Chapter III: Preface: v (2)

The 'vill' or 'town' of the later middle ages was, like the 'civil parish' of our own day, a tract of land with some houses on it, and this tract was a unit in the national system of police and finance[42], But we are not entitled to make for ourselves any one typical picture of the English vill. We are learning from the ordnance map (that marvellous palimpsest, which under Dr Meitzen's guidance we are beginning to decipher) that in all probability we must keep at least two types before our minds. On the one hand, there is what we might call the true village or the nucleated village. In the purest form of this type there is one and only one cluster of houses. It is a fairly large cluster; it stands in the midst of its fields, of its territory, and until lately a considerable part of its territory will probably have consisted of spacious 'common fields.' In a country in which there are villages of this type the parish boundaries seem almost to draw themselves[43]. On the other hand, we may easily find a country in which there are few villages of this character. The houses which lie within the boundary of the parish are scattered about in small clusters; here two or three, there three or four. These clusters often have names of their own, and it seems a mere chance that the name borne by one of them should be also the name of the whole parish or vill[44]. We see no traces of very large fields. On the face of the map there is no reason why a particular group of cottages should be reckoned to belong to this parish rather than to the next. As our eyes grow accustomed to the work we may arrive at some extremely important conclusions such as those which Meitzen has suggested. The outlines of our nucleated villages may have been drawn for us by Germanic settlers, whereas in the land of hamlets and scattered steads old Celtic arrangements may never have been thoroughly effaced. Towards theories of this kind we are slowly winning our way. In the meantime let us remember that a _villa_ of Domesday Book may correspond to one of at least two very different models or may be intermediate between various types. It may be a fairly large and agrarianly organic unit, or it may be a group of small agrarian units which are being held together in one whole merely by an external force, by police law and fiscal law[45].

Two little fragments of 'the original one inch ordnance map' will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written discourse. The one pictures a district on the border between Oxfordshire and Berkshire cut by the Thames and the main line of the Great Western Railway; the other a district on the border between Devon and Somerset, north of Collumpton and south of Wiveliscombe. Neither is an extreme example. True villages we may easily find. Cambridgeshire, for instance, would have afforded some beautiful specimens, for many of the 'open fields' were still open when the ordnance map of that county was made. But throughout large tracts of England, even though there has been an 'inclosure' and there are no longer any open fields, our map often shows a land of villages. When it does so and the district that it portrays is a purely agricultural district, we may generally assume without going far wrong that the villages are ancient, for during at least the last three centuries the predominant current in our agrarian history has set against the formation of villages and towards the distribution of scattered homesteads. To find the purest specimens of a land of hamlets we ought to go to Wales or to Cornwall or to other parts of 'the Celtic fringe'; very fair examples might be found throughout the west of England. Also we may perhaps find hamlets rather than villages wherever there have been within the historic period large tracts of forest land. Very often, again, the parish or township looks on our map like a hybrid. We seem to see a village with satellitic hamlets. Much more remains to be done before we shall be able to construe the testimony of our fields and walls and hedges, but at least two types of vill must be in our eyes when we are reading Domesday Book[46].

]

[Size of the vill.]

To say that the _villa_ of Domesday Book is in general the vill of the thirteenth century and the civil parish of the nineteenth is to say that the areal extent of the _villa_ varied widely from case to case. More important is it for us to observe that the number of inhabitants of the _villa_ varied widely from case to case. The error into which we are most likely to fall will be that of making our vill too populous. Some vills, especially some royal vills, are populous enough; a few contain a hundred households; but the average township is certainly much smaller than this[47]. Before we give any figures, it should first be observed that Domesday Book never enables us to count heads. It states the number of the tenants of various classes, _sochemanni_, _villani_, _bordarii_, and the like, and leaves us to suppose that each of these persons is, or may be, the head of a household. It also states how many _servi_ there are. Whether we ought to suppose that only the heads of servile households are reckoned, or whether we ought to think of the _servi_ as having no households but as living within the lord's gates and being enumerated, men, women and able-bodied children, by the head--this is a difficult question. Still we may reach some results which will enable us to compare township with township. By way of fair sample we may take the Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire, and all persons who are above the rank of _servi_ we will include under the term 'the non-servile population[48].'

ARMINGFORD HUNDRED.

Non-servile
population Servi Total

Abington 19 0 19
Bassingbourn 35 3 38
Clapton 19 0 19
Croydon 29 0 29
Hatley 18 3 21
Litlington 37 6 43
Melbourn 62 1 63
Meldreth 44 7 51
Morden 43 11 54
Morden Alia 50 0 50
Shingay 18 0 18
Tadlow 27 4 31
Wendy 12 4 16
Whaddon 44 6 50
--- --- ---
Total 457 45 502

Here in fourteen vills we have an average of thirty-two non-servile households for every vill. Now even in our own day a parish with thirty-two houses, though small, is not extremely small. But we should form a wrong picture of the England of the eleventh century if we filled all parts of it with such vills as these. We will take at random fourteen vills in Staffordshire held by Earl Roger[49].

