(See Gibbin's "Industrial History of England" and Cheyney's
"Industrial and Social England")
The inhabitants of a manor, or the estate of a lord, were: (1) the lord himself, or his representative, who held his estate on condition of furnishing the King a certain number of armed men (SS113, 150); (2) the lord's personal followers, who lived with him, and usually a parish priest or a number of monks; (3) the farm laborers, or villeins, bound to the soil, who could not leave the manor, were not subject to military duty, and who paid rent in labor or produce; there might also be a few actual slaves, but this last class gradually rose to the partial freedom of villenage; (4) certain free tenants or "sokemen," who paid a fixed rent either in money or service and were not bound to the soil as the villeins were.
Next to the manor house (where courts were also held) the most important buildings were the church (used sometimes for markets and town meetings); the lord's mill (if there was a stream), in which all tenants must grind their grain and pay for the grinding; and finally, the cottages of the tenants, gathered in a village near the mill.
The land was divided as follows: (1) the "demesne" (or domain) surrounding the manor house; this was strictly private—the lord's ground; (2) the land outside the demesne, suitable for cultivation; this was let in strips, usually of thirty acres, but was subject to certain rules in regard to methods of tillage and crops; (3) a piece of land which tenants might hire and use as they saw fit; (4) common pasture, open to all tenants to pasture their cattle on; (5) waste or untilled land, where all tenants had the right to cut turf for feul, or gather plants or shrubs for fodder; (6) the forest or woodland, where all tenants had the right to turn their hogs out to feed on acorns, and where they might also collect a certain amound of small wood for feul; (7) meadow land on which the tenants might hire the right to cut grass and make hay. On the above plan the fields of tenants—both those of villeins and of "sokemen," or tenants who paid a fixed rent in money or service—are marked by the letters A, B, C, etc.
If the village grew, the tenants might, in time, purchase from the lord the right to manage their own affairs in great measure, and so become a Free Town (S183).
II. Religion
151. The Church.
With respect to the organization of the Church, no changes were made under the Norman kings. They, however, generally deposed the English bishops and substituted Normans or foreigners, who, as a class, were superior in education to the English. William the Conqueror made it pretty clearly understood that he considered the Church subordinate to his will, and that in all cases of dispute about temporal matters, he, and not the Pope, was to decide (S118). During the Norman period great numbers of monasteries were built.
In one very important respect William the Conqueror greatly increased the power of the Church by establishing ecclesiastical courts in which all cases relating to the Church and the clergy were tried by the bishops according to laws of their own. Persons wearing the dress of a monk or priest, or those who could manage to spell out a verse of the Psalms, and so pass for ecclesiastics, would claim the right to be tried under the Church laws, and, as the punishments which the Church inflicted were notoriously mild, the consequence was that the majority of criminals escaped the penalty of their evil doings. So great was the abuse of this privilege, that, at a later period, Henry II made an attempt to reform it (S164); but it was not wholly and finally done away with until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
III. Military Affairs.