12. But the Danes were something more than tillers of the soil; they were traders too, and "tuns" became in many places more like our "towns" and trading-places than ever they had been before. In time we find the largest towns in the Danish part of England—Leicester, Lincoln, Derby, Nottingham, and Stamford—binding themselves together to protect their trading interests.
Summary.—Land was gradually left to monasteries by kings and nobles on condition that they and their families should always be prayed for. The monasteries became holders of lands, often far away from their houses, which had to be attended to. Towns grew up round many monasteries, like St. Alban's and Bury St. Edmund's, and the monastery was their overlord.
The Danes brought no new land system with them to England, though amongst them there was a class of freemen. Towns grew to be greater trading-places in Danish times.
[CHAPTER XIII]
TOWNS AND VILLAGES IN THE TIME OF CNUT THE DANE
1. Now let us see what an ordinary village was like in the time of King Cnut, when Saxon and Dane were living pretty comfortably together, side by side, under good government.
2. We find that each vill or tun had a lord, an eorl, or thane, who practically owned the place and everything in it, though he could not do entirely as he liked. There was the land which belonged to him, and which was in his own hands, or occupation, as we say; that was called his demesne. The rest of the land was also his, but it was let out to people who had lived on the land from time out of mind—the cheorls or villeins. The lord's house was on his demesne. The villeins' houses were all together in the tun, with the grass yards for the cattle close to them, and the open fields and pasture-lands outside the tun, just as they had been in the olden days.
3. There seem to have been two classes of villeins—geburs and cottiers.
4. The geburs were the higher class. They seem very frequently to have held about 120 acres of land; they had to work on the lord's home farm two or three days a week, or pay him certain produce of the land as a rent; and they had to provide one or more oxen for the village plough, when there was ploughing to be done on the lord's farm, or in the common field.