Non-servile
population Servi Total

Claverlege 45 0 45
Nordlege 9 0 9
Alvidelege 13 0 13
Halas 40 2 42
Chenistelei 11 0 11
Otne 7 1 8
Nortberie 20 1 21
Erlide 8 2 10
Gaitone 16 0 16
Cressvale 8 0 8
Dodintone 3 0 3
Modreshale 5 0 5
Almentone 8 0 8
Metford 7 1 8
--- --- ---
Total 200 7 207

Here for fourteen vills we have an average of but fourteen non-servile households and the _servi_ are so few that we may neglect them. We will next look at a page in the survey of Somersetshire which describes certain vills that have fallen to the lot of the bishop of Coutances[50].

Non-servile
population Servi Total

Winemeresham 8 3 11
Chetenore 3 1 4
Widicumbe 21 6 27
Harpetrev 10 2 12
Hotune 11 0 11
Lilebere 6 1 7
Wintreth 4 2 6
Aisecome 11 7 18
Clutone 22 1 23
Temesbare 7 3 10
Nortone 16 3 19
Cliveham 15 1 16
Ferenberge 13 6 19
Cliveware 6 0 6
--- --- ---
Total 153 36 189

Here we have on the average but eleven non-servile households for each village, and even if we suppose each _servus_ to represent a household, we have not fourteen households. Yet smaller vills will be found in Devonshire, many vills in which the total number of the persons mentioned does not exceed ten and near half of these are _servi_. In Cornwall the townships, if townships we ought to call them, are yet smaller; often we can attribute no more than five or six families to the vill even if we include the _servi_.

[Population of the vills.]

[Contrast between east and west.]

Unless our calculations mislead us, the density of the population in the average vill of a given county varies somewhat directly with the density of the population in that county; at all events we can not say that where vills are populous, vills will be few. As regards this matter no precise results are attainable; our document is full of snares for arithmeticians. Still if for a moment we have recourse to the crude method of dividing the number of acres comprised in a modern county by the number of the persons who are mentioned in the survey of that county, the outcome of our calculation will be remarkable and will point to some broad truth[51]. For Suffolk the quotient is 46 or thereabouts; for Norfolk but little larger[52]; for Essex 61, for Lincoln 67; for Bedford, Berkshire, Northampton, Leicester, Middlesex, Oxford, Kent and Somerset it lies between 70 and 80, for Buckingham, Warwick, Sussex, Wiltshire and Dorset it lies between 80 and 90; Devon, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford are thinly peopled, Cornwall, Stafford, Shropshire very thinly. Some particular results that we should thus attain would be delusive. Thus we should say that men were sparse in Cambridgeshire, did we not remember that a large part of our modern Cambridgeshire was then a sheet of water. Permanent physical causes interfere with the operation of the general rule. Thus Surrey, with its wide heaths has, as we might expect, but few men to the square mile. Derbyshire has many vills lying waste; Yorkshire is so much wasted that it can give us no valuable result; and again, Yorkshire and Cheshire were larger than they are now, while Rutland and the adjacent counties had not their present boundaries. For all this however, we come to a very general rule:--the density of the population decreases as we pass from east to west. With this we may connect another rule:--land is much more valuable in the east than it is in the west. This matter is indeed hedged in by many thorny questions; still whatever hypothesis we may adopt as to the mode in which land was valued, one general truth comes out pretty plainly, namely, that, economic arrangements being what they were, it was far better to have a team-land in Essex than to have an equal area of arable land in Devon.

[Small vills.]

Between eastern and western England there were differences visible to the natural eye. With these were connected unseen and legal differences, partly as causes, partly as effects. But for the moment let us dwell on the fact that many an English vill has very few inhabitants. We are to speak hereafter of village communities. Let us therefore reflect that a community of some eight or ten householders is not likely to be a highly organized entity. This is not all, for these eight or ten householders will often belong to two, three or four different social and economic, if not legal, classes. Some may be sokemen, some _villani_, _bordarii_, _cotarii_, and besides them there will be a few _servi_. If a vill consists, as in Devonshire often enough it will, of some three _villani_, some four _bordarii_ and some two _servi_, the 'township-moot,' if such a moot there be, will be a queer little assembly, the manorial court, if such a court there be, will not have much to do. These men can not have many communal affairs; there will be no great scope for dooms or for by-laws; they may well take all their disputes into the hundred court, especially in Devonshire where the hundreds are small. Thus of the visible vill of the eleventh century and its material surroundings we may form a wrong notion. Often enough in the west its common fields (if common fields it had) were not wide fields; the men who had shares therein were few and belonged to various classes. Thus of two villages in Gloucestershire, Brookthorpe and Harescombe, all that we can read is that in Brostrop there were two teams, one _villanus_, three _bordarii_, four _servi_, while in Hersecome there were two teams, two _bordarii_ and five _servi_[53]. Many a Devonshire township can produce but two or three teams. Often enough our 'village community' will be a heterogeneous little group whose main capital consists of some 300 acres of arable land and some 20 beasts of the plough.

[Importance of the east.]

