Comparing these services with the other examples, they do not seem to be any more the services of freemen, or any less those of serfs. They seem to plainly bear the ordinary characteristics of what is meant by serfdom wherever it is found. There is the gafol and there is the week-work; and the latter is not limited to certain days each week, as in the 'Rectitudines,' but 'each week, except three in the year, they are TO WORK AS THEY ARE BID.'
And these are the services—this is the serfdom—on a manor which was part of the royal domain of King Alfred, which for three successive reigns at least, and probably for generations earlier, had been royal domain, and now by the last royal holder is handed over, with the men that were upon it, to the perpetual, never-dying lordship of a monastery, as an eternal inheritance.
The chain of evidence complete.
Finally, the evidence of these Saxon documents—the 'Rectitudines' and the charters of Tidenham and Hysseburne—read in the light of the later evidence and of the earlier laws of King Ine, is so clear that it seems needful to explain how it has happened that [p164] there has ever been any doubt as to the servile nature of the services of the holders of yard-lands in Saxon times. The explanation is simple. Mr. Kemble quotes from all these documents in his chapter on 'Lænland;' [191] but for want of the clear knowledge what a yard-land was, it never seems to have occurred to him that in these services of the geburs or holders of yard-lands we have the services of the later villani of the Domesday Survey—the services of the holdings embracing by far the greater part of the arable land of England. Dr. Leo, in his work on the 'Rectitudines,' confesses that he does not know what is meant by the yard-land of the gebur.[192] It is only when, proceeding from the known to the unknown, we get a firm grasp of the fact that the yard-land was the normal holding of the gebur or villanus, that it was a bundle of normally thirty scattered acres in the open fields, that it was held in villenage, and that these were the services under which it was held of the manorial lord of the ham or tun to which it belonged—it is only when these facts are known and their importance realised, that these documents become intelligible, and take their proper place as links in what really is an unbroken chain of evidence.
VIII. THE THEOWS OR SLAVES ON THE LORD'S DEMESNE.
The theows, or slave class.
One word must be said of the theows or slaves on the lord's demesne—the thane's inland—lest we should [p165] forget the existence of this lowest class of all, in contrast with whose slavery the geburs and cottiers on the geneat land, notwithstanding their serfdom, were 'free.' These latter were prædial serfs 'adscripti glebæ,' but not slaves. The theows were slaves, bought and sold in the market, and exported from English ports across the seas as part of the commercial produce of the island. Some of the theows were slaves by birth. But it seems to have been a not uncommon thing for freemen to sell themselves into slavery under the pressure of want.[193]
The servi of the Domesday Survey.
The 'servi' of the Domesday Survey were no doubt the successors of the Saxon theows. And as in the Survey the servi are mostly found on the demesne land of the lord, so probably in Saxon times the theows were chiefly the slaves of the manor-house. Most of the farm work on the thane's inland, especially the ploughing, was done no doubt by the services of the villein tenants; but as, in addition to the villein ploughs, there were the great manorial plough teams, so also there were theows doing slave labour of various kinds on the home farm of the lord, and maintained at the lord's expense.
In the bilingual dialogue of Ælfric,[194] written in Saxon and Latin late in the tenth century as an educational lesson, in the reply of the 'yrthling' or ploughman to the question put as to the nature of his daily work, a touching picture is given of the work of a theow conscious of his thraldom:— [p166]