Chapter I: The England of Henry I (3)

Our great picture of medieval London belongs in all its completeness to a somewhat later date; it was painted in the closing years of the twelfth century. But, as in the case of so many other things which only come out into full light under Henry II., although the colouring and the details may belong more especially to his time, the main features were already there in the time of his grandfather. The outline of the city was a sort of irregular half-ellipse, fenced in upon the northern or land side by a girdle of massive walls pierced with gates and fortified with lofty towers; the wall on the south side, being built close upon the river bank, was gradually washed away by the ebb and flow of the tide constantly beating upon its foundations. On this side the river itself was an all-sufficient protection. The eastern extremity of the city, where the wall came down towards the water’s edge, was guarded by a mighty fortress, founded by King William in the earliest days of his conquest to hold his newly-won capital in check, and always known by the emphatic name of “the Tower.” The western end was protected by two lesser fortresses,[126]--Castle Baynard and Montfichet, whose sokes filled up the space between the cathedral precincts and the city wall. Another, which must have stood in the same neighbourhood, seems to have been partly destroyed by the fire which ravaged London a few months before the Conqueror’s death, and in which the cathedral of S. Paul entirely perished.[127] Part of the ditch of this fortress was surrendered by King Henry to make room for a wall with which Bishop Richard was now enclosing his precincts;[128] while within this enclosure a new church, gorgeous with all the latest developements of Norman architectural skill, was now fast approaching completion.[129] S. Paul’s was the rallying-point, as it had been the nucleus, of municipal life in London. In time of peace the folkmoot assembled at the eastern end of its churchyard at the summons of its great bell; in time of war the armed burghers gathered at its west door and beneath its banner, with the lord of Baynard’s castle as their standard-bearer.[130] The internal constitution of London, however, was scarcely a town-constitution of any kind; it was more like an epitome of the organization of all England. The ordinary system of the parish and the township, the special franchises and jurisdictions of the great individual landowners, of the churches, of the gilds--all these were loosely bundled together under the general headship of the bishop and the port-reeve, to whom King William addressed his one surviving English writ, just as he would have addressed the bishop and sheriff of a county. The writ itself merely confirmed to the citizens “all the law whereof they had been worthy in King Eadward’s day”;[131] but by the end of Henry I.’s reign the Londoners had got far beyond this. By virtue of a royal charter, they had exchanged their regally-appointed port-reeve for a sheriff of their own choice, and this officer served at once for the city and for the shire of Middlesex, which was granted in ferm to the citizens for ever, as the other shires were granted year by year to their respective sheriffs; they were exempted from all tolls and mercantile dues throughout the realm, and from suit and service to all courts outside their own walls, even the pleas of the crown being intrusted to a special justiciar elected by themselves. Yet there was no complete civic organization; the charter confirmed all the old separate jurisdictions and franchises, the various “sokens” and “customs” of churches, barons and burghers, the wardmoots or assemblies of the different parishes or townships, as well as the husting or folkmoot in which all were gathered together,[132]--and left London as it found it, not a compact, symmetrical municipality, but, as it has been truly called, simply “a shire covered with houses.”

[126] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Memorials of Becket_, vol.
iii.), p. 3.

[127] Eng. Chron. a. 1087.

[128] Dugdale, _Hist. of S. Paul’s_, app. xxiv. (Ellis), p.
305. Stow (_London_, ed. Thoms, p. 26) says that this fortress
“stood, as it may seem, where now standeth the house called
Bridewell.” But this is impossible; for the later palace of
Bridewell stood on the right bank of the Fleet, separated from
S. Paul’s by the course of that river and the whole width of
the soke of Castle Baynard, so that the gift of the ditch of a
castle on its site would have been perfectly useless for the
enlargement of the precincts.

[129] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. ii. c. 73 (Hamilton, p.
146).

[130] Stow, _London_ (Thoms, p. 121). For the rights and duties
of the lord of Castle Baynard, see _ib._ p. 24.

[131] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, pp. 82, 83.

[132] Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 108.

