The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  In late times churches were classified as chief minsters, middling ones, smaller ones (with graveyards), and field churches or country chapels. Churches cited in Domesday vary greatly in wealth and prestige.[279] By 1066 manorial churches must have been the most numerous, mainly linked with estates of thegns (whether bookland or loanland). A thegn with lands assessed at five hides was expected to have his own church; laws of Aethelred assume that a vill can supply priest and reeve. In Kent the church was often associated with the slaves and so with the demesne; in openfield regions, with the villeins. In boroughs churches were affected by burghal customs. There were usually several, a man with fair-sized holdings there being expected to build one for his tenants. We find such churches pledged as loan security, sold, ‘invaded’ by the sheriff, or handled by speculators who buy and sell the valet.[280]

  Occasionally protests were made. Aelfric denounced the sale of churches for money and attacked the lay domination of churches: ‘Some men sell even a church for hire, as if it were worthless mills.’ But no one could really question lordship; even the reform movement, gathering strength in the eleventh century, never came into collision with the trend towards stronger lordships. Usually a priest was a ceorl, a free man, and Wulfstan looked on him as mediator between manorial lord and servile tenants. He should be guardian of weights and measures; he should urge the theows to work for the lord and the lord to protect the theows. We do find a priest in a vill of Ely resisting a monk who wanted the peasants to work on a day when they normally went to make offerings to a saint (St Ives). If a priest was a celibate, he ranked with a thegn.[281]

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  The local priest had his importance as a dispenser of the sacraments; but he had little authority, partly because of his social status, partly because of his illiteracy and his appearing almost a secular character beside the monks. Still, in the cases where he was better equipped, a powerful weapon had been put in his hands, confession of sins. The early church had practised public confession; the private form seems to have been an Irish invention, brought to Europe by the Celtic missionaries in the later Merovingian and Carolingian periods. The priests of northern Europe came to be provided with penitentials and manuals for the examination of sins; and this monastic method of inquisition enabled the priest to question his people systematically and to get a deep grasp of their inner life. The detailed probing shook the confidence and self-reliance of penitents, gave a new urgency to their need to be united with the church, purged by penance, and afforded them a conviction, however temporary, of a new life.

  Another important factor in breaking down old relationships and supports, was the substitution of the saint for the old local deity or spirit of the place. Thus men took a decisive step towards alienation from nature, which was generally regarded as evil, the haunt of evil spirits and tempters. The saint, mediating with the terrible God in his unapproachable power, attracted a strong and sustaining devotion. Men were thus put in a psychological condition in which they felt it right to attack nature, to attempt by all means to control a sphere which was seen as in its essence hostile and implacably opposed to them. This movement of alienation, appearing in its first embryonic forms in the early medieval era, was something which was in the long run necessary for bourgeois society. That society, with its basis in money power (as the keystone of the free market of an industrial system), immeasurably increased the alienation of man from his fellows and from himself; but this latter aspect was inseparably linked with the alienation from nature which was inherent in Christianity. Only when the triadic set of alienations had begun to operate decisively could the quantitative science be born that arrived with Galileo.

  The power of the saint, we must add, was externalized in the relic, without which no church was considered a true church; and one of the great problems of the west, with its very few martyrs, was to beg, buy, or steal relics from the vastly richer east.

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  The bishoprics, as they had developed in both east and west, had come to represent what we may call the element of state power in the church: an element which both merged with secular state power and stood apart from it, ready to assert itself as the superior half of the partnership. In England two independent provinces had been set up in early years, with sees at Canterbury and York. Other dioceses were then formed, but in a somewhat haphazard way; the north had only one, the south had thirteen. The continental system of dioceses based on Roman administrative districts, with sees in urban centres, could not be applied. The layout had to conform to the boundaries of existing kingdoms, and so the diocesan areas changed with the political fortunes of the kings. This at least gave the church more elasticity in outlook and practice than in Gaul. The earliest foundations, made by kings or bishops with large endowments, were the minsters — called the Old Minsters by the eleventh century. We have already looked at these and at the growth of thegns’ churches which produced a parish system. The resulting complexity was such that not only did a bishop often have trouble in controlling the lesser churches in his diocese, but some of them might even belong to another bishop. (Such peculiars lasted into the nineteenth century.) But by the eleventh century the rough basis of the medieval parish system was present. For the state of the local church much depended on the bishop. If he travelled around, preaching, confirming, and making his presence felt, the local priest had to be careful; if the bishop was lax, the priest tended to be lax as well.

  The administrative system of the diocese, where it can be said to have existed at all, was primitive. The bishop must always have had a few priests and other clerks around him. They carried out arrangements for him and helped him with such work as ordinations, consecrations and confirmations. Also he needed clerks to look after the charters which were so important in assuring the see’s properties. So there must have been some simple form of chancery and archive; and when, shortly before 1066, trained royal clerks, like Leofric of Exeter and Giso of Wells, gained bishoprics, more efficient systems may have been built up. But in general the household and the chancery must have been simple and rough in character. Records of the bishop’s judicial work, carried on in the hundred courts, were kept by the clerk of the court and the bishop was not concerned with them.

