My first essay has been devoted to the peasantry of feudal England in its social character. We have had to examine its classes or divisions in their relation to freedom, personal slavery, and praedial serfage. The land system was touched upon only so far as it influenced such classification, or was influenced by it.
But no correct estimate of the social standing of the peasantry can stop here, or content itself with legal or administrative definitions. In no degree of society do men stand isolated, and a description of individual status alone would be thoroughly incomplete. Men stand arranged in groups for economical and political cooperation, and these groups are composed according to the laws of the division and hierarchical organisation of labour, composed, that is, of heterogeneous elements, of members who have to fulfil different functions, and to occupy higher and lower positions. The normal group which forms as it were the constitutive cell of English mediaeval society is the manor, and we must try to make out in what way it was organised, and how it did its work in the thirteenth century, at the time of fully developed feudalism.
The structure of the ordinary manor is always the same. Under the headship of the lord we find two layers of population the villains and the freeholders; and the territory occupied divides itself accordingly into demesne land and 'tributary land' (if I may use that phrase) of two different classes. The cultivation of the demesne depends to a certain extent on the work supplied by the tenants of the tributary land. Rents are collected, labour supervised, and all kinds of administrative business transacted, by a set of manorial officers or servants. The entire population is grouped into a village community which centres round the manorial court or halimote, which is both council and tribunal. My investigation will necessarily conform to this typical arrangement. The holding of the peasant is the natural starting-point: it will give us the clue to the whole agrarian system. Next may come that part of the territory which is not occupied in severalty, but used in common. The agrarian obligations with regard to the lord and the cultivation of the demesne land may be taken up afterwards. The position of privileged people, either servants or freeholders, must be discussed by itself, as an exceptional case. And, lastly, the question will have to be put to what extent were all these elements welded together in the village community, and under the sway of the manorial court?
The chief features of the field-system which was in operation in England during the middle ages have been sufficiently cleared up by modern scholars, especially by Nasse, Thorold Rogers, and Seebohm, and there is no need for dwelling at length on the subject. Everybody knows that the arable of an English village was commonly cultivated under a three years' rotation of crops; a two field system is also found very often; there are some instances of more complex arrangements, but they are very rare, and appear late-not earlier than the fourteenth century. Walter of Henley's treatise on farming, which appears to belong to the first half of the thirteenth, mentions only the first two systems, and its estimate of the plough-land is based on them. In the case of a three field rotation a hundred and eighty acres are reckoned to the plough; a hundred and sixty in a system of two courses. We find the same estimate in the chapters on husbandry and management of an estate which are inserted in the law-known as Fleta. The strips in the fields belonging to the several tenants were divided by narrow balks of turf, and when the field lay fallow, or after the harvest had been removed, the entire field was turned into a common pasture for the use of the village cattle. The whole area was protected by an inclosure while it was under crop.
A curious deviation is apparent in the following instance, taken from the cartulary of Malmesbury. The Abbey makes an exchange with a neighbour who has rights of common on some of the convent's land, and therefore does not allow of its being cultivated and inclosed (inhoc facere). In return for certain concessions on the part of the Abbey, this neighbouring owner agrees that fallow pasture should be turned into arable on the condition that after the harvest it should return to common use, as well as the land not actually under seed. Lastly comes a provision about the villains of the person entering into agreement with the Abbey: if they do not want to conform to the new arrangement of cultivation, they will be admitted to their strips for the purpose of ploughing up or using the fallow. The case is interesting in two respects: it shows the intimate connexion between the construction of the inclosure (inhoc) and the raising of the crop; the special paragraph about the villains gives us to understand that something more than the usual rotation of crops was meant: the 'inhokare' appears in opposition either to the ordinary ploughing up of the fallow, or in a general sense to its use for pasture; it seems to indicate extra-cultivation of such land as ought to have remained uncultivated. These considerations are borne out by other documents. In a trial of Edward I's time the 'inheche' is explained in as many words as the ploughing up of fallow for a crop of wheat, oats, or barley. The Gloucester Survey, in describing one of the manors belonging to the Abbey, arranges its land into four fields (campi), each consisting of several parts: the first field is said to contain 174 acres, the second 63, the third 109, the fourth 69 acres. Two-thirds of the whole are subjected to the usual modes of cultivation under a three-course system, and one-third remains for pasture. But out of this last third, 40 acres of the first field (of 174 acres) get inclosed and used for crop in one year, and 20 acres of the second in another. In this way the ordinary three-course alternation becomes somewhat more complicated, and it will be hardly too bold a guess to suppose that such extra-cultivation implied some manuring of such patches as were deprived of their usual rest once in three years. In contradiction to the customary arrangement which did not require any special manuring except that which was incident to the use of arable as pasture for the cattle after the harvest, we find plots set apart for more intense cultivation, and it is to be noticed that the reckoning in connexion with them does not start from the division according to three parts, but supposes a separate classification in two sections.
Another fact worth noticing in the Gloucester instance is the irregular distribution of acres in the 'fields,' and the division of the entire arable into four unequal parts. The husbandry is conducted on the three-course system, and still four fields are mentioned, and there is no simple relation between the number of acres which they respectively contain (174, 63, 109, 69). It seems obvious that the expression 'field' (campus) is used here not in the ordinary sense suggested by such records as spring-field, winter-field, and the like, but in reference to the topography of the district. The whole territory under cultivation was divided into a number of squares or furlongs which lay round the village in four large groups. The alternation of crops distributed the same area into three according to a mode not described by the Survey, and it looks proVable at first glance that each of the 'fields' (campi) contained elements of all three courses. The supposition becomes a certainty, if we reflect that it gives the only possible explanation of the way in which the twofold alternation of the 'inhoc' is made to fit with the threefold rotation of crops: every year some of the land in each campus had to remain in fallow, and could be inclosed or taken under 'inhoc.' Had the campus as a whole been reserved for one of the three courses, there would have been room for the 'inhoc' only every three years.
