Kitabı oku: «Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History», sayfa 23

CHAPTER VI.
THE MANOR AND THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY

Conclusions

If we look at the village life of mediaeval England, not for the purpose of dissecting it into its constitutive elements, but in order that we may detect the principles that hold it together and organise it as a whole, we shall be struck by several features which make it quite unlike the present arrangement of rural society. Even a casual observer will not fail to perceive the contrast which it presents to that free play of individual interests and that undisputed supremacy of the state in political matters, which are so characteristic of the present time. And on the other hand there is just as sharp a contrast between the manorial system and a system of tribal relationships based on blood relationship and its artificial outgrowths; and yet again it may be contrasted with a village community built upon the basis of equal partnership among free members. It is evident, at the same time, that such differences, deep though they are, cannot be treated as primordial and absolute divisions. All these systems are but stages of development, after all, and the most important problem concerning them is the problem of their origins and mutual relations. The main road towards its solution lies undoubtedly through the demesne of strictly historical investigation. Should we succeed in tracing with clearness the consecutive stages of the process and the intermediate links between them, the most important part of the work will have been done. This is simple enough, and seems hardly worth mentioning. But things are not so plain as they look.

To begin with, even a complete knowledge of the sequence of events would not be sufficient since it would merely present a series of arrangements following upon each other in time and not a chain of causes and effects. We cannot exempt ourselves from the duty of following up the investigation by speculations as to the agencies and motives which produced the changes. But even apart from the necessity of taking up ultimately what one may call the dynamic thread of the inquiry, there is considerable difficulty in obtaining a tolerably settled sequence of general facts to start with. Any one who has had to do with such studies knows how scanty the information about the earlier phenomena is apt to be, how difficult it is to distinguish between the main forms and the variations which mediate and lead from one to another. The task of settling a definite theory of development would not have been so arduous, and the conflicting views of scholars would not have suggested such directly opposite results, if the early data had not been so scattered and so ambiguous. The state of the existing material requires a method of treatment which may to some extent supplement the defects in the evidence. The later and well-recorded period ought to be made to supply additional information as to the earlier and imperfectly described ones. It is from this point of view that we must once more survey the ground that we have been exploring in the foregoing pages.

The first general feature that meets our eye is the cultivation of arable on the open-field system: the land tilled is not parcelled up by enclosures, but lies open through the whole or the greater part of the year; the plot held and tilled by a single cultivator is not a compact piece, but is composed of strips strewn about in all parts of the village fields and intermixed with patches or strips possessed by fellow villagers. Now, both facts are remarkable. They do not square at all with the rules and tendencies of private ownership and individualistic husbandry. The individual proprietor will naturally try to fence in his plot against strangers, to set up hedges and walls that would render trespassing over his ground difficult, if not impossible. And he could not but consider intermixture as a downright nuisance, and strive by all means in his power to get rid of it. Why should he put up with the inconvenience of holding a bundle of strips lying far apart from each other, more or less dependent because of their narrowness on the dealings of neighbours, who may be untidy and unthrifty? Instead of having one block of soil to look to and a comparatively short boundary to maintain, every occupier has a number of scattered pieces to care for, and neighbours, who not only surround, but actually cut up, dismember, invade his tenement. The open-field system stands in glaring contradiction with the present state of private rights in Western Europe, and no wonder that it has been abolished everywhere, except on some few tracts of land kept back by geographical conditions from joining the movement of modern civilisation. And even in mediaeval history we perceive that the arrangement does not keep its hold on those occasions when the rights of individuals are strongly felt: it gives way on the demesne farm and on newly reclaimed land.

At the same time, the absence of perpetual enclosures and the intermixture of strips are in a general way quite prevalent at the present time in the East of Europe. What conditions do they correspond to? Why have nations living in very different climates and on very different soils adopted the open-field system again and again in spite of all inconveniences and without having borrowed it from each other?

There is absolutely nothing in the manorial arrangement to occasion this curious system. It is not the fact that peasant holdings are made subservient to the wants of the lord's estate, that can explain why early agriculture is in the main a culture of open fields and involves a marvellous intermixture of rights. The absence of any logical connexion between these two things settles the question as to historical influence. The open-field arrangement is, I repeat it, no lax or indifferent system, but stringent and highly peculiar. And so it cannot but proceed from some pressing necessity.