  The relations of the two metropolitan sees were never clearly defined, though Canterbury in the more developed south could not but have a more prominent role. However, it was only after the Conquest that dissensions of a serious kind arose.[282] Connections with the papacy could hardly be other than loose and occasional, and the popes accepted this position. But relations were good. There was a fortified area in Rome for Englishmen who formed a schola or section of the militia there, as early as the eighth century; Alfred asked for it to be freed from taxation and his request was granted. Later in his reign, money described as the Alms of the King and the West Saxon People was sent yearly to Rome; and following kings issued laws to continue the payment, which was made in at least the latter part of the Confessor’s reign. This payment seems to be what was later called Peter’s Pence. Also, at least from early in the tenth century it was customary for the archbishop of Canterbury to go to Rome for his pallium; under Cnut we find the archbishop of York also making the journey. Nicholas II wrote to the Confessor: ‘To you and all your royal successors we commit the advowson and protection of...all the churches in the whole of England, so that with the counsel of the bishops and abbots you may on our behalf establish just laws everywhere.’

  The first papal interference seems to have come in 1051 after Robert of Jumièges had visited Rome. It was thus made on behalf of the Normans. After that date churchmen began looking to Rome for confirmations, and Rome began looking for the chance to make them. Victor II, 1055-7, confirmed a privilege to Chertsey Abbey; Ely asked him to confirm its liber. Nicholas II granted a privilege to the bishop of Wells and heard an appeal from Worcester against encroaching York; in 1062 papal legates demanded the separation of York and Worcester, and made sure that Wulfstan, prior of Worcester, was installed
in the see there. Edward built a monastery dedicated to St Peter. But all did not go smoothly, though the conflicts were still slight. Robert of Jumièges, for all his papal letters of reconstitution, failed to get back into England. Later Stigand had trouble with his pallium; he had had the bad luck to get it from Benedict X, soon afterwards declared a usurper, and he was closely linked with the party of Godwin.[283]

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  Now a glance at the economic advances that were being made, the development of towns, money, and new forms of union to meet the changing situation. The English had done much to clear wasteland and to transform the landscape. From the east coast they had worked along the river and attacked the forests and heavy clays of the Midlands. The Norsemen began the settlement of the northern dales. By 1066 a large proportion of the villages of today already existed, especially south of the Humber-Mersey line. Monasteries often helped to extend cultivation, for example in the wooded Severn valley and the fenlands round Ely. Nevertheless, the pre-1066 population has been estimated at only one and a half million, and half the kingdom waste-land. There were royal forests (not necessarily all woodland) and some thickly wooded regions, in Essex and on the Weald between the north and south downs, where the Mickle Wood was, which a ninth century Chronicler described as 120 miles long and 30 miles broad; though reduced by this time, it was still big. In 1086 only southern Essex was heavily occupied; at least a third was part of the wild belt reaching into Surrey, Kent, and Hampshire. In Surrey only two settlements are named on the wealden clay.[284] In the Forest of Arden, however, despite the clays, the woods were subordinated to villages and manors. There could have been few areas where wild patches did not lie close at hand. Even in Norfolk, with a density of population greater than anywhere except Suffolk, and with no part apparently ever under forest law, Domesday shows enough woodland in the central area for swine to be numerous and demesne sheep farming little developed.[285]

  Whatever the date of the introduction of the heavy plough, the system built up around it was well established by the tenth and eleventh centuries.[286] In Domesday the plough team is normally made up of eight oxen. Where a team of four is mentioned, it is set down as a half team, though one or two beasts more or less were not allowed to upset the standard reckoning. The threes and sixes gave the most bother. After harvest one field was left fallow next year; a second field by the first was ploughed and divided between spring and winter corn. This two field system seems normal throughout the twelfth century. After that a three field system was used, though both systems coexisted for a time. Many villages had open fields. After harvest the ground was used for common pastures, as distinct from the permanent closes found all over England. Beyond were the meadows, usually kept fenced and shared out yearly in agreed proportions among the farmers. Also there was wasteland where at any time cattle could be put and brushwood or timber gathered. Horses and pigs were turned out there; but as late as 1209 at Mardon (Hampshire) two foals belonging to the bishop of Winchester were eaten by wolves.[287] Arable and pastoral fields were both needed for a self-sufficient economy; and as the meadows didn’t bring in much hay, rights of common pasturage were highly valued. Not that open fields were found everywhere. Kent had its closes and scattered fields, though co-aration was also carried on; much of the west from Devon to Lancashire did not come under the open field system, but had pastoral villages and isolated homesteads. The nature of the land played its part in determining the type of settlement, but there were also perhaps influences inherited from as far back as the Britons.[288]