I have gone into some details in connexion with this instance because it presents a deviation from ordinary rules, and even a deviation from the usual phraseology, and it is probable that the exceptional use of words depended on the exceptional process of farming. A new species of arable -- the manured plot under 'inhoc' -- came into use, and naturally disturbed the plain arrangement of the old-fashioned three courses; the lands had to be grouped anew into four sections which went under the accustomed designation of 'fields,' although they did not fit in with the 'three fields' of the old system. In most cases, however, our records use the word 'field' (campus) in that very sense of land under one of the 'courses,' which is out of the question in the case taken from the Gloucester Cartulary. The common use is especially clear when the documents want to describe the holding of a person, and mention the number of acres in each 'field.' The Abbot of Malmesbury, e.g., enfeoffs one Robert with a virgate formerly held 'in the fields' by A., twenty-one acres in one field and twenty-one in another. The charter does not contain any description of campi in the territorial sense, and it is evident that the expression 'in the fields' is meant to indicate a customary and well-known husbandry arrangement. The same meaning must be put on sentences like the following: -- R.A. holds a virgate consisting of forty-two acres in both fields. The question may be raised whether we have to look for 'both fields' in the winter and springfield of the three courses rotation, or in the arable and fallow of the two courses. In the first of these eventualities, the third reserved for pasture and rest would be left out of the reckoning; it would be treated as an appurtenance of the land that was in cultivation. Cases in which the portions in the several fields are unequal seem to point to the second sense. It was impossible to divide the whole territory under cultivation like a piece of paper: conformation of the soil had, of course, much to do with the shape of the furlongs and their distribution, and the courses of the husbandry could not impress themselves on it without some inequalities and stray remnants. It may happen for this reason that a man holds sixteen acres in one field and fourteen in the other. There is almost always, however, a certain correspondence between the number of acres in each field; instances of very great disparity are rare, and suppose some local and special reasons which we cannot trace. Such disparities seem to point, however, to a rotation according to two courses, because the fallow of the three courses could have been left out of the reckoning only if all the parts in the fields were equal. I think that a careful inspection of the surveys from this point of view may lead to the conclusion that the two courses rotation was very extensively spread in England in the thirteenth century.
A most important feature of the mediaeval system of tillage was its compulsory character. The several tenants, even when freeholders, could not manage their plots at their own choice. The entire soil of the township formed one whole in this respect, and was subjected to the management of the entire village. The superior right of the community found expression in the fact that the fields were open to common use as pasture after the harvest, as well as in the regulation of the modes of farming and order of tillage by the township. Even the lord himself had to conform to the customs and rules set up by the community, and attempts to break through them, although they become frequent enough at the close of the thirteenth century, and especially in the fourteenth, are met by a resistance which sometimes actually leads to litigation. The freeholders alone have access to the courts, but in practice the entire body of the tenantry is equally concerned. The passage towards more efficient modes of cultivation was very much obstructed by these customary rules as to rotation of crops, which flow not from the will and interest of single owners, but from the decision of communities.
The several plots and holdings do not lie in compact I patches, but are formed of strips intermixed with each other. The so-called open-field system has been treated so exhaustively and with such admirable clearness by Seebohm, that I need not detain my readers in order to discuss it at length. I shall merely take from the Eynsham Cartulary the general description of the arable of Shifford, Oxon. It consists of several furlongs or areas, more or less rectangular in shape; each furlong divided into a certain number of strips (seliones), mostly half an acre or a rood (quarter acre) in width; some of these strips get shortened, however (seliones curtae), or sharpened (gorae), according to the shape of the country. At right angles with the strips in the fields lie the 'headlands' (capitales), which admit to other strips when there is no special rfor the purpose. When the area under tillage abuts against some obstacles, as against a highway, a river, a neighbouring furlong, the strips are stunted (buttae). Every strip is separated from the next by balks on even ground, and linches on the steep slopes of a hill. The holding of a peasant, free or villain, has been appropriately likened to a bundle of these strips of different shapes, the component parts of which lie intermixed with the elements of other holdings in the different fields of the township. There is e.g. in the Alvingham Cartulary a deed by which John Aysterby grants to the Priory of Alvingham in Lincolnshire his villain Robert and half a bovate of land. The half-bovate is found to consist of twelve strips west of Alvingham and sixteen strips east of the village; the several plots lie among similar plots owned by the priory and by other peasants. The demesne land of the priory is also situated not in compact areas, but in strips intermixed with those of the tenantry, in the 'communal fields' according to the phraseology of our documents.
Such a distribution of the arable seems odd enough. It led undoubtedly to very great inconvenience in many ways: it was difficult for the owner to look after his property in the several fields, and to move constantly from one place to another for the purposes of cultivation. A thrifty husbandman was more or less dependent for the results of his work on his neighbours, who very likely were not thrifty. The strips were not always measured with exactness, and our surveys mention curious misunderstandings in this respect: it happens that as much as three acres belonging to a particular person get mislaid somehow and cannot be identified. It is needless to say that disputes among the neighbours were rendered especially frequent by the rough way of dividing the strips, and by the cutting up of the holdings into narrow strips involving a very long line of boundary. And still the open-field system, with the intermixed strips, is quite a prevalent feature of mediaeval husbandry all over Europe. It covers the whole area occupied by the village community; it is found in Russia as well as in England.