This mass of growing life lay chiefly north-east of S. Paul’s, where a crowd of lesser churches, conventual and parochial, rose out of a network of close-packed streets and alleys thronged with busy craftsmen and noisy, chaffering traders. Through the heart of it flowed the “Wall-brook,” on whose bank there lingered, long after the stream itself was buried and built over, a tradition of the barges laden with merchandise which were towed up from the Thames to a landing-place at the eastern end of the Cheap.[133] Beyond the Walbrook lay the East-Cheap, almost busier and more crowded still; while to the north, along the upper course of the Walbrook, was a thriving Jewish quarter.[134] Population was spreading, too, beyond the walls. Many of the wealthier citizens dwelt in pleasant suburban houses, surrounded with bright gardens and shady trees.[135] Some two miles higher up the river, the populous suburb of Westminster clustered round the famous abbey built in honour of S. Peter by the last Old-English king, and the palace of William Rufus, a splendid edifice with a breast-work and bastion stretching down to the water’s edge.[136] North-west of the city, just outside the wall, lay the plain of Smithfield, where a great horse-fair was held every Friday.[137] Beyond was an expanse of fruitful tillage-lands and rich pastures, watered by running streams and made merry with the rush of countless watermills;[138] and this tract was sheltered by a wide belt of woodland stretching away across the northern part of Middlesex to the foot of the Chiltern Hills. Here the stag and the fallow-deer, the boar and the wild bull, had their coverts, beside a multitude of lesser game; all of which the citizens were by a special privilege entitled to hunt at their pleasure.[139] Such quasi-regal sport was doubtless only enjoyed by the greater and wealthier among them; the mass of the young burghers were content, in the summer evenings when their day’s work was done, with a saunter among the shady gardens and fresh springs which enlivened the northern suburbs; while in winter their favourite resort was a tract of low-lying moor or marsh--the Moorfields of later times--on whose frozen surface they could enjoy to their heart’s content the exercises of sliding, sledging and skating.[140] Business, pleasure, piety, intellectual culture, all had their places in the vigorous life of the great city. Each of the two great minsters, S. Paul’s and S. Peter’s, had a school attached to it, and so had the abbey of our Lady at Bermondsey, just over the water.[141] Money-getting did not absorb all the energies of the burghers; “they were respected and noted above all other citizens for their manners, dress, table and discourse.”[142] “Moreover, almost all the bishops, abbots and great men of England are, in a manner, citizens and freemen of London; as they have magnificent houses there, to which they resort, spending large sums of money, whenever they are summoned thither to councils and assemblies by the king or their metropolitan, or are compelled to go there by their own business.”[143] And between these visitors and the resident citizens there was no hard and fast line of demarcation. Neither the knight-errant’s blind contempt for practical industry nor the still blinder contempt of the merely practical man for everything which has not its value in hard cash had as yet come into existence. Under the old English system the merchant who had made three long voyages over sea on his own account was entitled to rank as a thegn, and to take his place among the nobles of the land. Under the Norman system a link between the two classes was supplied by the citizens of Norman origin, to whom London in no small measure owed the marked importance which it attained under Henry I. The Norman knights had no monopoly of the enterprizing spirit of their race; the victorious host had scarcely settled down upon the conquered soil when it was followed by a second invasion of a very different character. Merchants, traders, craftsmen of all sorts, came flocking to seek their fortunes in their sovereign’s newly-acquired dominions, not by forcible spoliation of the native people, but by fair traffic and honest labour in their midst. The fusion of races in this class, the class of which the town population chiefly consisted, began almost from the first years of the conquest. The process was very likely more helped than hindered by the grinding tyranny which united all the Red King’s victims in a community of suffering; but its great working-out was in the reign of Henry I. His restoration of law and order, his administrative and judicial reforms, gave scope for a great outburst of industrial and commercial energy. England under him had her heavy burthens and her cruel grievances; they stand out plainly enough in the complaints of her native chronicler. But to men who lived amidst the endless strife of the French kingdom or the Flemish border-land, or of the Norman duchy under the nominal government of Robert Curthose, a country where “no man durst misdo with other,” and where the sovereign “made peace for man and deer,”[144] may well have looked like a sort of earthly paradise. It is no wonder that peaceable citizens who only wanted to be quiet and get an honest living came across the sea to find shelter and security in the rich and prosperous island. For settlers of this kind it was easy enough to make a home. No gulf of hatred and suspicion, no ever-present sense of wrong suffered and wrong done, stood fixed between them and their English fellow-burghers. Even before the Conqueror’s reign had closed, English and Normans were living contentedly side by side in all the chief cities of England: sometimes, as we have noticed in the case of Norwich, the new-comers dwelt apart in a suburb or quarter of their own, but the distinction was one of locality only; the intercourse was perfectly free and perfectly amicable; Norman refinement, Norman taste, Norman fashions, especially in dress, made their way rapidly among the English burghers; and intermarriages soon became frequent.[145] In the great cities, where the sight of foreign traders was nothing new or strange, and the barriers of prejudice and ignorance of each other’s languages had been worn away by years of commercial intercourse, the fusion was naturally more easy; in London, whither the “men of Rouen” had come in their “great ships,” with their cargoes of wine or sturgeons,[146] long before their countrymen came with bow and spear and sword, it was easiest of all. The great commercial centre to which the Norman merchants had long been attracted as visitors attracted them as settlers now that it had become the capital of their own sovereign; and the attraction grew still stronger during the unquiet times in Normandy which followed the Conqueror’s death. “Many natives of the chief Norman cities, Rouen and Caen, removed to London, and chose them out a dwelling there, because it was a fitter place for their trade, and better stored with the goods in which they were wont to deal.”[147]

[133] Stow, _London_ (Thoms), p. 97.

[134] The only body of Jews who appear in the Pipe Roll of 31
Hen. I are those of London.

[135] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii.) p. 3.

[136] Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iii.) p. 3.

[137] _Ib._ p. 6.

[138] _Ib._ p. 3.

[139] _Ib._ p. 12.

[140] _Ib._ p. 11.

[141] _Ib._ p. 4.

[142] _Ibid._

[143] _Ib._ p. 8.

[144] Eng. Chron. a. 1135.

[145] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 520.