On the other hand, we must be careful not to omit from our view the rich and thickly populated shires or to imagine or to speak as though we imagined that a general theory of English history can neglect the East of England. If we leave Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk out of account we are to all appearance leaving out of account not much less than a quarter of the whole nation[54]. Let us make three groups of counties: (1) a South-Western group containing Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire: (2) a Mid-Western group containing the shires of Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Salop, Stafford and Warwick: (3) an Eastern group containing Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. The first of these groups has the largest; the third the smallest acreage. In Domesday Book, however, the figures which state their population seem to be these[55]:--

South-Western Group: 49,155
Mid-Western Group: 33,191
Eastern Group: 72,883

These figures are so emphatic that they may cause us for a moment to doubt their value, and on details we must lay no stress. But we have materials which enable us to check the general effect. In 1297 Edward I. levied a lay subsidy of a ninth[56]. The sums borne by our three groups of counties were these:--

£
South-Western Group: 4,038
Mid-Western Group: 3,514
Eastern Group: 7,329

There is a curious resemblance between these two sets of figures. Then in 1377 and 1381 returns were made for a poll-tax[57]. The number of polls returned in our three groups were these:--

1377 1381
South-Western Group: 183,842 106,086
Mid-Western Group: 158,245 115,679
Eastern Group: 255,498 182,830

No doubt all inferences drawn from medieval statistics are exceedingly precarious; but, unless a good many figures have conspired to deceive us, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were at the time of the Conquest and for three centuries afterwards vastly richer and more populous than any tract of equal area in the West.

[Manorial and non-manorial vills.]

Another distinction between the eastern counties and the rest of England is apparent. In many shires we shall find that the name of each vill is mentioned once and no more. This is so because the land of each vill belongs in its entirety to some one tenant in chief. We may go further: we may say, though at present in an untechnical sense, that each vill is a manor. Such is the general rule, though there will be exceptions to it. On the other hand, in the eastern counties this rule will become the exception. For example, of the fourteen vills in the Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire there is but one of which it is true that the whole of its land is held by a single tenant in chief. In this county it is common to find that three or four Norman lords hold land in the same vill. This seems true not only of Cambridgeshire but also of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, and some parts of Yorkshire. Even in other districts of England the rule that each vill has a single lord is by no means unbroken in the Conqueror's day and we can see that there were many exceptions to it in the Confessor's. A careful examination of all England vill by vill would perhaps show that the contrast which we are noting is neither so sharp nor so ancient as at first sight it seems to be: nevertheless it exists.

[The distribution of free men and serfs.]

A better known contrast there is. The eastern counties are the home of liberty[58]. We may divide the tillers of the soil into five great classes; these in order of dignity and freedom are (1) _liberi homines_, (2) _sochemanni_, (3) _villani_, (4) _bordarii_, _cotarii_ etc., (5) _servi_. The two first of these classes are to be found in large numbers only in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. We shall hereafter see that Cambridgeshire also has been full of sokemen, though since the Conquest they have fallen from their high estate. On the other hand, the number of _servi_ increases pretty steadily as we cross the country from east to west. It reaches its maximum in Cornwall and Gloucestershire; it is very low in Norfolk, Suffolk, Derby, Leicester, Middlesex, Sussex; it descends to zero in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. This descent to zero may fairly warn us that the terms with which we are dealing may not bear precisely the same meaning in all parts of England, or that a small class is apt to be reckoned as forming part of a larger class. But still it is clear enough that some of these terms are used with care and express real and important distinctions.

[The classification of men.]

Of this we are assured by a document which seems to reproduce the wording of the instructions which defined the duty of at least one party of royal commissioners[59]. We are about to speak of the mode in which the occupants of the soil are classified by Domesday Book, and therefore this document deserves our best attention. It runs thus:--The King's barons inquired by the oath of the sheriff of the shire and of all the barons and of their Frenchmen and of the whole hundred, the priest, reeve and six _villani_ of every vill, how the mansion (_mansio_) is called, who held it in the time of King Edward, who holds it now, how many hides, how many plough-teams on the demesne, how many plough-teams of the men, how many _villani_, how many _cotarii_, how many _servi_, how many _liberi homines_, how many _sochemanni_, how much wood, how much meadow, how much pasture, how many mills, how many fisheries, how much has been taken away therefrom, how much added thereto, and how much there is now, how much each _liber homo_ and _sochemannus_ had and has:--All this thrice over, to wit as regards the time of King Edward, the time when King William gave it, and the present time, and whether more can be had thence than is had now[60].

[Basis of classification.]

Five classes of men are mentioned and they are mentioned in an order that is extremely curious:--_villani_, _cotarii_, _servi_, _liberi homines_, _sochemanni_. It descends three steps, then it leaps from the very bottom of the scale to the very top and thence it descends one step. A parody of it might speak of the rural population of modern England as consisting of large farmers, small farmers, cottagers, great landlords, small landlords. But a little consideration will convince us that beneath this apparent caprice there lies some legal principle. We shall observe that these five species of tenants are grouped into two genera. The king wants to know how much each _liber homo_, how much each _sochemannus_ holds; he does not want to know how much each _villanus_, each _cotarius_, each _servus_ holds. Connecting this with the main object of the whole survey, we shall probably be brought to the guess that between the sokeman and the villein there is some broad distinction which concerns the king as the recipient of geld. May it not be this:--the villein's lord is answerable for the geld due from the land that the villein holds, the sokeman's lord is not answerable, at least he is not answerable as principal debtor for the geld due from the land that the sokeman holds? If this be so, the order in which the five classes of men are mentioned will not seem unnatural. It proceeds outwards from the lord and his _mansio_. First it mentions the persons seated on land for the geld of which he is responsible, and them it arranges in an 'order of merit.' Then it turns to persons who, though in some way or another connected with the lord and his _mansio_, are themselves tax-payers, and concerning them the commissioners are to inquire how much each of them holds. Of course we can not say that this theory is proved by the statement that lies before us; but it is suggested by that statement and may for a while serve us as a working hypothesis. If this theory be sound, then we have here a distinction of the utmost importance. For one mighty purpose, the purpose that is uppermost in King William's mind, the _villanus_ is not a landowner, his lord is the landowner; on the other hand the _sochemannus_ is a landowner, and is taxed as such. We are not saying that this is a purely fiscal distinction. In legal logic the lord's liability for the geld that is apportioned on the land occupied by his villeins may be rather an effect than a cause. A lawyer might argue that the lord must pay because the occupier is his _villanus_, not that the occupier is a _villanus_ because the lord pays. And yet, as we may often see in legal history, there will be action and reaction between cause and effect. The geld is no trifle. Levied at that rate of six shillings on the hide at which King William has just now levied it, it is a momentous force capable of depressing and displacing whole classes of men. In 1086 this tax is so much in everybody's mind that any distinction as to its incidence will cut deeply into the body of the law.

