by Jack Lindsay
For the most part only short and formal statements of royal acts and commands have come down from this curia regis. They scarcely ever cite any guiding principle or rule. Most come from religious houses and thus do not tell us much that we would like to know of the relations of king and barons. But we can be sure that the king often discussed with the barons such matters as the disposal of escheated fiefs, the settlement of conflicting claims to estates, and the marriage of heiresses; the decisions thus taken in the end determined the lines on which feudal practice was to develop.
Great Courts were normally held at the three great church festivals. The king sat enthroned in majesty with crown and regalia; the laudes, hymning his praise, were chanted; the archbishop celebrated a votive mass; and to the glorification of the anointed king was added the feasting of the magnates. There was nothing much to distinguish such a Great Council from the witanagemot, except perhaps that William held his meetings more regularly, as befitted his difficult and complex situation. In such a gathering there could be no voting. In a society which considered itself ruled by custom what was sought was a consensus, and all men had the duty to work together.
Coleman, who wrote in English the Life of Wulfstan, describes such a court held by the River Parret in Somerset (at North or South Petherton, both royal manors), 1070-1. A case had been brought by Wulfstan, the old bishop of Worcester, who claimed from Thomas, the Norman archbishop of York, the return of twelve villages. These had been kept by the previous archbishop, Ealdred, when promoted to York from Worcester. Odo of Bayeux and all the barons stood by Thomas; only Lanfranc supported Wulfstan. The parties took their stand and the hearing began. After the plaintiff had set out his case, Thomas withdrew with his advisers to compose an answer. Wulfstan went to sleep. His councillors woke him on Thomas’s return, but he merely recited psalms while Thomas eloquently pleaded his case. He was then sent out to compose his reply, but he recited the office of Nones. When his men complained that there were more pressing matters to deal with, he declared that he left the justice of his cause to God and the saints who had preceded him in his see. Back in court, he was asked by William what counsel he had got; he answered, ‘My counsel rests with you.’ The king, moved by Lanfranc, gave judgment for Wulfstan.[435]
Slowly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Great Council, from one of its aspects, evolved into Parliament; but this evolution was not the result of a legislative act or of any conscious process of distinguishing one meeting from another; we cannot put our finger on just when and how Parliament appeared. Certainly in the earlier phases Parliament did not need the presence of the Three Estates, of the representatives of shires or boroughs; its development as a distinctive form of the Council was largely brought about by the discontent and insurgency of the barons in the thirteenth century. However that may be, ‘already in 1258 a parliament has an authority, a status, superior to that of other afforced sessions of the Council, and it would appear to be a corollary, for which there is much evidence, that in parliament specially solemn acts may be expected to be performed, a higher justice administered’ (Richardson and Sayles).[436]
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William’s household was based on that of the French kings, with steward, butler, chamberlain, constable and chancellor. The first four officials were laymen dealing with the king’s food, drink, bedroom and sport. But Edward’s court no doubt had had the same officials, who then held the general title of staller or placeman. As the court and its duties grew in complexity, the work of the main officers multiplied. The steward dealt with pantry, larder and kitchen as well as dining hall; the butler with winecellar and chapel; the chamberlain with laundry, bath and beds; the constable with stables, kennels and mews. As the head officials got more helpers, their positions in time became honorary. William generally did not allow magnates, apart from William fitzOsbern, to hold any of these court dignities; though Hugh of Ivry was butler. The earliest account of the household is the Constitutio Domus Regis, drawn up on Henry I’s death in 1135 as a guide to his successor, which deals with all servants from steward to scullion. The liveries (pay and allowances) are set out. The underlying pattern is that of a medieval house divided into hall, chamber, chapel and yard. The chancellor controlled the priests and clerks of the chapel, who performed religious services and acted as secretariat. The hall (main living and dining room) was under the steward (sewer, dapifer) who controlled the dispensers of bread (pantry) and meat (larder), and the butler who looked after the cellar. The chamberlain supervised the chamber (private and sleeping quarters). A new servant, the treasurer, might also be found in the chamber as well as at Winchester, since the king kept some of his money under his bed. The constables in the yard, with the marshall’s aid, dealt with stables, kennels, mews and policed the whole court.
The chancellor shall have 5s a day and one lord’s simnel [a loaf of best quality] and two salt simnels and one sextary [4 gallons] of dessert wine and one sextary of ordinary wine and one large wax candle and 40 candle ends.