Before we try to find an explanation for it, I shall call the attention of the reader to the following tale preserved by an ancient survey of Dunstable Priory. I think that the record may suggest the explanation with the more authority as it will proceed from well-established facts and not from suppositions. The story goes back to the original division of the land belonging to the Wahull manor by the lords de Wahull and de la Lege. The former had to receive two-thirds of the manor and the latter one-third: a note explains this to mean, that one had to take twenty knight-fees and the other ten. The lord de Wahull took all the park in Segheho and the entire demesne farm in 'Bechebury'. As a compensation for the surrender of rights on the part of his fellow parcener, he ordered the wood and pasture called Northwood to be measured, as also the neighbouring wood called Churlwood. He removed all the peasants who lived in these places, and had also the arable of Segheho measured, and it was found that there were eight hides of villain land. Of these eight hides one-fourth was taken, and it was reckoned that this fourth was an equivalent to the one-third of the park and of the demesne farm, which ought by right to have gone to the lord de la Lege. On the basis of this estimation an exchange was effected. In the time of the war (perhaps the rebellion of 1173) the eight hides and other hides in Segheho were encroached upon and appropriated unrighteously by many, and for this reason a general revision of the holdings was undertaken before Walter de Wahull and Hugh de la Lege in full court by six old men; it was made out to which of the hides the several acres belonged. At that time, when all the tenants in Segheho (knights, freeholders, and others) did not know exactly about the land of the village and the tenements, and when each man was contending that his neighbours held unrighteously and more than they ought, all the people decided by common agreement and in the presence of the lords de Wahull and de la Lege, that everybody should surrender his land to be measured anew with the rood by the old men as if the ground had been occupied afresh: every one had to receive his due part on consideration of his rights. At that time R.F. admitted that he and his predecessors had held the area near the castle unrighteously. The men in charge of the distribution divided that area into sixteen strips (buttos), and these were divided as follows: there are eight hides of villain land in Segheho and to each two strips were apportioned.
The narrative is curious in many respects. it illustrates beautifully the extent to which the intermixture of plots was carried, and the inconveniences consequent upon it. Although the land had been measured and divided at the time when the lord de Wahull took the land, everything got into confusion at the time of the civil war, and the disputes originated not in violence from abrbut in encroachments of the village people among themselves: the owners of conterminous strips were constantly quarrelling. A new division became necessary, and it took place under circumstances of great solemnity, as a result of an agreement effected at a great meeting of the tenantry before both lords. The new distribution may stand for all purposes in lieu of the original parcelling of the land on fresh occupation. The mode of treating one of the areas shows that the intermixture of the strips was a direct consequence of the attempt to equalise the portions. instead of putting the whole of this area into one lot, the old men divide it into strips and assign to every great holding, to every hide, two strips of this area. Many inconveniences follow for some of the owners, e.g. for the church which, it is complained, cannot put its plot to any use on account of its lying far away, and in intermixture with other people's land. But the guiding principle of equal apportionment has found a suitable expression.
We may turn now from the analysis of this case to general considerations. The important point in the instance quoted was, that the assignment of scattered strips to every holding depended on the wish to equalise the shares of the tenants. I think it may be shown that the treatment adopted in Segheho was the most natural, and therefore the most widely-spread one. To begin with, what other form of allotment appears more natural in a crude state of society? To employ a simile which I have used already, the territory of the township is not like a homogeneous sheet of paper out of which you may cut lots of every desirable shape and size: the tilth will present all kinds of accidental features, according to the elevation of the ground, the direction of the watercourses and ways, the quality of the soil, the situation of dwellings, the disposition of wood and pasture-ground, etc. The whole must needs be dismembered into component parts, into smaller areas or furlongs, each stretching over land of one and the same condition, and separated from land of different quality and situation. Over the irregular squares of this rough chess-board a more or less entangled network of rights and interests must be extended. There seem to be only two ways of doing it: if you want the holding to lie in one compact patch you will have to make a very complicated reckoning of all the many circumstances which influence husbandry, will have to find some numerical expression for fertility, accessibility, and the like; or else you may simply give every householder a share in every one of the component areas, and subject him in this way to all the advantages and drawbacks which bear upon his neighbours. If the ground cannot be made to fit the system of allotment, the system must conform itself to the ground. There can be no question that the second way of escaping from the difficulty is much the easier one, and very suitable to the practice of communities in an early stage of development. This second way leads necessarily to a scattering and an intermixture of strips. The explanation is wide enough to meet the requirements of cases placed in entirely different local surroundings and historical connexions; the tendency towards an equalising of the shares of the tenantry is equally noticeable in England and in Russia, in the far west and in the far east of Europe. In Russia we need not even go into history to find it operating in the way described; the practice is alive even now.
