But uniform holdings and single succession are marks of manorial lordship.
In all this no manorial element need be present, and when the manorial element is absent there is not necessarily any uniformity or single succession in the holdings. But when manorial management comes upon the top of this widely extended and all but universal system of agriculture, whether in Roman times or later, the bundle of scattered strips which under tribal custom could be ploughed by a pair of oxen whether alone or in joint ploughing is very naturally taken as the typical holding. And thus when we find in the Laws of Ine and later records gafolgeldas and geburs settled upon yardlands and doing service by week-work on the lord’s demesne the natural inference must be that it is the result of manorial land management and that there has come into existence already something like a manor with something like a community in serfdom upon it, using the prevalent open-field system as the shell in which it will henceforth live so far as its agriculture is concerned.
And so it seems natural to attribute to the manorial management and the manorial requirement of fixed services and dues the uniformity of the holdings and the single succession by which the uniformity was preserved. The power which seeks and makes uniformity seems to come from above. Agricultural communities of free tribesmen who had become individual freeholders (if such could be conceived of as prevalent in King Ine’s and King Alfred’s time) would probably have used the open-field system in a quite different way. And we see no trace of it in the evidence.
Later evidence of free holdings may not be to the point.
When, however, we have said this we have no disposition to ignore or make light of the later evidence upon which great stress has quite rightly been laid by Professor Maitland in his remarkable work on ‘The Domesday Survey and beyond,’ showing that there were in some districts villages, in which the manorial element was apparently absent in the time of Edward the Confessor, though appearing as manors after the Conquest. He has suggested that in these villages not only the manor in name but also the manor as a thing was apparently non-existent. There was in these cases apparently, in King Edward’s time, no demesne land upon which the services of a tenantry in villenage could be rendered, and the tenants were often sokemen who had individually put themselves under the protection of this lord or that, instead of there being one lordship over the group, as in a manor.
The Danish wars left many estates vacant, which may have been reconstructed on feudal rather than manorial lines.
These lordless villages on the eve of the Conquest as shown by the entries T. R. E. in the Domesday survey and especially in the ‘Inquisitio Eliensis,’ merit more careful study than has yet been given to them, and so far as they can be shown to prove the existence of free villages of liberi homines or socmanni, after the Conquest merged sometimes in the class of villani, I am ready to welcome the evidence. But unless they can be traced back to earlier times, their occurrence mostly in the Danish districts interspersed with other villages which were manors and had demesne land, together with the singular fact that the holders in these villages were commended to several lords, suggests that their peculiar position may date from the time of the Danish invasions, and be the result of the devastations as to the effects of which the ‘Liber Eliensis’ contains so much evidence. Many a manor may have lost both lord and tenants, and have been filled up again by the great lords of the district with new tenants—soldiers and servants who had served in the wars, it may be. Thus these cases, in which many features of the ordinary manor were apparently missing in the time of Edward the Confessor, may be of recent date and so, while important when viewed in relation to the Domesday survey and the changes made by the Conquest, not specially instructive as regards earlier Anglo-Saxon conditions.
The fact regarding the Danelaga still very little known.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, the laws of the Danish period, while recording existing and modified Anglo-Saxon customs on various points, leave us in the dark as to Danish custom, whether of old standing in the Danelaga or newly imported in King Cnut’s time. It was, no doubt, known to the invaders, and it was enough for them to say ‘as the law stands,’ though we do not know what it was. The whole question of the Danelaga was purposely omitted from the scope of my former volume, and now, after twenty years, still remains a subject requiring careful examination by future inquirers.
But this cannot be done completely until the minute work which Professor Maitland and Mr. Round and Mr. Corbett are gradually doing upon the Domesday survey itself in its local details has been further pursued, and it lies, with so many other branches of a difficult subject, beyond the limits of the inquiry made in this volume.