Kitabı oku: «Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History», sayfa 13

CHAPTER VII.
THE PEASANTRY OF THE FEUDAL AGE. CONCLUSIONS

Legal and manorial records.

I have divided my analysis of the condition of the feudal peasantry into two parts according to a principle forcibly suggested, as I think, by the material at hand. The records of trials in the King's Court, and the doctrines of lawyers based on them, cannot be treated in the same way as the surveys compiled for the use of manorial administration. There is a marked difference between the two sets of documents as to method and point of view. In the case of legal records a method of dialectic examination could be followed. Legal rules are always more or less connected between themselves, and the investigator has to find out, first, from the application of what principles they flow, and to find out, secondly, whether fundamental contradictions disclose a fusion of heterogeneous elements. The study of manorial documents had to proceed by way of classification, to establish in what broad classes the local variations of terms and notions arrange themselves, and what variations of daily life these groups or classes represent.

It is not strange, of course, that things should assume a somewhat different aspect according to the point of view from which they are described. Legal classification need not go into details which may be very important for purposes of manorial administration; neither the size of the holdings nor the complex variations of services have to be looked to in cases where the law of status is concerned. Still it may be taken for granted that the distinctions and rules followed by the courts had to conform in a general way with matter-of-fact conditions. Lawyers naturally disregarded minute subdivisions, but their broad classes were not invented at fancy; they took them from life as they did the few traits they chose from among many as tests for the purpose of laying down clear and convenient rules. A general conformity is apparent in every point. At the same time there is undoubtedly an opposition between the curial (if I may use that term) and the manorial treatment of status and tenure, which does not resolve itself into a difference between broad principle and details. Just because the lawyer has to keep to distinct rules, he will often be behind his age and sometimes in advance of it. His doctrine, once established, is slow to follow the fluctuations of husbandry and politics: while in both departments new facts are ever cropping up and gathering strength, which have to fight their way against the rigidity of jurisprudence before they are accepted by it. On the other hand, notions of old standing and tenacious tradition cannot be put away at once, so soon as some new departure has been taken by jurists; and even when they die out at common law such notions persist in local habits and practical life. For these reasons, which hold good more or less everywhere, and are especially conspicuous in mediaeval history, the general relation between legal and manorial documents becomes especially important. It will widen and strengthen conclusions drawn from the analysis of legal theory. We may be sure to find in thirteenth-century documents of practical administration the foundations of a system which prevailed at law in the fifteenth. And what is much more interesting, we may be sure to find in local customaries the traces of a system which had its day long before the thirteenth century, but was still lingering in broken remains.

The will of the lord and the custom of the manor.

Bracton defines villainage as a condition of men who do not know in the evening what work and how much they will have to perform next morning. The corresponding tenure is entirely precarious and uncertain at law. But these fundamental positions of legal doctrine we find opposed in daily life to the all-controlling rule of custom. The peasant knows exactly on what days he has to appear personally or by representative at ploughings and reapings, how many loads he is bound to carry, and how many eggs he is expected to bring at Easter⁴⁴⁷; in most cases he knows also what will be required from him when he inherits from his father or marries his daughter. This customary arrangement of duties does not find any expression in common law, and vice versa the rule of common law dwindles down in daily life to a definition of power which may be exercised in exceptional cases. The opposition between our two sets of records is evidently connected in this case with their different way of treating facts.

Movement towards free contract and money rents.

Manorial extents and inquests give in themselves only a one-sided picture of mediaeval village life, because they describe it only from the point of view of the holding: people who do not own land are very seldom noticed, and among the population settled on the land only those persons are named who 'defend' the tenement in regard to the lord. Only the chief of the household appears; this is a matter of course. He may have many or few children, many or few women engaged on his plot: the extent will not make any difference in the description of the tenement and of its services. But although very incomplete in this important respect, manorial records allow us many a glimpse at the process which was preparing a great change in the law. Hired labourers are frequently mentioned in stewards' accounts, and the 'undersette' and 'levingmen' and 'anelipemen⁴⁴⁸' of the extents correspond evidently to this fluctuating population of rural workmen and squatters gathering behind the screen of recognised peasant holders.

