by Jack Lindsay
To the new technological devices that appeared in the Dark Ages we must add the water-driven mill and the windmill. The watermill was worked out in late Hellenistic times, but it spread widely only after the Roman breakdown in the west; and by the eleventh century it was a common feature of the agricultural landscape.[293] How well it was developed through the Dark Ages can be exemplified by the watermill at Tamworth in Staffordshire, the capital of Mercia. Here much information has been provided by what is probably the earliest watermill in Europe to have been excavated. There survive from a first mill the levels of the leat by which water was led to the wheel, and timbers forming a framework of thin pegged planks. Parts of this first mill were reused in a second one, which was substantial, with massive oak baulks, planks, posts and pegs, showing a wide variety of carpentry techniques. Components included a three-sided millpool of timber baulks in which a head of water was built up and fed along a wheelrace and overflow channels. The wheelrace seems to have had a grid to stop debris from fouling the wheel, which is thought to have been of the vertical undershot type. Fragments of millstones (some of local gritstone, some of Rhineland lava) have been found, and a block of iron with a spindle socket set in a plank represents part of the machinery, perhaps the hopper. The superstructure seems to be of timber, with window leading in small lozenges for horn or glass panes. If the panes were glass, here would be one of the few instances of its use in an Anglo-Saxon context other than in monasteries as at Jarrow and Glastonbury.
The origins of the western windmill are lost. A document, apparently from about 1180 or even earlier, shows a windmill in Normandy. One existed in 1185 at Weedley (Yorkshire), rented at eight shillings a year. Before Henry II’s death in 1189 one of his constables gave a windmill near Buckingham to the abbey of Oseney; and about the same time a witness of the third crusade tells how German soldiers constructed the first windmill in Syria, thus demonstrating that the idea was not imported from Islam. Diffusion must have been fast, for Pope Celestine III (1191-8) decreed that windmills should pay tithes.[294]
Despite the new collar and harness the use of horses on the land was erratic and slow to catch on. The earliest representation of this occurs on the Bayeux Tapestry (about 1077-82), where a horse draws a harrow while a mule is harnessed to a wheeled plough; the fields are no doubt those of Kent rather than Normandy. In 1095, at the Clermont council that launched the first crusade, Pope Urban II put under the protection of God’s Peace ‘Oxen and horses ploughing (arantes) and men who work ploughs and harrows, and the horses with which they harrow’. Material gathered from near Kiev reveals that the peasants there used horses for all possible tasks: a fact that perhaps helps us to understand the advanced level of Kievan culture at this time. But Domesday gives no hint of working horses, perhaps because the ox team was used as a standard assessment.[295] In the Liber Niger of Peterborough about 1225, we find a horse used for harrowing and a few years later in an account of the Friday market at Smithfield horses for ploughing are mentioned. Horses for harrowing turn up at Durham in 1183 and in the Inquest of the Templars, 1185.[296]
In short, the Dark Ages and the early medieval period saw the breakthrough which was in time to make possible the development of industrialism and which the ancient world with its slave economy had been unable to achieve. We see the operation of new free energies on the material inherited from the collapsed Roman world of the west — an operation which, though at certain points influenced by the Byzantine east, was essentially the work of the peasant and craftsman of the semi-tribal societies — men who, despite all the disorders and oppressions, were yet able to retain certain free and fraternal elements of the tribal organization, and to use their initiative and inventive powers at crucial points. The seventh century may be taken as the turning point after which, despite local setbacks, expansion goes strongly on, with a new momentum after 1000.