[Our course.]

Now this classification of men we will take as the starting point for our enterprise. If we could define the _liber homo_, _sochemannus_, _villanus_, _cotarius_, _servus_, we should have solved some of the great legal problems of Domesday Book, for by the way we should have had to define two other difficult terms, namely _manerium_ and _soca_. It would then remain that we should say something of the higher strata of society, of earls and sheriffs, of barons, knights, thegns and their tenures, of such terms as _alodium_ and _feudum_, of the general theory of landownership or landholdership. We will begin with the lowest order of men, with the _servi_, and thence work our way upwards. But our course can not be straightforward. There are so many terms to be explained that sometimes we shall be compelled to leave a question but partially answered while we are endeavouring to find a partial answer for some yet more difficult question.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] D. B. ii. 109 b: 'Hundret de Grenehou 14 letis.' Ib. 212 b:
'Hundret et Dim. de Clakelosa de 10 leitis.' Round, Feudal
England, 101.

[23] Some of them are mentioned by Ellis, Introduction, i. 34-9.

[24] D. B. i. 184 b: 'Haec terra non geldat nec consuetudinem dat
nec in aliquo hundredo iacet'; i. 157 'Haec terra nunquam
geldavit nec alicui hundredo pertinet nec pertinuit'; i. 357 b
'Hae duae carucatae non sunt in numero alicuius hundredi neque
habent pares in Lincolescyra.'

[25] D. B. i. 207 b: 'Jacet in Bedefordscira set geldum dat in
Huntedonscire'; i. 61 b 'Jacet et appreciata est in Gratentun
quod est in Oxenefordscire et tamen dat scotum in Berchescire';
i. 132 b, the manor of Weston 'lies in' Hitchin which is in
Hertfordshire, but its _wara_ 'lies in' Bedfordshire, i.e. it
pays geld, it 'defends itself' in the latter county; i. 189 b,
the _wara_ of a certain hide 'lies in' Hinxton which is in
Cambridgeshire, but the land belongs to the manor of
Chesterford and therefore is valued in Essex. D. B. i. 178;
five hides 'geld and plead' in Worcestershire, but pay their
farm in Herefordshire.

[26] D. B. i. 157 b: 'Has [terras in Oxenefordscire] coniunxit
terrae suae in Glowecestrescire'; i. 209 b 'foris misit de
hundredo ubi se defendebat T. R. E.'; i. 50 'et misit foras
comitatum et misit in Wiltesire.' See also Ellis, i. 36.

[27] See Round, Feudal England, p. 118. Mr Round seems to think that
the commissioners made a circuit through the hundreds. I doubt
they did more than their successors the justices in eyre were
wont to do, that is, they held in the shire-town a moot which
was attended by (1) the magnates of the shire who spoke for the
shire, (2) a jury from every hundred, (3) a deputation of
_villani_ from every township. See the Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire _Clamores_ (i. 375) where we may find successive
entries beginning with (_a_) _Scyra testatur_, (_b_)
_Westreding testatur_, (_c_) _Testatur wapentac_. Strikingly
similar entries are found on the eyre rolls. As Sir F. Pollock
(Eng. Hist. Rev. xi. 213) remarks, it is misleading to speak of
the Domesday 'survey'; Domesday Inquest would be better.

[28] See Round, Feudal England, p. 44.

[29] Inquis. Com. Cantab. 60.

[30] See the table in Round, Feudal England, p. 50. I had already
selected this beautiful specimen before Mr Round's book
appeared. He has given several others that are quite as neat.

[31] Of course we take no account of urban parishes.

[32] Eyton's laborious studies have made this plain as regards some
counties widely removed from each other; still, _e.g._ in his
book on Somerset, he has now and again to note that names which
appear in D. B. are obsolete.

[33] Inq. Com. Cant. 60-1.

[34] D. B. i. 31.

[35] D. B. i. 41. We shall return to this matter hereafter.

[36] A good many cases will be found in Essex and Suffolk.

[37] Inq. Com. Cantab. 51, 53.

[38] Ibid. 47.

[39] Ibid. 29.

[40] Maitland, Surnames of English Villages, Archaeological Review,
iv. 233.