The very foundation of the mediaeval system, its organisation of work according to equalised holdings and around a manorial centre, is in course of time undermined by the process of commutation. Villains are released from ploughings and reapings, from carriage-duties and boon work by paying certain rents; they bargain with the lord for a surrender of his right of arbitrary taxation and arbitrary amercement; they take leases of houses, arable and meadows. This important movement is directly noticed by the law in so far as it takes the shape of an increase in the number of freeholders and of freehold tenements; charters and instruments of conveyance may be concerned with it. But the process is chiefly apparent in a standing contradiction with the law. Legally an arrangement with a villain either ought not to bind the lord or else ought to destroy his power. Even in law books, however, the intermediate form of a binding covenant with the villain emerges, as we have seen, in opposition to the consistent theory. In practice the villains are constantly found possessed of 'soclands,' 'forlands,' and freeholds. The passage from obligatory labour to proprietary rights is effected in this way without any sudden emancipation, by the gradual accumulation of facts which are not strictly legal and at the same time tend to become legal.

Emancipation.

Again, the Royal courts do not know anything about 'molmen,' 'gavelmen,' or 'censuarii,' They keep to the plain distinction between free and bond. Nevertheless, all these groups exist in practice, and are constantly growing in consequence of commutation. The whole law of status gets transformed by their growth as the law of tenure gets transformed by the growth of leases. Molmen, though treated as villains by Royal courts, are already recognised as more 'free' than the villains by manorial juries. The existence of such groups testifies to something more than a precarious passage from service to rent, namely to a change from servile subjection to a status closely resembling that of peasant freeholders, and actually leading up to it. In one word, our manorial records give ample notice of the growth of a system based on free contract and not on customary labour. But the old forms of tenure and service are still existent in law, and the contradiction involved in this fact is not merely a technical one: it lies at the root of the revolutionary movement at the close of the fourteenth century. In this manner facts were slowly paving the way towards a modification of the law. But now, turning from what is in the future, to what is in the past, let us try to collect those indications which throw light on the condition of things preceding feudal law and organisation.

Contrast between labour and rent.

The one-sided conception of feudal law builds up the entire structure of social divisions on the principle of the lord's will. Custom, however sacred, is not equivalent to actionable right, and a person who has nothing but custom to lean upon is supposed to be at the will and mercy of his lord and of base or servile condition. But we find even in the domain of legal doctrine other notions less convenient for the purpose of classification, and more adapted to the practice of daily life. Servile persons and servile land are known from the nature of the services to which they are subject. This test is applied in two directions: (1) regular rural work, 'with pitch-fork and flail,' is considered servile; and this would exclude the payment of rents and occasional help in the performance of agricultural labour; (2) certain duties are singled out as marking servitude because they imply the idea of one person being owned by another, and this would exclude subjection derived from the possession of land, however burdensome and arbitrary such subjection might be.

Turning next to manorial records, we find these abortive features of feudal law resting on a very broad basis. Only that land is considered servile which owes labour, if it renders nothing but rent it is termed free. We have here no mere commutation: the notion is an old one, and rather driven back by later law than emerging from it. It is natural enough that the holder of a plot is considered free if his relations with the lord are restricted to occasional appearances at court, occasional fines, and the payment of certain rents two or three times a year. It is natural enough that the holder of another plot should be treated as a serf because he is bound to perform work which is fitted as a part into the arrangement of his lord's husbandry, and constantly brought under the control and the coercive power of the steward. This matter-of-fact contrast comes naturally to the fore in documents which are drawn up as descriptions of daily transactions and not as evidence for a lawsuit. But the terms 'free' and 'servile' are not used lightly even in such documents. We may be sure that manorial juries and bailiffs would not have been allowed to displace at their pleasure terminological distinctions which might lead people to alter their legal position. The double sense of these terms cannot be taken as arranging society under the same two categories and yet in two entirely different ways: it must be construed as implying the two sides of one and the same thing, the substance in manorial records and the formal distinction in legal records. That is to say, when the test of legal protection was applied, the people who had to perform labour were deprived of it and designated as holding in villainage, and to the people who paid rent protection was granted and they were considered as holding freely. For this very reason the process of commutation creating mol-land actually led to an increase in the number of free tenancies⁴⁴⁹.

