Smaller teams of the villani.
So far as it goes, this evidence proves that, as a rule, 8 oxen made up the full normal manorial plough team in the twelfth as in the thirteenth century. But it should be observed that this seems to hold good only of the ploughs on the lord's demesne—in dominio curiæ. The villani held other and apparently smaller ploughs, with about 4 oxen to the team instead of 8, and with these they performed their services.[103] [p075]
But this fact does not appear to clash with the supposed connexion between the hide of 8 bovates and the manorial plough with its team of 8 oxen. It probably simply shows that the connexion between them on which the regular gradation of holdings in villenage depended had its origin at an earlier period, when a simpler condition of the community in villenage existed than that to be found in those days immediately following the Domesday Survey. There were, in fact, many other symptoms that the community in villenage had long been losing its archaic simplicity and wandering from its original type.
Symptoms of the breaking up of serfdom.
One of these symptoms may be found in the fact observed in the later evidence, that the number of irregular holdings increased as time went on. In the 'Liber Niger,' with the exception of the peculiar and local class of 'sochmanni' found in some of the manors, these irregular holdings seldom occur—a fact in itself very significant.
Another symptom may be noticed in the circumstance mentioned in the Boldon Book, and also in other cartularies, of the land in demesne being as a whole sometimes let or farmed out to the villani. Another was the fact, so apparent in the Hundred Rolls and cartularies, of the substitution of money payments for the services. There is no mention in the 'Liber Niger' of either of these practices.
All these are symptoms that the system was not a system recently introduced, but an old system gradually breaking up, relaxing its rules, and becoming in some points inconsistent with itself. [p076]
XII. SUMMARY OF THE POST-DOMESDAY EVIDENCE.
Manors everywhere.
Land in demesne and in villenage.