All that was in addition to the two main meals he took in the common hall. The duties sound crude and even menial, but they led to high preferments. Most of the king’s clerks gained lands, bishoprics or churches.[437]
The court travelled with the king on horses or in carts, as he was seldom still; the government of the land was carried on in castle, hunting lodge or the like, in England or Normandy. The sudden appearance of the court could be a disaster for a township. However, the financial side of government needed something more settled than this roving court. Flambard was Rufus’s agent in England, and under Henry I the appointment of a permanent deputy was more carefully considered. He was to be called the chief or capital justiciar, or the Justiciar of All England; once procurator in a Latin document. The first holder was Roger, a Norman from Caen, who was later bishop of Salisbury, while in Normandy the bishop of Lisieux held a corresponding post. Much of the governmental system was able to carry on by its own momentum, but twice a year, at Easter and Michaelmas, the court sat round the exchequer board at Winchester to audit the accounts of sheriffs and other officers directly rendering monies, and to deal with disputes arising from them. King or justiciar presided at this special meeting of the curia, and most great household officers were present: the barons of the exchequer. Michaelmas saw the final audit. Later the meetings were held at Westminster. A statement of each account was enrolled on two sheep membranes stitched together, end to top; when the membranes were rolled up, the effect was cylindrical, as of a pipe. This pipe was the Great Roll of the Exchequer. That of the thirty-first year of Henry I is the oldest extant. In his reign the exchequer took definite shape, and was again reorganized after Stephen’s. We may contrast the state of things in the German empire where there was a great lack of professional administrators; no archives were kept before Henry VI (1190-7) and no register of the chancellory till the early fourteenth century.
Writs and charters were in Latin under the second chancellor, Osmund. For his first four years William had had to carry on with Edward’s clerks. Chancery clerks attending the king continued to be clerks of the chapel, and we also find clerks of the scriptorium attending justices in eyre. The scope of writs was quickly widened. William found in them a convenient way of making his will known without delay all over England. What had been a title deed became a way of sending out all sorts of commands. The writs were authenticated by the Great Seal held by the chancellor, whose authority grew with the scope of the matters treated. He remained a royal chaplain who left the administration on being rewarded with a bishopric; he had no special judicial duties. The full importance of the later office was foreshadowed, however, when in 1133 the chancellor, given the see of Durham, kept the Seal.[438]
Sealing was a classical device and by the sixth century the popes had sealed letters with a two-faced leaden bulla: the pope’s name and number on one side, the head of St Peter and St Paul on the other. Merovingian and Carolingian kings impressed a wax seal on charters; but this meant
that the parchment was cut to give the wax a grip and the seal could be easily removed. At last in the eleventh century Edward’s writing office devised the pendant, a wax seal like a coin attached to a parchment strip cut at the document’s foot; the king was shown on both sides seated in majesty; a position used by the emperor Otto III and his successors, but on single-faced seals. The idea of the double face, as we saw, probably came from Cnut, the head of a dual monarchy. This new kind of bulla was soon taken over, via the French court, by every European chancery, royal, baronial or episcopal. (The apex of seal-using was in the thirteenth century; in the fifteenth century we find jurors signing their names to inquisitions; the Tudors introduced the personal signature or sign manual into affairs of state.) William seems to have had no pre-1066 seal of his own; he took over Edward’s, though on the seal’s obverse he put a horseman. However, there are perhaps some signs of an occasional use of a seal under him and Richard II in Normandy.
The name and office of justiciar suggests the exchange of administrative ideas between Norman England and Sicily. In Sicily we met itinerant justices, who on account of the settled conditions tended to become justices for a particular district. Nothing similar can be found in Italy, France or Germany at the time. ‘In England and Normandy, on the other hand, Henry I had established a system of judicial and fiscal visitations, which could hardly have failed to be brought to the notice of Roger II, and the relations of the two kingdoms under Henry II were such as to keep the Sicilian rulers well informed of the development of the Anglo-Norman institution’ (Haskins).[439] Thomas Brown was an official both of Roger II of Sicily and of our Henry II; the Dialogue of the Exchequer describes him as serving Roger in regis secretis, in the Diwan or Doanna de secretis. Other Englishmen, Robert of Selby, Richard Palmer and Walter Offamil, were employed in the Sicilian chancery.
