Kitabı oku: «Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History», sayfa 9

CHAPTER V.
THE SERVILE PEASANTRY OF MANORIAL RECORDS

Manorial documents.

It would be as wrong to restrict the study of villainage to legal documents as to disregard them. The jurisprudence and practice of the king's courts present a one-sided, though a very important view of the subject, but it must be supplemented and verified by an investigation of manorial records. With one class of such documents we have had already to deal, namely with the rolls of manorial courts, which form as it were the stepping-stone between local arrangements and the general theories of Common Law. So-called manorial 'extents' and royal inquisitions based on them lead us one step further; they were intended to describe the matter-of-fact conditions of actual life, the distribution of holdings, the amount and nature of services, the personal divisions of the peasantry; their evidence is not open to the objection of having been artificially treated for legal purposes. Treatises on farming and instructions to manorial officers reflect the economic side of the system, and an enormous number of accounts of expenditure and receipts would enable the modern searcher, if so minded, to enter even into the detail of agricultural management²⁴⁸. We need not undertake this last inquiry, but some comparison between the views of lawyers and the actual facts of manorial administration must be attempted. Writers on Common Law invite one to the task by recognising a great variety of local customs; Bracton, for instance, mentioning two notable deviations from general rules in the department of law under discussion. In Cornwall the children of a villain and of a free woman were not all unfree, but some followed the father and others the mother²⁴⁹. In Herefordshire the master was not bound to produce his serfs to answer criminal charges²⁵⁰. If such customs were sufficiently strong to counteract the influence of general rules of Common Law, the vitality of local distinctions was even more felt in those cases where they had no rules to break through. It may be even asked at the very outset of the inquiry whether there is not a danger of our being distracted by endless details. I hope that the following pages will show how the varieties naturally fall into certain classes and converge towards a few definite positions, which appear the more important as they were not produced by artificial arrangement from above. We must be careful however, and distinguish between isolated facts and widely-spread conditions. Another possible objection to the method of our study may be also noticed here, as it is connected with the same difficulty. Suppose we get in one case the explanation of a custom or institution which recurs in many other cases; are we entitled to generalise our explanation? This seems methodically sound as long as the contrary cannot be established, for the plain reason that the variety of local facts is a variety of combinations and of effects, not of constitutive elements and of causes. The agents of development are not many, though their joint work shades off into a great number of variations. We may be pretty sure that a result repeated several times has been effected by the same factors in the same way; and if in some instances these factors appear manifestly, there is every reason to suppose them to have existed in all the cases. Such reflections are never convincing by themselves, however, and the best thing to test them will be to proceed from these broad statements to an inquiry into the particulars of the case.

Terminological classification.

The study of manorial evidence must start from a discussion as to terminology. The names of the peasantry will show the natural subdivisions of the class. If we look only to the unfree villagers, we shall notice that all the varieties of denomination can easily be arranged into four classes: one of these classes has in view social standing, another economic condition, a third starts from a difference of services, and a fourth from a difference of holdings. The line may not be drawn sharply between the several divisions, but the general contrast cannot be mistaken.

Terms to indicate social standing.

The term of most common occurrence is, of course, villanus. Although its etymology points primarily to the place of dwelling, and indirectly to specific occupations, it is chiefly used during the feudal period to denote servitude. It takes in both the man who is personally unfree and stands in complete subjection to the lord, and the free person settled on servile land. Both classes mentioned and distinguished by Bracton are covered by it. The common opposition is between villanus and libere tenens, not between villanus and liber homo. It is not difficult to explain such a phraseology in books compiled either in the immediate interest of the lords or under their indirect influence, but it must have necessarily led to encroachments and disputes: it has even become a snare for later investigators, who have sometimes been led to consider as one compact mass a population consisting of two different classes, each with a separate history of its own. The Latin 'rusticus' is applied in the same general way. It is less technical however, and occurs chiefly in annals and other literary productions, for which it was better suited by its classical derivation. But when it is used in opposition to other terms, it stands exactly as villanus, that is to say, it is contrasted with libere tenens²⁵¹.

Villains personally unfree.

The fundamental distinction of personal status has left some traces in terminology. The Hundred Rolls, especially the Warwickshire one²⁵², mention servi very often. Sometimes the word is used exactly as villanus would be²⁵³. Tenere in servitute and tenere in villenagio are equivalent²⁵⁴. But other instances show that servus has also a special meaning. Cases where it occurs in an 'extent' immediately after villanus, and possibly in opposition to it, are not decisive²⁵⁵. They may be explained by the fact that the persons engaged in drawing up a custumal, jotted down denominations of the peasantry without comparing them carefully with what preceded. A marginal note servi would not be necessarily opposed to a villani following it; it may only be a different name for the same thing. And it may be noted that in the Hundred Rolls these names very often stand in the margin, and not in the text. But such an explanation would be out of place when both expressions are used in the same sentence. The description of Ipsden in Oxfordshire has the following passage: item dictus R. de N. habet de proparte sua septem servos villanos. (Rot. Hundr. ii. 781, b: cf. 775, b, Servi Custumarii.) It is clear that it was intended, not only to describe the general condition of the peasantry, but to define more particularly their status. This observation and the general meaning of the word will lead us to believe that in many cases when it is used by itself, it implies personal subjection.