Personal subjection.

The courts made some attempts to utilise personal subjection as a distinctive feature of born villains. If it had been possible to follow out the principle, we should have been able to distinguish between villains proper and men of free blood holding in villainage. The attempt miscarried in practice, although the King's courts were acting in this case in conjunction with local custom and local juries. The reason of the failure is disclosed by manorial documents. Merchet, the most debasing incident of personal villainage, appears so widely spread in the Hundred Rolls that there can be no question, at least at the close of the thirteenth century, of treating it as a sure test of personal subjection. We cannot admit even for one moment that the whole peasant population of entire counties was descended from personal slaves, as the diffusion of merchet would lead us to suppose. The appearance of the distinction is quite as characteristic as its gradual collapse. The original idea underlying it was to connect villain status with personal slavery, and it failed because the incidents of personal slavery were confused with other facts which were quite independent of it and which were expanded over a very large area instead of a very restricted one.

Three tests of serfdom.

And now we have ready the several links of one chain. The three tests of serfdom applied by our documents are connected with each other by the very terms in which they are stated, and at the same time they present three consecutive stages of development. The notion of serfdom is originally confined to forms of personal subjection and to the possession of land under the bane of personal subjection: in this sense servitude is a narrow term, and the condition denoted by it is exceptional. In its second meaning it connects itself with rural labour and spreads over the whole class of peasants engaged in it. In its last and broadest sense it includes all the people and all the land not protected by the Common Law. We have no evidence as to the chronological landmarks between these several epochs, and it is clear that the passage from one to another was very gradual, and by no means implied the absolute disappearance of ancient terms. But it seems hardly doubtful that the movement was effected in the direction described; both the intrinsic evidence of the notions under discussion and their appearance in our documents point this way.

History of free peasantry.

This being so, we may expect to find some traces of the gradual spread of serfdom in the subdivisions of that comprehensive class called villainage. And, indeed, there are unmistakable signs of the fact that the flood was rising slowly and swamping the several groups of the peasantry which hitherto had been of very various conditions. The Domesday classification will have to be discussed by itself, but it may be noticed even now that its fundamental features are the distinction between serfs and villains, and the very limited number of these first. Judging by this, the bulk of the peasantry was not considered unfree. The inference is corroborated for the epoch of the early Norman kings by the laws of Henry I, in which the villain is still treated on the same footing as the ceorl of Saxon times, is deemed 'worthy of his were and of his wite,' and is called as a free man to the hundred court, although not a landlord, 'terrarum dominus.' The hundredors of later times kept up the tradition: degraded in many ways, they were still considered as representatives of a free population. Ancient demesne tenure is another proof of the same freedom in villainage; it is protected though base, and supposes independent rights on the part of the peasantry. The position of the group of socmen outside the ancient demesne points the same way: their tenure is originally nothing more and nothing less than a customary freehold or a free copyhold, if one may say so. The law of Kent is constructed on this very basis: it is the law of free ceorls subjected to a certain manorial authority which has not been able to strike very deep roots in this soil.