[41] We do not mean to imply that there were not wide stretches of
waste land which were regarded as being 'extra-villar,' or
common to several vills.

[42] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 547.

[43] This of course would not be true of cases in which the lands of
various villages were intermixed in one large tract of common
field. As to these 'discrete vills,' see Hist. Eng. Law, i.
549.

[44] This name-giving cluster will usually contain the parish church
and so will enjoy a certain preeminence. But we are to speak of
a time when parish churches were novelties.

[45] See Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Germanen, especially
ii. 119 ff.

[46] When the hamlets bear names with such ancient suffixes as
-_ton_, -_ham_, -_by_, _-worth_, _-wick_, _-thorpe_, this of
course is in favour of their antiquity. On the other hand, if
they are known merely by family names such as _Styles's_,
_Nokes's_, _Johnson's_ or the like, this, though not conclusive
evidence of, is compatible with their modernity. Meitzen thinks
that in Kent and along the southern shore the German invaders
founded but few villages. The map does not convince me that
this inference is correct.

[47] When more than five-and-twenty team-lands or thereabouts are
ascribed to a single place, we shall generally find reason to
believe that what is being described is not a single vill. See
above, p. 13.

[48] Inq. Com. Cant. 51 fol. In a few cases our figures will involve
a small element of conjecture.

[49] D. B. i. 248. We have tried to avoid vills in which it is
certain or probable that some other tenant in chief had an
estate.

[50] D. B. i. 88. We have tried to make sure that no tenant in chief
save the bishop had land in any of these vills, and this we
think fairly certain, except as regards Harptree and Norton.
There are now two Harptrees, East and West, and four or more
Nortons.

[51] We take the figures from Ellis, Introduction, ii. 417 ff.

[52] Very possibly this figure is too low. There is reason to think
that some of the free men and sokemen of these counties get
counted twice or thrice over because they hold land under
several different lords. On the other hand Ellis (Introduction,
ii. 491) would argue that the figure is too high. But the words
_Alii ibi tenent_ which occur at the end of numerous entries
mean, we believe, not that there are in this vill other
unenumerated tillers of the soil, but that the vill is divided
between several tenants in chief.

[53] D. B. i. 162 b.

[54] Ellis's figures are: England 283,242: the three counties
72,883.

[55] We take these figures from Ellis.

[56] Lay Subsidy, 25 Edw. I. (Yorkshire Archaeological Society), pp.
xxxi-xxxv. Fractions of a pound are neglected.

[57] Powell, The Rising in East Anglia, 120-3. The great decrease
between 1377 and 1381 in the number of persons taxed, we must
not try to explain.

[58] See the serviceable maps in Seebohm, Village Community, 86. But
they seem to treat Yorkshire unfairly. It has 5·5 per cent. of
sokemen.

[59] This is found at the beginning of the Inquisitio Eliensis; D.
B. iv. 497; Hamilton, Inquisitio, 97. See Round, Feudal
England, 133 ff.

[60] We must not hastily draw the inference that every party of
commissioners received the same set of instructions. Perhaps,
for example, carucates, not hides, were mentioned in the
instructions given to those commissioners who were to visit the
carucated counties. Perhaps the non-appearance of _servi_ in
Yorkshire and Lincolnshire may be due to no deeper cause.

§ 2. _The Serfs._

[The serfs in Domesday Book.]

The existence of some 25,000 serfs is recorded. In the thirteenth century _servus_ and _villanus_ are, at least among lawyers, equivalent words. The only unfree man is the 'serf-villein' and the lawyers are trying to subject him to the curious principle that he is the lord's chattel but a free man in relation to all but his lord[61]. It is far otherwise in Domesday Book. In entry after entry and county after county the _servi_ are kept well apart from the _villani_, _bordarii_, _cotarii_. Often they are mentioned in quite another context to that in which the _villani_ are enumerated. As an instance we may take a manor in Surrey[62]:--'In demesne there are 5 teams and there are 25 _villani_ and 6 _bordarii_ with 14 teams. There is one mill of 2 shillings and one fishery and one church and 4 acres of meadow, and wood for 150 pannage pigs, and 2 stone-quarries of 2 shillings and 2 nests of hawks in the wood and 10 _servi_.' Often enough the _servi_ are placed between two other sources of wealth, the church and the mill. In some counties they seem to take precedence over the _villani_; the common formula is 'In dominio sunt _a_ carucae et _b_ servi et _c_ villani et _d_ bordarii cum _e_ carucis.' But this is delusive; the formula is bringing the _servi_ into connexion with the demesne teams and separating them from the teams of the tenants. We must render it thus--'On the demesne there are _a_ teams and _b_ servi; and there are _c_ villani and _d_ bordarii with _e_ teams.' Still we seem to see a gently graduated scale of social classes, _villani_, _bordarii_, _cotarii_, _servi_, and while the jurors of one county will arrange them in one fashion, the jurors of another county may adopt a different scheme. Thus in their classification of mankind the jurors will sometimes lay great stress on the possession of plough oxen. In Hertfordshire we read:--'There are 6 teams in demesne and 41 _villani_ and 17 _bordarii_ have 20 teams ... there are 22 _cotarii_ and 12 _servi_[63].'--'The priest, 13 _villani_ and 4 _bordarii_ have 6 teams ... there are two _cotarii_ and 4 _servi_[64].'--'The priest and 24 _villani_ have 13 teams ... there are 12 _bordarii_, 16 _cotarii_ and 11 _servi_[65].' A division is in this instance made between the people who have oxen and the people who have none; _villani_ have oxen, _cotarii_ and _servi_ have none; sometimes the _bordarii_ stand above this line, sometimes below it.