The term nativus has a similar sense. But the relation between it and villanus is not constant; sometimes this latter marks the genus, while the former applies to a species; but sometimes they are used interchangeably²⁵⁶, and the feminine for villain is nieve (nativa). But while villanus is made to appear both in a wide and in a restricted sense, and for this reason cannot be used as a special qualification, nativus has only the restricted sense suggesting status²⁵⁷. In connection with other denominations nativus is used for the personally unfree²⁵⁸. When we find nativus domini, the personal relation to the lord is especially noticed²⁵⁹. The sense being such, no wonder that the nature of the tenure is sometimes described in addition²⁶⁰. Of course, the primary meaning is, that a person has been born in the power of the lord, and in this sense it is opposed to the stranger—forinsecus, extraneus²⁶¹. In this sense again the Domesday of St. Paul's speaks of 'nativi a principio' in Navestock²⁶². But the fact of being born to the condition supposes personal subjection, and this explains why nativi are sometimes mentioned in contrast with freemen²⁶³, without any regard being paid to the question of tenure. Natives, or villains born, had their pedigrees as well as the most noble among the peers. Such pedigrees were drawn up to prevent any fraudulent assertion as to freedom, and to guide the lord in case he wanted to use the native's kin in prosecution of an action de nativo habendo. One such pedigree preserved in the Record Office is especially interesting, because it starts from some stranger, extraneus²⁶⁴, who came into the manor as a freeman, and whose progeny lapses into personal villainage; apparently it is a case of villainage by prescription.

Free men holding villain land.

The other subdivision of the class—freemen holding unfree land²⁶⁵—has no special denomination. This deprives us of a very important clue as to the composition of the peasantry, but we may gather from the fact how very near both divisions must have stood to each other in actual life. The free man holding in villainage had the right to go away, while the native was legally bound to the lord; but it was difficult for the one to leave land and homestead, and it was not impossible for the other to fly from them, if he were ill-treated by his lord or the steward. Even the fundamental distinction could not be drawn very sharply in the practice of daily life, and in every other respect, as to services, mode of holding, etc., there was no distinction. No wonder that the common term villanus is used quite broadly, and aims at the tenure more than at personal status.

Terms to indicate economic condition.

Terms which have in view the general economic condition of the peasant, vary a good deal according to localities. Even in private documents they are on the whole less frequent than the terms of the first class, and the Hundred Rolls use them but very rarely. It would be very wrong to imply that they were not widely spread in practice. On the contrary, their vernacular forms vouch for their vitality and their use in common speech. But being vernacular and popular in origin, these terms cannot obtain the uniformity and currency of literary names employed and recognised by official authority. The vernacular equivalent for villanus seems to have been niet or neat²⁶⁶. It points to the regular cultivators of the arable, possessed of holdings of normal size and performing the typical services of the manor²⁶⁷. The peasant's condition is here regarded from the economical side, in the mutual relation of tenure and work, not in the strictly legal sense, and men of this category form the main stock of the manorial population. The Rochester Custumal says²⁶⁸ that neats are more free than cottagers, and that they hold virgates. The superior degree of freedom thus ascribed to them is certainly not to be taken in the legal sense, but is merely a superiority in material condition. The contrast with cottagers is a standing one²⁶⁹, and, being the main population of the village, neats are treated sometimes as if they were the only people there²⁷⁰. The name may be explained etymologically by the Anglo-Saxon geneat, which in documents of the tenth and eleventh century means a man using another person's land. The differences in application may be discussed when we come to examine the Saxon evidence.

Another Saxon term—gebúr—has left its trace in the burus and buriman of Norman records. The word does not occur very often, and seems to have been applied in two different ways—to the chief villains of the township in some places, and to the smaller tenantry, apparently in confusion with the Norman bordarius, in some other²⁷¹. The very possibility of such a confusion shows that it was going out of common use. On the other hand, the Danish equivalent bondus is widely spread. It is to be found constantly in the Danish counties²⁷². The original meaning is that of cultivator or 'husband'—the same in fact as that of gebúr and boor. Feudal records give curious testimony of the way in which the word slid down into the 'bondage' of the present day. We see it wavering, as it were, sometimes exchanging with servus and villanus, and sometimes opposed to them²⁷³. Another word of kindred meaning, chiefly found in eastern districts, is landsettus, with the corresponding term for the tenure²⁷⁴; this of course according to its etymology simply means an occupier, a man sitting on land.