Feudal society saw endless disputes over land at all levels. When tenants-in-chief were concerned, the dispute called for a decision by the king, who was for them both dominus and rex. Such trials were instituted by royal writ and the judge presided as the king’s deputy, with tenants-in-chief attending. Geoffrey bishop of Coutances was often appointed to hear such pleas; he and others of the period who received such appointments were not professional lawyers. Indeed we do not get men to whom that term could be applied and who may be called justiciars with entire correctness until a century after Henry I’s reign. The hearings were held at the full meetings of the shire courts where local men, including Englishmen, could pronounce on the custom of the country. Thus native tradition and feudal law were able to some extent to merge. There was not always time to examine the many witnesses closely. So the method was used of a sworn verdict being given by a group of men whom the court appointed. We cannot find a definite precedent in Normandy, though the Franks were familiar with the idea of a collective verdict, as also were the most populated parts of the Danelaw. The origins of the jury are lost in obscurity, but the wide use of it certainly goes back to William; Domesday Book was compiled from the verdicts of juries all over England. It was returned in terms of shires, and then the information was rendered hundred by hundred according to a list of landholders headed by the king.[440]
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Domesday needs a further glance. This remarkable work is the best testimony to the extent to which the Norman curia and its officials had been able to grasp the nature of the English system and to begin integrating it with their own. At Christmas 1085, as we saw, under the threat of Danish invasion, William wore his crown at Gloucester and the decision was taken to carry out a nationwide survey: to record how much land was held by the king and how much by the barons on whose knight service he depended; to discover all taxable values; to sort out questions of ownership by setting down the positions and conditions in Edward’s day, and thus finding out just what changes had occurred. The survey was at times called a descriptio, a tax assessment; but there were other aspects, feudal and judicial, as well as fiscal. The Chronicle says that William wanted to learn about his conquered land: ‘how it was occupied and with what sort of people’.[441] England was divided into seven circuits, to be visited by royal commissioners. Only the most northern shires were to be ignored. Despite the scattering of many estates, the information was returned in terms of the shires. The survey was partly a book of fees, a record of the way in which England had been parcelled out in fiefs; and it revealed how thoroughly England had in fact become a Norman dominion. But it was not concerned with the personal duties of vassals to lords. Indeed the extent to which the duties of the king’s barons were a controversial subject in the twelfth century makes it clear that no detailed conditions were imposed when William made the grants. The customs involved were so well known at the time that they were assumed and never put on paper; they may also have been very varied.[442]
The survey disregards many of the finer distinctions of old English social status, and lumps the mass of cultivators, save in some eastern counties, into two groups, villani, villagers with a landed stake in the village fields, and bordarii or cotarii, cottagers, village labourers and craftsmen. We must not here read into villani the later colourations of the servile villein. The term is used for some groups of petty thegns holding a small estate as joint heirs, and for larger numbers of sokemen. Certainly a levelling effect became apparent immediately after the Normans took over the land; but this was the result of their general way of ordering the situation, their imposition of fief systems, and the attitudes inevitable in an alien ruling class towards a subject people. One notable effect of the levelling trend, with its ultimate heavy depression of peasant status to a servile level, was a quick elimination of the class of slaves. This was solely an economic process; no one ever set out the desirability of ending slavery. There was simply nothing for the Norman lords to gain by retaining a slave-class as well as a peasant class which they wanted to subject to as many rents in kind, labour, or money as possible. They had no use for slaves whom it would be their responsibility to maintain while putting them out to work. From the 1190s the records of the curia regis show the lords waging a successful fight against customary or villein tenants on the question of freedom: that is, on whether the tenants had an hereditary obligation to perform labour services.
The name given to the survey, Domesday Book, shows how dreadful the glare of its inquiries appeared to the men of the times. (In earlier days Leontius of Neapolis had compared the ruthless Roman fiscal system with the inexorable terrors of a last judgment; and the text of the medieval Dies Irae abounds in metaphors from the technical vocabulary of tax exaction.) The report enabled William to settle once and for all many of the thorny disputes about land that had kept arising throughout his settlement with its many usurpations, encroachments and high-handed transfers; the churches were always liable to have land or other valuables stolen in times of confusion, and must have become involved in many complicated lawsuits.[443]
One detail of Domesday terminology is worth noting, for it shows how the Norman clerks, faced with the problem of ordering the new system of fiefs and land grants, were forced to generalize and make precise definitions to replace vague terms. They called the seigneurie a manoir, manerium, manor. The root is the Latin manere, to remain, to dwell, and the term had been given a special reference to a well-built house, often with defences: something less than a proper castle, but more than a peasant’s home. All the Norman texts which use the word before 1066 preserve this meaning. But in Domesday manerium takes on a technical meaning; it refers to the seigneurie, the tenure, with the demesne, the fields, the wastes and the forests in the territory under the lord’s rule. A piece of land depends on the manor; the lord’s court is the manorial court.
There is here something of a new concept. Previously the Normans had spoken of the seigneurie of such and such a thing; the word did not include the land itself or the attached rights. In the Frankish epoch the old Latin term villa was used to refer to landed property. But by the eleventh century villa had come to refer to an agglomera
tion of houses — to a village as well as to a township. The diminutive village came later. A Norman lord before 1066, referring to his estate, would speak of ‘my land, ma terre’, just as, speaking of his vassal, his serf or his tenant, he would say ‘my man, mon homme’. The term manerium or manor thus has the flavour, in its English applications, of an official creation, a deliberate use of an old term with a quite new significance. The clerks used the term manerium because the manor house was the seat of power which endowed the attached territory with its feudal values and meanings. The English had used the term hall for the residence of the chief, the lord; and indeed in Domesday we find hall and manor used as interchangeable terms, e.g. of Ingelric, where on one page he puts men under the dependence of his hall, and on the next joins them to his manor. But naturally the foreign word served better for technical usage, as it had fewer local associations. In the processes of thought probably leading to its adoption we see how the Normans were led to generalize, simplify, and interrelate their feudal ideas and practices: when confronted with a strange country, they had to ask themselves just what had happened there, and how best they could find categories for the effective organization of the system of land-holdings that had resulted from the Conquest.[444]