[146] _De Institutis Lundoniæ_, Thorpe, _Anc. Laws_, p. 127
(folio ed.).

[147] _Vita S. Thomæ_, Anon. II. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol.
iv.) p. 81.

That the influence of these Norman burghers was dominant in the city there can be little doubt; but they seem to have won their predominance by fair means and to have used it fairly. If they, as individuals, prospered in the English capital, they contributed their full share to its corporate prosperity, and indirectly to that of the nation at large. They brought a great deal more than mere wealth; they brought enterprize, vigour, refinement, culture, social as well as political progress. In their pleasant, cheerful, well-ordered dwellings many a noble knight or baron may have been glad to accept a hospitality such as his own stately but comfortless and desolate castle could never afford; many a learned and dignified ecclesiastic may have enjoyed a refinement of society such as he could rarely hope to meet among the rough and reckless swordsmen with whom the ranks of the high-born laity were filled. We are not dependent on mere general statements; we can do as did these barons and prelates themselves; we can go with them to visit the home of a typical London citizen of the early twelfth century. In the heart of the busiest trading quarter, on the spot where Mercer’s Hall now stands in Cheapside, under the shadow of S. Mary Colechurch, and well within sound of the bells of the more famous S. Mary-at-Bow, was the house of Gilbert Becket and Rohesia his wife. When their son, grown to manhood and high in office, was asked of his origin and extraction, he answered simply that his parents were citizens of London, dwelling blameless and respected among their fellow-burghers.[148] Had not the inquisitive zeal of his biographers led them to search more closely into his pedigree, we might never have known that his father and mother were foreigners--Gilbert, born at Rouen, of a respectable burgher family; Rohesia, sprung from the same rank of life at Caen.[149] Gilbert once filled the office of port-reeve of London,[150] and bore a high character for intelligence, industry and upright dealing. Rohesia was the pattern of wives and mothers. Her domestic affections and her wider Christian sympathies, her motherly love and her charity to the needy, are seen exquisitely blended together in her habit of weighing her little son at stated intervals against money, clothes and food which she gave to the poor, trusting thereby to bring a blessing on the child.[151] As soon as he was old enough, he was sent to school at Merton Priory in Surrey,[152] where his father seems to have been treated as a friend by the prior; and when the boy came home for his holidays, it was to spend them in riding and hawking with Richer de L’Aigle, a young knight sprung from one of the noblest families of Normandy, and a constant visitor and intimate friend of the little household in Cheapside.[153] It is plain from the simple, matter-of-fact way in which that household is described that it in nowise differed from the generality of burgher-households around it. Its head was wealthy, but not to such a degree as to excite special notice or envy; he and his wife lived in comfort and affluence, but only such as befitted their station; they seem to have been in no way distinguished from the bulk of respectable, well-to-do, middle-class citizens of their day. The one peculiarity of their home was the circumstance to which we owe our knowledge of its character and its history:--that in it had been born a child who was to begin his career as Thomas of London the burgher’s son, and to end it as Thomas of Canterbury, archbishop, saint and martyr.

[148] _S. Thomæ Ep._ cxxiv. (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. v. p.
515).

[149] Anon. II. _Vita S. Thomæ_ (_ib._ vol. iv.), p. 81.

[150] Will. Fitz-Steph. (_ib._ vol. iii. p. 14) calls him
_vicecomes_, which in relation to London at this period can
only mean port-reeve; and a constant tradition of later days
pointed to the father of S. Thomas as the most venerated
predecessor of the mayor.

[151] Anon. I. _Vita S. Thomæ_ (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. iv.),
p. 7.

[152] Will. Fitz-Steph. (_ib._ vol. iii.), p. 14.

[153] E. Grim (_ib._ vol. ii.), p. 359. Anon. I. (_ib._ vol.
iv.), p. 6. Garnier, _Vie de S. Thomas_ (Hippeau), p. 3.

The Norman settlers were not the only new element in the population of the English towns. Flanders, the border-land of Normandy, France and the Empire, the immediate neighbour of the Norman dukes, the ally of the English kings, had been for ages associated with the destinies of England. The relation between the two countries was primarily a political one; but kindred blood, kindred speech and kindred temper drew Fleming and Englishman together in the bonds of a natural sympathy which grew with the growth of both nations. The merchants of Bruges were even more familiar visitors in London than those of Rouen and Caen. The trade with Flanders was the most important part of the trade of eastern England. Not only was the estuary of the Scheld a high-way of communication with the more distant regions of central Europe, but Flanders herself was the head-quarters of a flourishing industry for which the raw material was in great part furnished by England. The cloth which all Europe flocked to buy at the great yearly fairs of Bruges and Ghent was made chiefly from the wool of English sheep. Dover was the chief mart for this export; in the itinerary of the canons of Laon we see Flemish merchants dispersing to buy wool all over the country and bringing it up to Dover in great bales, which were deposited in a warehouse built for that special purpose till they could be shipped over sea.[154] As yet the Flemings had almost a monopoly of this weaving trade, although the appearance of weavers’ gilds at Huntingdon, Lincoln, Oxford and London may show that Englishmen were already beginning to emulate their example; it may, on the other hand, point to a Flemish element in the population of these towns. In the time of William the Conqueror some fellow-countrymen of his Flemish queen had come not merely to traffic but to dwell in England; in the time of Henry I. they seem to have become numerous and prosperous enough to excite the jealousy of both Normans and English. It may have been partly to allay this jealousy, but it was surely, nevertheless, a marked testimony to their character as active and trustworthy members of the state, that in 1111 Henry, casting about for a means of holding in check the turbulent Welsh whose restlessness was the one remaining element of disturbance in his realm, planted a colony of these Flemings in the extremity of South Wales, the southern part of our Pembrokeshire.[155] The experiment was a daring one; cut off as they were from all direct communication with England, there must have seemed little chance that these colonists could hold their own against the Welsh. The success of the experiment is matter not of history but of present fact; South Pembrokeshire remains to this day a Teutonic land, a “little England beyond Wales.” But the true significance of the Flemish settlements under Henry I. is for England rather than for Wales. They are the first links of a social and industrial, as distinguished from a merely political, connexion between England and the Low Countries, which in later days was to exercise an important influence on the life of both peoples. They are the forerunners of two greater settlements--one under Edward III. and one under Elizabeth--which were to work a revolution in English industry.

