies and begin to take on some of their characteristics; but the king still has a supreme place for which we find no parallel in post-Carolingian Gaul. The stability of the kingship, however, cannot be properly understood without a consideration of the popular courts and the king’s peace, which we shall look at later.
For the moment it is enough to note that there were two great binding forces in this society: forces which in some respects merged to strengthen one another, and in other respects were antagonistic. These were the bond of lordship, which we have considered, and the bond of kindred. In everyday village life the two bonds continually interlocked. A man in his home and in the fields was affected con-tinually by both relationships; and it was the harmony of the two bonds that gave him many of his impulses, satisfactions and organizing energies. And yet, in the full historical process, the overriding needs of lordship were breaking down the broad and rich kindred systems. At first the commendation of person or land was a private matter, a private bond. But it greatly affected a man’s place in the kindred, drawing him into a different sphere of controls. And the kings soon saw its use in their police administration. In such a society a man for whom no one was responsible was a suspicious and unreliable character. Was the kindred or the lord responsible for this or that man? The kindred had certain protective functions, especially in connection with acts of violence against him; but more and more the lord controlled his economic and social life. As the law codes developed, we see the weakening of the kin bond. Already in the early seventh century, in the laws of Wihtred of Kent, an accused ceorl had to clear himself, with the help not of his kinsmen, but of three oath-helpers of his own status. A century later the laws of Ine enjoined, in the case of a man charged with homicide, the inclusion of a man of high rank among those who testified; and for a ceorl such a witness could only be the lord to whom he was bound. Theft was a common crime. But the kindred, possibly scattered about, were not the most likely to know the facts; the accused had to get oaths sworn by neighbours whom he chose and who were then named for him by the court, provided that he did not thus suffer disparagement. An embryonic notion of trial by peers is present here. If the offence were against the king, a man was better placed if he could call on neighbours chosen by royal officials. In general we may say that territorial connections had begun to oust the kindred and that fealty to a lord disrupted the kin bond. We saw how Alfred allowed a man to fight for a wronged kinsman only if it did not mean fighting his lord.