This intermixture of strips in the open fields is also characteristic in another way: it manifests the working of a principle which became obliterated in the course of history, but had to play a very important part originally. It was a system primarily intended for the purpose of equalising shares, and it considered every man's rights and property as interwoven with other people's rights and property: it was therefore a system particularly adapted to bring home the superior right of the community as a whole, and the inferior, derivative character of individual rights. The most complete inference from such a general conception would be to treat individual occupation of the land as a shifting ownership, to redistribute the land among the members of the community from time to time, according to some system of lot or rotation. The western village community does not go so far, as a rule, in regard to the arable, at least in the time to which our records belong. But even in the west, and particularly in England, traces of shifting ownership, 'shifting severalty,' may be found as scattered survivals of a condition which, if not general, was certainly much more widely spread in earlier times. The arable is sometimes treated as meadows constantly are: every householder's lot is only an 'ideal' one, and may be assigned one year in one place, and next year in another. The stubborn existence of intermixed ownership, even as described by feudal and later records, is in itself a strong testimony to the communal character of early property. The strips of the several holders were not divided by hedges or inclosures, and a good part of the time, after harvest and before seed, individual rights retreated before common use; every individualising treatment of the soil was excluded by the compulsory rotation of crops and the fact that every share consisted of a number of narrow strips wedged in among other people's shares. The husbandry could not be very energetic and lucrative under such pressure, and a powerful consideration which kept the system working, against convenience and interest, was its equalising and as it were communal tendency. I lay stress on the fact: if the open-field system with its intermixture had been merely a reflection of the original allotment, it would have certainly lost its regularity very soon. People could not be blind to its drawbacks from the point of view of individual farming; and if the single strips had become private property as soon as they ceased to be shifting, exchanges, if not sales, would have greatly destroyed the inconvenient network. The lord had no interest to prevent such exchanges, which could manifestly lead to an improvement of husbandry,. and in regard to his own strips, he must have perceived soon enough that it would be better to have them in one compact mass than scattered about in all the fields. And still the open-field intermixture holds its ground all through the middle ages, and we find its survivals far into modern times. This can only mean, that even when the shifting, 'ideal,' share in the land of the community had given way to the permanent ownership by each member of certain particular scattered strips, this permanent ownership did by no means amount to private property in the Roman or in the modern sense. The communal principle with its equalising tendency remained still as the efficient force regulating the whole, and strong enough to subject even the lord and the freeholders to its customary influence. By saying this I do not mean to maintain, of course, that private property was not existent, that it was not breaking through the communal system, and acting as a dissolvent of it. I shall have to show by-and-by in what ways this process was effected. But the fact remains, that the system which prevailed upon the whole during the middle ages appears directly connected in its most important features with ideas of communal ownership and equalised individual rights.
These ideas are carried out in a very rough way in the mediaeval arrangement of the holding, which is more complicated in England than on the continent. According to a very common mode of reckoning, the hide contains four virgates, every virgate two bovates, and every bovate fifteen acres. The bovate (oxgang) shows by its very name that not only the land is taken into account, but the oxen employed in its tillage, and the records explain the hide or carucate to be the land of the eight-oxen plough, that is so much land as may be cultivated by a plough drawn by eight oxen. The virgate, or yard-land, being the fourth part of a hide, corresponds to one-fourth part of the plough, that is, to two oxen, contributed by the holder to the full plough-team; the bovate or oxgang appears as the land of one ox, and the eighth part of the hide. Such proportions are, as I said, very commonly found in the records, but they are by no means prevalent everywhere. On the possessions of Glastonbury Abbey, for instance, we find virgates of forty acres, and a hide of 160; and the same reckoning appears in manors of Wetherall Priory, Westmoreland, of the Abbey of Eynsham, Oxfordshire, and many other places.
The so-called Domesday of St. Paul's reports, that in Runwell eighty acres used to be reckoned to the hide, but in course of time new land was acquired (for tillage) and measured, and so the hide was raised to 120 acres. Altogether the supposition of an uniform acre-measurement of bovates, virgates, hides, and knights' fees all over England would be entirely misleading. The oxen were an important element in the arrangement, but, of course, not the only one. The formation of the holding had to conform also to the quality of the soil, the density of the population, etc. We find in any case the most varying figures. The knight's fee contained mostly four or five full ploughs or carucates, and still in Lincolnshire sixteen carucates went to the knight's fee. The carucate was not identical with the hide, but carucate and hide alike had originally meant a unit corresponding to a plough-team. Four virgates were mostly reckoned to the hide, but sometimes six, eight, seven are taken. The yardlands (virgates) or full lands, as they are sometimes called, because they were considered as the typical peasant holdings, consist of fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-four, forty, forty-eight, fifty, sixty-two, eighty acres, although thirty is perhaps the figure which appears more often than any other. Bovates of ten, twelve, and sixteen acres are to be found in the same locality. We cannot even seize hold of the acre as the one constant unit among these many variables; the size of the acre itself varied from place to place. In this way any attempt to establish a normal reckoning of the holdings will not only seem hazardous, but will actually stand in contradiction with patent facts.
Another circumstance seems of yet greater import: even within the boundaries of one and the same community the equality was an agrarian one and did not amount to a strict correspondence in figures. It was obviously impossible to cut up the land among the holdings in such a way as to make every one contain quite the same number of acres as the rest. In the Cartulary of Ramsey it is stated, that in one of the manors the virgate contains sometimes forty-eight acres and sometimes less. The Huntingdon Hundred Rolls mentions a locality where some of the half-virgates have got houses on their plots and some have not. In the Dorsetshire manor of Newton, belonging to Glastonbury, we find a reduction of the duties of one of the virgates because it is a small one. A curious instance is supplied by the same Glastonbury survey as to the Wiltshire manor of Christian Malford: one of the virgates was formed out of two former virgates, which were found insufficient to support two separate households.
