CHAPTER V. MANORS AND SERFDOM UNDER SAXON RULE.
I. THE SAXON 'HAMS' AND 'TUNS' WERE MANORS WITH VILLAGE COMMUNITIES IN SERFDOM UPON THEM.
The hams and tuns were manors.
Having now ascertained that the open field system was prevalent during Saxon, and probably pre-Saxon times, we have next to inquire whether the 'hams' and 'tuns' to which the common fields belonged were manors—i.e. estates with a village community in serfdom upon them—or whether, on the contrary, there once dwelt within them a free village community holding their yard-lands by freehold or allodial tenure.
Let us at once dismiss from the question the word 'manor.' It was the name generally used in the Domesday Survey, for a thing described in the Survey as already existing at the time of Edward the Confessor. The estate called a manor was certainly as much a Saxon institution under the Confessor as it was a Norman one afterwards.
The Domesday book itself does not always adhere to this single word 'manor' throughout its pages. [p127]
The word manerium gives place in the Exeter Survey to the word villa for the whole manor, and mansio for the manor-house; and the same words, villa and mansio, are also used in the instructions[153] given at the commencement of the Inquisitio Eliensis. It is perfectly clear, then, that what was called a manor or villa, both in the west and in the east of England, was in fact the estate of a lord with a village community in villenage upon it.
In the Boldon Book also the word villa is used instead of manor.
So in Saxon documents the whole manor or estate was called by various names, generally 'ham' or 'tun.'
King Alfred's will.