[143]. Ini, § 36. Thorpe, i. 124.
[144]. Ini, § 39. Thorpe, i. 126.
CHAPTER IV.
LANDED POSSESSION. THE EÐEL, HÍD OR ALOD.
Possession of a certain amount of land in the district was the indispensable condition of enjoying the privileges and exercising the rights of a freeman[[145]]. There is no trace of such a qualification as constituted citizenship at Athens or Rome: among our forefathers, the exclusive idea of the city had indeed no sway. They formed voluntary associations upon the land, for mutual benefit; the qualification by birth, as far as it could be of any importance, was inferred from the fact of admission among the community; and gelondan, or those who occupied the same land, were taken to be connected in blood[[146]]. An inquiry into the pedigree of a man who presented himself to share in the perils of the conquest or the settlement, would assuredly have appeared superfluous; nor was it more likely to be made, when secure enjoyment came to reward the labours of invasion. In fact the Germanic settlements, whether in their origin isolated or collective, are based throughout upon the idea of common property in land. It is not the city, but the country, that regulates their form of life and social institutions: as Tacitus knew them, they bore in general the character of disliking cities: “It is well enough known,” he says, “that none of the German populations dwell in cities; nay that they will not even suffer continuous building, and house joined to house. They live apart, each by himself, as the woodside, the plain or the fresh spring attracted him”[[147]]. Thus the Germanic community is in some sense adstricta glebae, bound to the soil: its members are sharers in the arable, the forest and the marsh, the waters and the pastures: their bond of union is a partnership in the advantages to be derived from possession of the land, an individual interest in a common benefit.
The district occupied by a body of new settlers was divided by lot in various proportions[[148]]. Yet it is certain that not all the land was so distributed; a quantity sufficient to supply a proper block of arable[[149]] to each settler, was set apart for division; while the surplus fitted for cultivation, the marshes and forests less suited to the operations of the plough, and a great amount of fine grass or meadow-land, destined for the maintenance of cattle, remained in undivided possession as commons. At first too, it is clear, from what has been said in the second chapter, that considerable tracts were left purposely out of cultivation to form the marches or defences of the several communities. But those alone whose share in the arable demonstrated them to be members of the little state, could hope to participate in the advantages of the commons of pasture: like the old Roman patricians, they derived from their haeredium benefits totally incommensurate with its extent. Without such share of the arable, the man formed no portion of the state; it was his franchise, his political qualification, even as a very few years ago a freehold of inconsiderable amount sufficed to enable an Englishman to vote, or even be voted for, as a member of the legislature,—to be, as the Greeks would call it, in the πολιτεία,—a privilege which the utmost wealth in copyhold estates or chattels could not confer. He that had no land was at first unfree: he could not represent himself and his interests in the courts or assemblies of the freemen, but must remain in the mund or hand of another[[150]],—a necessary consequence of a state of society in which there is indeed no property but land, in other words, no market for its produce.
From the mode of distribution it is probable that each share was originally called Hlyt (sors, κλῆρος), it derived however another and more common name from its extent and nature. The ordinary Anglosaxon words are Higid[[151]] (in its contracted and almost universal form Híd) and Hiwisc. The Latin equivalents which we find in the chronicles and charters are, familia, cassatus, mansus, mansa, mansio, martens and terra tributarii. The words Híd and Hiwisc are similar, if not identical, in meaning: they stand in close etymological relation to Higan, Hiwan, the family, the man and wife, and thus perfectly justify the Latin terms familia and cassatus[[152]], by which they are translated. The Híd then, or Hide of land, is the estate of one household, the amount of land sufficient for the support of one family[[153]]. It is clear however that this could not be an invariable quantity, if the households were to be subsisted on an equal scale: it must depend upon the original quality and condition of the soil, as well as upon manifold contingencies of situation—climate, aspect, accessibility of water and roads, abundance of natural manures, proximity of marshes and forests, in short an endless catalogue of varying details. If therefore the Hide contained a fixed number of acres all over England, and all the freemen were to be placed in a position of equal prosperity, we must assume that in the less favoured districts one Hide would not suffice for the establishment of one man, but that his allotment must have comprised more than that quantity. The first of these hypotheses may be very easily disposed of: there is not the slightest ground for supposing that any attempt was, or could be, made to regulate the amount of individual possession beyond the limit of each community; or that there ever was, or could be, any concert between different communities for such a purpose. The second supposition however presents greater difficulties.
There is no doubt a strong antecedent improbability of the Hide having been alike all over England: isolated as were the various conquests which gradually established the Saxon rule in the several districts, it can hardly be supposed that any agreement was at first found among bands, engaged in continual struggles for safety, rather than for extension of territory. It may indeed be objected that later, when the work of conquest had been consolidated, when, under the rule of powerful chieftains, the resistance of the Britons had ceased to appear dangerous, some steps may have been taken towards a general arrangement; those historians who please themselves with the phantom of a Saxon confederation under one imperial head,—a Bretwaldadóm—may find therein an easy solution of this, and many other difficulties[[154]]: but still it seems little likely that the important step of dividing the country should have been postponed, or that a successful body of invaders should have thought it necessary to wait for the consent or co-operation of others, whose ultimate triumph was yet uncertain. Experience of human nature would rather incline us to believe that, as each band wrung from the old masters of the soil as much as sufficed for its own support and safety, it hastened to realize its position and marked its acquisition by the stamp and impress of individual possession. It is moreover probable that, had any solemn and general agreement been brought about through the influence of any one predominant chief, we should not have been left without some record of a fact, so beneficial in itself, and so conclusive as to the power and wisdom of its author: this we might not unreasonably expect, even though we admit that such an event could only have taken place at the very commencement of our history, and that such a division, or, what is more difficult still, redivision of the soil, is totally inconsistent with the state of society in England at any period subsequent to A.D. 600: but these are precisely the cases where the mythus replaces and is ancillary to history.
Against all these arguments we have only one fact to adduce, but it is no light one. It is certain that, in all the cases where a calculation can be made at all, we do find a most striking coincidence with respect to the size of the Hide in various parts of England; that such calculation is applicable to very numerous instances, and apparently satisfies the condition of the problem in all; and lastly that there appears no reason to suppose that any such real change had taken place in the value of the Hide, down to the period of the Norman conquest and the compilation of Domesday, according to the admeasurement of at least the largest and the most influential of the English tribes[[155]]. The latest of these measurements are recorded in Domesday; the earliest by Beda: the same system of calculations, the same results, apply to every case in which trial has been made between these remote limits; and we are thus enabled to ascend to the seventh century, a period at which any equality of possessions is entirely out of the question, but at which the old unit of measurement may still have retained and handed down its original value: even as, with us, one farm may comprise a thousand, another only two or three hundred acres, and yet the extent of the acre remain unaltered.
How then are we to account for this surprising fact, in the face of the arguments thus arrayed against it? I cannot positively assert, but still think it highly probable, that there was some such general measure common to the Germanic tribes upon the continent, and especially in the north. Whether originally sacerdotal, or how settled, it is useless to guess; but there does seem reason to believe that a measure not widely different from the result of my own calculations as to the Hide, prevailed in Germany; and hence to conclude that it was the usual basis of measurement among all the tribes that issued from the storehouse of nations[[156]].
What was the amount then of the Hide among the Anglosaxons? Perhaps the easiest way of arriving at a trustworthy conclusion will be to commence with the Anglosaxon acre, and other subdivisions of the Hide and the acre itself.