Chapter XI (2)

At this early period there must have been a considerable amount of accumulated wealth in England, to have enabled Canute to have expended the vast sums he is said to have done on his pilgrimage to Rome, or to have allowed Edward the Confessor to build the Abbey of St. Peter’s at Westminster, and many other churches, at an enormous expense. Nor do the resources of his treasury appear to have been drained by all this expenditure; for the quantity of money the Conqueror took from Harold enabled him to be, in the words of his biographer, “incredibly liberal” to the Church of Rome;[519] moreover, that some of the nobles had great wealth, may be inferred from the present of Earl Godwin to Hardicanute already alluded to, together with the other rich gifts which he bestowed upon the Church.[520]

[Sidenote: Imports.]

But the governing class and the great ecclesiastics must have had in those days the bulk of the wealth of the country in their hands; indeed, the limited extent of trade, and the character of the imports of the period, demonstrate plainly that such was the case. Silk, and similar expensive articles of dress, precious stones, perfumes, and other oriental luxuries, purchased in the ports of Italy or at Marseilles, are, with one or two extraordinary exceptions, the only items the historians of the period record as having been brought from foreign countries: these exceptions, strange to relate, consisted of portions of legs, arms, fingers, and toes, supposed to have belonged to canonized saints. It is almost impossible now to conceive that such articles constituted, at any period of English history, important items of her imports. There is, however, no doubt of the fact; and so high in estimation were such remains held, that Egelnoth, archbishop of Canterbury, is said[521] to have purchased at Paris, on his return from Rome, an arm of St. Augustine for one hundred talents of silver and one talent of gold; while Elfsig, abbot of Peterborough, gave no less than five thousand pounds of silver for a headless body, which some knavish dealer had pronounced to be that of a distinguished saint.[522]

[Sidenote: Taxation.]

[Sidenote: London specially favoured.]

By the records of Domesday, nearly all the cities and boroughs of England appear to have been, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, the property of the king, or of some noble to whom the inhabitants looked for protection and paid a rent or borough-mail. London, Winchester, York, and Exeter alone enjoyed exemptions from taxes imposed on other cities of the kingdom. London was afterwards especially favoured by the Conqueror, who, recognizing the great importance of that city, endeavoured to conciliate the goodwill of the inhabitants by a charter, which not merely confirmed all the privileges they had previously possessed, but enjoined that “every child should be his father’s heir after his death.” To William the City owes the jurisdiction of the Thames,[523] the conservancy of which is even now to some extent in its hands, the Lord Mayor being still _ex-officio_ chairman of the present board for that purpose. The inhabitants, or burgesses of London, also enjoyed the highly-prized privilege of hunting in the extensive chases of Chiltern, Middlesex, and Surrey, which, with the conservancy over the Thames, was confirmed by subsequent charters, and especially by that of Henry I.

[Sidenote: Chester specially burdened.]

It is clear that the taxes imposed on the seaport as well as inland towns, were not arranged by any systematic law. Thus, for no especial reason that can now be discerned, Chester was taxed far more heavily than any other city in the reigns of both William I. and his predecessor, Edward. Dover again paid 18_l._ annually, but the burgesses, who were required to provide twenty ships, carrying twenty-one men each, for fifteen days in the year, were exempted from all tolls throughout the country. Sandwich was placed on a similar footing, but only paid 15_l._ per annum. In Southwark, the king claimed a duty on all vessels entering the “dock,” and levied a toll on those that used the strand for the delivering or loading of their cargoes. Colchester paid two marks of silver, and also, as a composition for the rent of six pennies on every house, 15_l._ 5_s._ 4_d._, of which 4_l._ was paid by the coiners. Yarmouth, which had seventy burgesses, was taxed to the extent of 27_l._ by toll to the king and earl. In Ipswich there were eight hundred and eight burgesses paying custom to the king, but the amount is not stated.

No determinate principle can now be discerned why such dues were exacted, small towns being in many cases required to pay more than others of double their size. In some places the taxes were paid in produce or merchandise—as, for instance, at Gloucester, where, besides 36_l._ levied in toll, the inhabitants had to contribute twelve gallons of honey, and one hundred iron rods to the king’s ships, together with a few other petty customs. Again, Leicester had also to provide honey, and twelve burgesses to supply the king’s army, and four horses to carry arms and stores to London when any maritime expedition was about to sail from the Thames. In Shrewsbury the king levied a tax of ten shillings on the marriage of every maid, and twenty shillings on that of every widow, besides numerous taxes upon the people in the shape of services or customs; and in Hereford, the king had one hundred and three tenants, including six blacksmiths, who performed certain services in lieu of rents, while the burgesses had, among other burdens, to provide “a bear, and six dogs for the bear.” At Sandwich, forty thousand herrings were demanded for the use of the monks of the neighbourhood.[524]

[Sidenote: State of the people at the time of the Conquest.]