This last case makes it especially clear that the object was to make the shares on the same pattern in point of quality, and not of mere quantity. It is only to be regretted that manorial surveys, hundred rolls, and other documents of the same kind take too little heed of such variations, and consider the whole arrangement merely in regard to the interests of the landlord. For this purpose a rough quantitative statement was sufficient. They give very sparing indications as to the facts underlying the system of holdings; their aim is to reduce all relations to artificial uniformity in order to make them a fitter basis for the distribution of rents and labour services. But very little attention is required to notice a very great difference between such figures and reality. In most of the cases, when the virgate is described in its component parts, we come across irregularities. Again, each component part is more or less irregular, because instead of the acres and half-acres the real ground presents strips of a very capricious shape. And so we must come to the conclusion, that the hide, the virgate, the bovate, in short every holding mentioned in the surveys, appears primarily as an artificial, administrative, and fiscal unit which corresponds only in a very rough way to the agrarian reality.
This conclusion coincides with the most important fact, that the reckoning of acres in regard to the plough-team is entirely different in the treatises on husbandry from what it is in the manorial records drawn up for the purpose of an assessment of duties and payments. Walter of Henley and Fleta reckon 180 acres to the plough in a three-field system, and 160 in a two-field system. Now these figures are quite exceptional in surveys, whereas 120 acres is most usual without any distinction as to the course of rotation of crops. The relation between the three-field ploughland of 180 acres and the hide of 120 suggests the inference that the official assessment started from the prevalence of the three-field rotation, and disregarded the fallow. But the inference is hardly sufficient to explain the facts of the case. The way towards a solution of the problem is indicated by the terminology of the Ely surveys in the British Museum. These documents very often mention virgates and full yardlands of twelve acres de ware; on the other hand, the Court Rolls from Edward I's time till Elizabeth's, and a survey of the reign of Edward III, show the virgate to consist of twenty-four acres. The virgate de ware corresponds usually to one-half of the real virgate; I say usually, because in one case it is reckoned to contain eighteen acres in the place of twenty-four mentioned in the rolls and the later survey. Such 'acre ware' are to be found, though rarely, in other manors besides those of Ely minster. The contradiction between the documents may be taken at first glance to originate in a difference between the number of acres under actual tillage and the number of acres comprised in the holding: perhaps the first reckoning leaves out the fallow. This explanation has been tried by Mr O. Pell, the present owner of one of the Ely manors he started it in connexion with an etymology which brought together 'ware' and 'warectum': on this assumption twelve acres appeared instead of twenty-four, because the fallow of the two-field system was left out of the reckoning. But this reading of the evidence does not seem satisfactory. It is one-sided at the least. Why should the holding from which the 'warectum' has been left out get its name from the 'warectum'? How is one to explain either from the two-field or from the three-field system the case when eighteen 'acre ware' correspond to twenty-four common acres, or the even more perplexing case when eighteen acres of 'ware' go to the full land and twelve to half-a-full land? In fact, this last instance does not admit of any explanation from natural conditions, because in the natural course of things twelve will never come to be one-half of eighteen. Thus we are driven to assume that the 'ware' reckoning is an artificial one: as such it could, of course, treat the half-holdings in a different way from the full holdings. Now the only possible basis for an artificial distribution seems to be the assessment of rents and labour. Starting from this assumption we shall have to say that the virgate 'de wara' represents a unit of assessment in which twelve really existing acres have been left out of the reckoning. The assessment stretches only over half the area occupied by the real holding.
The conclusion we have come to is corroborated by the meaning of the word 'wara.' The etymological connexion with warectum is not sound; the meaning may be best brought out by a comparison with those instances where the word is used without a direct reference to the number of acres. We often find the expression 'ad inwaram' in Domesday, and it corresponds to the plain 'ad gildam Regis'. If a manor is said to contain seven hides ad inwaram, it is meant that it pays to the king for seven hides, although there may have been more than seven ploughteams and ploughlands. Another expression of like import is, 'pro sextem hidis se defendit erga Regem.' The Burton Cartulary, the earliest survey after Domesday, employed the word 'wara' in the same sense. It is not difficult to draw the inference from the above-mentioned facts: the etymological connexion for 'wara' is to be sought in the German word for defence -- 'wehre.' The manor defends itself or answers to the king for seven hides. The expression could get other special significations besides the one discussed: we find it for the poll-tax, by which a freeman defends himself in regard to the state, and for the weir, which prevents the fish from escaping into the river.
This origin and use of the term is of considerable. importance, because it shows the artificial character of the system and its close connexion with the taxation by the State. This is a disturbing element which ought to be taken into account by the side of the agrarian influence. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the assessment started from actual facts, from existing agrarian conditions and divisions. The hide, the yardland, the oxgang existed not only in the geld-rolls, but in fact and on the ground. But in geld-rolls they appeared with a regularity they did not possess in real fact; the rolls express all modifications in the modes of farming and all exemptions, not in the shape of any qualification or lighter assessment of single plots, but by way of striking off from the number of these plots, or from the number of acres in them; the object which in modern times would be effected by the registration of a 'rateable value' differing from the 'actual value' was effected in ancient times by the registration of a 'rateable size' differing from the 'actual size'; lastly, the surveys and rolls of assessment do not keep time with the actual facts, and often reflect, by their figures and statistics, the conditions of bygone periods. The hides of the geld or of the 'wara' tend to become constant and rigid: it is difficult for the king's officers to alter their estimates, and the people subjected to the tax try in every way to guard against ies and encroachments. The real agrarian hide-area is changing at the same time because the population increases, new tenements are formed, and new land is reclaimed.
