Later and closer research does but indicate gradations in the status of the unfree—gradations which seem to have varied arbitrarily in terms of local law. (On this, however, see Morgan, p. 62.) The Domesday Book specifies multitudes of villani, servi, bordarii (or cotarii), as well as (occasionally) large numbers of sochmanni, and liberi homines. In Cornwall there were only six chief proprietors, with 1,738 villani, 2,441 bordarii, and 1,148 servi; in Devonshire, 8,246 villani, 4,814 bordarii, and 3,210 servi; in Gloucestershire, 3,071 villani, 1,701 bordarii, and 2,423 servi; while in Lincolnshire there were 11,322 sochmanni, 7,168 villani, 3,737 bordarii; and in Norfolk 4,528 villani, 8,679 bordarii, 1,066 servi, 5,521 sochmanni, and 4,981 liberi homines. (Cp. Sharon Turner, as cited, vol. iii, bk. viii, ch. 9.) Thus the largest numbers of ostensible freemen are found in the lately settled Danish districts, and the largest number of slaves where most of the old British population survived (Ashley, Economic History, 1888, i, 17, 18; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 1891, i, 88). "The eastern counties are the home of liberty" (Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 23). The main totals are: bordarii, 82,119; villani, 108,407; servi, 25,156; that is, 215,000 heads of families, roughly speaking, all of whom were more or less "unfree," out of an entire enumerated male population of 300,000.
The constant tendency was to reduce all shades to one of nativi or born villeins (Stubbs, Constitutional History, 4th ed. i, 465); that is to say, the number of absolute serfs tends to lessen, their status being gradually improved, while higher grades tend to be somewhat lowered. Prof. Vinogradoff's research, which aims at correcting Mr. Seebohm's, does but disclose that villenage in general had three aspects:—"Legal theory and political disabilities would fain make it all but slavery; the manorial system ensures it something of the character of the Roman colonatus; there is a stock of freedom in it which speaks of Saxon tradition" (Villainage in England, 1892, p. 137; cp. Seebohm, as cited, p. 409; and Stubbs, § 132, i, 462-65). Even the comparatively "free" socmen were tied to the land and were not independent yeomen (Ashley, i, 19); and even "freedmen" were often tied to a specified service by the act of manumission (Dunham, as cited, iii, 51). As to Teutonic slavery in general, cp. C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, French tr. 1878, i, 41-44, and U.R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. 1900, i, 116; as to France, cp. Guizot, Essais sur l'Histoire de France, édit. 1847, pp. 162-72; Histoire de la civilisation en France, 13e édit. iii, 172, 190-203; and as to the Netherlands, see above, pp. 295-96.
There is a tendency on the one hand to exaggerate the significance of the data, as when we identify the lot of an ancient serf or villein with that of a negro in the United States of sixty years ago;[993] and on the other hand to forget, in familiarity with scholarly research, the inevitable moral bearing of all degrees of bondage. The villanus "both is and is not a free man"; but the "not" is none the less morally significant: "though he may be liber homo, he is not francus";[994] and his name carries a slur. An immeasurable amount of moral history is conveyed in the simple fact that "slave" was always a term of abuse; that "villain" is just "villein"; that "caitiff" is just "captive"; and that "churl" is just "ceorl." So the "neif" (= naïf = native) becomes the "knave";[995] the "scullion" the "blackguard"; and the homeless wanderer the "vagabond"; even as for the Roman "the guest," hostis, was "the enemy." The "rogue" has doubtless a similar descent, and "rogue and peasant-slave" in Tudor times, when slavery had ceased, stood for all things contemptible. Men degrade and impoverish their fellows, and out of the created fact of deprivation make their worst aspersions; never asking who or what it is that thus turns human beings into scullions, churls, blackguards, knaves, caitiffs, rogues, and villains. The Greeks knew that a man enslaved was a man demoralised; but saw in the knowledge no motive for change of social tactics. Still less did the Saxons; for their manumissions at the bidding of the priest were but penitential acts, in no way altering the general drift of things.
Green (Short History, ch. i, § 6, ed. 1881, pp. 54, 55), laying stress on the manumissions, asserts that under Edgar "slavery was gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church." But this is going far beyond the evidence. Green seems to have assumed that the laws framed by Dunstan were efficacious; but they clearly were not. (Cp. C. Edmond Maurice, Tyler, Bale, and Oldcastle, 1875, pp. 14-18.) Kemble rightly notes—here going deeper than Prof. Vinogradoff—that there was a constant process of new slave-making (Saxons, i, 183-84; cp. Maitland, p. 31); and in particular notes how "the honours and security of service became more anxiously desired than a needy and unsafe freedom" (p. 184). There is in short a law of worsenment in a crude polity as in an advanced one. Green himself says of the slave class that it "sprang mainly from debt or crime" (The Making of England, 1885, p. 192; cp. Short History, p. 13). But debt and "crime" were always arising. Compare his admissions in The Conquest of England, 2nd ed. pp. 444, 445. Elsewhere he admits that slaves were multiplied by the mutual wars of the Saxons (p. 13); and Kemble, recognising "crime" as an important factor, agrees (i, 186) with Eichhorn and Grimm in seeing in war and conquest the "principal and original cause of slavery in all its branches." A battle would make more slaves in a day than were manumitted in a year. Some slaves indeed, as in the Roman Empire, were able to buy their freedom (Maurice, as cited, p. 20, and refs.; Dunham, as cited, iii, 51); but there can have been few such cases. (Cp. C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, French tr. i, 41-44, as to the general tendencies of Teutonic slavery.) The clergy for a time promoted enfranchisement, and even set an example in order to widen their own basis of power; but as Green later notes (ch. v, § 4, p. 239) the Church in the end promoted "emancipation, as a work of piety, on all estates but its own." Green further makes the vital admission that "the decrease of slavery was more than compensated by the increasing degradation of the bulk of the people.... Religion had told against political independence"—for the Church played into the hands of the king.