In many places, the records of Domesday show that considerable portions of the inhabitants were too poor to pay any taxes. Thus, in Norwich, while six hundred and sixty-five are rated among the burgesses, there are no less than four hundred and eighty heads of families who had no means of contributing. Notices are also preserved of the number of houses at that time in a state of decay or disuse: thus, at Winchester, whole streets and many churches were in a state of ruin; in Thetford, there were one hundred and twenty houses empty; in Ipswich, more than three hundred and twenty-eight falling to decay. In Chester, once so flourishing and so heavily taxed, there were, soon after the Conquest, two hundred and five houses lying waste; while, in York, four hundred houses were so much decayed, as to pay only one penny each, or even less; five hundred and forty were waste, and paid nothing; and one hundred and forty-five were occupied by Frenchmen, who were relieved from the tax.

But while poverty and oppressive taxation ground down the masses of the people, the nobles abandoned themselves to the excesses of gluttony, drunkenness, and promiscuous concubinage, frequently not scrupling to consign the objects of their lust, and even their own offspring, to the miseries of slavery, for paltry sums of money to be squandered in wretched folly. Learning was almost at as low an ebb as it had been at the commencement of the reign of Alfred; while the middle classes, with some, though few, exceptions, were, in many respects, no better than the nobles, and trade and commerce languished and declined. Such was the state of things in England when the Norman conqueror landed on its shores.[525]

FOOTNOTES:

[464] Laing’s Transl. of the Heimskringla, p. 135.

[465] Monach. Sangall. De rebus Caroli Magni ap. Muratori. Antiq. v. 1.

[466] Full details of this, and of two other less perfect vessels discovered about the same time, at Thorsbjerg and Nydam, in S. Jutland, are given in the very interesting work by Mr. C. Engelhardt, entitled “Denmark in the early Iron Age,” Lond. 4to. 1866. From the frontispiece of this work the accompanying plate has been taken. Special attention has been called to it by Mr. J. H. Burton, to whose “History of Scotland” we are indebted for some of the notices of the Scandinavians.

[467] We have also a record of the discovery in England of two very ancient oak boats of considerable size. The first was found in 1822, in a deserted bed of the River Rother, near Matham, in Kent, and has been fully described in the Archæol. vol. xx. p. 553. This boat, which was sixty-three feet long by fifteen feet broad, appears to have been half-decked, and to have had at least one mast. It had been caulked with moss. The second was found in 1833, at North Stoke, near Arundel, in what was formerly a creek running into the River Arun. This boat, which was made of the half of a single oak-tree, hollowed out like a canoe, was thirty-five feet four inches long, and four feet six inches broad. It is now preserved in the British Museum, having been presented to that institution by the Earl of Egremont.—_Vide_ Archæol. vol. xxvi.

[468] St. Patrick flourished from A.D. 432, the year of his mission to England, to 493; St. Brigit, about 500; and St. Columba, from 522-97. The venerable and more trustworthy Bede, who mentions Horsa by name (Eccles. Hist. i. c. 15), lived at a much later period, A.D. 750.

[469] Bede, ii. 3.

[470] The kingdom of Mercia comprised the midland and western counties.

[471] Muratori, Antiq. v. 12.

[472] Laws of Hlothar and Eadric, ap. Schmid’s Anglo-Sax. Laws, c. 1-5, p. 11. Leipsig, 1858.

[473] Scriptores Brit. Gale, p. 762.

[474] William of Malmesbury, s. 17, and M. Paris Vit. Offæ.

[475] Macpherson, i. p. 251; and compare Monach. Sangall, i. c. 13, ap. Muratori, Antiq. v. 1.

[4765] This first Danish invasion is said to have taken place A.D. 753. Macpherson, i. p. 247; and Chronic. Augustin, ap. Twysden.

[477] Sir H. Nicolas (“Hist. Roy. Navy,” i. p. 10) states that the Snekkar, or Serpent, was manned by twenty rowers. See also Depping, “Hist. des Exped. Maritimes des Normands.” i. 71-73.