We find at every step in our records that the assessment and the agrarian conditions do not coincide. If a manor has been given to a convent in free almoign (in liberam et perpetuam eleemosynam), that is, free from all taxes and payments to the State, there is no reason to describe it in units of assessment, and in fact such property often appears in manorial records without any 'hidation' or reckoning of knight-fees. The Ramsey Cartulary tells us that the land in Hulme was not divided into hides and virgates. There are holdings, of course, and they are equal, but they are estimated in acres. When the hidation has been laid on the land and taxes are paid from it, the smaller subdivisions are sometimes omitted: the artificial system of taxation does not go very deep into details. Even if most part of the land has been brought under the operation of that system, some plots are left which do not participate in the common payments, and therefore are said to be 'out of the hide'. Such being the case, there can be no wonder that one of the Ramsey manors answers to the king for ten hides, and to the abbot for eleven and a-half.
It is to be noted especially, that although in a few cases a difference is made between the division for royal assessment and for the manorial impositions, in the great majority of cases no such difference exists, and the duties in regard to the king and to the lord are reckoned according to the same system of holdings. On the manors of Ely, for instance, the 12 acreware form the basis of all the reckoning of rents and work. And so if the royal assessment appear with the features of an artificial fiscal arrangement, the same observation has to be extended to the manorial assessment; and thus we reach by another way the same conclusion which we drew from an analysis of the single holding and of its component parts. No doubt the whole stands in close relation to the reality of cultivation and land-holding, but the rigidity, regularity, and correctness of the system present a necessary contrast to the facts of actual life. As the soil could not be made to fit into geometrical squares, even so the population could not remain without change from one age to the other within the same boundaries. Thus in course of time the plough-land of 160 and 180 acres, which is the plough-land of practical farming, appears by the side of the statutory hide of 120 acres; and so again inside every single holding there comes up the contrast between its real conformation and distribution, and the outward form it assumed in regard to the king, the lord, and the steward.
The inquiry as to the relation between the holding and the population on it is, of course, of the utmost importance for a general estimate of the arrangement. From a formal point of view the question is soon solved: on the one hand, the holding of the villain remains undivided and entire; it does not admit of partition by sale or descent; on the other, the will of the lord may alter, if necessary, the natural course of inheritance and possession; the socage tenure is often free from the first of these limitations, and always free from the second. The indivisibility of villain tenements is chiefly conspicuous in the law of inheritance: all the land went to one of the sons if there were several; very often the youngest inherited; and this custom, to which mere chance has given the name of Borough English, was considered as one of the proofs of villainage. It is certainly a custom of great importance, and probably it depended on the fact that the elder brothers left the land at the earliest opportunity, and during their father's life. Where did they go? It is easy to guess that they sought work out of the manor, as craftsmen or labourers; that they served the lord as servants, ploughmen, and the like; that they were provided with holdings, which for some reason did not descend to male heirs; that they were endowed with some demesne land, or fitted out to reclaim land from the waste. We may find for all these suppositions some supporting quotation in the records. And still it would be hard to believe that the entire increase of population found an exit by these by-paths. If no exit was found, the brothers had to remain on their father's plot, and the fact that they did so can be proved, if it needs proof, from documents. The unity of the holding was not disturbed in the case; there was no division, and only the right heir, the estiopamon as they said in Sparta, had to answer for the services; the lord looked to him and no further; but in point of fact the holding contained more than one family, and perhaps more than one household. However this may be, in regard to the lord the holding remained one and undivided. This circumstance draws a sharp line between the feudal arrangement of most counties and that which prevailed in Kent. The gavelkind or tributary tenure there was subjected to equal partition among the heirs.
Let us take a Kentish survey, the Black of St. Augustine's, Canterbury, for instance: it describes the peasant holdings in a way which differs entirely from other surveys. It begins by stating what duties lie on each sulung, that is, on the Kentish ploughland corresponding to the hide of feudal England. No regular sub-divisions corresponding to the virgates and bovates are mentioned, and the reckoning starts not from separate tenements, but from their combination into sulungs. Then follow descriptions of the single sulungs, and it turns out that every one of them consists of a very great number of component parts, because the progeny of the original holders has clustered on them, and parcelled them up in very complicated combinations. The portions are sometimes so small, that an independent cultivation of them would have been quite impossible. In order to understand the description it must be borne in mind that the fact of the tenement being owned by several different persons in definite but undivided shares did not preclude farming in common; while on the other hand, in judging of the usual feudal arrangement of holdings we must remember that the artificial unity and indivisibility of the tenement may be a mere screen behind which there exists a complex mass of rights sanctioned by morality and custom though not by law. The surveys of the Kentish possessions of Battle Abbey are drawn up on the same principle as those of St. Augustine's; the only difference is, that the individual portions are collected not in sulungs, but in yokes (juga).
And so we have in England two systems of dividing the land of the peasant, of regulating its descent and its duties. In one case the tenant-right is connected with rigid holdings descending to a single heir; in another the tenements get broken up, and the heirs club together in order to meet the demands of the manorial administration. The contrast is sharp and curious enough. How is one to explain, that in conditions which were more or less identical, the land was sometimes partitioned and sometimes kept together, the people were dispersed in some instances and kept together in others?
Closer inspection will show that however sharp the opposition in law may have been, in point of husbandry and actual management the contrast was not so uncompromising. Connecting links may be found between the two. The Domesday of St. Paul's, for instance, is compiled in the main in the usual way, but one section of it -- the description of the Essex manors of Kirby, Horlock, and Thorpe -- does not differ from the Kentish surveys in anything but the terminology. The services are laid on hides, and not on the actual tenements. Each hide includes a great number of plots which do not fall in with any constant subdivisions of the same kind as the virgates and bovates. Some of these plots are very small, all are irregular in their formation. It happens that one and the same person holds in several hides. In one word, the Kentish system has found a way for some unexplained reason into the possessions of St. Paul's, and we find subjected to it some Essex manors which do not differ much in their husbandry arrangements from other properties in Essex, and have no claim to the special privileges of Kentish soil.
