Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England

by Frederic William Maitland

The farm.

But, to return to the village, we must once more notice that the Canons of St Paul’s have let their manor of Willesden to the villeins[605]. This leads us to speculate as to the incidence and collection of those great provender rents of which we read when royal manors are described. In King Edward’s day a royal manor is often charged with the whole or some aliquot share of a ‘one night’s farm,’ that is one day’s victual for the king’s household. Definite amounts of bread, cheese, malt, meat, beer, honey, wool have to be supplied; thus, for example, Cheltenham must furnish three thousand loaves for the king’s dogs and King’s Barton must do the like[606]. Then too Edward the sheriff receives as the profits of the shrievalty of Wiltshire, 130 pigs, 32 bacons, certain quantities of wheat, malt, oats, and honey, 400 chicken, 1600 eggs, 100 cheeses, 100 lambs, 52 fleeces[607]. Between the king and the men of the manor, no doubt there stands a farmer, either the sheriff or some other person, who is bound to supply the due quantity of provender; but to say that this is so does not solve the problem that is before us. We have still to ask how this due quantity is obtained from the men of the village. It is a quantity which can be expressed by round figures; it is 3000 dog-cakes, or the like. We do not arrive at these pretty results by adding up the rents due from individuals. Again, just in the counties which are the homes of freedom we hear much of sums of money that are paid to a lord by way of free will offering[608]. In Norfolk and Suffolk the villagers will give a yearly gersuma, in Lincoln they will pay a yearly tailla, and this will be a neat round sum; very often it is 20 shillings, or 40 or 10.

Round sums raised from the villages.

In this particular we seem to see an increase of something that may be called communalism, as we go backwards. Of course in the cartularies of a later age we may discover round sums of money which, under the names of ‘tallage’ or ‘aid’ are imposed upon the vill as a whole; but in general we may accept the rule that tributes to be paid by the vill as a whole, in money or in kind, are not of recent origin. They are more prominent in the oldest than in other documents. As examples, we may notice the ‘cornage’ of the Boldon Book—one vill renders 20 shillings, another 30 shillings for cornage[609]; also the contributions of sheep, poultry, bread and cloth which the vills of Peterborough Abbey bring to the monks on the festival of their patron saint—one vill supplying ten rams and twenty ells of cloth, another four rams, five ells of cloth, ten chicken and three hundred loaves[610]. But then we have to notice that a village which has to pay a provender rent or even a tailla or gersuma is not altogether a free village. Its communal action is called out by seignorial pressure.

The township and police law.

And as we go backwards the township seems to lose such definiteness as is given to it by the police law of the thirteenth century[611]. This was to be expected, for such law implies a powerful, centralized state, which sends its justices round the country to amerce the townships and compel these local communities to do their duties. Once and once only does the township appear in the Anglo-Saxon dooms. This is in a law of Edgar. If a man who is on a journey buys cattle, then on his return home he must turn them onto the common pasture, ‘with the witness of the township.’ If he fails to do so, then after five nights the townsmen are to give information to the elder of the hundred, and in that case they and their cattle-herd will be free of blame, and the man who brought the cattle into the town will forfeit them, half to the lord and half to the hundred. If, on the other hand, the townsmen fail in the duty of giving information, their herd will pay for it with his skin[612]. The township has very little organization of which the state can make use. It does not seem even to have an ‘elder’ or head-man, and, from the threat of a flogging, we may gather that its common herdsman will be a slave. Purchases of cattle can not be made ‘with the witness of the township’; the purchaser ought to seek out two or three of those twelve standing witnesses who are appointed for every hundred[613]. So again, in the twelfth century we see the finder of a stray beast bringing it into the vill; he conducts it to the church-door and tells his story to the priest, the reeve and as many of the best men of the vill as can be got together. Then the reeve sends to the four neighbouring vills, calls in from each the priest, the reeve and three or four men and recounts the tale in their presence. Then on the following day he goes to the head-man of the hundred and puts the whole matter before him and delivers up the beast to him, unless indeed the place where it was found straying was within the domain of some lord who had sake and soke[614]. Here again, the organization of the township appears to be of a most rudimentary kind. It has no court, unless its lord has sake and soke; it has no power to detain an estray for safe custody. In this very simple case it requires the help of other vills and must transmit the cause to the hundred court. And so again, though there may be some reason for thinking that at one time the murder fine—the fine payable if the slayer of a foreigner was not arrested—was primarily exigible from the vill in which the corpse was found, the hundred being but subsidiarily liable, still this rule seems to have been soon abandoned and the burden of the fine, a fine far too heavy for a single vill, was cast upon the hundred[615]. For all this, however, the law knew and made use of the township. The Domesday commissioners required the testimony of the priest, the reeve and six villani of every vill. So soon as the law about suit to the hundred court becomes at all plain, the suit is due rather from vills than from men, and the burden is discharged by the lord of the vill or his steward, or, if neither of them can attend, then by the priest, the reeve and four of the vill’s best men[616].