[Legal position of the serf.]

Of the legal position of the _servus_ Domesday Book tells us little or nothing; but earlier and later documents oblige us to think of him as a slave, one who in the main has no legal rights. He is the _theów_ of the Anglo-Saxon dooms, the _servus_ of the ecclesiastical canons. But though we do right in calling him a slave, still we might well be mistaken were we to think of the line which divides him from other men as being as sharp as the line which a mature jurisprudence will draw between thing and person. We may well doubt whether this principle--'The slave is a thing, not a person'--can be fully understood by a grossly barbarous age. It implies the idea of a person, and in the world of sense we find not persons but men.

[Degrees of serfdom.]

Thus degrees of servility are possible. A class may stand, as it were, half-way between the class of slaves and the class of free men. The Kentish law of the seventh century as it appears in the dooms of Æthelbert[66], like many of its continental sisters, knows a class of men who perhaps are not free men and yet are not slaves; it knows the _læt_ as well as the _theów_. From what race the Kentish _læt_ has sprung, and how, when it comes to details, the law will treat him--these are obscure questions, and the latter of them can not be answered unless we apply to him what is written about the _laeti_, _liti_ and _lidi_ of the continent. He is thus far a person that he has a small wergild but possibly he is bound to the soil. Only in Æthelbert's dooms do we read of him. From later days, until Domesday Book breaks the silence, we do not obtain any definite evidence of the existence of any class of men who are not slaves but none the less are tied to the land. Of men who are bound to do heavy labour services for their lords we do hear, but we do not hear that if they run away they can be captured and brought back. As we shall see by and by, Domesday Book bears witness to the existence of a class of _buri_, _burs_, _coliberti_, who seem to be distinctly superior to the _servi_, but distinctly inferior to the villeins, bordiers and cottiers. It is by no means impossible that they, without being slaves, are in a very proper and intelligible sense unfree men, that they have civil rights which they can assert in courts of law, but that they are tied to the soil. The gulf between the seventh and the eleventh centuries is too wide to allow of our connecting them with the _læt_ of Æthelbert's laws, but still our documents are not exhaustive enough to justify us in denying that all along there has been a class (though it can hardly have been a large class) of men who could not quit their tenements and yet were no slaves. As we shall see hereafter, liberty was in certain contexts reckoned a matter of degree; even the _villanus_, even the _sochemannus_ was not for every purpose _liber homo_. When this is so, the _theów_ or _servus_ is like to appear as the unfreest of persons rather than as no person but a thing.

[Prædial element in serfage.]

In the second place, we may guess that from a remote time there has been in the condition of the _theów_ a certain element of praediality. The slaves have not been worked in gangs nor housed in barracks[67]. The _servus_ has often been a _servus casatus_, he has had a cottage or even a manse and yardland which _de facto_ he might call his own. There is here no legal limitation of his master's power. Some slave trade there has been; but on the whole it seems probable that the _theów_ has been usually treated as annexed to a tenement. The duties exacted of him from year to year have remained constant. The consequence is that a free man in return for a plot of land may well agree to do all that a _theów_ usually does and see in this no descent into slavery. Thus the slave gets a chance of acquiring what will be as a matter of fact a _peculium_. In the seventh century the church tried to turn this matter of fact into matter of law. 'Non licet homini,' says Theodore's Penitential, 'a servo tollere pecuniam, quam ipse labore suo adquesierit[68].' We have no reason for thinking that this effort was very strenuous or very successful, or that the law of the eleventh century allowed the _servus_ any proprietary rights; and yet he might often be the occupier of land and of chattels with which, so long as he did his customary services, his lord would seldom meddle.

[The serf in criminal law.]

In the third place, we may believe that for some time past police law and punitive law have been doing something to conceal, if not to obliterate, the line which separates the slave from other men. A mature jurisprudence may be able to hold fast the fundamental principle that a slave is not a person but a thing, while at the same time it both limits the master's power of abusing his human chattel and guards against those dangers which may arise from the existence of things which have wills, and sometimes bad wills, of their own. But an immature jurisprudence is incapable of this exploit. It begins to play fast and loose with its elementary notions. It begins to punish the criminous slave without being quite certain as to how far it is punishing him and how far it is punishing his master. Confusion is easy, for if the slave be punished by death or mutilation, his master will suffer, and a pecuniary mulct exacted from the slave is exacted from his master. Learned writers have come to the most opposite opinions as to the extent to which the Anglo-Saxon dooms by their distribution of penalties recognize the personality of the _theów_. But this is not all. For a long time past the law has had before it the difficult problem of dealing with crimes and delicts committed by poor and economically dependent free men, men who have no land of their own, who are here to-day and gone to-morrow, 'men from whom no right can be had.' It has been endeavouring to make the lords answerable to a certain extent for the misdeeds of their free retainers. If a slave is charged with a crime his master is bound to produce him in court. But the law requires that the lord shall in very similar fashion produce his free 'loaf eater,' his mainpast, nay, it has been endeavouring to enforce the rule that every free man who has no land of his own shall have a lord bound to produce him when he is accused. Also it has been fostering the growth of private justice. The lord's duty of producing his men, bond and free, has been becoming the duty of holding a court in which his men, free and bond, will answer for themselves. How far this process had gone in the days of the Confessor is a question to which we shall return[69].