Once apprised of the possible existence of such inter mediate forms, we shall find in most surveys facts tending to connect the two arrangements. The Gloucester Cartulary, for instance, mentions virgates held by four persons. The plots of these four owners are evidently brought together into a virgate for the purpose of assessing the services. Two peasants on the same virgate are found constantly. It happens that one gets the greater part of the land and is called the heir, while his fellow appears as a small cotter who has to co-operate in the work performed by the virgate. Indications are not wanting that sometimes virgates crumbled up into cotlands, bordlands, and crofts. The denomination of some peasants in Northumberland is characteristic enough -- they are 'selfoders,' obviously dwelling 'self-other' on their tenements. On the other hand, it is to be noticed that the gavelkind rule of succession, although enacting the partibility of the inheritance, still reserves the hearth to the youngest born, a trace of the same junior right which led to Borough English.
I think that upon the whole we must say that in practice the very marked contrast between the general arrangement of the holdings and the Kentish one is more a difference in the way of reckoning than in actual occupation, in legal forms than in economical substance. The general arrangement admitted a certain subdivision under the cover of an artificial unity which found its expression in the settlement of the services and of the relations with the lord. The English case has its parallel on the Continent in this respect. In Alsace, for instance, the holding was united under one 'Trager' or bearer of the manorial duties; but by the side of him other people are found who participate with this official holder in the ownership and in the cultivation. The second system also kept up the artificial existence of the higher units, and obvious interests prevented it from leading to a 'morcellement' of land into very small portions in practice. The economic management of land could not go as far as the legal partition. In practice the subdivision was certainly checked, as in the virgate system, by the necessity of keeping together the cattle necessary for the tillage. Virgates and bovates would arise of themselves: it was not advantageous to split the yoke of two oxen, the smallest possible plough; and co-heirs had to think even more when they inherited one ox with its ox-gang of land. The animal could not be divided, and this certainly must have stopped in many cases the division of land. When the documents speak of plots containing two or three acres, it must be remembered that such crofts and cotlands occur also in the usual system, and I do not see any reason to suppose that the existence of such subdivided rights always indicated a real dispersion of the economic unit: they may have stood as a landmark of the relative rights of joint occupiers. I do not mean to say, of course, that there was no real basis for the very great difference which is assumed by the two ways of describing the tenements. No doubt the hand of the lord lay heavier on the Essex people than on the Kentish men, their occupation and usage of the land was more under the control of the lord, and assumed therefore an aspect of greater regularity and order. Again, the legal privileges of the Kentish people opened the way towards a greater development of individual freedom and a certain looseness of social relations. Still it would be wrong to infer too much from this formal opposition. In both cases the centripetal and the centrifugal tendency are working against each other in the same way, although one case presents the stronger influence of disruptive forces, and the other gives predominance to the collective power. In the history of socage and military tenure the system of unity arose gradually, and without any sudden break, out of the system of division. The intimate connexion between both forms is even more natural in peasant ownership, which had to operate with small plots and small agricultural capital, and therefore inclined naturally towards the artificial combination of divided interests. In any case there is no room in practice for the rigid and consequent operation of either rule of ownership, and, if so, there is no actual basis for the inference that the unification of the holding is to be taken as a direct consequence of a servile origin of the tenement and a sure proof of it. Unification appears on closer inspection as a result of economic considerations as well as of legal disabilities, and for this reason the tendency operated in the sphere of free property as well as among the villains; among these last it could not preclude the working of the disruptive elements, but in many cases only hid them from sight by its artificial screen of rigid holdings.
We have seen that the size and distribution of the holdings are connected with the number of oxen necessary for the tillage, and its relation to the full plough. The hide appears as the ploughland with eight oxen, the virgate corresponds to one yoke of oxen, and the bovate to the single head. it need not be added that such figures are not absolutely settled, and are to be accepted as approximate terms, The great heavy plough drawn by eight or ten oxen is certainly often mentioned in the records, especially on demesne land. The dependent people, when they have to help in the cultivation of the demesne, club together in order to make up full plough teams. It is also obvious that the peasantry had to associate for the tilling of their own land, as it was very rare for the single shareholder to possess a sufficient number of beasts to work by himself. But it must be noticed that alongside of the unwieldy eight-oxen plough we find much lighter ones. Even on the demesne we may find them drawn by six oxen. And as for the peasantry, they seem to have very often contented themselves with forming a plough team of four heads. It is commonly supposed by the surveys that the holder of a yardland joins with one of his fellows to make up the team. This would mean on the scale of the hide of 120 acres that the team consists of four beasts. It happens even that a full plough is supposed to belong to two or three peasants, of which every one is possessed only of five acres; in such cases there can be no talk of a big plough; it is difficult to admit even a four-oxen team, and probably those people only worked with one yoke or pair of beasts. Altogether it would be very wrong to assume in practice a strict correspondence between the size of the holding and the parts of an eight-oxen plough. The observation that the usual reckoning of the hide and of its subdivisions, according to the pattern of the big team, cannot be made to fit exactly with the real arrangement of the teams owned by the peasantry -- this firmly established observation leads us once more to the conclusion that the system of equal holdings had become very artificial in process of time and was determined rather by the relation between the peasants and the manorial administration than by the actual conditions of peasant life. Unhappily the artificial features of the system have been made by modern inquirers the starting point of very far-reaching theories and suppositions. Seebohm has proposed an explanation of the intermixture of strips as originating in the practice of coaration. He argues that it was natural to divide the land tilled by a mixed plough-team among the owners of the several beasts and implements. Every man got a strip according to a certain settled and ever-recurring succession. I do not pretend to judge of the value of the interesting instances adduced by Seebohm from Celtic practices, but whatever the arrangement in Wales or Ireland may have been, the explanation does not suit the English case. A doubt is cast on it already by the fact that such a universal feature as the intermixture of strips appears connected with the occurrence of such a special instrument as the eight-oxen plough, The intermixture is quite the same in Central Russia, where they till with one horse, and in England where more or less big ploughs were used. the doubt increases when we reflect that if the strips followed each other as parts of the plough-team, the great owners would have been possessed of compact plots. Every holder of an entire hide would have been out of the intermixture, and every virgater would have stood in conjunction with a sequence of three other tenants. Neither the one nor the other inference is supported by the facts. The observation that the peasantry are commonly provided with small ploughs drawn by four beasts ruins Seebohm's hypothesis entirely. One would have to suppose that most fields were divided into two parts, as the majority of the tenements are yardlands with half a team. The only adequate explanation of the open-field intermixture has been given above; it has its roots in the wish to equalise the holdings as to the quantity and quality of the land assigned to them in spite of all differences in the shape, the position, and the value of the soil.
