Social Life in England Through the Centuries

by H. R. Wilton Hall

There seems to have been two classes of villeins—geburs and cottiers.

The geburs were the higher class. They appear very frequently to have held about one hundred and twenty 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.

In the Danish part of the country there appears to have been a class of freeholders, in some places, called socmen, but there were not very many of them. They, no doubt, had had their rights granted to them for distinguished service in the Danish wars.

The cottiers held only about five acres of land. They had to work for the thane or lord on certain days of the week; but, as they had no oxen, they had no ploughing to do for him.

Below the geburs and the cottiers were the theows, thralls, or slaves, who could be bought and sold. They were captives taken in war, or men who, for their crimes, had been doomed to slavery.

We must remember that the overlord might be the king or a bishop, a monastery or a thane. Their rights over their vills and tuns were much the same in each case, and their duties to those vills and tuns were also similar.

A very large number of vills and tuns were under the lordship of the various bishops and monasteries. It was so with towns like Winchester, Reading, Bury St. Edmund's, and St. Alban's. The custom had grown up quite naturally and in the course of many years.

It is pretty clear that the overlord did not always reside in his vill or tun. The tuns or vills of the bishopric of Winchester, for instance, were scattered about in the various parts of the diocese. It was the same with other overlords. But we find in every place a steward, and in each town the king's reeve or the lord's reeve. These acted for the overlord, whoever he was, and saw that the villeins and cottiers did their proper proportion of work at the right time; they saw that the lord's tolls at the markets, fairs, and ferries, were properly enforced. The steward was a most important officer in every town and village, and a great deal of power was in his hands.

Then in the ordinary country vill there was the faber, or smith; the mason; the pundar, or man who looked after the fences and hedges and drove stray cattle into the pound. Then there was the carpenter, and even the bee-keeper, for honey was an important ingredient used in the making of the drink of the community. The simple ordinary trades were found in the country villages then, as they are now; but the craftsmen, the most skilled workmen, had become for the most part dwellers in the towns. Even in very early times we find craftsmen in towns formed into trades' unions or guilds, to protect their special trades.