It is evidently communal in its very essence. Every trait that makes it strange and inconvenient from the point of view of individualistic interests, renders it highly appropriate to a state of things ruled by communal conceptions. It is difficult to prevent trespasses upon an open plot, but the plot must be open, if many people besides the tiller have rights over it, pasture rights, for instance. It involves great loss of time and difficulty of supervision to work a property that lies in thirty separate pieces all over the territory of a village, but such a disposition is remarkably well adapted for the purpose of assigning to fellow villagers equal shares in the arable. It is grievous to depend on your neighbours for the proceeds and results of your own work, but the tangled web of rights and boundaries becomes simple if one considers it as the management of land by an agricultural community which has allotted the places where its members have to work. Rights of common usage, communal apportionment of shares in the arable, communal arrangement of ways and times of cultivation—these are the chief features of open-field husbandry, and all point to one source—the village community. It is not a manorial arrangement, though it may be adapted to the manor. If more proof were needed we have only to notice the fact, that open-field cultivation is in full work in countries where the manor has not been established, and in times when it has not as yet been formed. We may take India or tribal Italy as instances.

The system as exhibited in England is linked to a division into holdings which gives it additional significance. The holding of the English peasant is distinguished by two characteristic features: it is a unit which as a rule does not admit of division; it is equal to other units in the same village. There is no need to point out at length to what extent these features are repugnant to an individualistic order of things. They belong to a rural community. But even in a community the arrangement adopted seems peculiar. We must not disregard some important contradictions. The holdings are not all equal, but are grouped on a scale of three, four, five divisions—virgates, bovates, and cotlands for instance. And the question may be put: why should an artificial arrangement contrived for the sake of equality start from a flagrant inequality which looks the more unjust, because instead of those intermediate quantities which shade off into each other in our modern society we meet with abrupt transitions? A second difficulty may be found in the unchangeable nature of the holding. The equal virgates are in fact an obstacle to a proportionate repartition of the land among the population, because there is nothing to insure that the differences of growth and requirements arising between different families will keep square with the relations of the holdings. In one case the family plot may become too large, in another too scanty an allowance for the peasant household working and feeding on that plot. And ultimately, as we have seen, the indivisible nature of the holding looks to some extent like an artificial one, and one that is more apparent than real. Not to speak of that provincial variation, the Kentish system of gavelkind, we notice that even in the rest of England large units are breaking into fractions, and that very often the supposed unity is only a thin covering for material division. Why should it be kept up then?

Such serious contradictions and incongruities lead us forcibly to the conclusion that we have a state of transition before us, an institution that is in some degree distorted and warped from its original shape. In this respect the manorial element comes strongly to the fore. The rough scale of holdings would be grossly against justice for purely communal purposes, but it is not only the occupation of land, but also the incidence of services that is regulated by it. People would not so much complain of holding five acres instead of thirty, if they had to work and to pay six times less in the first case. Again, a division of tenements fixed once and for all in spite of changes in the numbers and wants of the population, looks anything but convenient. At the same time the fixed scheme of the division offers a ready basis for computing rents and assessing labour services. And for the sake of the lord it was advisable to preserve outward unity even when the system was actually breaking up: for dealings with the manorial administration virgates remained undivided, even when they were no longer occupied as integral units.

Although the holdings are undoubtedly made subservient to the wants of the manor, it would be going a great deal too far to suppose that they were formed with the primary object of meeting those wants. If we look closer into the structure we find that it is based on the relation between the plough-team and the arable, a relation which is more or less constant and explains the gradations and the mode of apportionment. The division of the land is no indefinite or capricious one, because the land has to be used in certain quantities, and smaller quantities or fractions would disarrange the natural connexion between the soil and the forces that make it productive. The society of those days appears as an agricultural mass consisting not of individual persons or natural families, but of groups possessed of the implements for tilling the land. Its unit of reckoning is not the man, but the plough-beast. As the model plough-team happens to be a very large one, the large unit of the hide is adopted. Lesser quantities may be formed also, but still they correspond to aliquot parts of the full team of eight oxen. Thus the possible gradations are not so many or so gentle as in our own time, but are in the main the half plough-land, the virgate, and the oxgang. What else there is can be only regarded as subsidiary to the main arrangement: the cotters and crofters are not tenants in the fields, but gardeners, labourers, craftsmen, herdsmen, and the like. If the country had not been mainly cultivated as ploughland, but had borne vines or olives or crops that required no cumbersome implements, but intense and individualistic labour, one may readily believe that the holdings would have been more compact, and also more irregular.