  The extension of cultivation and pasture helped to increase the population, and the increase in population in turn drove men to bring more land into use. In general, economic expansion had been going on from the eighth century, with effects that in time led to a decisive growth of trade and urban development and of the political systems and building programmes which emerged between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The earlier stages of this development are unclear; and it may be argued that the main factor was not so much a stepping up of productivity as the creation of a more efficient system by the lords for extracting the surplus from the producers. Probably both factors operated in complex interactions. Any increase in productivity was liable to stimulate the lords to demand more in rent and taxes, and the pressure from the lords helped to drive the peasants into producing more from the land. The systems of exploitation would in some ways inhibit the free activity of the village community; in other ways they would tend to bring about a more comprehensive organization. What we call the manorial system of exploitation grew up especially in areas where arable land could be effectively and widely tackled: France north of the Loire, Franconia, Lorraine, England south of the Humber. The Normans shared in this development.

  One way in which the pressures of the lords and the initiatives of peasants came together usefully was in assarting, that is clearing forests and wastes. For instance, the work of clearing and dyking began in Flanders in the late ninth century. The workers who settled in the cleared areas formed associations which later got the name of Wateringues. Their method of drying out the polders of Holland and Flanders was applied to the gulf of St Omer, where new lands were gained from the sea; also on the Atlantic coast in Poitou and Saintonge. The Parisian region was cleared and became the centre of a kingdom from the end of the tenth century; the Capetians multiplied clearings on the Paris-Orleans route and we find places with the significant name Les Essarts: from exarare, to plough or dig up soil. As a result came the growth of villages and ultimately of towns, bourgs, burhs, communes. William the Conqueror carefully fostered the expansion of Caen; he founded two abbeys there and raised a castle of strong stone. Germany was expanding eastward, especially after the defeat of the Wends (a Slavonic people between the Elbe and the Oder) and the Magyars. Henry I, after beating the Wends, turned south and drove into Bohemia, where he forced the prince Wenceslas to surrender and then regain his land as a fief to the German crown. The Slavs were defeated in 933, though they were to keep on attacking the Germans for some time. By 955 the Hungarian danger had been disposed of by Henry’s son. burhs (small fortified towns) were built, and marks (defensive areas) set up beyond the Elbe. New dioceses were carved out of the conquered land for the ecclesiastical provinces of Mainz and Bremen. The eastern expansion of Germany had begun, carried on largely by the higher clergy and the margraves. Monasteries played a key part, for example in Pomerania and Rugen.[289]

  Assarting, reclamation of land, and colonization certainly had much to do with the economic expansion, as did such planning as the lay and monastic lords were capable of. But there must have been other elements, hard to isolate now, which played an essential part in producing the new quality of medieval society, something that cannot be paralleled in previous societies. The relations of the village community, and later the town and commune, to the exploiting ruling classes, were indeed of the utmost significance; but the peculiar quality of which we speak has deep roots in the tribal past and involves the steps taken by members of the tribal groups in their resistance to exploitation: their attempts to reassert cooperative methods and to keep the kindreds alive, their resolute taking advantage of all the interstices in the exploiting systems. Hence the way in which a large number of new technical devices and applications, new materials and uses appeared in the Dark Ages and were developed throughout the medieval periods. For instance: the easily heated house (as against the Mediterranean type), felting (which led in time to paper making), trousers and the use of furs for clothing, skis, soap for cleansing and butter for food (instead of oil), barrels and tubs, cloisonné jewellery, crops of rye, oats, spelt, hops, the fore-and-aft rig, the sport of falconry, the stirrup. Many of these had long existed, but they all now assumed a new importance. By the thirteenth century further devices or more effective applications had come in: crossbow, church bells, fiddle-bow, wheelbarrow, spinning wheel, functional button, cast iron, and finally fire-arms, gunpowder, clocks, paper, distilled liquors, roads paved with cube
s of stone on a loose earthbed, instruments embodying reciprocal and rotary forms of motion — first in hand querns and rotary grindstone, later in all sorts of machinery.[290] Of much importance was the invention of the horse collar, with tandem harness and the horse shoes, which made the horse available for work. The ancient yoke harness strangled the horse if it pulled heavy weights. Here we may certainly give the credit to the nomads; the name for horse collar in Germanic and Slavonic tongues (English hames) is derived from central Asian sources.[291] A picture of a collar appears in the illuminated Apocalypse of Trèves done about 880; but in Swedish tombs of the middle and later years of the ninth century the frames of metal collars have been found; and near the end of the century Alfred, we saw, noted with surprise that in northern Norway the horse was used for work. This seems to be an instance of how receptive the independent Norsemen were to new ideas.[292]