| Carucates. | Bovates. | |
| Henry de Ferrers | 3 | |
| Geoffrey Alselin | 1 | |
| Gilbert de Gand | 2 | 0 |
| Roger de Busli | 3 | 0 |
| ” ” | 4 | |
| 6 | 0 |
These examples show very clearly that no consistent principle governed the assessment of a fractional part of vills, and are typical of the neatness with which unpromising figures combine into even totals. As to the way in which the men of a vill apportioned their fiscal responsibility, we are left almost entirely in the dark; the vill or township seems to have had no court of its own capable of deciding such a matter. Largely, no doubt, it was a matter of tradition; a certain holding which had once answered for two hides would continue to do so, no matter into whose hands it might come, unless the assessment of the whole vill were arbitrarily raised or lowered from without, when the assessment of this particular parcel of land would almost automatically be affected in proportion. But these local matters do not come within the scope of our slender stock of early fiscal authorities, and so we hear nothing about them.
We are now in a position to examine a normal entry from Domesday Book in the light of the above conclusions. A Nottinghamshire manor will do very well:
“M[anor]—In Hoveringham Swegn had two carucates of land and two bovates assessed to the geld. There is land for four ploughs. There Walter [de Aincurt] has in demesne two ploughs, and five sokemen on three and a third bovates of this land, and nine villeins and three bordars who have four ploughs. There is a priest and a church and two mills rendering forty shillings, and forty acres of meadow. In King Edward’s time it was worth £4; now it is worth the same and ten shillings more.”
We ought first to see how each detail here fits into the general scheme of the survey. The statement as to the former owner of the manor was important; for, just as King William maintained that he was the lawful successor of King Edward, so also he was determined that each of his men should occupy in each manor which he might hold the exact legal position filled by the Englishman or group of Englishmen, as the case might be, whom he had dispossessed in that particular estate. In particular it was essential that he should take up his predecessor’s responsibility with reference to the “geld” due from his land, a point which is well brought out in the above entry, for Walter de Aincurt clearly is being debited with the same number of carucates and bovates as were laid to the account of “Swegn” before the Conquest. Probably fiscal in character also is the statement which follows, to the effect that in Hoveringham “there is land for four ploughs.” For all its apparent simplicity, this formula, which is extremely common in the survey, presents upon investigation an extraordinary number of difficult complications. Taken simply it would seem to denote the number of ploughs which could find employment on the manor, and most probably it has such an agricultural significance in many counties, the argument in the mind of the commissioners being: if this estate has land for more ploughs than are actually to be found there, it is undeveloped, and more “geld” may be got out of it some day; if it is being cultivated to the full extent of its areal capacity or in excess of it (for this often happens) its assessment probably represents its agricultural condition well enough, and it may therefore stand. By making this inquiry about “ploughlands” the commissioners are probably fulfilling the instruction which directed them to find out whether the king was drawing the largest possible amount from each manor, but great caution is needed before we decide that they are obtaining this information in quite the same way from every county surveyed. In one county, for example, the jurors may be stating the amount of land in their manor which has never been brought under the plough at all; in another we may be given the total number of ploughs, actual and potential, which could be employed in the estate; in yet a third the commissioners may have taken as an answer a statement of the number of ploughs that had been going in the time of King Edward. The commissioners are not in the least concerned with details about ploughs and ploughlands merely as such; their interest is entirely centred in a possible increase of the king’s dues from each manor surveyed. But it is well to remember this fact, for it throws most serious difficulties in the way of any estimate of the agricultural condition of England in the eleventh century.
More straightforward are the details which follow in our entry. It will be seen that the scribes have marked a distinction between three divisions of the land of the vill: first the lord’s demesne, then the land held of him by sokemen, then the holdings of the villeins and bordars. That such a distinction should be made was in accordance with the instruction given to the commissioners by which they were directed to find out not only how many ploughs were in demesne and on the villeins’ land respectively, but also how much each free man and sokeman in the manor possessed. These latter are so entered, not necessarily because they were more definitely responsible for their share of the manorial Danegeld[[332]] than were the villeins and bordars for their own portion, but largely no doubt because they were less directly under manorial control. We have seen that the sokemen and free men of Domesday most probably represent social classes which have survived the Conquest, and are rapidly becoming modified to suit the stricter conditions of land tenure which the Conquest produced. But in Domesday the process is not yet complete; the sokeman is still a somewhat independent member of the manorial economy, and as such it is desirable to indicate exactly the place which he fills in each estate. But that this part of the inquiry was not essential is proved by the fact that the holdings of the sokemen, whether in ploughs or land, are usually combined with those of the villeins and bordars, even in the surveys of the eastern counties, where the free population was strongest.
