The process of disintegration which the mediæval system suffered took in Britain a peculiar form, and in this most typical district of Britain, in Sussex, that form is clearly to be traced. The village, which was the unit of mediæval life, was essentially co-operative. As the segregation of individual industry arose, either the lord was certain
THE RISE OF THE SQUIRES
to become, from the head official of a corporation, a proprietor of the whole, or the villein, his tenant, was bound to become, from a member of a co-operative society, a proprietor of his part. There was not room for both. Elsewhere, in all northern France, and to some extent in the valley of the Rhine, the break-up of the mediæval system is the attack of the peasant upon his lord. It is (spread over a much longer period) something like the campaign which the Irish have inaugurated in our own time. It is a movement towards peasant proprietorship.
In England the development is very different. Feudalism in England, even when it was highly organised, as in Sussex, had to fight against a force which is almost inherent in the soil. For that force it is difficult to find a name, though it is a tendency clearly observable in the whole of English history. It may, perhaps, best be defined as the tendency of the English village group to submit to one lord, coupled with the lack of any tendency among these lords to coalesce under a superior. The system is essentially oligarchic, and its foundations were laid in the natural crystallisation of society during the anarchy of the Anglo-Saxon centuries. With his inheritance of law weakened, and his memory of a protecting government destroyed, the small man had not the wit or the courage to fight against the big man; hence the English squire. The big men had not the necessity forced upon them to unite in defence of an antique civilisation and a strong Roman tradition; hence the permanent insecurity and ultimate abasement of the English monarchy.
The latter of these two forces you see at work continually in the history of England during that space which lies between the Norman Conquest and the Barons’ Wars, when the attempt to govern from a centre was made and failed. The village aristocracy is always stronger than the Crown, and in some sense expresses a national action against the Crown. At first this aristocracy merely supported the barons (who were their nominal overlords) in the joint attack upon monarchy, but as the centuries pass the overlords themselves lose their hegemony. At last, round about the period of the Reformation, the lords of single manors, the squires, become completely independent, and their final, wholly successful effort matures when the Tudors are no longer there with their violent personalities to defend the symbol, the remaining symbol, of a central authority.
GLYNDE
THE SUSSEX FAMILIES
The Stuarts break down. The squires arm. The Crown is defeated. A king is beheaded. From thence onward a process which was easily apparent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which had taken on strength with the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth, which had become of further importance with the large transfers of land at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, is completed. The seventeenth century sees in Sussex, as throughout England, the final victory of the village landlords, their complete possession of the soil and of the people who dwell upon it, and their complete independence from any authority over them.