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 (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

IX. THE CREATION OF NEW MANORS.

We have hitherto spoken only of the manors. Are we therefore to conclude that there was no land extra-manorial?

Folkland, or terra regis, included royal hams or manors.

It may be asked whether 'folkland' was not extra-manorial.

Now in one sense all that belonged to the ancient demesne of the Crown was folkland and extra-manorial. All estates with the villages and towns upon them, which had no manorial lord but the king, [p167] were in the demesne of the Crown, as also were the royal forests.

Formerly, while there were many petty kings in England, and before the kingship had attained its unity and its full growth, i.e. before it had, as we are told by historians, absorbed in itself exclusively the sole representation of the nation, the term folkland was apparently applied to all that was afterwards included in the royal demesne. All that had not become the boc-land or private property either of members of the royal house or of a monastery or of a private person was still folkland. And it would appear that the kings had originally no power to alienate this folkland without the consent of the great men of their witan.

But inasmuch as the royal demesne or folkland included an endless number of manors as well as forest, it cannot properly be said that it was necessarily extra-manorial. More correctly it was in the manor of the king. The king was its manorial lord, and the geburs and cottiers upon it were geneats or villani of the king. The Tidenham and Hysseburne manors were both of them manors of the royal demesne until they were granted by charter to their new monastic owners.

Now, it is clear that in the course of time, after that in a similar way grant after grant had been made of 'ham' after 'ham,' with its little territory—its ager or agellus, or agellulus, as the ecclesiastical writers were wont to describe it in the charters—to the king's thanes or to monasteries, as boc-land or private estate, the number of 'hams' still remaining folkland would grow less and less. [p168]

These were granted as lænland to thanes in reward for services.

In the meantime the royal forests were managed by royal foresters under separate laws and regulations of great severity, whilst the royal hams or manors were put under the management of a resident steward, præpositus or villicus—in Saxon 'tun-gerefa,'—or were let out for life as lænland to neighbouring great men or their sons, or to thanes in the royal service.

This granting of life-leases of folkland or hams on the royal demesne seems to have been a usual mode of rewarding special military services, and Bede bitterly complained that the profuse and illegitimate grants which were wheedled out of the king for pretended monastic purposes had already in his time seriously weakened the king's power of using the royal estates legitimately as a means of keeping up his army and maintaining the national defences.[195] To be able to provide some adequate maintenance for the thanes, on whose services he relied, was a king's necessity; for well might King Alfred enforce the truth of the philosophy of his favourite Boethius by exclaiming that every one may know how 'full miserable and full unmighty' kings must be who cannot count upon the support of their thanes.[196]

Tendency for them to pass into private hands.

But from the nature of the case it was inevitable that the area of folkland or royal demesne must constantly be lessened as each succeeding grant increased the area of the boc-land. In other words, to use the later phrase, the tendency was not only for new [p169] manors to be created out of the royal forests and wastes, but also for more and more of the royal manors to pass from the royal demesne into private hands.

King Alfred's sketch of the growth of a new ham.

Now there is a remarkable passage in one of King Alfred's treatises[197] which incidentally throws some light upon this process, and explains the way in which new manors may have been created. He describes how the forest or a great wood provided every [p170] requisite of building, shafts and handles for tools, bay timbers and bolt timbers for house-building, fair rods (gerda) with which many a house (hus) may be constructed, and many a fair tun timbered, wherein men may dwell permanently in peace and quiet, summer and winter, which, writes the king with a sigh, 'is more than I have yet done!' There was, he said, an eternal 'ham' above, but He that had promised it through the holy fathers might in the meantime make him, so long as he was in this world, to dwell softly in a log-hut on lænland ('lænan stoclif' [198]), waiting patiently for his eternal inheritance. So we wonder not, he continued, that men should work in timber-felling and in carrying and in building,[199] for a man hopes that if he has built a cottage on lænland of his lord, with his lord's help, he may be allowed to lie there awhile, and hunt and fowl and fish, and occupy the læn as he likes on sea and land, until through his lord's grace he may perhaps some day obtain boc-land and permanent inheritance. Then finally he completes his parable by reverting once more to the contrast between 'thissa lænena stoclife' and 'thara ecena hama'—between the log hut on lænland and the permanent freehold 'ham' on the boc-land, or hereditary manorial estate.

It is true that in this passage King Alfred does not suggest distinctly that the lord would make the actual holding of lænland into boc-land, thus converting a clearing in his forest into a new manor for his thane; but, on the other hand, there was a good reason [p171] for this omission, seeing that such a suggestion would have just overreached the point of his parable.

Be this as it may, the vivid little glimpse we get into the modus operandi of the possible growth of a Saxon manorial estate, out of folkland granted first as lænland, and then as boc-land, or out of the woods or waste of an ealdorman's domain, may well be made use of to illustrate the matter in hand.

The rod, gyrd, or virga in the growth of a new ham.

The typical importance in so many ways of the gyrd, or rod, or virga in the origin and growth of the Saxon 'tun' or 'ham' is worth at least a moment's notice.

The typical site for a new settlement was a clearing in a wood or forest, because of the 'fair rods' which there abound. The clearing was measured out by rods. An allusion to this occurs in Notker's paraphrase of Psa. lxxviii. 55—'He cast out the heathen before them, and divided them an inheritance by line.' The Vulgate which Notker had before him was 'Et sorte divisit eis terram in funiculo distributionis;' and he translated the last clause thus—'teilta er daz lant mit mazseile,'—to which he added, 'also man nu tuot mit RUOTO,' as they now do it with rods, i.e. at St. Gall in the tenth or eleventh century.[200]

So in England the typical holding in the cleared land of the open fields was called yard-land, or in earlier Saxon a gyrd landes, or in Latin a virgata terræ; yard, gyrd, and virga all meaning rod, and all meaning also in a secondary sense a yard measure. The holdings in the open fields were of yarded or [p172] rooded land—land measured out with a rod into acres four rods wide, each rod in width being therefore a rood, as we have seen.

Again, the whole homestead was called a tun or a worth, because it was tyned or girded with a wattled fence of gyrds or rods. And so, too, in the Gothic of Ulfilas the homestead was a 'gard.' So that in the evident connexion of these words we seem to get confirmation of the hint given by King Alfred of the process of the growth of new manors.

It begins with a clearing in the forest.

The young thane, with his lord's permission, makes a clearing in a forest, building his log hut and then other log huts for his servants. At first it is forest game on which he lives. By-and-by the cluster of huts becomes a little hamlet of homesteads. He provides his servants with their outfits of oxen, and they become his geburs. The cleared land is measured out by rods into acres. The acres ploughed by the common plough are allotted in rotation to the yard-lands. A new hamlet has grown up in the royal forest, or in the outlying woods of an old ham or manor. In the meantime the king perhaps rewards his industrious thane, who has made the clearing in his forest, with a grant of the estate with the village upon it, as his boc-land for ever, and it becomes a manor, or the lord of the old manor of which it is a hamlet grants to him the inheritance, and the hamlet becomes a subject manor held of the higher lord.

So we seem now to see clearly how new tuns and hams or manors were always growing up century after century, on the royal demesne and on private estates or manors, as in a former chapter it became [p173] clear incidentally how new geburs with fresh yard-lands could be added to the village community, and the strips which made up the yard-lands intermixed with those of their neighbours in the village fields.