[154] Herman. Mon., l. ii. c. 5 (D’Achéry, _Guib. Noviog.
Opp._, p. 536).

[155] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 401 (Hardy, p. 628).
Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 64; Ann. Camb. a. 1107; Brut
y Tywysogion, a. 1105.

A third class of foreign settlers stood in a totally different position from both the Fleming and the Norman. These were the Jews. Their first appearance in England is said to have been due to the Conqueror, who brought over a Jewish colony from Rouen to London.[156] They were special favourites of William Rufus; under Henry they play a less conspicuous part; but in the next reign we find them at Lincoln, Oxford, and elsewhere, and there can be no doubt that they were already established in most of the chief English towns. They formed, however, no part of the townsfolk. The Jew was not a member of the state; he was the king’s chattel, not to be meddled with, for good or for evil, save at the king’s own bidding. Exempt from toll and tax and from the fines of justice, he had the means of accumulating a hoard of wealth which might indeed be seized at any moment by an arbitrary act of the king, but which the king’s protection guarded with jealous care against all other interference. The capacity in which the Jew usually appears is that of a money-lender--an occupation in which the scruples of the Church forbade Christians to engage, lest they should be contaminated with the sin of usury. Fettered by no such scruples, the Hebrew money-lenders drove a thriving trade; and their loans doubtless contributed to the material benefit of the country, by furnishing means for a greater extension of commercial enterprize than would have been possible without such aid. But, except in this indirect way, their presence contributed nothing to the political developement of the towns; and in their social developement the Jewry, a distinct quarter exempt from the jurisdiction of merchant-gild or port-reeve as well as from that of sheriff or bishop, shut off by impassable barriers from the Christian community around it, had no part at all.

[156] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 317 (Hardy, p. 500,
note).

Outside this little separate world of the Jewry the general manner of life was much the same in all ranks of society. The domestic arrangements of the castle or manor-house differed little from those of the citizen’s dwelling. In both the accommodation usually consisted merely of a hall, a “solar” or upper chamber raised on a substructure of cellars, and a kitchen with its appendant offices.[157] The hall was the general living, eating, and sleeping-apartment for the whole household. Its floor was of wood, strewn with hay or rushes;[158] a fire blazed upon a great stone hearth in its centre, or in a wide recess at one end; and round the fire were ranged in due order the tables and benches at which the family, guests and servants all assembled for meals. In the higher ranks of society the king’s friend Count Robert of Meulan had set a fashion of taking but one daily repast--the mid-day dinner--and those who wished to ape courtly manners followed his example; the practice, however, found little favour with the mass of the people, who attributed it to aristocratic stinginess, and preferred their four meals a day according to ancient English custom.[159] It was in the hall that noble or merchant transacted his business or conversed with his friends; and it was in the hall too that at nightfall, when the tables were cleared and the wooden shutters which closed the unglazed windows safely barred,[160] guests and servants, divided at most by a curtain drawn across the room, lay down to sleep in the glow of the dying fire.[161] The solar was used at once as bedroom and private sitting-room by the master and mistress of the house;[162] a curtainless bed and an oaken chest,[163] serving as a wardrobe and fastened with lock and hinges often of elaborate ironwork,[164] made up its ordinary furniture; in the story of S. Thomas we catch a glimpse, too, of the cradle in which a burgher-mother rocked her baby to sleep, wrapped in a dainty silken coverlet.[165] The whole house, whether in town or country, was commonly of wood.[166] With open hearths and chimneys ill-constructed, or more probably altogether lacking, the natural consequence was that fires in towns were of constant occurrence and disastrous extent; Gilbert Becket’s house was burnt over his head several times, and in each case a large part of London shared in the destruction.[167] But the buildings thus easily destroyed were as easily replaced; while the cost of a stone house was beyond the means of any but the great nobles, unless it were here and there some exceptionally wealthy Jew; and there was no other building material to be had except wood or rubble, for the nearest approach to a brick which had yet come into general use was a tile;[168] and although these were sometimes used for roofing, the majority of houses, even in great cities like London, were covered with thatch.[169] All the architectural energy of the time spent itself in two channels--military and ecclesiastical; and even the castle was as yet a very simple edifice. The various buildings which occupied its outer ward were mere huts of wood or rubble; and the stone wall of the keep itself, though of enormous thickness and solidity, was often nothing more than a shell, the space inside it being divided by wooden partitions into rooms covered with lean-to roofs of thatch. Even where the keep was entirely of stone, all thought of accommodation or elegance was completely subordinated to the one simple, all-important purpose of defence. It is this stern simplicity which gives to the remains of our early castles a grandeur of their own, and strikes the imagination far more impressively than the elaborate fortifications of later times. But it left no scope to the finer fancies of the architect. His feeling for artistic decoration, his love of beauty, of harmonious light and shade, had free play only in his work for the Church; while the more general taste for personal luxury and elegance had to find expression chiefly in minor matters, and especially in dress. During the last reign the extravagance of attire among the nobles had been carried to a pitch which called forth the energetic remonstrances of serious men; prelate after prelate thundered against the unseemly fashions--the long hair curled and scented like a woman’s, the feminine ornaments, the long pointed shoes and loose flowing garments which rendered all manly exercises impossible.[170] After the Red King’s death a reforming party, headed by the new sovereign and his friend Robert of Meulan,[171] succeeded in effecting a return to the more rational attire of the ordinary Norman knighthood; a close-fitting tunic with a long cloak, reaching almost to the feet, thrown over it for riding or walking.[172] The English townsfolk, then as now, endeavoured to copy the dress of their neighbours from beyond the Channel. Among the rural population, however, foreign fashions were slow to penetrate; and the English countryman went on tilling his fields clad in the linen smock-frock which had once been the ordinary costume of all classes of men among his forefathers, and which has scarcely yet gone out of use among his descendants.