[Serf and villein.]

For all this however, we may say with certainty that in the eleventh century the _servi_ were marked off from all other men by definite legal lines. What is more, we may say that every man who was not a _theów_ was in some definite legal sense a free man. This sharp contrast is put before us by the laws of Cnut as well as by those of his predecessors. If a freeman works on a holiday, he pays for it with his _healsfang_; if a _theówman_ does the like, he pays for it with his hide or his hide-geld[70]. Equally sharp is the same distinction in the Leges Henrici, and this too in passages which, so far as we know, are not borrowed from Anglo-Saxon documents. For many purposes 'aut servus aut liber homo' is a perfect dilemma. There is no confusion whatever between the _villani_ and the _servi_. The _villani_ are 'viles et inopes personae' but clearly enough they are _liberi homines_. So also in the Quadripartitus, the Latin translation of the ancient dooms made in Henry I.'s reign, there is no confusion about this matter; the _theówman_ becomes a _servus_, while _villanus_ is the equivalent for _ceorl_. The Norman writers still tell how according to the old law of the English the _villanus_ might become a thegn if he acquired five hides of land[71]; at times they will put before us _villani_ and _thaini_ or even _villani_ and _barones_ as an exhaustive classification of free men[72].

[The serf of the Leges.]

Let us learn what may be learnt of the _servus_ from the Leges Henrici. Every man is either a _liber homo_ or a _servus_[73]. Free men are either two-hundred-men or twelve-hundred-men; perhaps we ought to add that there is also a class of six-hundred-men[74]. A serf becomes such either by birth or by some event, such as a sale into slavery, that happens in his lifetime[75]. Servile blood is transmitted from father to child; some lords hold that it is also transmitted by mother to child[76]. If a slave is to be freed this should be done publicly, in court, or church or market, and lance and helmet or other the arms of free men should be given him, while he should give his lord thirty pence, that is the price of his skin, as a sign that he is henceforth 'worthy of his hide.' On the other hand, when a free man falls into slavery then also there should be a public ceremony. He should put his head between his lord's hands and should receive as the arms of slavery some bill-hook or the like[77]. Public ceremonies are requisite, for the state is endangered by the uncertain condition of accused criminals; the lords will assert at one moment that their men are free and at the next moment that these same men are slaves[78]. The descent of a free man into slavery is treated as no uncommon event; the slave may well have free kinsfolk[79]. But, to come to the fundamental rule, the _villanus_, the meanest of free men, is a two-hundred-man, that is to say, if he be slain the very substantial wergild of 200 Saxon shillings or £4 must be paid to his kinsfolk[80], while a man-bót of 30 shillings is paid to his lord[81]. But if a _servus_ be slain his kinsfolk receive the comparatively trifling sum of 40 pence while the lord gets the man-bót of 20 shillings[82]. That the serf's kinsfolk should receive a small sum need not surprise us. Germanic law has never found it easy to carry the principle that the slave is a chattel to extreme conclusions; but the payment seems trifling and half contemptuous; at any rate the life of the villein is worth the life of twenty-four serfs[83]. Then again, it is by no means certain that a lord can not kill his serf with impunity. 'If,' says our text, 'a man slay his own serf, his is the sin and his is the loss':--we may interpret this to mean that he has sinned but sinned against himself[84]. Then again, for the evil deeds of his slave the master is in some degree responsible. If my slave be guilty of a petty theft not worthy of death, I am bound to make restitution; if the crime be a capital one and he be taken handhaving, then he must 'die like a free man[85].' If my slave be guilty of homicide, my duty is to set him free and hand him over to the kindred of the slain, but apparently I may purchase his life by a sum of 40 shillings, a sum much less than the _wer_ of the slain man[86]. We must not be too hard on the owners of delinquent slaves. There are cases, for example, in which, several slaves having committed a crime, one of them chosen by lot must suffer for the sins of all[87]. Our author is borrowing from the laws of several different centuries and does not arrive at any neat result; nor must we wonder at this, for the problems presented to jurisprudence by the crimes and delicts of slaves are very intricate. Then again, we have the rule that if free men and serfs join in a crime, the whole guilt is to be attributed to the free: he who joins with a slave in a theft has no companion[88]. On the whole, though the slave is likely to have as a matter of fact a _peculium_ of his own, a _peculium_ out of which he may be able to pay for his offences and even perhaps to purchase his liberty[89], the _servus_ of our Leges seems to be in the main a rightless being. We look in vain for any trace of that idea of the relativity of servitude which becomes the core of Bracton's doctrine[90]. At the same time we observe that many, perhaps most, of the rules which mark the slavish condition of the serf are ancient rules and rules that are becoming obsolete. In the twelfth century the old system of _wer_ and _bót_ is already vanishing, though an antiquarian lawyer may yet try to revivify it. When it disappears altogether before the new law, which holds every grave crime to be a felony, and punishes almost every felony with death[91], many grand differences between the villein and the serf will have perished. The gallows is a great leveller.