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All communities from small hamlets to grandiose monastic households were more or less self-supporting if necessary. The old Roman roads had mostly fallen into decay through lack of repair; men had found the shortest routes from market to market. There was a fair amount of moving about, probably more than in later centuries. Free men had to attend folk courts; the royal court moved around. One of the main problems was to keep up the bridges over rivers, so the building of burhs and brucgs (bridges) was among the essential public burdens. The early burhs seem to have been mostly stockaded country houses, as we see from Ine’s law that fixes the scale of penalties for breaking into them, starting from the king’s and going down to that of the ordinary noble landowner. But by the eleventh century the boroughs were sites that had been fortified with ditch, bank and palisade during the Danish wars, or else reused old Roman sites. Mostly they had the administrative functions suitable for a fortress. Before 850 we don’t know of even ten such sites that could be called burhs, fortresses or towns; within a century there is a record of over a hundred more. Before 850 there was the open port or trade town, the reused Roman site with good position and sheltering walls, the promontory burh, and the fortlet of the king’s residence. The model for the new sort of burh was probably a town like Canterbury, which had streets, market, wall, and houseplots before 800. Throughout the period Iron Age sites were used. Alfred took the key step in seeking to build effective lines of defence against the Danes. Each fortress was kept in repair, and, when necessary, garrisoned by the men of the country around. Responsibility for the work was distributed among the villages which the fortress guarded, in accordance with the number of hides which each was considered to contain. It was assumed that four men were needed to hold each perch of wall or earthwork, and that each hide in the attached district should be able to supply one man. The system was completed before the reign of Alfred’s son Edward. By the early tenth century no village in Sussex, Surrey or Wessex east of the Tamar was more than twenty miles from one of the burhs.[297]
Where did Alfred get his system from? As far as we know, the Danes built no fortifications in England before 868; but there were diplomatic connections between England and countries reaching from Ireland to the Mediterranean. and a lot was known of Scandinavia. However, comparison of the design and layout of towns in Scandinavia and the Danelaw suggests different lines of development, though the Norsemen may have provided various techniques such as timber lacing in the construction of banks, towers and gateways. There were certainly also many links with the Franks as we see in coinage and church architecture; Alfred’s father married a daughter of Charles the Bald. There is only one clear example of a rectangular burh, Cricklade; but the bridge or double burh played a large part in the strategy of Alfred and Edward the Elder, sometimes straddling quite small streams, though the documentary evidence presents the double burh as meant to block the river on which it stood. Bridges and their fortifications played a big part in Frankish campaigns of the late ninth century; bridgeworks used by Charles the Bald antedate the burhs of Alfred.[298]
By the eleventh century the distinction of port or market town and burh or defence position was blurred. A borough was generally the seat of a mint and market, and sometimes of shire and hundred courts. But there was no hard line cutting it off from the countryside. A royal reeve, here a port-reeve, headed its administration; it was assessed in the usual way in hides or carucates. Only London had its own government, with divisions into wards, each of which was presided over by an alderman owning a court; for more serious cases there was the husting court and a great folk moot three times a year. Land tenure inside a borough worked out in the same way as land tenure outside; the fenced tenements or buildings were usually held by payment of a rent (landgable) and by performance of services. Most boroughs were on royal demesne, but the king often granted away the tenements, customs, and jurisdiction. A borough could thus contain the same fragmented lordships and obligations as a village, with commendation and anything bringing in profits held by nobles or churchmen. The burgesses, burhwaru, were not all the inhabitants; they were those respon
