by Jack Lindsay
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Only some forty names of lords who came over in 1066 are definitely known. Some invaders were killed; others for one reason or another decided that they preferred Normandy, Anjou or Brittany, for instance Aubrey de Coucy and Gherbod the Fleming. Perhaps they found the terms of settlement too onerous; William may have tried to impose unusually strict systems on his vassals. Humphrey of Tilleuil, who had visited England under Edward and was for a while put over Hastings castle, heard that his wife was being unchaste and hurried back to Normandy. His brother-in-law, Hugh of Grandmesnil, also returned to see what his wife had been up to, but decided on England after all and became a great landowner there. Many important families of the twelfth century derived from troop commanders of 1066. A large number of lords felt that their roots were in Normandy, but moved to and fro; when they had more than one son, as we saw, they often asked William to allow the elder to inherit the Norman estate, and the younger to settle in England. William himself followed that course in 1087.
The small group of advisers who helped William to deal with such matters as land grants was mostly related to the ducal house and came from the Rouen district; among them were Odo and possibly William fitzOsbern. About half the land in England was held in lay tenure; about a quarter of the landed wealth was granted to ten men, mostly relatives of the king, who himself held about a fifth.[366] The great magnates made up a group which usually felt a strong sense of solidarity, though conflicts could arise. They were in a sense governors, the core of the king’s council, though he kept up the witangemot as a Great Council at Christmas, Easter and Whitsun. With such a shrewd and ever watchful taskmaster, these barons knew that they could not relax without falling away from the centre of power and events. The second generation had less the sense of being an alien group in a country that hated them or accepted them only out of impotence; the close links between them began to weaken. For the men who wanted something to replace the fierce jostling and private wars of Normandy, there were the marcher earldoms with their difficult and changing frontier situations. The holder there was generally the largest landowner in the shire, at times almost the only tenant-in-chief. (Throughout the Middle Ages the marches of north and east produced many challenges to the crown, which, however, had no choice but to allow dangerous concentrations of power there.) However, William granted the lands of one or more English lords to the new beneficiaries; marcher lords often held estates scattered about the realm, like most barons. In many cases, especially with important men, rough bargains may have been struck before the expedition of 1066. But the amount of land forfeited by English resisters may well have exceeded estimates of what would be available. The result would have been increased demands, expectations and intrigues, which William and his advisers would have had to tackle decisively.
In return for the extensive lands held by his barons William demanded considerable services. No longer, as at home, could most of his great lords meet their dues to the ducal host by drawing on their household knights. The king was in theory the owner of all land; he could echo, with effect, the boast attributed to his ancestor Robert the Magnificent that he held from God alone. Under the late Saxon kings the royal estates had been slowly but steadily shrinking; now William was able to expand them again dramatically — though the shrinking process was to reappear through royal grants in the coming decades. And since this creation of the royal demesne took place in a situation where land tenures and military services were being closely linked, the demesne took on a new significance. William granted out bits of the demesne as in effect he had granted out the rest of the land — even if there was no specific act of giving involved for the mass of lesser landholders and peasants of varying status.[367] William fixed the services due when he made the grant of an honour. From now on rights and obligations were not to be built up in a confused way over generations; the ruler could settle everything from the outset. Not that there was any master plan; much must have been improvised. But William and his advisers must have given a lot of thought to the allocations made gradually from 1066 on. There must have been some correlation between the size and value of the lands and the services exacted, but there was no definite ratio. The whole thing happened too fast and there was too little knowledge of just what was being granted even if William did realize the virtue of uniform services. What happened was a result of the tension between the feudal concepts hammered out under William in Normandy and the actual situation in England: a tension resolved, in so far as it was resolved, by the practical necessity to keep the English down and get the maximum profits from them.