[157] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, vol. i. pp. 2, 5.

[158] _Ib._ p. 16.

[159] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 407 (Hardy, p. 636).

[160] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, vol. i. p. 13.

[161] _Ib._ pp. 2, 15.

[162] _Ib._ p. 5.

[163] _Ib._ p. 16.

[164] _Ib._ p. 10.

[165] Ed. Grim (Robertson, _Becket_, vol. ii.), p. 357. Anon.
I. (_ib._ vol. iv.), p. 4.

[166] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, pp. 8, 17, 18.

[167] According to Will. Fitz-Steph. (Robertson, _Becket_,
vol. iii. p. 8), fires and drunkenness were the two plagues of
London.

[168] Turner, _Domestic Architecture_, p. xxvii. (introduction).

[169] _Ib._ p. 18.

[170] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 816.
Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 314 (Hardy, p. 498).

[171] Will. Malm. as above, and l. v. c. 407 (p. 636).

[172] We see this long cloak in a story of Robert of Bellême
(Hen. Hunt. _De Contemptu Mundi_, ed. Arnold, p. 310), and in
that of Henry “Curt-Mantel” (Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._,
dist. iii. c. 28., ed. Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 157).

The life of the English country folk had changed since the first days of the Norman settlement almost as little as their dress. The final transformation, now everywhere complete, of the ancient township into the feudal manor was but the last step in a process which had begun at least as far back as the time of Eadgar. The castle or manor-house of the baron or lord, into which the thegn’s hall had now developed, was the centre of rural life. Around it lay the home-farm, the lord’s demesne land, cultivated partly by free tenants, partly by the customary labour due from the villeins whose cottages clustered on its border, and whose holdings, with a tract of common pasture and common woodland, made up the remainder of the estate. In the portion thus held in villenage, the arable land was distributed in large open fields in strips of an acre or half an acre in extent, each man holding a certain number of strips scattered one in one field and one in another; while in proportion to the total amount of land which he thus held he contributed one ox or more to the team that drew the heavy plough wherewith each whole field was ploughed in common. On the estates of the great abbey of Peterborough the holdings were mostly of virgates or half-virgates--that is, land to the extent of some thirty or fifteen acres, and furnishing in the former case two oxen, in the latter one ox, to the common plough team, which usually consisted of four; those belonging to the demesne were usually of six or eight. Each tenant had, besides his land, a right to his share of the common pasture and the common hay-meadow, as well as of the common woodland where he fed his pigs on the oak-mast, and cut turf and brushwood for fuel and other household uses. Some of the lesser tenants had no land, but were merely “cottiers,” occupying their little cottage with or without a garden. Whatever the extent and character of their holding, they held it in consideration of certain services due to the lord, discharged partly by labour upon his demesne land, partly by customary payments in money or in kind, partly in work for specified purposes on particular occasions, known as “boon” or “bene-work.”[173] The superintendence of all these matters was in the hands of the reeve or bailiff of the manor, who was charged with the regulation of its labour, the maintenance of its farming-stock, the ingathering of its dues, the letting of its unoccupied land, and the general account of its revenues. Under his orders every villein was bound to do a certain amount of “week-work”--to plough, sow, or reap, or otherwise labour on the demesne land a certain number of days every week; generally the obligation, on every virgate held in villenage, was for two or three days a week throughout the year, sometimes with an extra day at harvest-tide. The customary dues and services varied with the special custom of each manor; they consisted partly of payments either in kind or money, or both, and partly of services such as hewing, carting, and drying wood, cutting turf, making thatch, making malt, mowing and carrying hay, putting up fences, providing ploughs and labour for a specified length of time at particular seasons, ploughing, sowing, harrowing and reaping a given extent of the demesne land. Some of the rents were paid by the discharge of a special duty; the cowherds, oxherds, shepherds, swineherds, usually held a piece of land “by their service,” that is, in consideration of their charge over the flocks and herds of the lord; sometimes we find a further labour-rent paid by their wives, who winnow and reap so much corn on the demesne.[174] Many of the cotters doubtless held their little dwellings on a similar tenure, by virtue of their offices as the indispensable craftsmen of the village community, such as the blacksmith, the carpenter, or the wheelwright. The mill, too, an important institution on every large manor, paid a fixed money rent, and sometimes a tribute of fish from the mill-stream.[175]

