§ 1. Measures and Fields.
Permanence and change in agrarian history.
At the present moment there is no need for arguments which insist upon the immutable character of ancient agrarian arrangements. If we take up a map of a common field drawn in the eighteenth century, the lines that we see upon it are in the main very old. The scheme seems fashioned for the purpose of resisting change and compelling the men of one age to till the land as their fathers tilled it. Nothing but an unanimous agreement among those who are not likely to agree can break up that prison-house of cells in which agriculture has been cramped and confined. Rather, it may be, the student who is perusing the ‘estate map’ and who is fascinated by the possession of a new tool for picking historical locks, should warn himself that, though there has been permanence, there has also been change, and that in a far-off time changes of a certain sort came quickly. True that in the current of agricultural progress there is a rapid acceleration as it flows towards our own day. We may easily go back to an age when the introduction of a new process or new implement was rare. On the other hand, if we fix our attention on the map of any one village and contemplate its strips and balks and virgates, the hazard involved in an assumption of their antiquity will increase swiftly when we have left behind us the advent of Duke William and are urging our inferential career towards Hengest or, it may be, towards Cæsar.
Rapidity of change in old times.
Let us look, for example, at the changes that take place in some Essex villages during the twenty years that precede the Domesday Inquest. The following table shows them:
| Villani | Bordarii | Servi | Lord’s teams | Men’s teams | ||
| Teidana[1217], | T.R.E. | 5 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 4 |
| T.R.W. | 1 | 17 | 0 | 3 | 3 | |
| Waldena[1218], | T.R.E. | 66 | 17 | 16 | 8 | 5 |
| T.R.W. | 46 | 40 | 20 | 10 | 22 | |
| Hame[1219], | T.R.E. | 32 | 16 | 3 | 5 | 8 |
| T.R.W. | 48 | 79 | 3 | 4 | 12 | |
| Benefelda[1220], | T.R.E. | 10 | 2 | 7 | 3 | 7 |
| T.R.W. | 9 | 11 | 4 | 3 | 4 | |
| Wimbeis[1221], | T.R.E. | 26 | 18 | 6 | 3 | 21 |
| T.R.W. | 26 | 55 | 0 | 3 | 15 |
These are but specimens of the obscure little revolutions that are being accomplished in the Essex villages. In general there has been a marked increase in the number of bordarii, at the expense of the villeins on the one part and the serfs on the other[1222], and this, whatever else it may represent, must tell us of a redistribution of tenements, perhaps of a process that substitutes the half-virgate for the virgate as the average holding of an Essex peasant. The jar of conquest has made such revolutions easy[1223].
Devastation of villages.
But, it will be said, though the ‘bundles’ of strips be cut in half, the main features of the field remain constant. Let us, however, look at Yorkshire, where for fifteen years an immense tract of land has been lying ‘waste.’ Have we any reason to believe that when agriculture slowly steals back into this desert there will be a mere restoration of the defaced map? Surely not. If for a few years an ‘open field’ lies waste, there will be no mere restoration. For one thing, many of the old outlines will have utterly vanished. Even if the acres were already divided by the so-called ‘balks’ (and we can not be sure that they always were[1224]), the balk was but a narrow strip of unploughed sward and would hardly be perceptible when the whole field was once more a sheet of grass and weeds. For another thing, new settlers would probably begin by ploughing only a small portion of the old field. It is likely enough that their measuring rod would not be even approximately equal to the rod employed in a previous century, and they would have ample opportunity for the introduction of novelties, for the substitution of three fields for two and for all that such a change implies. Now William’s deliberate devastation of the north is but one final and grandiose exploit of an ancient kind of warfare. After his day agrarian history becomes more stable because invasions cease and the character of civil warfare changes. The strife between York and Lancaster, between King and Parliament, passes like a thunderstorm over the fields; it damages the crops; but that is all, and Bosworth ‘Field’ and Naseby ‘Field’ will next year be tilled in the same old way. A raid of the Danes, a feud between Angle and Saxon, was a different affair. The peasants fought. Men, women and children were sold as slaves. Also there was deliberate devastation. ‘They make a wilderness and call it peace.’ What else should they call it, when a foodless wilderness is the most scientific of all frontiers? Readers of the English Chronicle will doubt whether there is any village in England that has not been once, or more than once, a deserted village. And if we must reckon with war, there is famine also to be reckoned with. When in a few brief words the English Chronicler tells us that in 1043 there was mickle hunger in the land so that the sestar of corn sold for sixty pence and even more[1225], he is, like enough, telling us of a disaster which depopulated many a village and forced many a villager to bow his head for meat in those evil days[1226]. Agrarian history becomes more catastrophic as we trace it backwards.
Village colonies.