The Project Gutenberg eBook, The English Village Community, by Frederic Seebohm

Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See [ https://archive.org/details/englishvillageco00seeb]

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

This book contains Old English text that was originally printed in an Old English typeface. These passages have been transliterated into modern Latin characters. More details are located in the [Transcriber's Endnote].

To [Table of Contents.]

THE ENGLISH VILLAGE COMMUNITY

WORKS BY FREDERIC SEEBOHM.

THE OXFORD REFORMERS—John Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More: a History of their Fellow-Work. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

THE ERA OF THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION. With 4 Maps and 12 Diagrams. Fcp. 8vo. 2s. 6d. (Epochs of Modern History.)

THE ENGLISH VILLAGE COMMUNITY: Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry. An Essay in Economic History. With 13 Maps and Plates. 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.

CUSTOMARY ACRES AND THEIR HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE, being a Series of Unfinished Essays. 8vo. 12s. 6d. net.

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LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 39 Paternoster Row; London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras.

Reduced Tracing of the Tithe Map of Hitchin Township about 1816, together with a Hand Map of pieces belonging to W. Lucas Esqre about 1750, and an Enlarged Plan of the normal acre strips in the open fields afterwards adopted as the statute acre.

See Larger: [Tithe Map of Hitchen Twp.]
[W. Lucas land and normal acre strips.]
Go to: [List of Illustrations]

THE ENGLISH VILLAGE COMMUNITY EXAMINED IN ITS RELATIONS TO THE MANORIAL AND TRIBAL SYSTEMS AND TO THE COMMON OR OPEN FIELD SYSTEM OF HUSBANDRY

AN ESSAY IN ECONOMIC HISTORY

BY FREDERIC SEEBOHM Hon.LL.D.(Edin.), Litt.D.(Camb.)
D.Litt.(Oxford)

REPRINTED FROM THE FOURTH EDITION (1905)

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 1915

All rights reserved

DEDICATED BY PERMISSION TO THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES OF LONDON

PREFACE.

When I had the honour to lay the two papers which have expanded into this volume before the Society of Antiquaries, it was with a confession and an apology which, in publishing and dedicating to them this Essay, I now repeat.

I confessed to having approached the subject not as an antiquary but as a student of Economic History, and even with a directly political interest. To learn the meaning of the old order of things, with its 'community' and 'equality' as a key to a right understanding of the new order of things, with its contrasting individual independence and inequality, this was the object which in the first instance tempted me to poach upon antiquarian manors, and it must be my apology for treating from an economic point of view a subject which has also an antiquarian interest.

To statesmen, whether of England or of the new Englands across the oceans, the importance can hardly be over-estimated of a sound appreciation of the nature of that remarkable economic evolution in the course of which the great English speaking nations have, so to speak, become charged in our time with the trial of the experiment—let us hope also with the solution of the problem—of freedom and democracy, using the words in the highest political sense as the antipodes of Paternal Government and Communism.

Perhaps, without presumption, it may be said that the future happiness of the human race—the success or failure of the planet—is in no small degree dependent upon the ultimate course of what seems, to us at least, to be the main stream of human progress, upon whether it shall be guided by the foresight of statesmen into safe channels or misguided, diverted, or obstructed, till some great social or political convulsion proves that its force and its direction have been misunderstood.

It may indeed be but too true that, in spite of the economic lessons of the past—

The weary Titan! with deaf

Ears, and labour dimmed eyes,

Regarding neither to right

Nor left, goes passively by,

Staggering on to her goal;

Bearing on shoulders immense,

Atlantëan, the load,

Wellnigh not to be borne,

Of the too vast orb of her fate.

And she may continue to do so, however clearly and truthfully the economic lessons of the past may be dinned into her ear. But still the deep sense I have endeavoured to describe in these few sentences of the importance of a sound understanding of English Economic History as the true basis of much of the practical politics of the future will be accepted, I trust, as a sufficient reason why, ill-furnished as I have constantly found myself for the task, I should have ventured to devote some years of scant leisure to the production of this imperfect Essay.