The principles of coaration give an insight into the nature of these English village communities. They did not aim at absolute equality; they subordinated the personal element to the agricultural one, if we may use that expression. Not so much an apportionment of individual claims was effected as an apportionment of the land to the forces at work upon it. This observation helps us to get rid of the anomalies with which we started: the holding was united because an ox could not be divided; the plots might be smaller or larger, but everywhere they were connected with a scheme of which the plough-team was the unit. An increasing population had to take care of itself, and to try to fit itself into the existing divisions by family arrangements, marriage, adoption, reclaiming of new land, employment for hire, by-professions, and emigration. The manorial factor comes in to make everything artificially regular and rigid.

If we examine the open-field system and its relation to the holdings of individual peasants, we see, as it were, the framework of a peasant community that has swerved from the path of its original development. The gathering of scattered and intermixed strips into holdings points to practices of division or allotment: these practices are the very essence of the whole, and they alone can explain the glaring inconveniencies of scattered ownership coupled with artificial concentration. But redivision of the arable is not seen in the documents of our period. There is no shifting of strips, no changes in the quantities allotted to each family. Everything goes by heredity and settled rules of family property, as if the husbandry was not arranged for communal ownership and re-allotment. I should like to compare the whole to the icebound surface of a northern sea: it is not smooth, although hard and immoveable, and the hills and hollows of the uneven plain remind one of the billows that rolled when it was yet unfrozen.

The treatment of the arable gives the clue to all other sides of the subject. The rights of common usage of meadow and pasture carry us back to practices which must have been originally applied to arable also. When one reads of a meadow being cut up into strips and partitioned for a year among the members of the community by regular rotation or by lot, one does not see why only the grass land should be thus treated while there is no re-allotment of the arable plots. As for the waste, it does not even admit of set boundaries, and the only possible means of apportioning its use is to prescribe what and how many heads of cattle each holding may send out upon it. The close affinity between the different parts of the village soil is especially illustrated by the fact, that the open-field arable is treated as common through the greater part of the year. Such facts are more than survivals, more than stray relics of a bygone time. The communal element of English mediaeval husbandry becomes conspicuous in the individualistic elements that grow out of it.

The question has been asked whether we ought not to regard these communal arrangements as derived from the exclusive right of ownership, and the power of coercion vested in the lord of the soil. I think that many features in the constitution of the thirteenth century manor show its gradual growth and comparatively recent origin. The so-called manorial system consists, in truth, in the peculiar connexion between two agrarian bodies, the settlement of villagers cultivating their own fields, and the home-estate of the lord tacked on to this settlement and dependent on the work supplied by it. I take only the agrarian side, of course, and do not mention the political protection which stands more or less as an equivalent for the profits received by the lord from the peasantry. And as for the agrarian arrangement, we ought to keep it quite distinct from forms which are sometimes confused with it through loose terminology. A community paying taxes, farmers leasing land for rent, labourers without independent husbandry of their own, may be all subjected to some lord, but their subjection is not manorial. Two elements are necessary to constitute the manorial arrangement, the peasant village and the home farm worked by its help.

If we turn now to the evidence of the feudal period, we shall see that the labour-service relation, although very marked and prevalent in most cases, is by no means the only one that should be taken into account. In a large number of cases the relation between lord and peasants resolves itself into money payments, and this is only another way of saying that the manorial group disaggregates itself. The peasant holding gets free from the obligation of labouring under the supervision of the bailiff, and the home estate may be either thrown over or managed by the help of hired servants and labourers.

But alongside of these facts, testifying to a progress towards modern times, we find survivals of a more ancient order of things, quite as incompatible with manorial husbandry. Instead of performing work on the demesne, the peasantry are sometimes made to collect and furnish produce for the lord's table and his other wants. They send bread, ale, sheep, chicken, cheese, etc., sometimes to a neighbouring castle and sometimes a good way off. When we hear of the firma unius noctis, paid to the king's household by a borough or a village, we have to imagine a community standing entirely by itself and taxed to a certain tribute, without any superior land estate necessarily engrafted upon it; a home farm may or may not be close by, but its management is not dependent on the customary work of the vill (consuetudines villae), and the connexion between the two is casual. The facts of which I am speaking are certainly of rare occurrence and dying out, but they are very interesting from a historical point of view, they throw light on a condition of things preceding the manorial system, and characterised by a large over-lordship exacting tribute, and not cultivating land by help of the peasantry.

