The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  Not that in such a world the kin element could ever be quite driven out or reduced to the family in its narrow sense. We have no clear proof that there ever were corporate holdings of land by kindreds or if the latter ever existed as territorial units; but right into the eleventh century the kindreds carried on as a powerful source of social control. A law of Aethelstan mentions a kin group strong enough to resist the central authority, but it may refer to a man who gathered members of his kindred from far as well as near.[241] The stress was on patrilineal descent and the kin thus involved; on the spear side rather than on the spindle side. Surnames did not exist, though additional names might be given to help identification, amid the crowd of Aelfwines, Wulfrics, and the like. Children’s names were compounded from parents’ names, but there is no trace of reference to a named kin group.[242]

  How far did reality live up to the ideal of loyalty, not in the high exciting moments, but in everyday life? We see the steady intrusion of economic bargaining in the forms of commendation and dependence. Except among household troops and the like the old element of devoted adherence between lord and man could hardly have been felt. In theory all free men were obliged to join the royal fyrd in an emergency. Alfred called up sections at a time and so could extend the length of campaigns, but in general a peasant soldiery could not stay long away from the fields. Something of the old comitatus relationship was carried on by the king’s thegns. The number of such retainers was much enlarged by Cnut with his house-carles or companions-in-arms, Anglo-Danish courtiers well endowed with land. But we must not think of all the thegns as being on their level or as much involved with the king. No doubt free men on the whole felt a definite loyalty towards the king in the sense of looking to him as the ultimate source of what they most valued in life; and at certain moments this emotion could be intensified. But it could also be jeopardized by heavy exactions. Alfred had built a fleet of ships too large, we are told, for his people to handle them; and later kings maintained the right to seize any ship in times of need. But a regular fleet was too expensive for the revenues of those days; Cnut reached England with forty ships, then quickly reduced the number to sixteen. When Harthacnut tried to bear the cost of forty-two ships, he caused much discontent and two of his house-caries were murdered.

  Still, the kings did their best to remain at the centre of the situation and keep a constant grip on men’s loyalties; and partly through the workings of the local courts they were able to appear as the effective fountain-head of justice and security. The ideal position was expressed in the Battle of Maldon where the warriors are ready to die for their lord Byrhtnoth, but he sees himself in the role of ‘guardian of the people and of the country, the home of Aethelred my prince — who’ll defend this land to the last ditch’. Here is the perfect feudal situation: the retainers, nobles and even lesser ceorls all faithful to the lord, and the lord faithful to the king, his overlord, who in turn embodies an embryonic sense of the nation.

  In that ideal situation the kindred systems did not intrude; they merely helped men to exist and work together in a cooperative brotherly sort of way. But in practice there could be clashes of kindreds, especially when the member of one was killed and his fellows felt impelled by the bond to avenge him on the killer, who in turn invoked the solidarity of his own group. And villagers in areas where kindred groups had at all strongly survived would talk over any grievances they had against the lord and would be encouraged to resist. Later we will look at two matters that show the power of the kindred in English society: the way in which the kings sought to keep peace by inducing kindreds to take wergild in compensation for a killed member rather than turn to the feud, and the way in which, as the kindred forms weakened, men sought to devise new forms of cooperation, guilds, on the same model. Here we can well consider the hide, which in this period was seen as a territorial unit, used for assessing taxes and rents, renders and services for king or lord, but which has a complex story behind it, a story that helps us to grasp the early English concept of family and kindred.