Terms to indicate the nature of services.

Several terms are found which have regard to the nature of services. Agricultural work was the most common and burdensome expression of economical subjection. Peasants who have to perform such services in kind instead of paying rents for them are called operarii²⁷⁵. Another designation which may be found everywhere is consuetudinarii or custumarii²⁷⁶. It points to customary services, which the people were bound to perform. When such tenants are opposed to the villains, they are probably free men holding in villainage by customary work²⁷⁷. As the name does not give any indication as to the importance of the holding a qualification is sometimes added to it, which determines the size of the tenement²⁷⁸.

In many manors we find a group of tenants, possessed of small plots of land for the service of following the demesne ploughs. These are called akermanni or carucarii²⁷⁹, are mostly selected among the customary holders, and enjoy an immunity from ordinary work as long as they have to perform their special duty²⁸⁰. On some occasions the records mention gersumarii, that is peasants who pay a gersuma, a fine for marrying their daughters²⁸¹. This payment being considered as the badge of personal serfdom, the class must have consisted of men personally unfree.

Terms to indicate the size of the holding.

Those names remain to be noticed which reflect the size of the holding. In one of the manors belonging to St. Paul's Cathedral in London we find hidarii²⁸². This does not mean that every tenant held a whole hide. On the contrary, they have each only a part of the hide, but their plots are reckoned up into hides, and the services due from the whole hide are stated. Virgatarius²⁸³ is of very common occurrence, because the virgate was considered as the normal holding of a peasant. It is curious that in consequence the virgate is sometimes called simply terra, and holders of virgates—yerdlings²⁸⁴. Peasants possessed of half virgates are halfyerdlings accordingly. The expressions 'a full villain²⁸⁵' and 'half a villain' must be understood in the same sense. They have nothing to do with rank, but aim merely at the size of the farm and the quantity of services and rents. Ferlingseti are to be met with now and then in connexion with the ferling or ferdel, the fourth part of a virgate²⁸⁶.

The constant denomination for those who have no part in the common arable fields, but hold only crofts or small plots with their homesteads, is 'cotters' (cotsetle, cottagiarii, cottarii²⁸⁷, etc.). They get opposed to villains as to owners of normal holdings²⁸⁸. Exceptionally the term is used for those who have very small holdings in the open fields. In this case the authorities distinguish between greater and lesser cotters²⁸⁹, between the owners of a 'full cote' and of 'half a cote²⁹⁰.' The bordarii, so conspicuous in Domesday, and evidently representing small tenants of the same kind as the cottagers, disappear almost entirely in later times²⁹¹.

Results as to terminology.

We may start from this last observation in our general estimate of the terminology. One might expect to find traces of very strong French influence in this respect, if in any. Even if the tradition of facts had not been interrupted by the Conquest, names were likely to be altered for the convenience of the new upper class. And the Domesday Survey really begins a new epoch in terminology by its use of villani and bordarii. But, curiously enough, only the first of these terms takes root on English soil. Now it is not a word transplanted by the Conquest; it was in use before the Conquest as the Latin equivalent of ceorl, geneat, and probably gebúr. Its success in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is a success of Latin, and not of French, of the half-literary record language over conversational idioms, and not of foreign over vernacular notions. The peculiarly French 'bordier,' on the other hand, gets misunderstood and eliminated. Looking to Saxon and Danish terms, we find that they hold their ground tenaciously enough; but still the one most prevalent before the Conquest—ceorl—disappears entirely, and all the others taken together cannot balance the diffusion of the 'villains.' The disappearance of ceorl may be accounted for by the important fact that it was primarily the designation of a free man, and had not quite lost this sense even in the time immediately before the Conquest. The spread of the Latin term is characteristic enough in any case. It is well in keeping with a historical development which, though it cannot be reduced to an importation of foreign manners, was by no means a mere sequel to Saxon history²⁹². A new turn had been given towards centralisation and organisation from above, and villanus, the Latin record term, illustrates very aptly the remodelling of the lower stratum of society by the influence of the curiously centralised English feudalism.

The position of the peasantry gets considered chiefly from the point of view of the lord's interests, and the classification on the basis of services comes naturally to the fore. The distribution of holdings is also noticed, because services and rents are arranged according to them. But the most important fact remains, that the whole system, though admitting theoretically the difference between personal freedom and personal subjection, works itself out into uniformity on the ground of unfree tenure. Freemen holding in villainage and born villains get mixed up under the same names. The fact has its two sides. On the one hand it detracts from the original rights of free origin, on the other it strengthens the element of order and legality in the relations between lord and peasant. The peasants are custumarii at the worst—they work by custom, even if custom is regulated by the lord's power. In any case, even a mere analysis of terminological distinctions leads to the conclusion that the simplicity and rigidity of legal contrasts was largely modified by the influence of historical tradition and practical life.