The barons were to a great extent left to meet the contracted services in their own way. They could maintain a large number of knights in their households, supplying them with food, equipment, and so on; or they could do in their sphere what the king did in his — keep a demesne of their own and allot parcels of the rest of the estate to knights, who thus in turn became enfeoffed. Most barons, especially in danger areas, preferred to have a troop of knights answering their call; sometimes these knights held land or dwellings close by and were available for such duties as escort. At times a churchman felt the same preference, for instance at Glastonbury and Abingdon. Or he could hire mercenaries. Walcher of Durham had knights in his household and their presence helped to bring about the troubles of 1080. Wulfstan at Worcester gathered a retinue whose yearly wages were a heavy burden on the bishopric; he used to dine with them as he thought it wrong to eat in private while they grumbled. In the revolt of 1088 these knights did much to beat a rebel force. But when Wulfstan died in 1095 many had been enfeoffed. Henry of Huntingdon as a boy (about Imo) admired the pomp of the bishop of Lincoln’s retinue.[368]
As the magnates could settle differences at the royal curia and feel that they played a part in the destinies of the realm, so at the lower levels the courts made the sub-tenants feel that they had an important relationship with the lords. Thus Haimo Daipfer, who held an estate of St Augustine’s, promised to ‘give counsel, aid and succour to the church, to the abbot and his successors, concerning all pleas of the shire or in the king’s court, against all barons, except those whose vassals he will have become by the giving of hands’. The feudal relation thus gave the lord bonds of personal and political influence, and often put him in active relation with men of yet higher rank. Not that disputes could not break out at all levels. Thus, later bishops of Worcester claimed that they owed the king fifty and not sixty knights. Early enfeoffment charters are rare; we must conclude that the early fiefs were granted mostly by word of mouth before witnesses, with no written record.[369]
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How far was there continuity between Anglo-Saxon customs and Norman feudalism? The question cannot be answered in a few words, but it is clear that the two worlds had many similar elements, even if the Normans also made great changes. Anglo-Saxon commendation anticipated Norman homage; Anglo-Norman writers sometimes regarded the two terms as having the same meaning. For more than a century before 1066 the lesser thegns had been insecure in status, so they were more and more ready to give up their independence in return for a lord’s protection. The process by which the new relationship was brought about is often cited by Domesday as commendatio: a ceremony of homage binding a man to be true to a lord and kept alive year by year by payments recognizing the lord’s role. The lord was to support his man in pleas and use his influence on his behalf at court or in the shires. The man might or not pledge himself to render service to the lord, obtain the lord’s licence before alienating his land, or subject himself and his land to the lord’s jurisdiction. A man might commend himself to more than one lord and could withdraw his allegiance — ‘go with his land to whatsoever he would’ (Domesday). Not only thegns commended themselves; we find the custom also among the Anglo-Danish peasantry of East Anglia and the eastern midlands.
There were many instances where Anglo-Saxon custom merged without friction into Norman feudal practices. Legists linked Norman feudal reliefs with English heriot;
and the point is significant, even though reliefs may have been paid in pre-1066 Normandy. Among both English and Normans the failure to perform military obligations entailed forfeiture of land; and the five hides of the fyrd soldiers corresponded approximately to the hidage of the average knight’s fee. Further, in the leases of English ecclesiastical estates we find services specified. We have some seventy leases granted by St Oswald as bishop of Worcester to men whose status is not sure, but who were certainly mostly above peasant level. In a long memorandum to King Edgar, Oswald shows that he looked on his tenants primarily as mounted retainers, bound ‘to fulfil the law of riding as riding men should’. They had to ride on errands, lend him horses when he needed them, make fences when he wanted to hunt, help him to meet the king’s demand for service, pay church-scot and other customary dues, apparently find lime for the church fabric and bridges, and be generally obedient to his commands — a phrase which may cover various services or agricultural work. (Hard manual work would have been done by their slaves, servants, or dependent peasants.) Oswald seems to have taken as his model the services due from geneatas as set out in the Rectitudines; and the geneat, whatever his condition in the tenth century, was originally a lord’s companion.
We do not know how prevalent were such loan lands as those of Oswald’s tenants; but the land grants have close resemblances to Norman enfeoffments and they come near to having feudal incidents connected with them. Thus, by the Confessor’s time the grantor of loanland claimed the right to marry the heiress to the man he named. On the other hand the services exacted were vague and miscellaneous, unlike the specific military services of the fief; and loanland was generally given for three generations; it was not hereditary.
The English concept of kingship, implicit in the organization of the fyrd as the king’s force, involved the view that the king owned the primary allegiance of all subjects, as above any particular commendation or obligation. This position emerged among the Normans as the reservation of allegiance to the ruler as above any particular homage.
The first document in which it directly appears is one of 1087-96 in which the bishop of Bayeux pays homage in the time of Duke Robert Curthose; here we meet an express reservation of ducal rights. But the vassal is a vicomte, whose allegiance to the duke would be a function of his office. The general obligation to join the arrière-ban held, however, an implication of the duke’s paramount authority, though not in as clear a form as fyrd duty implied the English king’s supremacy. A passage in William’s Ten Articles carries the old fyrd duty forward into the new situation by ordering that all free men should swear loyalty to the king both in and out of England, upholding his lands and honour with all loyalty, and defending them against his enemies. The 1086 assembly at Salisbury put into practice the theory of the fealty of all important landlords, tenants-in-chief or sub-tenants to the king. At times lesser men defied the call of their immediate lord and clove to the king, as in the 1101 revolt. The Salisbury ceremony was repeated at the coronations of Rufus and Henry I. It is clear then that, whatever embryonic elements of such paramount authority existed in ducal Normandy, the big advance in England of the idea and its application owed much to Anglo-Saxon tradition. The idea still needed considerable working out but a turn of great importance had been decisively made. The 1086 oath not only brought the loyalty of sub-tenants more directly into connection with the king; we may argue that it also implicitly promised those subtenants security of tenure. We find the under-tenants of rebellious lords converted into tenants-in-chief of the crown and the estates of loyal under-tenants excepted from the grant of a rebel’s land to a new tenant-in-chief.