  The hide can be traced back in documents to the seventh century; and the laws of Ine, the East Saxon king, have a rule defining the food render due from ten hides. The Northumbrian Bede several times refers to the hide and calls it the normal unit of land measurement used by the English. Kings and lords use both the manse and the hide in their systems; but it is most unlikely that they devised the forms or criteria of the measurements of land which they applied. To do so they would have needed methods of surveying and administration which plainly they lacked. The unit they used would certainly have been taken over from earlier stages in the evolution of their society. The Frankish manse, a unit equivalent to the hide, may have existed since the late Roman empire, when administrators may have taken it up in assessing taxes and services; but again they certainly did not create it. (By comparing the Anglo-Saxon evidence with that from Ireland in this period, where there is no question of Roman influences in such matters, we see that both Celtic and Germanic society had fairly similar systems.) The hide had three main aspects: it was the land of one family, the land of a normal freeman, the land worked by one plough.[243]

  The key question is how a family was defined. Was it as wide as a kindred, or was it the limited family of man, wife, and children? In Germanic tongues the term for the home (Old English ham, Old High German helm, Gothic halms, village) is linked with the Old English hœmed, sexual intercourse. The home is the place where a man and his wife cohabit. So the Old English words for hide (hid, hiwisc, hiwiscipe) seem definitely to refer to the limited family, its house and holding. As early as the late seventh century in Wessex, and perhaps earlier in Mercia and Northumbria, the emphasis on the term hide shifted from the home aspect to that of the land unit. A passage in Bede’s Historia Abbatum shows that at a landholder’s death the estate was divided among the sons, but the eldest son was given a preference. Ine’s laws show that his prerogative was the ‘first seat’. The inheriting sons each set up his own home.[244]

  The normal freeman or ceorl belonged to the main body of freemen entitled to share fully in the life of the community. The hide was the unit of land he held, an area enabling him to enjoy his status; the noble held at least five hides. Already in Ine’s Wessex many peasants, legally free, were in fact tenants of manorial lords; they were probably often yardlanders, holding a quarter of a hide. There was thus a loosening of the link between wealth and status.

  Where does the kindred come into this system, and how was it constituted? For any precise information on this point we must turn to wergild. In Ireland, the four-generation, agnatic lineage was the basic kin group for feuds as for other matters. The status of a lord required that the holders of a five-hide unit, namely a lineage, should be his vassals; lineage, lordship, status and land were bound up in a closely knit unity. We best make sense of the English situation by assuming that at an early stage in the history of the Germanic speaking peoples a corresponding system existed in their society. This would involve three essential elements: the status of the normal freeman, an appropriate holding of land and a kinship system which included the lineage as a normal form of kin-group’ (Charles-Edwards).

  It seems clear that the structure of Anglo-Saxon kinship was agnatic; but such a structure did not imply that men who were not members of the same agnatic kindred might not have close kin ties. In agnatic systems there is often a close link between a man and his mother’s brother — perhaps a carry-over from matrilinear systems. In certain circumstances a man may then become attached to his maternal kindred as if it were the paternal one. Such a tie was possible in Ireland; it is also recognized in some Welsh lawbooks.

  Tacitus tells us of his Germans:

  The sons of sisters are highly honoured by their uncles as by their own fathers. Some even go so far as to regard this tie of blood as peculiarly close and sacred, and, in taking hostages, insist on having them of this group; they think this gives them a firmer grip on men’s hearts and a wider hold on the family.
However, a man’s heirs and successors are his own children, and there is no such thing as a will; where there are no children, the next to succeed are, first, brothers, and then uncles, first on the father’s, then on the mother’s side. The larger a man’s kin and the greater the number of his relations by marriage, the stronger is his influence when old.[245]

  The laws earlier than the Danish invasions do not define kindreds; the latter were so integral a part of society that their role and nature is assumed. We must look to Bede for information. Genealogies of kings in Kent and East Anglia are agnatic in form: the members of royal kindreds could trace their descent back in the male line to a particular ancestor. A man could become king in one of three ways. A member of the royal kindred who showed powers of leadership, especially in war, might be elected; the eldest son might succeed; the kingdom might be divided among two or more sons. Partible inheritance meant that if there were at least two or three sons in each generation, we should after a while get a cluster of farmsteads held by agnatic kinsmen. (This point does not apply to lords with scattered estates; hence the impermanence of their kindreds.) The clusters were at times called by the name of the kindred: for example, one type of early place name is formed on the same pattern as were the names of royal kindreds such as the Oiscingas or the Wuffingas. The suffix -ing was attached to a personal name, with the masculine plural -as added. Not that all -ingas names can be assumed to be originally the names of kindreds, but many of them probably were.[246]

