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

Dr. Kern, in editing the Malberg glosses, points out that the gloss in Title xlii. shows that 'ham' might be used by the Franks in the sense of 'court'—'king's court,'—just as in some parts of the Netherlands, especially in the Betuwe, 'ham' is even now a common name for ancient mansions, such as in mediæval Latin were termed 'curtes.' Thus he shows that the Frankish words 'chami theuto' (the bull of the ham) were translated in Latin as 'taurum regis,' cham being taken to mean king's court.[360] Possibly the lord of a villa provided the 'village bull,' just as till recent times in the Hitchin manor, as we have seen, the village bull was under the manorial customs provided for the commoners by the rectorial sub-manor.

So in another place the word 'chamestalia' seems to be used in the Malberg gloss for 'in truste dominica,' [361] the 'cham' again being taken in a thoroughly manorial sense.

That there were manorial lords with lidi and tributarii—semi-servile tenants—as well as servi, or slaves, under them, is clear from other passages of the Salic laws.[362] [p262]

But the 'ham' of the Malberg glosses seems to have had sometimes at least the king for its lord. And this brings us again to the double use in the Salic laws of the word 'villa.' It seems, as we have said, to have been used not only for a 'villa' in private hands, but also in a wider sense for the usual fiscal or judicial territorial unit, whether under the jurisdiction of a manorial lord, or of the 'villicus' or 'judex,' or beneficiary of the king.

Lastly, the early date of the Salic laws bringing the Frankish and Roman provincial rule into such close proximity, irresistibly raises the question[363] whether there may not have been an actual continuity, first between the Roman and Frankish villa, and secondly, between the Roman system of management of the imperial provincial domains during the later empire, and the Frankish system of manorial management of the 'terra regis' or 'villæ fiscales' after the Frankish conquest. If this should turn out to have been the case, then the further question will arise whether under the tribal system of the Germans the beginnings of manorial tendencies can be so far traced as to explain the ease with which Frankish and Saxon conquerors of the old Roman provinces fell into manorial ways, and adopted the manor as the normal type of estate.

This is the line of inquiry which it is now proposed to follow. [p263]

III. THE ROMAN 'VILLA,' ITS EASY TRANSITION INTO THE LATER MANOR, AND ITS TENDENCY TO BECOME THE PREDOMINANT TYPE OF ESTATE.

The Roman villa like a manor.

The Roman villa was, in fact, exceedingly like a manor, and, moreover, becoming more and more so in the Gallic and German provinces, at least under the later empire as time went on.

An estate.