But the general current went steadily against the peasantry. The disruption of political unity at the time of the great civil war, and the systematic resumption of royal rights by Henry II, must have led to a settlement which impaired the social standing of the villain in the sense of feudal law. The immediate connexion between the lower class and the royal power could not be kept up during the troubled reign of Stephen, when England all but lapsed into the political dismemberment of the neighbouring continental states. Government and law were restored by Henry II, but he had to set a limit to his sphere of action in order that within that sphere he might act efficiently. The very growth of the great system of royal writs necessitated the drawing a sharp line between the people admitted to use them and those excluded from this benefit. One part of the revolution effected by the development of royal jurisdiction is very noticeable in our documents: the struggle between king and magnates as to the right of judging freeholders has left many traces, of which the history of the 'breve quod vocatur praecipe' is perhaps the most remarkable. But the victorious progress of royal jurisdiction in regard to freeholders was counterbalanced by an all but complete surrender of it in regard to villains. The celebrated tit. 29 of William the Conqueror's laws providing that the cultivators of the land are not to be subjected to new exactions, had lost its sense in the reign of Henry II, and so soon as it was settled that one class of tenants was to be protected, while another was to be unprotected in the king's court, the lawyers set themselves thinking over the problem of a definite and plain division of classes. Their work in this direction bears all the marks of a fresh departure. They are wavering between the formal and the material test: instead of setting up at once the convenient doctrine that villainage is proved by stock, and that in regard to service and tenure the question is decided by their certainty or uncertainty, they try for a long time to shape conclusive rules as to the kind of services and incidents which imply villainage, and for a time distinction between rural labour and rent becomes especially important.

On the whole, I think that an analysis of the legal and manorial evidence belonging to the feudal age leads forcibly to the conclusion that the general classification of society under the two heads of freeholders and villains is an artificial and a late one. A number of important groups appear between the two, and if we try to reduce them to some unity, we may say that a third class is formed by customary freeholders. Another way of stating the same thing would be to say, that the feudal notion of a freehold from which the modern notion has developed must be supplemented from the point of view of the historian by a more ancient form which is hidden, as it were, inside the class distinction of villainage. By the side of the freeholder recognised by later law there stands the villain as a customary freeholder who has lost legal protection. I do not think that the problems resulting from the ambiguous position of the feudal villain can be solved better than on the supposition of this 'third estate.'

SECOND ESSAY.
THE MANOR AND THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY

CHAPTER I.
THE OPEN FIELD SYSTEM AND THE HOLDINGS

Structure of the manor.

My first essay has been devoted to the peasantry of feudal England in its social character. We have had to examine its classes or divisions in their relation to freedom, personal slavery, and praedial serfage. The land system was touched upon only so far as it influenced such classification, or was influenced by it.

But no correct estimate of the social standing of the peasantry can stop here, or content itself with legal or administrative definitions. In no degree of society do men stand isolated, and a description of individual status alone would be thoroughly incomplete. Men stand arranged in groups for economical and political co-operation, and these groups are composed according to the laws of the division and hierarchical organisation of labour, composed, that is, of heterogeneous elements, of members who have to fulfil different functions, and to occupy higher and lower positions. The normal group which forms as it were the constitutive cell of English mediaeval society is the manor, and we must try to make out in what way it was organised, and how it did its work in the thirteenth century, at the time of fully developed feudalism.

The structure of the ordinary manor is always the same. Under the headship of the lord we find two layers of population—the villains and the freeholders; and the territory occupied divides itself accordingly into demesne land⁴⁵⁰ and 'tributary land' (if I may use that phrase) of two different classes. The cultivation of the demesne depends to a certain extent on the work supplied by the tenants of the tributary land. Rents are collected, labour supervised, and all kinds of administrative business transacted, by a set of manorial officers or servants. The entire population is grouped into a village community which centres round the manorial court or halimote, which is both council and tribunal. My investigation will necessarily conform to this typical arrangement. The holding of the peasant is the natural starting-point: it will give us the clue to the whole agrarian system. Next may come that part of the territory which is not occupied in severalty but used in common. The agrarian obligations with regard to the lord and the cultivation of the demesne land may be taken up afterwards. The position of privileged people, either servants or freeholders, must be discussed by itself, as an exceptional case. And, lastly, the question will have to be put—to what extent were all these elements welded together in the village community, and under the sway of the manorial court?