sible for the customs. Many townsmen did work in the borough fields; but a growing population with a lessening field area suggests that more and more men lived on town activities. There was no borough court, but when other courts like the hundred met there, they may have taken on new colourations; further there may have been some rough sort of communal organization not considered in the royal system. A town could have a recognizable corporate character; Edward arranged for a supply of ships from the ports of Dover, Sandwich, Romney, Hithe and Fordwich, in return for which he allowed the ports to keep the profits of justice. In the wars of Alfred and his son we hear of the burgesses carrying on war work such as the defence of their area or local operations; in the following wars we hear of ‘king’s thegns at home in the burhs’. And the towns could develop guilds. By Domesday at least twenty of them had populations over 1,000; Norwich may have had over 3,000 burhwaru, Thetford almost 5,000, Lincoln and Norwich 6-7,000, York about 9,000. For London and Winchester we can only guess. At least we can say that some genuine towns had emerged as a result of military and administrative organization together with the growth of trade.[299]
England was advanced in its monetary system, which was centrally controlled through the dies and thus brought in profit to the king. The one coin, the silver penny, was of a good weight, which was ensured by heavy penalties. A large amount of money was in circulation. In Edward’s reign, till 1051, pennies of 18 gr (300 to the pound) were usual; then for a while the weight was raised to 27 gr, and in 1065 there were more reforms. Cnut called on English craftsmen to make dies for Scandinavia; his aim was to create a national coinage there also. Dies were cut in London, or, for a short period, at various sites under royal supervision; they were then sent to the boroughs. In Domesday we meet at Hereford seven moneyers, who, at a change in the coinage, paid 18 shillings for the dies, with a further 20 shillings within a month of their return. Most moneyers were directly under the king, but one of these seven belonged to the local bishop. From 973 the coinage was changed every six years, then under Edward every three years, with seventy mints operating. The old coinage was called in and melted down for the new issues. In general we may say that analysis of the number of dies and the probable number of coins struck from each of them suggests that money circulation was very much greater than our historical sources imply. It has been estimated that the coins are to be numbered in fives and tens of millions at a time when the population was less than a million. The moneyer (named on the reverse) seems to have been a man of substance, his profitable office hereditary. The strength of the administrative system is shown by the considerable issues from the forty-four mints during Harold’s brief reign; the distribution of the finds (from the mints of York, Chester, Romney and Exeter) suggest that preparations for war helped to stimulate the local economies.[300]
The close trade links of England and Scandinavia at this time are shown by the efforts made in Denmark and Norway to imitate English coins, and by the introduction of English moneyers. The Life of St Oswald shows that soon after 1000 York was filled with the treasures of merchants, mostly Danish, who had come from every quarter. The Danes seem to have formed a colony there in the tenth century, like the Frisians in the eighth.[301] Edward granted Dover freedom from toll throughout England to help the diffusion of imported goods not produced in England, cattle, salt and iron implements.
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Under Cnut and Edward no other town had so many moneyers striking coins as London, which was also the centre of a large rural area. We find in 1097 shires owing work to the town, and in the next century Londoners still held old hunting rights in Middlesex, Surrey, the Chilterns, and perhaps Kent as far as the Cray. William I found it necessary to forbid them to take stags, hinds and roe deer from Lanfranc’s manor of Harrow. (These rights may go back to the days when Middle Saxons were a separate people with London as their centre.) The folk moot ranked with the shire court as a place where outlawry was proclaimed. The burden of suit fell on all men of London; everyone was assumed to be within the sound of St Paul’s great bell that rang for a meeting. There were three sessions a year, at Christmas, Michaelmas and Midsummer, probably with the sheriff presiding. The Christmas meeting dealt with the keeping of the wards; the Midsummer one with fire precautions; the Michaelmas one with the question of who the sheriff would be, and with the hearing of his commands. Land-ownership was dealt with at the husting, a Norse term, which seems originally to have meant the meeting of a great man’s dependents, but to have gained a wider reference by the eleventh century. It may have come in during the Norse occupation under Alfred; but London moneyers of the tenth century all have English names. More likely the husting emerged from the need of the citizens to deal with Norse traders. The earliest reference suggests a concern with the standard weight of silver; but later the court’s business was much concerned with trading regulations. In the twelfth century it met every Monday in the Guildhall, with its suitors on four benches as in other old assemblies. It could deal with civil matters, pleas of debt, land disputes. A special summons was needed to enforce an answer in a suit. The court also controlled weights and measures, and dealt with cases involving foreign merchants. Aldermen, in charge of wards, also did the adjudicating in the husting.