The communistic system of agriculture is sufficiently well brought out in this entry; the four plough teams which the men of Hoveringham possessed, so far as we can see, were composed of oxen supplied by sokemen, villeins, and bordars alike, and the survey is not careful to tell us what proportion of the thirty-two oxen implied in these teams was supplied by each of the above three classes. We should beware of the assumption that the sokemen of Domesday were invariably wealthier than the villeins; we know little enough about the economic position of either class, but we know enough to see that many a sokeman of the Conqueror’s time possessed much less land than was considered in the thirteenth century to be the normal holding of a villein. In the entry we have chosen we can see that the average number of oxen possessed by each man in the vill is something under two; and we may suspect that the three bordars owned no oxen, at all; but although the possession of plough oxen may here and there have been taken as a line of definition between rural classes, we cannot be sure that this is so everywhere, certainly we cannot assume that it is the case here.[[333]]
After its enumeration of the several classes of peasantry, with their agricultural equipment, the survey will commonly proceed to deal with certain incidental sources of manorial revenue; in the present case the church, the mills, and the meadow. Even in the eleventh century the relations between the lord of a manor and the church on his estate bear a proprietary character; the lord in most cases possesses the right of advowson and he can make gifts from the tithes of his manor to a religious house for the good of his individual soul. The village church and the village mill were both in their several ways sources of profit to the lord, and in the case we have chosen it will be noted that nearly half the value assigned to the manor by the Domesday jurors is derived from the proceeds of the latter. “Mill soke,” the right of the lord to compel his tenants to grind their corn at his mill, long continued to be a profitable feature of the manorial organisation. The peculiar value of the meadow lay in the necessity of providing keep for the plough-oxen over and above the food which they obtained by grazing the fallow portion of the village lands. The distribution of meadow land along the rivers and streams of a county determines to a great extent the relative value of the vills contained in it.[[334]]
The value which is assigned to a manor in Domesday Book seems to represent, as a general rule, a rough estimate of the rent which the estate would bring in to its lord if he let it on lease, stocked as it was with men and cattle. In general it is probable that the jurors were required to make such an estimate with regard to three periods, namely, 1066, 1086, and the time when King William gave the manor to its existing owner. The last estimate, however, is frequently omitted from the completed survey; but it is included often enough for us to be able to say that the disorder which attended the Conquest was commonly accompanied by a sharp depreciation in the value of agricultural land; and in many counties manorial values in general had failed to rise to their pre-Conquest level in the twenty years between 1066 and 1086. If the whole of England be taken into account, it has been computed that the average value of the hide or carucate will be very close to one pound, and the Nottinghamshire manor we are considering is sufficiently typical in this respect. But it must be remembered that the jurors on making their estimate of value would certainly have to take into consideration sources of local revenue which were not agricultural in character, and the tallage of the peasantry and the profits of the manorial court will be included in one round figure, together with the value of the labour services of the villeins and the rent of mills and meadows.
Our attempt to understand the terms employed in a typical entry may serve to introduce us to a matter of universal importance, the indefiniteness of Domesday. We are not using this word as a term of reproach. The compilers of Domesday had to deal with a vast mass of most intractable material, and the marvel is that they should have given so splendid an account of their task. But for all that, it is often a most formidable business to define even some of the commonest terms used in Domesday. It has been shown, for instance, that the word manerium, which we can only translate by “manor,” was used in the vaguest of senses. It may denote one estate rated at one hundred hides, and another rated at eighty acres; most manors will contain a certain amount of land “in demesne,” but there are numerous instances in which the whole manor is being held of a lord by the peasantry; in the south of England the area of a manor will very frequently coincide with that of the vill from which it takes its name, but then again there may very well be as many as ten manors in one vill, while a single manor may equally well extend over half a dozen vills. In many cases the vague impression left by Domesday is due to the indefiniteness of its subject-matter—if we find it hard to distinguish a free man from a sokeman this is in great measure due to the fact that these classes in all probability did really overlap and intersect each other. Just so if we cannot be quite sure what the compilers of our record meant when they called one man a “bordar” and another man a “villein,” we must remember that it would not be easy to give an exact definition of a “cottager” at the present day; and also that the villein class which covered more than half of the rural population of England cannot possibly have possessed uniform status, wealth, privileges, and duties over this vast area. But there exists another cause of confusion which is solely due to the idiosyncrasies of the Domesday scribes, and that is their inveterate propensity for using different words and phrases to mean the same thing. Thus when they wish to note that a certain man could not “commend” his land to anybody, without the consent of his lord, we find them saying “he could not withdraw without his leave,” “he could not sell his land without his leave,” “he could not sell his land,” “he could not sell or give his land without his leave”—all these phrases and many others describing exactly the same idea. This peculiarity runs through the whole of the survey; it is shown in another way by the wonderful eccentricities of the scribes in the matter of the spelling of proper names. So far as place names go, this variety of spelling does little more than place difficulties in the way of their identification; but when we find the same Englishman described in the same county as Anschil, Aschil, and Achi,[[335]] matters become more serious. For there is hardly a question on which we could wish for more exact evidence than that of the number of Englishmen who continued to hold land after the Conquest; and yet, owing to the habits of the Domesday scribes, we can never quite avoid an uneasy suspicion that two Englishmen whose names faintly resemble each other may, after all, turn out to be one and the same person. We cannot really blame the scribes for relieving their monotonous task by indulging in such pleasure as the variation of phrase and spelling may have brought them, but it is very necessary to face this fact in dealing with any branch of Domesday study, and the neglect of this precaution has led many enquirers into serious error.