It is simply an attempt to set English Economic History upon right lines at its historical commencement by trying to solve the still open question whether it began with the freedom or with the serfdom of the masses of the people—whether the village communities living in the 'hams' and 'tons' of England were, at the outset of English history, free village communities or communities in serfdom under a manorial lordship; and further, what were their relations to the tribal communities of the Western and less easily conquered portions of the island.

On the answer to this question depends fundamentally the view to be taken by historians (let us say by politicians also) of the nature of the economic evolution which has taken place in England since the English Conquest. If answered in one way, English Economic History begins with free village communities which gradually degenerated into the serfdom of the Middle Ages. If answered in the other way, it begins with the serfdom of the masses of the rural population under Saxon rule—a serfdom from which it has taken 1,000 years of English economic evolution to set them free.

Much learning and labour have already been expended upon this question, and fresh light has been recently streaming in upon it from many sides.

A real flash of light was struck when German students perceived the connexion between the widely prevalent common or open field system of husbandry, and the village community which for centuries had used it as a shell. Whatever may be the ultimate verdict upon G. L. von Maurer's theory of the German 'mark,' there can be no doubt of its service as a working hypothesis by means of which the study of the economic problem has been materially advanced.

A great step was taken as regards the English problem when Mr. Kemble, followed by Mr. Freeman and others, attempted to trace in English constitutional history the development of ancient German free institutions, and to solve the English problem upon the lines of the German 'mark.' The merit of this attempt will not be destroyed even though doubt should be thrown upon the correctness of this suggested solution of the problem, and though other and non-German elements should prove to have been larger factors in English economic history. The caution observed by Professor Stubbs in the early chapters of his great work on English Constitutional History may be said to have at least reopened the question whether the German 'mark system' ever really took root in England.

Another step was gained on somewhat new lines when Professor Nasse, of Bonn, pointed out to English students (who hitherto had not realised the fact) that the English and German land systems were the same, and that in England also the open-field system of husbandry was the shell of the mediæval village community. The importance of this view is obvious, and it is to be regretted that no English student has as yet followed it up by an adequate examination of the remarkably rich materials which lie at the disposal of English Economic History.

A new flash of light at once lit up the subject and greatly widened its interest when Sir Henry S. Maine, carrying with him to India his profound insight into 'Ancient Law,' recognised the fundamental analogies between the 'village communities' of the East and the West, and sought to use actually surviving Indian institutions as typical representatives of ancient stages of similar Western institutions. Undoubtedly much more light may be looked for from the same direction.

Further, Sir Henry S. Maine has opened fresh ground, and perhaps (if he will permit me to say so) even to some extent narrowed the area within which the theory of archaic free village communities can be applied, by widening the range of investigation in yet another direction. In his lectures on the 'Early History of Institutions' he has turned his telescope upon the tribal communities, and especially the 'tribal system' of the Brehon laws, and tried to dissolve parts of its mysterious nebulæ into stars—a work in which he has been followed by Mr. W. F. Skene with results which give a peculiar interest to the third volume of that learned writer's valuable work on 'Celtic Scotland.'

Lastly, under the close examination of Dr. Landau and Professors Hanssen and Meitzen, the open-field system itself has been found in Germany to take several distinct forms, corresponding, in part at least, with differences in economic conditions, if not directly with various stages in economic development, from the early tribal to the later manorial system.

It is very much to be desired that the open-field system of the various districts of France should be carefully studied in the same way. An examination of its widely extended modern remains could hardly fail to throw important light upon the contents of the cartularies which have been published in the 'Collection de Documents Inédits sur l'histoire de France,' amongst which the 'Polyptique d'Irminon,' with M. Guérard's invaluable preface, is pre-eminently useful.