Field systems.

The chief features of the field-system which was in operation in England during the middle ages have been sufficiently cleared up by modern scholars, especially by Nasse, Thorold Rogers, and Seebohm, and there is no need for dwelling at length on the subject. Everybody knows that the arable of an English village was commonly cultivated under a three years rotation of crops⁴⁵¹; a two-field system is also found very often⁴⁵²; there are some instances of more complex arrangements⁴⁵³, but they are very rare, and appear late—not earlier than the fourteenth century. Walter of Henley's treatise on farming, which appears to belong to the first half of the thirteenth, mentions only the first two systems, and its estimate of the plough-land is based on them. In the case of a three-field rotation a hundred and eighty acres are reckoned to the plough; a hundred and sixty in a system of two courses⁴⁵⁴. We find the same estimate in the chapters on husbandry and management of an estate which are inserted in the law-book known as Fleta⁴⁵⁵. The strips in the fields belonging to the several tenants were divided by narrow balks of turf, and when the field lay fallow, or after the harvest had been removed, the entire field was turned into a common pasture for the use of the village cattle. The whole area was protected by an inclosure while it was under crop.

Inhoke.

A curious deviation is apparent in the following instance, taken from the cartulary of Malmesbury. The Abbey makes an exchange with a neighbour who has rights of common on some of the convent's land, and therefore does not allow of its being cultivated and inclosed (inhoc facere). In return for certain concessions on the part of the Abbey, this neighbouring owner agrees that fallow pasture should be turned into arable on the condition that after the harvest it should return to common use, as well as the land not actually under seed. Lastly comes a provision about the villains of the person entering into agreement with the Abbey: if they do not want to conform to the new arrangement of cultivation, they will be admitted to their strips for the purpose of ploughing up or using the fallow⁴⁵⁶. The case is interesting in two respects: it shows the intimate connexion between the construction of the inclosure (inhoc) and the raising of the crop; the special paragraph about the villains gives us to understand that something more than the usual rotation of crops was meant: the 'inhokare' appears in opposition either to the ordinary ploughing up of the fallow, or in a general sense to its use for pasture; it seems to indicate extra-cultivation of such land as ought to have remained uncultivated. These considerations are borne out by other documents. In a trial of Edward I's time the 'inheche' is explained in as many words as the ploughing up of fallow for a crop of wheat, oats, or barley⁴⁵⁷. The Gloucester Survey, in describing one of the manors belonging to the Abbey, arranges its land into four fields (campi), each consisting of several parts: the first field is said to contain 174 acres, the second 63, the third 109, the fourth 69 acres. Two-thirds of the whole are subjected to the usual modes of cultivation under a three-course system, and one-third remains for pasture. But out of this last third, 40 acres of the first field (of 174 acres) get inclosed and used for crop in one year, and 20 acres of the second in another⁴⁵⁸. In this way the ordinary three-course alternation becomes somewhat more complicated, and it will be hardly too bold a guess to suppose that such extra-cultivation implied some manuring of such patches as were deprived of their usual rest once in three years. In contradiction to the customary arrangement which did not require any special manuring except that which was incident to the use of arable as pasture for the cattle after the harvest, we find plots set apart for more intense cultivation⁴⁵⁹, and it is to be noticed that the reckoning in connexion with them does not start from the division according to three parts, but supposes a separate classification in two sections.

The 'Campus.'