[173] “Præcaria” or “præcationes.”

[174] _Liber Niger_ (App. to Chron. Petroburgense, ed.
Stapleton, Camden Soc.), pp. 158, 163, 164, 165.

[175] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), p. 158, “i molendinus
cum i virgâ terræ reddit xl solidos et cc anguillas.”

We may draw some illustrations of the life of these rural communities from the “Black Book” of Peterborough, in which the manors belonging to the abbey were described about the year 1125. On the manor of Thorp there were twelve “full villeins” holding eleven acres each, and working on the demesne three days a week; there were also six half villeins who did the like in proportion to their holdings. All these paid of custom ten shillings annually, besides five sheep for eating, ten ells of linen cloth, ten porringers, and two hundred loaves for the love-feast of S. Peter; moreover they all ploughed sixteen acres and a half for their lord. Six _bordarii_ paid seven shillings a year; and they all rendered twenty-two bushels of oats for their share of the dead wood, twenty-two loaves, sixty-four hens, and one hundred and sixty eggs.[176] At Colingham twenty villeins worked each one day a week, and three boon-days in August; they brought sixty waggon-loads of wood to the manor-house, dug and carried twenty loads of turf and twenty of thatch, harrowed all the winter-ploughing, and paid annually four pounds in money. There were also fifty sokemen who paid twelve pounds a year, ploughed, harrowed and reaped eighteen acres, besides ploughing with their own ploughs three times in Lent; each of them worked three days in August, and served of custom six times a year in driving the deer for the abbot’s hunting.[177] At Easton twenty-one villeins holding a virgate each worked twice a week throughout the year and three boon-days in August; they had twelve ploughs with which they worked once in winter and once in spring, and then harrowed; they ploughed fifteen acres and three roods, whereof five acres and one rood were to be sown with their own seed; in spring they had to plough ten acres and a half and sow twenty and a half with their own seed; in summer, for fifteen days, they had to do whatsoever the lord commanded. They also made seventy-three bushels of malt from the lord’s barley; and they paid seventeen shillings and sixpence a year. A man named Toli held one virgate at a rent of five shillings a year; and eleven sokemen held thirteen virgates and a half by a payment of twelve shillings, two days’ work in summer and winter, and fifteen days in summer at the lord’s bidding. The miller, with a holding of six acres of arable land and two of meadow, rendered one mark of silver to the lord.[178]

[176] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), pp. 158, 159.

[177] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), p. 159.

[178] _Ib._ pp. 159, 160.

Fisherton, again, supplies illustrations of a great variety of services. On this manor there were twenty-six “full villeins,” twelve “half villeins,” one “cotsetus” and three “bordarii.” The full villeins worked two days a week, the half villeins one day, throughout the year; the four cottagers worked one day a week in August, their food being supplied by the lord. The villeins had among them nine ploughs, which were all brought into requisition once in winter and three times in spring. The full villeins carted a load of wood, the half villeins in proportion; the full villeins moreover ploughed and harrowed of custom an acre in spring, and half an acre in winter; they also lent their ploughs once in summer for fallowing. At Pentecost the lord received one penny for every villein plough-ox. Each full villein paid twopence at Martinmas and thirty-two pence on the four quarter-days; the half villeins paid half the sum. Every one of them gave a hen at Christmas. The mill brought three shillings a year, the fishing five shillings. Land enough for twelve full villeins lay unoccupied; the reeve had to discharge its dues out of his own purse, and hire it out at the best rent he could get. There were twenty sokemen, holding three ploughlands, and lending their ploughs once in winter, twice in spring, and once for fallowing; each of them reaped one acre, and did two days bene-work in August; at hay-harvest they gave of custom three days’ work, one for mowing, one for turning the hay, and one for carrying it; each gave a hen at Christmas, and they all paid four pounds a quarter. On the demesne were three ploughs, each with a team of eight oxen; these were under the care of five ox-herds, who held five acres each, and whose wives reaped one day a week in August, the lord supplying their food.[179] At Oundle we get a glimpse not only of the rural township, but of the little dependent town growing up on it. “In Oundle are four hides paying geld to the king. Of these hides, twenty-five men hold twenty virgates, and pay of custom twenty shillings a year, forty hens, and two hundred eggs. The men of the township have nine ploughs; from Michaelmas to Martinmas they find ploughs for the lord’s use once a week, and from Martinmas to Easter once a fortnight, and ten acres fallow. Each virgate owes three days’ work a week. There are ten _bordarii_, who work one day a week; and fifteen burghers, who pay thirty shillings. The market of the township renders four pounds and three shillings. A mill with one virgate renders forty shillings and two hundred eels. The abbot holds the wood in his own hand. The men of the township, with six herdsmen, pay five shillings a year poll-tax. The church of this township belongs to the altar of the abbey of Borough.”[180]