[478] Macpherson, in his “Annals of Commerce,” vol. i. p. 254, says that “the Norwegians and Danes, under the names of Ostmen (_i.e._ eastern men), Gauls, Gentiles, Pagans, &c., were the chief, or rather the only commercial, people in Ireland, and continued for several centuries to carry on trade with the mother countries, and other places on the west coast of Europe, from their Irish settlements.”

[479] See Saxon Chronicle A.D. 897, Florence of Worcester; Simeon of Durham, the Chronicle of Melros; and Pauli, “Life of Alfred,” p. 212.

[480] Pauli, “Life,” &c., p. 178.

[481] If Asser is correct in his statements, London had been almost destroyed by the Danes just before the accession of Alfred.—Asser, “Vit. Alfred,” p. 51.

[482] William of Malmesbury, Gest. Reg. Angl. 24, a. Some of the jewels of curious manufacture which Bishop Sighelm brought home were to be seen among the treasures of the church at Sherbourne; and Asser says that King Alfred one morning gave him a silk robe, and as much frankincense (incense) as a man could carry; from which it may be inferred that, after the visit of Sighelm, a trade was opened out between England and India, or with other countries of the East, where frankincense was produced or stored. For the Christians in Malabar, see a curious story in the “Legenda Aurea;” in Buchanan’s “Christian Researches;” in the Journal of Bishop Heber; and in Thomas’s “Prinsep’s Indian Essays,” vol. ii. p. 214. Sighelm, who had previously been sent to Rome by King Alfred, is thought by Pauli to have been a layman, as his name is not found in the episcopal registers of Sherbourne.—Life of Alfred, p. 146.

[483] Thorpe, “Ancient Laws of England,” p. 31; and Macpherson, vol. i. pp. 266-268. There is another order of Ethelred, “that the ships of war should be ready every year at Easter.”—Ancient Laws, p. 137.

[484] William of Malmesbury, i. p. 215.

[485] The Saxon Chronicle gives to his predecessor, Edward the Elder, a fleet of some hundreds of ships, but this number is evidently too indefinite for any historical purpose. (Sax. Chron. A.D. 911.) If the charter granted to Worcester by this king in A.D. 964 be genuine, which Kemble doubts (Cod. Diplom. Ævi Saxon. ii. 404), he would seem to have been the first English monarch who claimed the “sovereignty of the sea.”

[486] Bp. Wilkins, “Leg. Saxon.” p. 78. Nearly eighty mints of Edgar’s money are known. Hawkins’s “Silver Coins of England,” p. 57.

[487] Vol. i. p. 275. A list of all these Danish invasions may be consulted in Sir H. Nicolas’s “Hist. Royal Navy,” vol. i. pp. 10-28.

[488] This was the well-known tax called “Dane geld,” imposed, apparently for the first time, about A.D. 991; see also Saxon Chron., A.D. 994, 1002, 1007. Stow, p. 114, ed. 1600.

[489] Mr. Kemble, in an elaborate chapter on the “Hide,” has determined that it was probably a little less than 100 statute acres of arable land. (“Anglo-Saxons,” vol. i. c. 4, p. 88-121.) It is clear, however, that the word was often used for a much smaller, though indefinite extent of land. In Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (_in voc._ Hyde) many examples are quoted, showing that it was popularly held to be as much land as “could be tilled in a year by one plough.”

[490] Saxon Chron., A.D. 1009.

[491] London Bridge is noticed in the Saxon Chronicle under A.D. 1016, The first stone bridge is said to have been commenced, A.D. 1176, and finished, A.D. 1209.—Stow’s Survey, pp. 50, 52, 682.

[492] Then called “Emperor’s men,” the forerunners, probably, of the “Merchants of the Steel-yard.” See also Brompton, p. 897, quoted by Macpherson, p. 277, and “Ancient Laws,” p. 127; Prynne, “Annales,” p. 105.

[493] Snorro, “Hist. Olaf. Trygv.” cc. 124-8.

[494] “Heimskringla,” vol. ii. p. 125. Cf. Reginæ Emmæ Encomium, ap. Script. Rer. Normann. pp. 166, 170.

[495] “Florence of Worcester,” p. 623, who calls the vessel a “trierem.”

[496] “Annals of Commerce,” vol. i. p. 279.

[497] It may not be generally known that a considerable number of the charters and deeds preserved in the collections of the British Museum, and of the libraries of the Bodleian and of Magdalen College at Oxford, bear seals impressed with ancient Roman, and occasionally with Greek, gems, all, or nearly all, of which are now lost.

[498] Thorkelin’s “Essay on the Slave Trade,” pp. 4-9.