Another fact worth noticing in the Gloucester instance is the irregular distribution of acres in the 'fields,' and the division of the entire arable into four unequal parts. The husbandry is conducted on the three-course system, and still four fields are mentioned, and there is no simple relation between the number of acres which they respectively contain (174, 63, 109, 69). It seems obvious that the expression 'field' (campus) is used here not in the ordinary sense suggested by such records as spring-field, winter-field, and the like, but in reference to the topography of the district. The whole territory under cultivation was divided into a number of squares or furlongs which lay round the village in four large groups. The alternation of crops distributed the same area into three according to a mode not described by the Survey, and it looks probable at first glance that each of the 'fields' (campi) contained elements of all three courses. The supposition becomes a certainty, if we reflect that it gives the only possible explanation of the way in which the twofold alternation of the 'inhoc' is made to fit with the threefold rotation of crops: every year some of the land in each campus had to remain in fallow, and could be inclosed or taken under 'inhoc.' Had the campus as a whole been reserved for one of the three courses, there would have been room for the 'inhoc' only every three years.

I have gone into some details in connexion with this instance because it presents a deviation from ordinary rules, and even a deviation from the usual phraseology, and it is probable that the exceptional use of words depended on the exceptional process of farming. A new species of arable—the manured plot under 'inhoc'—came into use, and naturally disturbed the plain arrangement of the old-fashioned three courses; the lands had to be grouped anew into four sections which went under the accustomed designation of 'fields,' although they did not fit in with the 'three fields' of the old system. In most cases, however, our records use the word 'field' (campus) in that very sense of land under one of the 'courses,' which is out of the question in the case taken from the Gloucester Cartulary. The common use is especially clear when the documents want to describe the holding of a person, and mention the number of acres in each 'field,' The Abbot of Malmesbury, e.g., enfeoffs one Robert with a virgate formerly held 'in the fields' by A., twenty-one acres in one field and twenty-one in another⁴⁶⁰. The charter does not contain any description of campi in the territorial sense, and it is evident that the expression 'in the fields' is meant to indicate a customary and well-known husbandry arrangement. The same meaning must be put on sentences like the following—R.A. holds a virgate consisting of forty-two acres in both fields⁴⁶¹. The question may be raised whether we have to look for 'both fields' in the winter and spring-field of the three courses rotation, or in the arable and fallow of the two courses. In the first of these eventualities, the third reserved for pasture and rest would be left out of the reckoning; it would be treated as an appurtenance of the land that was in cultivation. Cases in which the portions in the several fields are unequal seem to point to the second sense⁴⁶². It was impossible to divide the whole territory under cultivation like a piece of paper: conformation of the soil had, of course, much to do with the shape of the furlongs and their distribution, and the courses of the husbandry could not impress themselves on it without some inequalities and stray remnants. It may happen for this reason that a man holds sixteen acres in one field and fourteen in the other. There is almost always, however, a certain correspondence between the number of acres in each field; instances of very great disparity are rare, and suppose some local and special reasons which we cannot trace. Such disparities seem to point, however, to a rotation according to two courses, because the fallow of the three courses could have been left out of the reckoning only if all the parts in the fields were equal⁴⁶³. I think that a careful inspection of the surveys from this point of view may lead to the conclusion that the two courses rotation was very extensively spread in England in the thirteenth century.

Compulsory rotation of crops.

A most important feature of the mediaeval system of tillage was its compulsory character. The several tenants, even when freeholders, could not manage their plots at their own choice⁴⁶⁴. The entire soil of the township formed one whole in this respect, and was subjected to the management of the entire village. The superior right of the community found expression in the fact that the fields were open to common use as pasture after the harvest, as well as in the regulation of the modes of farming and order of tillage by the township. Even the lord himself had to conform to the customs and rules set up by the community, and attempts to break through them, although they become frequent enough at the close of the thirteenth century, and especially in the fourteenth, are met by a resistance which sometimes actually leads to litigation⁴⁶⁵. The freeholders alone have access to the courts, but in practice the entire body of the tenantry is equally concerned. The passage towards more efficient modes of cultivation was very much obstructed by these customary rules as to rotation of crops, which flow not from the will and interest of single owners, but from the decision of communities.