[179] _Liber Niger Petrob._ (Stapleton), p. 164.

[180] _Ib._ p. 158.

Services such as these were doubtless an irksome and a heavy burthen; to modern ideas of independence, the life of the rural population was the degraded life of serfdom. But there was another side to the system. The lord had his duties as well as the villein; the villein had his rights as well as the lord. When their work for the lord was done and their customary dues were paid, the villagers were free to make their own arrangements one with another for the yoking of their oxen to the common ploughs and the tillage of the common fields; and the rest of their time and produce of their labour was theirs to do with as they would, subject merely to such restrictions as to grinding at the lord’s mill, or obtaining his license for the sale of cattle, as were necessary for maintaining the integrity of the estate. While they owed suit and service to their lord, he was bound by his own interest as well as by law and duty to guard them against external interference, oppression, or injury; the extent of his rights over them, no less than of their duties to him, was defined by a strict and minute code of custom to which long prescription gave all and more than all the force of law, and law itself could occasionally step in to avenge the wronged villein even upon his lord; Alfred of Cheaffword is recorded in the Pipe Roll as having paid a fine of forty shillings for scourging a rustic of his own.[181] The villein’s life was not harder than that of the poor free man; it was quite as secure from wrong, and far more secure from want. The majority of the cultivators were indeed tied to their land; but their land was equally tied to them; the lord was bound to furnish each little bundle of acre-strips with its proper outfit of plough-oxen, to provide each tenant with his little cottage, and to see that the heritage passed on to the next generation, just as the manor itself, and with it the tenants and their services, passed from father to son in the case of a lay proprietor, or from one generation of monks to another in a case like that of Peterborough. Even if a villein failed in his dues, the worst punishment that could befall him was the seizure of his little household goods; eviction was out of the question. The serfdom of the villein was after all only the lowest link in a chain of feudal interdependence which ended only with the king himself. If the “rustics” possessed their homesteads only on condition of work done at the lord’s bidding and for his benefit, the knight held his “fee” and the baron his “honour” only on condition of a service to the king, less laborious indeed, but more dangerous, and in reality not a whit more morally elevating. If they had to ask their lord’s leave for giving a daughter in marriage, the first baron of the realm had to ask a like permission of the king, and to pay for it too. If their persons and their services could be transferred by the lord to another owner together with the soil which they tilled, the same principle really applied to every grade of feudal society; Count William of Evreux only stated a simple fact in grotesque language when he complained that his homage and his services had been made over together with the overlordship of his county by Robert Curthose to Henry I., with no more regard to his own will than if he had been a horse or an ox.[182] The mere gift of personal freedom, when it meant the uprooting of all local and social ties and the withdrawal of all accustomed means of sustenance, would have been in itself but a doubtful boon. There were, however, at least three ways in which freedom might be attained. Sometimes the lord on his death-bed, or in penance for some great sin, would be moved by the Church’s influence to enfranchise some of his serfs. Sometimes a rustic might flee to one of the chartered towns, and if for the space of a year and a day he could find shelter under its protecting customs from the pursuit of his lord’s justice, he was thenceforth a free burgher. And there was a greater city of refuge whose protection was readier and surer still. The Church had but to lay her consecrating hands upon a man, and he was free at once. To ordain a villein or admit him as a monk without his lord’s consent was indeed forbidden; but the consecration once bestowed was valid nevertheless; and the storm of indignation which met the endeavour of Henry II. to enforce the prohibition shows that it had long been almost a dead letter.

[181] Pipe Roll, 31 Hen. I. (Hunter), p. 55.

[182] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 814.