London citizens might own the rights of jurisdiction over their own city properties. Such sokes obstructed the growth of a single court system. No inhabitant of a soke could be arrested in his house or penthouse; only in the middle of the road was he vulnerable. The soke-reeve had to be brought in to enable distraint in a soke; and temporary dwellers there owed customary payments only to the lord of the soke. Disputes between men of the same soke had to be settled privately. Thus, right into Norman London there survived small centres liable to erupt with violence and filled with a wergild. atmosphere.[302] With the soke, again, was closely associated the defensible house, the burh. In the precincts of St Paul’s was such a burh. The idea of a private stronghold was familiar to tenth century society. One text says that such a lair was necessary for a ceorl advancing to the status of thegn. Lothbury, for example, seems to have been the burh of a man whose name began Hloth. No doubt such a burh would merely have had a wall round the house and gives us some idea of what the houses of rich Londoners were like. A name like Bucklersbury (from Bucarelli, a name of Italian origin) reveals the merging of English and invasive elements. But generally English names are strong among London citizens, as in all the ancient boroughs. In lists of the early canons of St Pauls we find men with family connections in the city.[303]
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An important proof of how deeply rooted in everyday life the kindreds were is afforded by the offshoots from them that we find both in boroughs and villages. These organizations, which used the model of the kindred for activities in new spheres of life, were the guilds. We meet guilds of cnihts in London, Winchester and Canterbury; a thegn’s guild in Cambridge. These were clearly bodies with a long history during which many changes might have come about. No doubt at first the cnihts were servants put by a lord in charge of his town property. They thus provided a link between his upland estates and the borough markets. A class of burghal cnihts existed by the mid-tenth century, as is shown by an attestation to a charter of Aethelberht’s reign referring to the Canterbury guild. Other associations may well also go back to the pre-Alfredian period. If such a group had grown up in London, it had had time to change its character by the eleventh century. The growth of trade could have developed a group of men who ministered for lords into independent merchants such as we find in the first list of the cnihtena gild of London. According to a survey under Henry I there were two cnihts’ halls in Winchester, at one of which ‘they drank their gild and held it freely under king Edward’. Other Winchester sources tell of a chapman’s hall and later of a hall ‘where the good men of Winchester drank their gild’. William Rufus and Henry I confirmed the London guild’s land-holdings and privileges as it had enjoyed them under William I and Edward; and in 1125 the members, in return for religious benefit
s, gave all their land to the newly founded priory of the Holy Trinity, Aldgate. They included some of London’s leading citizens. Their land took in the big tract outside the eastern city wall (afterwards called Portsoken Ward). The guild had now certainly become an association for religious purposes.[304]
We must not think of these cnihts as warriors. A document in English of 1093-1109 describes the Canterbury cnihts as of the Chapmen’s Guild. The guild-principle could be used for organizing any group of a lord’s servants, who might be settled on some outlying part of the estate for his convenience. Thurstan, magnate of eastern England, left to his knights ‘the wood at Ongar, apart from the park and the stud I have there’. We surely see here a group of hunt servants quartered in their master’s park. Similar groups no doubt lay behind placenames containing cnihta tun, e.g. Knighton. A lord might found a guild or lend his name to it. Thus, Urki, founder of Abbotsbury abbey, also founded a guild at this site, from which one of the few surviving sets of Old English guild statutes has come down. (He was certainly Norse; his wife Tola had a Danish name. Cnut gave him an estate near Abbotsbury in 1024, and he attested the charter of an estate in Dorset granted to Bovy in 1033; Edward called him min huskarl in a writ and ‘my faithful minister’ in a charter of 1044.)[305]
But we must not look for the origin of the guilds in the wishes of the lords. Men got together with the aim of gaining special benefits from the church, and the king and the lords accepted the associations for this reason. Besides Cambridge and Abbotsbury, Bedwyn (a royal manor in Wiltshire), Exeter, Woodbury and several other villages or hamlets near Exeter, had left their rules. The latter guilds were post-conquest, but almost all the members had English names; and we can safely see in them formations that go well back into the English period. They differed in social status, object and character, but all had some religious colouring. At Abbotsbury was a thegn’s guild, and the members at Bedwyn and Exeter seem to be men of substance. But the fourteen guilds attached to St Peter’s, Exeter, were rural and humble; at times the chief member was the village priest. All were burial societies and possibly confraternities for obits. But their other aims give us clues as to the impulses driving men to come together. At Cambridge the members wanted mutual assurance against legal penalties and such troubles. At Exeter the group seems to have been mainly concerned about prayers for the dead; they met three times a year, not to feast, but to hear the priest sing two masses, one for living friends, one for the dead, while they themselves recited two psalters. Failure to attend brought the penalty of having to provide further masses. (We may compare the fratres kalendarii of twelfth century Exeter.) The village guilds were also associates for obits.[306]