  Such groups, we noted, did not own land collectively, though the rule against alienating land outside the kindred shows there was still a feeling that a kindred had a territorial urtity, into which non-members should not intrude. Ine’s laws reveal neighbours (clusters of agnatic lineage?) cooperating in agricultural matters. There is strong evidence for the long life of kindreds; one late Northumbrian vendetta carried on for four generations. [247] The Chronicle says that Uhtred was killed by the advice of Eadric Streona; but the main agent seems to have been a noble, Thurbrand. Uhtred, it seems, came with forty companions to treat for peace with Cnut, but they were all killed by Cnut’s soldiers through Thurbrand’s guile. Thurbrand was then killed by Uhtred’s son, earl of Northumbria, who in turn was killed by Waltheof, son of Earl Siward, whose mother was the earl’s daughter. The gegildan, the group of associates who supported each other in feuds (and later in other ways) formed a corporate body and played a role analogous to that of the kindred. And indeed the kindred was used as a model for various kinds of social and political groups. A whole people might be called a kin, maeg or cynn; and thus the kindred in its final emotional extension foreshadowed the later nation.[248]

  Despite then the silence of the laws on the kindreds (apart from wergild), it is clear that they played an essential part in holding English society together. We know a good deal about the forms of exploitation of the normal freemen by the lords; but in the concrete details of everyday life the ties of kindred must have operated in a myriad of pervasive ways that are largely lost to us.

  *

  We now turn to the system of kingly or centralized government which had been built up, and its relation to the popular local courts. The royal household showed a mixture of primitive elements and advanced methods. A great deal of the income was still food rent; but there was a certain amount of cash kept in a chest. The chest was at first put with other belongings in the wardrobe next to the king’s chamber, to be looked after by his bower-thegns (chamberlains) and his hraegel-thegns (wardrobe attendants). But as the quantity of money increased and the king still moved round much of the time, by Cnut’s reign it had to be stored in a single place where it could be watched over and be available for auditing; the coins were weighed or assayed as to their silver content. Lesser store points had also to be set up. The sheriffs of each shire farmed the various items of the royal revenue (profits of justice, customs of boroughs, feorms of royal estates) and paid in the stipulated amounts at Winchester, together with any extra sums that had come in. ‘No other fisc in Europe had developed so far; and it was accepted and developed by the Normans. Its archives, like those of the scriptorium, have disappeared. Its records were superseded by, and started anew with, Domesday Book’ (Barlow). We saw that in a smaller and more circumscribed way the Normans had begun to move towards a monetary system in their treasure; but the English system was far more complex and far-reaching. After the Conquest the Normans were able to build upon it, driven by their keen and ruthless quest for profits, and their capacity to see the potential in systems worked out by others.

  There were also the usual officials of any court of the time. Thegns served as butlers, stewards (table-waiters), chamberlains (or stallers, the Danish term), with priests and clerks in the oratory. In the country the king and his thegns dominated each shire, reeves supervised his estates and the hundreds, port-reeves in the boroughs and sheriffs in the shires. His system was that of a magnate writ large, while the magnates used the system on a smaller scale. The clerks, apart from religion, acted as scribes, but there was no definite scriptorium or chancellor, though Domesday uses the latter term of one of Edward’s clerks. We see clear signs of administrative continuity from Aethelstan on.[249] The diploma faded out at the conquest; but the writ or summary letter, setting out in English the grant of land or privileges, was taken over by the Normans and underlay most of the diplomatic forms used in medieval England. The use of the vernacular was remarkable for western Europe and carried on till 1070 when the Normans reverted to Latin, without significantly changing the form. The writ’s virtue lay in its direct simple form as an order sent to the king’s officer in the shire court where it was read to the assembly.[250] How clear and even curt it could be may be seen in the writ (1045-53) issued to the monastery of St Mary in Coventry: ‘King Edward declares that he has granted to Abbot Leofwine judicial and financial rights over his lands and over his men as fully and as completely as ever Earl Leofric had.’ A more detailed example is that issued to the twelve canons at Bromfield serving the minster of St Mary:

  King Edward sends greetings to archbishop Ealdred and bishop Begard and earl Harold and all my thegns in Herefordshire and in Shropshire. And I inform you that I have granted to St Mary and to my clerks at Bromfield who dwell in the minster in the service of Christ, that they be worthy of their sake and their soke (jurisdiction) over their lands, and to payments made as penalty for breach of the peace and for forcible entry into other people’s houses and for committing ambush and to the right of doing justice on a thief taken within the estate in possession of stolen property, and that they be entitled to every fine within borough and without, to toll and to vouching-to-warranty on strand and in stream. And I will not allow anyone to take anything therefrom, neither bishop nor any other person, save whomsoever they may themselves desire. And I will not permit anyone to violate this on pain of losing my friendship.

  Cnut had used a double image on his seal as king of two realms, a seal that enabled the writ to be sealed open. He seems to have drawn on the seal of the successors of the Emperor Otto III (983-1002); and Edward carried on the style. His seal, three inches wide, showed the king enthroned in majesty on both its sides, and was the first of its kind in Europe, providing the type for most ‘great seals’.

  We see then that a relatively advanced central system was built up expressive of the high degree of efficiency in the local courts and their interrelations with the crown. But the development was fairly recent; the administrative structure of shire and hundred was a product of the tenth century. The kingship had been extending and coordinating its rule ever since Alfred. The creation of the great earls as viceroys of wide tracts was Cnut’s work. Structures at lower levels had been strengthened and given a cohesive force, while at the same time the unifying role of the kingship was intensified. The way in which the system had been built appears especially in the shires with their various origins and in the diversity shown by the hundreds or the wapentakes.

  In all decisions of importance th
e king was associated with the witangemot.[251] The wita (plural witan) was a man whom he consulted, a councillor. But the group was not a constitutional body, with a list of secular and ecclesiastical magnates who had a right to attend. It was simply the group who happened to be present and whom the king consulted, traditionally composed of members of his household, earls, bishops, abbots and thegns with court offices or an influential role in the area where the meeting took place. A king or any lord was in custom expected to take counsel of leading vassals. The unlucky Aethelred II was called Unraed, Uncounselled. In a sense the witangemots were household occasions, held often at festival times when the great men were likely to attend court for social reasons, to keep in touch with the king and with one another. The linking up of these high court gatherings with festivals was older than Christianity and went back to the days of the sacral kingship, of which so many survivals remained. Under Edward we can make out twenty-six meetings of varying size in his twenty-four years as king; on the average thirty to forty persons seem to have been present. They discussed whatever was the most pressing business of the moment, political, judicial, diplomatic. Grants were now made, dooms issued, geld imposed, treaties or high appointments dealt with. The witan was not meant to represent different or conflicting opinions or interests that had to be resolved. The assumption of a tribal or feudal society was that custom held all the answers and reflected the needs of everyone. Men only wanted to clarify custom for new application; counsel was a form of aid, not a way of thwarting or correcting the king’s judgment. In fact, opinions did differ at times and there could be a pull of opposing interests; but these were expected somehow to find their place in a unanimous agreement as to what constituted the customary solution. The witan too could play a part in disputed successions. There was no rigid scheme of succession by an eldest son. If the direct heir was a child, some other suitable member of the royal kindred could be chosen. A certain elective element survived from remote times in the notion that the ruler needed the approval of the people, expressed by acclamations. Councils of the same general type as the witan (descended from the gatherings of tribal elders) were characteristic of all the kingdoms with a tribal basis in western Europe; we saw that the Normans too had their ducal council. But the scope of the witan was unusually large because of the scope of the English kingship.