If the spiritual life of the English Church in the time of Henry I. were to be judged solely from her highest official representatives, it would certainly appear to have been at a low ebb. S. Anselm had lived just long enough to accomplish the settlement of the investitures, but not to direct its working or experience its results. On his death early in 1109 Henry so far fell back into his brother’s evil ways as to keep the metropolitan see vacant for five years. The supreme direction of affairs in the Church as well as in the state was thus left in the hands of the party represented by Roger of Salisbury. Roger’s policy and that of his master was indeed less flagrantly insulting to religion than that of Rufus and Flambard; but it was hardly less injurious in a moral and spiritual point of view. The most important sees were no longer farmed by Jewish usurers for the king’s benefit; the most sacred offices of the Church were no longer openly sold to the highest bidder; but they were made appendages to the great offices of the state; the Church herself was practically turned into a mere handmaid of the state, and her ministers into tools for the purposes of secular government. The system had undoubted advantages in a worldly point of view. A great deal of the most important political and administrative work was of a nature which, in the condition of society then existing, required the services of a clerk rather than of a layman; moreover, a man in holy orders, incapable of founding a family, and standing, so to say, alone in the world, was less exposed to the temptations and corruptions of place and power than a layman surrounded with personal and social ties and open to all sorts of personal and social ambitions, and could thus be safely intrusted with a freedom of action and authority such as in the hands of a lay baron with territorial and family influence might have led to the most dangerous results. On these and similar grounds Henry made a practice of choosing his chief ministers from the ranks of the clergy, and bestowing vacant bishoprics upon them, by way either of rewarding their past labours or of insuring a continuance of their zeal and devotion in the discharge of their temporal functions. Thereby he undoubtedly secured to the state the services of a more able, vigorous and honest set of administrators than could have been obtained by any other means; but from another side the system lay open to grave objection. The men whom it set over the dioceses of England were, beyond all question, men of very superior intelligence and energy, and, on the whole, of fair moral character, men whom it would be most unjust to compare for a moment with the hirelings who bought their sees of William Rufus. But they were essentially of the world, worldly; their minds and their hearts were both alike fixed on their thoroughly well fulfilled duties as treasurer or justiciar, not on their too often neglected duties as bishop of Ely or Salisbury. And as were the bishops, so were the priests. When once it became clear that the main road to ecclesiastical preferment lay through the temporal service of the crown, the whole body of secular clergy turned into a nursery of statesmen, and while they rose to their highest point of worldly importance the little spiritual influence which they still retained passed altogether away. But the Church’s life was not in her bishops and her priests; it was in her humble, faithful laity. Down below the dull utilitarianism, the “faithless coldness of the times,” the finer sympathies and higher instincts of the soul lay buried but not dead; ready to spring to the surface with a burst of enthusiasm at the touch first of the Austin canons, and then of the monks of Citeaux.

Of the two religious movements which at this time stirred the depths of English society, the earlier, that of the Austin canons, was in its origin not monastic but secular. It arose, in fact, out of a protest against monasticism. About the middle of the eleventh century an attempt had been made to redress the balance between the regular and secular clergy, and restore to the latter the influence and consideration in spiritual matters which they had, partly by their own fault, already to a great extent lost. Some earnest and thoughtful spirits, distressed at once by the abuse of monastic privileges and by the general decay of ecclesiastical order, sought to effect a reform by the establishment of a stricter and better organized discipline in those cathedral and other churches which were served by colleges of secular priests. For this end a rule composed in the eighth century by Archbishop Chrodegang of Metz for the members of his own chapter, and generally followed in the collegiate churches of Gaul, was the model adopted by cathedral reformers in England in the reigns of Eadward the Confessor and William the Conqueror. Bishops Gisa of Wells and Leofric of Exeter under the former king, Archbishop Thomas of York under the latter, severally attempted to enforce it upon their canons, but without success. The English clergy were accustomed to the full enjoyment not only of their separate property but of their separate houses; many were even yet, in spite of Pope Gregory, married men and fathers of families; and the new rule, which required them to break up their homes and submit to community of table and dwelling, was naturally resented as an attempt to curtail their liberty and bring them under monastic restraint. Lanfranc soon found that the only way to get rid of the old lax system was to get rid of the canons altogether; accordingly, from some few cathedrals the secular clerks were once again, as in Eadgar’s days, driven out and replaced by monks, this time to return no more till the great secularization in the sixteenth century. But in the greater number of churches the canons were influential enough to resist expulsion as well as reform, and to maintain the old fashion with its merits and its abuses, its good and evil sides, all alike undisturbed and unrestrained. On the Continent, too, the rule of Chrodegang proved unequal to the needs of the time. Those who had the attainment of its object really at heart ended by taking a lesson from their rivals and challenging the monks with their own weapons. Towards the beginning of the twelfth century the attempts at canonical reform issued in the foundation of what was virtually a new religious order, that of the Augustinians or Canons Regular of the order of S. Augustine. Like the monks and unlike the secular canons, from whom they were carefully distinguished, they had not only their table and dwelling but all things in common, and were bound by a vow to the observance of their rule, grounded upon a passage in one of the letters of that great father of the Latin Church from whom they took their name.[183] Their scheme was a compromise between the old-fashioned system of canons and that of the monastic confraternities; but a compromise leaning strongly towards the monastic side, tending more and more towards it with every fresh developement, and distinguished from it chiefly by a certain simplicity and elasticity of organization which gave scope for an almost unlimited variety in the adjustment of the relations between the active and the contemplative life of the members of the order, thus enabling it to adapt itself to the most dissimilar temperaments and to the most diverse spheres of religious activity.

[183] On Austin canons see Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._ (Eng.
trans. ed. Stubbs), vol. ii. p. 47; on canons in general, _ib._
vol. i. pp. 494, 495, 538; Stubbs, pref. to _Tract. de Inv. S.
Crucis_; and Freeman, _Norm. Conq._, vol. ii. pp. 84, 85, 452,
453, and vol. iv. p. 374.