[499] Arngrim Jonas. For the story of the Singhalese sailors, see Plin. H. N. vi. 83.

[500] The Shetland as well as the Orkney Islands were then in the possession of the Norwegians, and Sutherland, the most northern portion of Great Britain, obtained this title as the land to the south of the Orkneys.

[501] Saxon Chron. A.D. 1018.

[502] This fact is mentioned, incidentally, in the Saxon Chronicle under the reign of Hardicanute, A.D. 1039.

[503] William of Malmesbury gives a letter from Canute to the English nobility stating his success in this matter, ii. c. 11.

[504] See Ruding, “Annals of the Coinage of England,” and Hawkins, “Silver Coins of England.” No other English king had so many mints, at least 350 of the names of his moneyers having been preserved.

[505] Saxon Chron., A.D. 1036.

[506] Saxon Chron., A.D. 1039-40. A mancus was worth about seven shillings and a penny, sterling. Spelman (p. 387) has pointed out that accounts differ as to whether we are to read here mancusses or marks, and that these two denominations of money were sometimes interchanged.

[507] Saxon Chron., A.D. 1039.

[508] It will be observed that in this, as in other boats, in the tapestry, the steersman holds the sheet in his left hand. The man at the masthead may indicate the sailor whom Wace (who heard the story from his father) says William sent aloft to look out.—Will. Poict., p. 199.

[509] Mr. Freeman, who has recently and most fully examined every record relating to the Norman invasion, states that he finds the largest number of ships recorded to have amounted to 3000, the smallest to 693. Most of the ships were gifts from the great barons or prelates. Thus, W. Fitz-Osborn gave 60; the Count de Mortain, 120; the Bishop of Bayeux, 100; while the finest of all, that in which William himself came over, was presented to him by his Duchess Matilda, and was called the “Mora.” (E. A. Freeman, “Norman Conquest,” vol. iii. c. 15, pp 376-1381. 1869.) Sir H. Nicolas has examined at considerable length the evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry, pp. 63-66.

[510] Judging from the records of the chronicles of the period, it seems that William the Conqueror had not at any time a fleet capable of competing with those of the Northmen, who appear to have made descents on the coasts much as they had done in earlier years. Cf. Saxon Chronicle for the years 1069, 1070, 1083; and Selden, “Mare Clausum,” c. xxv.

[511] See the histories of Ramsey and Ely, and others.

[512] No data exist from which we can calculate with any certainty the value of a pound of silver in the Conqueror’s reign.

[513] Pliny states that lead was found so abundantly on the surface in Britain, that a law was passed to limit the supply. H. N. xxxiv. 49; cf. also Wright’s “Uriconium,” pp. 6, 7, 8.

[514] Matthew Paris, Hist. p. 570. Camden, Britan. p. 134.

[515] Wilkins, “Leges Anglo-Saxon,” p. 52.

[516] William of Malmesbury, i. c. 3. Wharton, “Angl. Sacr.” ii. p. 258. According also to Bede, it appears that the sight of English slaves in the market-place at Rome first led Gregory to think of evangelizing the country.—Hist. Eccles. ii. c. 1.

[517] William of Poictiers, p. 216.

[518] Ibid. Muratori, Antiq. v. coll. 404, 405.

[519] William of Poictiers, chaplain to William the Conqueror, speaks of his rich gifts to Rome, p. 206.

[520] William of Malmesb. p. 43.

[521] Ibid. p. 42.

[522] Saxon Chron. The list of relics preserved (till quite recently) in the Escurial in Spain, would satisfy the wildest curiosity of any owner of a “rag and bone shop.” Cf. also W. of Malmesb. De Pontif. 5. Bede, Hist. Abbat. Weremouth.

[523] Thom. Chron. ap. Twysden, ed. 1793.

[524] For these and other references to Domesday, see Macpherson, i. pp. 293-7, and i. pp. 303-7.

[525] The above particulars are derived from the records of Domesday, which were, however, never completed for several of the northern counties, possibly owing to the great northern up-rising against William the Conqueror. It is also remarkable that there are no notices of London and Winchester in the Conqueror’s Domesday. (See Spelman’s Gloss, s. v. Domesday, and Ayloffe’s Calendar, p. xviii.) For Winchester, there was a separate register known as the “Winchester Book.” A portion of the _original_ survey, with the title of “Inquisitio Eliensis” (from which that in Domesday has been _reduced_) has been recently discovered in the British Museum, and will shortly be published, under the direction of the Royal Society of Literature, by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Librarian to the Society, and late of the Dep. of MSS., British Museum.