Before I leave the question as to the holdings of the feudal peasantry, I must mention some terms which occur in different parts of England, although more rarely than the usual hides and virgates. Of the sulung I have spoken already. It is a full ploughland, and 200 acres are commonly reckoned to belong to it. The name is sometimes found out of Kent, in Essex for instance. In Tillingham, a manor of St. Paul's of London, we come across six hides 'trium solandarum'. The most probable explanation seems to be that the hide or unit of assessment is contrasted with the solanda or sulland (sulung), that is with the actual ploughland, and two hides are reckoned as a single solanda.
The yokes (juga) of Battle Abbey are not virgates, but carucates, full ploughlands. This follows from the fact that a certain virgate mentioned in the record is equivalent only to one fourth of the yoke. In the Norfolk manors of Ely Minster we find tenmanlands of 120 acres in the possession of several copartitioners, participes. The survey does not go into a detailed description of tenements and rights, and the reckoning of services starts from the entire combination, as in the Kentish documents. A commonly recurrent term is wista; it corresponds to the virgate: a great wista is as much as half-a-hide, or two virgates.
The terms discussed hitherto are applied to the tenements in the fields of the village; but besides those there are other names for the plots occupied by a numerous population which did not find a place in the regular holdings. There were craftsmen and rural labourers working for the lord and for the tenants; there were people living by gardening and the raising of vegetables. This class is always contrasted with the tenants in the fields. The usual name for their plots is cote, cotland, or cotsetland. The so-called ferdel, or fourth part of a virgate, is usually mentioned among them because there are no ploughbeasts on it. Another name for the ferdel is nook. Next come the crofters, whose gardens sometimes extend to a very fair size -- as much as ten acres in one enclosed patch. The cotters proper have generally one, two, and sometimes as much as five acres with their dwellings; they cannot keep themselves on this, as a rule, and have to look out for more on other people's tenements. A very common name for their plots is 'lundinaria' 'Mondaylands,' because the holders are bound to work for the lord only one day in the week, usually on Monday. Although the absence of plough-beasts, of a part in coaration, and of shares in the common fields draws a sharp line between these men and the regular holders, our surveys try sometimes to fit their duties and plots into the arrangement of holdings; the cotland is assumed to represent one sixteenth or even one thirty-second part of the hide. The Glastonbury Survey of 1189 contains a curious hint that two cottages are more valuable than one half-virgate: two cotlands were ruined during the war, and they were thrown together into half a virgate, although it would have been more advantageous to keep two houses on them, that is two households. The bordae mentioned by the documents are simply cottages or booths without any land belonging to them. The manorial police keeps a lookout that such houses may not arise without licence and service.
A good many terms are not connected in any way with the general arrangement of the holdings, but depend upon the part played by the land in husbandry or the services imposed upon it. To mention a few among them. A plot which has to provide cheese is called Cheeseland. Those tenements which are singled out for the special duty of carrying the proceeds of the manorial cultivation get the name of averlands. The terms lodland, serland or sharland, are also connected with compulsory labour. The first is taken from the duty to carry l or possibly to lwaggons; the second may be employed in reference to work performed with the sithe or reap-hook. A plot reserved for the leader of the plough-team, the akerman, was naturally called akermanland. Sometimes, though rarely, the holding gets its name from the money rent it has to pay. We hear of denerates and nummates of land in this connexion.
All these variations in detail do not avail to modify to any considerable extent the chief lines on which the medieval system of holdings is constructed. I presume that the foregoing exposition has been sufficient to establish the following points: --
1. The principle upon which the original distribution depended was that of equalizing the shares of the members of the community. This led to the scattering and to the intermixture of strips. The principle did not preclude inequality according to certain degrees, but it aimed at putting all the people of one degree into approximately similar conditions.
2. The growth of population, of capital, of cultivation, of social inequalities led to a considerable difference between the artificial uniformity in which the arrangement of the holdings was kept and the actual practice of farming and ownership.
3. The system was designed and kept working by the influence of communal right, but it got its artificial shape and its legal rigidity from the manorial administration which used it for the purpose of distributing and collecting labour and rent.
4. The holdings were held together as units, not merely by the superior property of the lord, but by economic considerations. They were breaking up under the pressure of population, not merely in the case of free holdings, but also where the holdings were servile.
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