The free village and Norman government.

How could these requirements be met by a vill which had no lord? It would be a fair remark that the existence of such vills is not contemplated by the Norman rulers. The men who will represent the vill before the Domesday commissioners will in their eyes be villani. This assumption is becoming true enough. We have seen Orwell full of sokemen; in 1086 there is never a sokeman in it; there is no one in it who is above the rank of a villein. Count Roger and Walter Giffard, Count Alan and Geoffrey de Mandeville can make such arrangements about the suit of Orwell, the reeveship of Orwell, as they think fit. Everywhere the Frenchmen are consolidating their manors, creating demesne land where their English antecessores had none, devising scientific frontiers, doing what in them lies to make every vill a manor. Thus is evolved that state of things which comes before us in the thirteenth century. The work of the foreigners was done so completely that we can see but very little of the institutions that they swept away.

Organization of the free village.

On the whole, however, we shall do well not to endow the free township of the Confessor’s day with much organization. We may be certain that, at least as a general rule, it had no court; we may doubt very gravely whether it always had any elder, head-man, or reeve. Often it was a small and yet a heterogeneous, and a politically distracted body. Some of its members might be attached to the house of Godwin, some had sworn to live and die for the house of Leofric. Just because it is free it has few, if any, communal payments to make. Only if it comes under a single lord will it have to render a provender rent, a tailla or gersuma. As a sphere for communal action there remains only the regulation of the arable lands, the woods and waste. We can not say for certain that these give scope for much regulation. The arable strips are held in severalty; if by chance some of them are held in common, this in all probability is a case rather of co-ownership than of communal ownership. The pasture rights may well be regarded as appurtenances of the arable strips. The practice of ‘co-aration’ need not be enforced by law; the man who will not help his neighbours must be content to see his own land unploughed. The course of agriculture is fixed and will not be often or easily altered. The ‘realism’ which roots every right and duty in a definite patch of soil, the rapid conversion of new arrangements into immemorial customs, the practice of taking turn and turn about, the practice of casting lots, these will do much towards settling questions such as our modern imaginations would solve by means of a village council. No doubt, from time to time a new departure is made; new land is reclaimed from the waste, perhaps the pasture rights are stinted or redistributed, a mill is built or a church is endowed;—but all this requires no periodic assemblies, no organization that we dare call either permanent or legal. Once in five years or so there may be something to be done, and done it will be by a resolution of the villagers which is or calls itself an unanimous resolution. If the Cambridgeshire townships had been landowning corporations, each of them would have passed as a single unit into the hands of some Norman baron. But this did not happen. On the contrary, the Norman barons had to content themselves with intermixed strips; the strips of Ælfgar’s men went to Count Roger, the strips of Edith’s men went to Count Alan. We are far from denying the existence of a communal sentiment, of a notion that somehow or another the men of the vill taken as a whole owned the lands of the vill, but this sentiment, this notion, if strong was vague. There were no institutions in which it could realize itself, there was no form of speech or thought in which it could find an apt expression. It evaded the grasp of law. At the touch of jurisprudence the township became a mere group of individuals, each with his separate rights[617].