[Return to the _servus_ of Domesday.]

If now we recur to the days of the Conquest, we cannot doubt that the law knew a definite class of slaves, and marked them off by many distinctions from the _villani_ and _cotarii_, and even from the _coliberti_. Sums that seem high were being paid for men whose freedom was being purchased[92]. At Lewes the toll paid for the sale of an ox was a halfpenny; on the sale of a man it was fourpence[93]. In later documents we may sometimes see a distinction well drawn. Thus in the Black Book of Peterborough, compiled in 1127 or thereabouts, we may read how on one of his manors the abbot has eight herdsmen (_bovarii_), how each of them holds ten acres, has to do labour services and render loaves and poultry. And then we read that each of them must pay one penny for his head if he be a free man (_liber homo_), while he pays nothing if he be a _servus_[94]. This is a well-drawn distinction. Of two men whose economic position is precisely the same, the one may be free, the other a slave, and it is the free man, not the slave, who has to pay a head-penny. Now when the Conqueror's surveyors, or rather the jurors, call a man a _servus_ they are, so it seems to us, thinking rather of his legal status than of his position in the economy of a manor. At any rate we ought to observe that the economic stratification of society may cut the legal stratification. We are accustomed perhaps to suppose that while the _villani_ have lands that are in some sense their own, while they support themselves and their families by tilling those lands, the _servus_ has no land that is in any sense his own, but is fed at his lord's board, is housed in his lord's court, and spends all his time in the cultivation of his lord's demesne lands. Such may have been the case in those parts of England where we hear of but few _servi_; those few may have been inmates of the lord's house and have had no plots of their own. But such can hardly have been the case in the south-western counties; the _servi_ are too many to be menials. Indeed it would seem that these _servi_ sometimes had arable plots, and had oxen, which were to be distinguished from the demesne oxen of their lords--not indeed as a matter of law, but as a matter of economic usage[95]. It is plain that the legal and the economic lines may intersect one another; the menial who is fed by the lord and who must give his whole time to the lord's work may be a free man; the slave may have a cottage and oxen and a plot of arable land, and labour for himself as well labouring for his lord. Hence a perplexed and uncertain terminology:--the _servus_ who has land and oxen may be casually called a _villanus_[96], and we cannot be sure that no one whom our record calls a _servus_ has the wergild of a free man. Nor can we be sure that the enumeration of the _servi_ is always governed by one consistent principle. In the shires of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester we read of numerous _ancillae_--in Worcestershire of 677 _servi_ and 101 _ancillae_[97]--and this may make us think that in this district all the able-bodied serfs are enumerated, whether or no they have cottages to themselves[98]. We may strongly suspect that the king's commissioners were not much interested in the line that separated the _villani_ from the _servi_, since the lord was as directly answerable for the geld of any lands that were in the occupation of his villeins as he was for the geld of those plots that were tilled for him by his slaves. That there should have been never a _theów_ in all Yorkshire and Lincolnshire is hardly credible, and yet we hear of no _servi_ in those counties.

[Disappearance of _servi_.]

This being so, we encounter some difficulty if we would put just the right interpretation on a remarkable fact that is visible in Essex. The description of that county tells us not only how many _villani_, _bordarii_ and _servi_ there are now, but also how many there were in King Edward's day, and thus shows what changes have taken place during the last twenty years. Now on manor after manor the number of villeins and bordiers, if of them we make one class, has increased, while the number of _servi_ has fallen. We take 100 entries (four batches of 25 apiece) and see that the number of _villani_ and _bordarii_ has risen from 1486 to 1894, while the number of _servi_ has fallen from 423 to 303. We make another experiment with a hundred entries. This gives the following result:--

1066 1086
Villani 1273 1247
Bordarii 810 1241
Servi 384 312

This decrease in the number of _servi_ seems to be pretty evenly distributed throughout the county[99]. We shall not readily ascribe the change to any mildheartedness of the lords. They are Frenchmen, and in all probability they have got the most they could out of a mass of peasantry made malleable and manageable by the Conquest. We may rather be entitled to infer that there has been a considerable change in rural economy. For the cultivation of his demesne land the lord begins to rely less and less on the labour of serfs whom he feeds, more and more upon the labour of tenants who have plots of their own and who feed themselves. From this again we may perhaps infer that the labour services of the _villani_ and _bordarii_ are being augmented. But at any rate it speaks ill of their fate, that under the sway of foreigners, who may fairly be suspected of some harshness and greed, their inferiors, the true _servi_, are somewhat rapidly disappearing. However, it is by no means impossible that with a slavery so complete as that of the English _theów_ the Normans were not very familiar in their own country[100].

FOOTNOTES:

[61] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 398.

[62] D. B. i. 34, Limenesfeld.

[63] D. B. i. 132 b, Hiz.

[64] D. B. i. 132 b, Waldenei.

[65] D. B. i. 136, Sandone.

[66] Æthelb. 26.

[67] Tacitus, Germ. c. 25: 'Caeteris servis non in nostrum morem,
descriptis per familiam ministeriis, utuntur. Suam quisque
sedem, suos penates regit. Frumenti modum dominus aut pecoris
aut vestis ut colono iniungit, et servus hactenus paret.'

[68] Haddan and Stubbs, Councils, iii. 202.