During the Danish invasions, which involved heavy taxation (Danegeld) to buy off the invaders, slavery increased and worsened; and Cnut's repetition of the old laws against the foreign slave trade can have availed little (Maurice, as cited, pp. 23-24). Prof. Abdy, after recognising that before the Conquest English liberties were disappearing like those of France (Lectures on Feudalism, 1890, pp. 322, 326-27, 331), argues that, though the tenure of the villein was servile, he in person was not bond (App. p. 428). "Bond" is, of course, a term of degree, like others; but if "not bond" means "freeman," the case will not stand. The sole argument is that "had he been so [bond], it is difficult to understand his admission into the conference [in the procedure of the Domesday Survey] apparently on an equality with the other members of the inquest." Now he was plainly not on an equality. The inquest was to be made through the sheriff, the lord of the manor, the parish priest, the reeve, the bailiff, and six villeins out of each hamlet (Id. p. 360). It is pretty clear that the villeins were simply witnesses to check, if need were, the statements of their superiors.
The weightiest argument against the darker view of Saxon serfdom is the suggestion of the late Prof. Maitland (Domesday Book, p. 223) that the process of technical subordination, broadly called feudalism, was really a process of infusion of law and order. But he confessedly made out no clear case, and historical analogy is against him.
Finally, though under the Normans the Saxon slaves appear to have gained as beside the middle grades of peasants (Morgan, England under the Normans, p. 225; Ashley, i, 18), it is a plain error to state that the Bristol slave-trade was suppressed under William by "the preaching of Wulfstan, and the influence of Lanfranc" (Green, Short History, p. 55; also in longer History, i, 127; so also Bishop Stubbs, i, 463, note. The true view is put by Maurice, as cited, p. 30). The historian incidentally reveals later (Short History, ch. vii, § 8, p. 432, proceeding on Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hiberniæ, lib. i, c. 18) that "at the time of Henry II's accession Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, in spite of Royal prohibitions and the spiritual menaces of the English Church." (Cp. Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 316, note.) He admits, too (p. 55), that "a hundred years later than Dunstan the wealth of English nobles was sometimes said to spring from breeding slaves for the market." The "market" was for concubines and prostitutes, as well as for labourers. (Cp. Southey, Book of the Church, ed. 1824, i, 115, following William of Malmesbury; and Hallam, as last cited.) Gibbon justifiably infers (ch. 38, Bohn ed. iv, 227) that the children of the Roman slave market of the days of Gregory the Great, non Angli sed angeli, were sold into slavery by their parents. "From the first to the last age," he holds, the Anglo-Saxons "persisted in this unnatural practice." Cp. Maurice, as cited, pp. 4-5. Gregory actually encouraged the traffic in English slaves after he became Pope. (Ep. to Candidus, cited in pref. to Mrs. Elstoh's trans. of the Anglo-Saxon Homily, p. xi.)
Thus, under Saxon, Danish, and Norman law alike, a slave trade persisted for centuries. As regards the conditions of domestic slavery, it seems clear that the Conquest lowered the status of the half-free; but on the other hand "there was a great decrease in the number of slaves in Essex between the years 1065 and 1085" (Morgan, as cited, p. 225; cp. Maitland, p. 35).
In Saxondom, for centuries before the Conquest, "history" is made chiefly by the primitive forces of tribal and local animosity, the Northmen coming in to complicate the insoluble strifes of the earlier English, partly uniting these against them, dominating some, and getting ultimately absorbed in the population, but probably constituting for long an extra source of conflict in domestic politics. A broad difference of accent, as in the Scandinavian States down to our own day, is often a strain on fellowship. In any case, the Anglo-Saxons at the time of the Conquest, as always from the time of their own entry, showed themselves utterly devoid of the "gift of union" which has been ascribed to their "race," as to the Roman. No "Celts" were ever more hopelessly divided: the Battle of Hastings is the crowning proof.[996] And in the absence of leading and stimulus from a higher culture, so little progressive force is there in a group of struggling barbaric communities that there was only the scantiest political and other improvement in Saxon England during hundreds of years. When Alfred strove to build up a civilisation, he turned as a matter of course to the Franks.[997] The one civilising force was that of the slight contacts kept up with the Continent, perhaps the most important being the organisation of the Church. It was the Norman Conquest, bringing with it a multitude of new contacts, and an entrance of swarms of French and Flemish artificers and clerics, that decisively began the civilisation of England. The Teutonic basis, barbarous as it was, showed symptoms of degeneration rather than of development. In brief, France was mainly civilised through Italy; England was mainly civilised through France.
Bishop Stubbs, after admitting as much (§ 91, i, 269, 270) and noting the Norman "genius for every branch of organisation," proceeds to say "that the Norman polity had very little substantial organisation of its own, and that it was native energy that wrought the subsequent transformation." His own pages supply the disproof. See in particular as to the legislative and administrative activity of Henry II, § 147, i, 530-33. As to the arrest or degeneration of the Saxon civilisation, cp. § 79, i, 227, 228; Sharon Turner, History of England during the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. i, 1, 73; H.W. C. Davis, England under the Normans and the Angevins, 1905, p. 1; Pearson, History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, 1867, i, 288, 308-12, 321, 343, 346, 347; Abdy, as cited above. Mr. Pearson's testimony, it should be noted, is that of a partisan and eulogist of the "race."