We may claim then that practically all the elements of the Norman system were present in pre-1066 English society; but that the fief did not exist in the clear-cut and specific form in which it was imposed by the Normans. On the other hand the broadly based fiscal and administrative system enabled the Anglo-Norman state itself to emerge, giving to the fief a new meaning and decisively expanding its social and economic effects.[370]
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The speed at which military tenures developed in England varied with the regions and the characters of the lords. Some barons made their fiefs microcosms of the king’s realm. They too had their lords, knights and sergeants, they could enfeoff their men; and in each barony or honour the feudal law had to be worked out. But William kept to himself two rights. There were to be no private wars (save on the Welsh borders) and no baronial troops were to fight save in the royal army. Also the king could interfere with the barons, since a baron’s vassal might appeal to him against denial of justice or wrongful action. The barons certainly considered the Salisbury oath of 1086 a high-handed intrusion on their sphere. Further William was ready, when he felt it necessary, to ignore a magnate and deal directly with an important rear-vassal. His interference might have had as an object the supplementing of one of his officials’ income or the support of a nepotic enfeoffment. A writ of William’s orders that the dapifer Eudo be given an estate (Easton) to be held as fief of the abbot of Peterborough; the abbot refused to comply, but Domesday shows Eudo in possession. It also mentions several enfeoffments made at the king’s command, especially on ecclesiastical lands. Occasionally the intrusion was merciful. A knight, caught in an attack by pirates as he sailed home, had had his hands cut off; he was a professional knight of Abingdon Abbey, who had not yet got any land, and the abbot did not want to enfeoff a useless man. The knight somehow got his case before the king, who, ‘feeling pity, commanded the abbot to provide for the man enough land of the king to support him while he lived’. In the marcher-earldoms independence from the king reached its limit. The knights had no obligation to serve on the king’s expeditions except when he joined with their lord in operations against a near enemy.[371]
Roger of Montgomery, a tenant-in-chief who left his name to a county, had a capable financial system; he seems to have appointed his own sheriffs in Shropshire and the Rape of Arundel. We may assume that a baron began by enfeoffing his own kinsmen, his trusted officials, or his leading warriors, constables, marshals and seneschals. Each sub-tenant would be given land to maintain, say, four or five knights, and was responsible for calling up that number. Sub-tenants might when necessary, for instance in the baron’s absence, lead the feudal levy or a part of it. The knights, we saw, might be men of modest or even poor means. No doubt at first they gathered round the head, caput, of an honour; but some of them, perhaps after a period of service (the rules of which were then familiar but are lost to us), were settled in more various ways or were endowed with a revenue corresponding to that from whole villages. There was certainly no standard knight’s fee, perhaps not even at the end of the Anglo-Norman era. Sub-infeudation developed more in some areas than others; even when we allow for the devastations, it was rare in northern Danelaw. Many honours in Lincolnshire were much under-enfeoffed, perhaps as a result of less manorialized conditions, or perhaps because the lord wanted to have fighters ready in case of Danish attacks.
We find some knights holding about five hides, men who were probably of the later gentry type (at least in embryo). Others had a hide or two and were on much the same level as well-to-do peasants. Even a single district can provide contradictions. In general we may say there were two main types holding fiefs: the substantial sub-tenant and the professional knight. But as the twelfth century went on, the minimum needed to maintain and furnish a knight increased, so that soon the small professional, and then the superior kind, found difficulty in carrying out the knightly role.[372]
Efforts have been made to argue that the inheritability of fiefs was far from established in the period immediately following 1066. In support of this position it has been pointed out that life tenures certainly survived for a time and can indeed be cited up to the reign of Henry I; but the grants in question come from ecclesiastics such as the bishop of Hereford or the abbots of Westminster and of Abingdon. All we can safely argue is that the church took a conservative view and wanted
to stick to the old laen grants, which gave it much more control of its lands than grants with an hereditary basis; this ecclesiastical attitude is illustrated by Domesday.[373] It is more than unlikely that the marked development of hereditary fiefs in Normandy would have been reversed in England. What constituted the main difference between the situations in the two areas was the fact that for some time the fiefs in England had all been granted out of conquered territory and so had not been inherited. The royal rights to the land were much more direct than in cases where a family had held a fief for generations. William I was able, it seems, to readjust the initial acquisitions of his Normans in England without much difficulty or friction; exchanges were made and compensation was provided when a new tenant-in-chief was accommodated on land already held, as we see in the Sussex baronies. Under Henry I it was still possible for Ranulf le Meschin to exchange one acquisition, the lordship of Carlisle, for another, the earldom of Chester. The king was also liable to intervene in disputes concerning twins, claims through an heiress, collateral title — cases for which there was no clearly established procedure.
Till 1087 the whole structure of inheritance involved dependence on a single feudal lord; but then, as we saw, title and succession could come into conflict with the calls of political allegiance. Hence the increased rebellions among the great families, and the use of disseisin or disinheritance as a penalty by the crown. The uncertainties thus produced explain why even in later times an heir wanted if possible to get a new charter confirming or restoring his father’s land to him. From the third quarter of the twelfth century such charters have come down in considerable numbers. Men of high rank, experienced in the law, like Richard de Lacy, who had been joint justiciar of England, thought it prudent to get a confirming charter. Gerard de Limesi granted him the manor of Chigwell for a knight’s service and confirmed it by charter, getting three marks in recognition of the lordship as well as a gold ring from Richard’s son, who became his affidatus.