We come precisely to the same conclusion by another way. The feudal landlord is represented in the village by his demesne land, and by the servants acting as his helpers in administration. Now, the demesne land is often found intermixed with the strips of the peasantry. This seems particularly fitted for a time when the peasantry did not collect to work on a separate home farm, but simply devoted one part of the labour on their own ground to the use of the lord. What I mean is, that if a demesne consisted of, say, every fifth acre in the village fields, the teams of four virgaters composing the plough would traverse this additional acre after going over four of their own instead of being called up under the supervision of the bailiff, to do work on an independent estate. The work performed by the peasants when the demesne is still in intermixture with the village land, appears as an intermediate stage between the tribute paid by a practically self-dependent community, and the double husbandry of a manorial estate linked to a village.

Another feature of transition is perceivable in the history of the class of servants or ministers who collect and supervise the dues and services of the peasants. The feudal arrangement is quite as much characterised by the existence of these middlemen as modern life by the agreements and money dealings which have rendered it useless. In the period preceding the manorial age we see fewer officers, and their interference in the life of the community is but occasional. The gathering of tribute, the supervision of a few labour duties in addition, did not require a large staff of ministers. It was in the interest of the lord to dispense as much as possible with their costly help, and to throw what obligations there were to be performed on the community itself. It seems to me that the feudal age has preserved several traces of institutions belonging to that period of transition. The older surveys, especially the Kentish ones, show a very remarkable development of carriage duties which must have been called forth by the necessity of sending produce to the lord's central halls or courts, while the home farms were still few and small. The riding bailiffs appear in ancient documents in a position which is gradually modified as time goes on. They begin by forming a very conspicuous class among the tenants, in fact the foremost rank of the peasantry. These radmen, radulfs, rodknights, riders, are privileged people, and mostly rank with the free tenants, but they are selected from among the villagers, and very closely resemble the hundredors, whose special duties have kept up their status among the general decay. In later times, in the second half of the thirteenth century and in the fourteenth, it would be impossible to distinguish such a class of riding tenants. They exist here and there, but in most cases their place has been taken by direct dependents of the lord. Besides, as the home-farm has developed on every manor, their office has lost some of the importance it had at a time when there was a good deal of business to transact in the way of communicating between the villages and the few central courts to which rents had to be carried. And, lastly, I may remind the reader of the importance attached in some surveys to the supervision of the best tenants over the rest at the boon works. The socmen, or free tenants, or holders of full lands, as the case may be, have to ride out with rods in their hands to inspect the people cutting the corn or making hay. These customs are mostly to be found in manors with a particularly archaic constitution. They occur very often on ancient demesne. And I need hardly say that they point to a still imperfect development of the ministerial class. The village is already set to work for the lord, but it manages this work as much as possible by itself, with hardly any interference from foreign overseers.

One part of the village population is altogether outside the manorial labour intercourse between village and demesne. The freeholders may perform some labour-services, but the home-farm could never depend on them, and when such services are mentioned, they are merely considered as a supplement to the regular duties of the servile holders. At the same time, the free tenants are members of the village community, engrained in it by their participation in all the eventualities of open field life, by their holdings in the arable, by their use of the commons. This shows, again, that the manorial element is superimposed on the communal, and not the foundation of it. I shall not revert to my positive arguments in favour of the existence of ancient freehold by the side of tenements that have become freehold by exemption from servile duties. But I may be allowed to point out in this place, that negatively the appearance of free elements among the peasantry presents a most powerful check to the theory of a servile origin of the community: it throws the burden of proof on those who contend for such an origin as against the theory of a free village feudalized in process of time.

In a sense the partizans of the servile community are in the same awkward position in respect to the manorial court. Its body of suitors may have consisted to a great extent of serfs, but surely it must have contained a powerful free admixture also, because out of serfdom could hardly have arisen all the privileges and rights which make it a constitutional establishment by the side of the lord. The suitors are the judges in litigation, the conveyancing practice proceeds from the principle of communal testimony, and in matters of husbandry, custom and self-government prevail against any capricious change or unprecedented exaction. And it has to be noticed that the will and influence of the lord is much more distinct and overbearing in the documents of the later thirteenth and of the fourteenth century, than in the earlier records; one more hint, that the feudal conception of society took some time to push back older notions, which implied a greater liberty of the folk in regard to their rulers.

Whichever way we may look, one and the same observation is forced upon us: the communal organisation of the peasantry is more ancient and more deeply laid than the manorial order. Even the feudal period that has formed the immediate subject of our study shows everywhere traces of a peasant class living and working in economically self-dependent communities under the loose authority of a lord, whose claims may proceed from political sources and affect the semblance of ownership, but do not give rise to the manorial connexion between estate and village.