In the meantime, whilst students had perhaps been too exclusively absorbed in working in the rich mine of early German institutions, Mr. Coote has done service in recalling attention in his 'Neglected Fact in English History' and his 'Romans of Britain' to the evidences which remain of the survival of Roman influences in English institutions, even though it may be true that some of his conclusions may require reconsideration. The details of the later Roman provincial government, and of the economic conditions of the German and British provinces, remain so obscure even after the labours of Mommsen, Marquardt, and Madvig, that he who attempts to build a bridge across the gulf of the Teutonic conquests between Roman and English institutions still builds it somewhat at a venture.

It is interesting to find that problems connected with early English and German Economic History are engaging the careful and independent research also of American students. The contributions of Mr. Denman Ross, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Professor Allen, of the University of Wisconsin, will be welcomed by fellow-students of these questions in the old country.

It has seemed to me that the time may have come when an inquiry directed strictly upon economic lines, and carefully following the English evidence, might strike a light of its own, in the strength of which the various side lights might perhaps be gathered together and some clear result obtained, at least as regards the main course of economic evolution in England.

The English, like the Continental village community, as we have said, inhabited a shell—an open-field system—into the nooks and corners of which it was curiously bound and fitted, and from which it was apparently inseparable.

The remains of this cast-off shell still survive in parishes where no Enclosure Act happens to have swept them away. The common or open field system can even now be studied on the ground within the township in which I am writing as well as in many others. Men are still living who have held and worked farms under its inconvenient rules, and who know the meaning of its terms and eccentric details. Making use of this circumstance the method pursued in this Essay will be, first, to become familiar with the little distinctive marks and traits of the English open-field system, so that they may be readily recognised wherever they present themselves; and then, proceeding from the known to the unknown, carefully to trace back the shell by searching and watching for its marks and traits as far into the past as evidence can be found. Using the knowledge so acquired about the shell as the key, the inquiry will turn upon its occupant. Examining how the mediæval English village community in serfdom fitted itself into the shell, and then again working back from the known to the unknown, it may be perhaps possible to discern whether, within historical times, it once had been free, or whether its serfdom was as old as the shell.

The relation of the 'tribal system' in Wales, in Ireland, and in Germany to the open-field system, and so also to the village community, will be a necessary branch of the inquiry. It will embrace also both the German and the Roman sources of serfdom and of the manorial system of land management.

It may at least be possible that Economic History may sometimes find secure stepping stones over what may be impassable gulfs in constitutional history; and it obviously does not follow that a continuity lost, perhaps, to the one may not have been preserved by the other. The result of a strictly economic inquiry may, as already suggested, prove that more things went to the 'making of England' than were imported in the keels of the English invaders of Britain. But whatever the result—whatever modifications of former theories the facts here brought into view, after full consideration by others, may suggest—I trust that this Essay will not be regarded as controversial in its aim or its spirit. I had rather that it were accepted simply as fellow-work, as a stone added at the eleventh hour to a structure in the building of which others, some of whose names I have mentioned, have laboured during the length and heat of the day.

In conclusion, I have to tender my best thanks to Sir Henry S. Maine for the kind interest he has taken, and the sound advice he has given, during the preparation of this Essay for the press; also to Mr. Elton, for similar unsolicited help generously given. To my friend George von Bunsen, and to Professor Meitzen, of Berlin, I am deeply indebted as regards the German branches of my subject, and to Mr. T. Hodgkin and Mr. H. Pelham as regards the Roman side of it. For the ever ready assistance of my friend Mr. H. Bradshaw, of Cambridge, Mr. Selby, of the Record Office, and Mr. Thompson, of the British Museum, in reference to the manuscripts under their charge, I cannot be too grateful. Nor must I omit to acknowledge the care with which Messrs. Stuart Moore and Kirk have undertaken for me the task of revising the text and translations of the many extracts from mediæval documents contained in this volume.

F. Seebohm.

The Hermitage, Hitchin:

May, 1883

CONTENTS.

LIST OF MAPS AND PLATES.

[p001]

THE ENGLISH VILLAGE COMMUNITY.

CHAPTER I. THE ENGLISH OPEN FIELD SYSTEM EXAMINED IN ITS MODERN REMAINS.