Rights of the lord.

Classification.

Our next object must be to see in what shape the rights of the lord are presented by manorial documents. All expressions of his power may be considered under three different heads, as connected with one of the three fundamental aspects of the manorial relation. There were customs and services clearly derived from the personal subjection of the villain, which had its historical root in slavery. Some burdens again lay on the land, and not on the person. And finally, manorial exactions could grow from the political sway conferred by feudal lordship. It may be difficult to distinguish in the concrete between these several relations, and the constant tendency in practice must have been undoubtedly directed towards mixing up the separate threads of subjection. Still, a general survey of manorial rights has undoubtedly to start from these fundamental distinctions.

Sale of villains.

There has been some debate on the question whether the lord could sell his villains. It has been urged that we have no traces of such transactions during the feudal period, and that therefore personal serfdom did not exist even in law²⁹³. It can be pointed out, on the other side, that deeds of sale conveying villains apart from their tenements, although rare, actually exist. The usual form of enfranchisement was a deed of sale, and it cannot be argued that this treatment of manumission is a mere relic of former times, because both the Frank and the Saxon manumissions of the preceding period assume a different shape; they are not effected by sale. The existing evidence entitles one to maintain that a villain could be lawfully sold, with all his family, his sequela, but that in practice such transactions were uncommon²⁹⁴. The fact is a most important one in itself; the whole aspect of society and of its work would have been different if the workman had been a saleable commodity passing easily from hand to hand. Nothing of the kind is to be noticed in the medieval system. There is no slave market, and no slave trade, nothing to be compared with what took place in the slave states of North America, or even to the restricted traffic in Russia before the emancipation. The reason is a curious one, and forcibly suggested by a comparison between the cases when such trade comes into being, and those when it does not. The essential condition for commercial transfer is a protected market, and such a market existed more or less in every case when men could be bought and sold. An organised state of some kind, however slightly built, is necessary as a shelter for such transfer. The feudal system proved more deficient in this respect than very raw forms of early society, which make up for deficiencies in State protection by the facilities of acquiring slaves and punishing them. The landowner had enough political independence to prevent the State from exercising an efficient control over the dependent population, and for this very reason he had to rely on his own force and influence to keep those dependents under his sway. Personal dependence was locally limited, and not politically general, if one may use the expression. It was easy for the villain to step out of the precincts of bondage; it was all but impossible for the lord to treat his man as a transferable chattel. The whole relation got to be regulated more by internal conditions than by external pressure, by a customary modus vivendi, and not by commercial and state-protected competition. This explains why in some cases political progress meant a temporary change for the worse, as in some parts of Germany and in Russia: the State brought its extended influence to bear in favour of dependence, and rendered commercial transactions possible by its protection. In most cases, however, the influence of moral, economical, and political conceptions made itself felt in the direction of freedom, and we have seen already that in England legal doctrine created a powerful check on the development of servitude by protecting the actual possession of liberty, and throwing the burden of proof in questions of status on the side contending against such liberty.

Merchet.

But not all the consequences of personal servitude could be removed in the same way by the conditions of actual life. Of all manorial exactions the most odious was incontestably the merchetum, a fine paid by the villain for marrying his daughter²⁹⁵. It was considered as a note of servile descent, and the man free by blood was supposed to be always exempted from it, however debased his position in every other respect. Our authorities often allude to this payment by the energetic expression 'buying one's blood' (servus de sanguine suo emendo). It seems at first sight that one may safely take hold of this distinction in order to trace the difference between the two component parts of the villain class. In the status of the socman, developed from the law of Saxon free-men, there was usually nothing of the kind. The maritagium of military tenure of course has nothing in common with it, being paid only by the heiress of a fee, and resulting from the control of the military lord over the land of his retainer. The merchetum must be paid for every one of the daughters, and even the granddaughters of a villain; it had nothing to do with succession, and sprang from personal subjection.

When the bride married out of the power of the lord a new element was brought to bear on the case: the lord was entitled to a special compensation for the loss of a subject and of her progeny²⁹⁶. When the case is mentioned in manorial documents, the fine gets heightened accordingly, and sometimes it is even expressly stated that an arbitrary payment will be exacted. The fine for incontinence naturally connects itself with the merchet, and a Glastonbury manorial instruction enjoins the Courts to present such cases to the bailiffs; the lord loses his merchet from women who go wrong and do not get married²⁹⁷.

Origin and modifications of merchet.

Such is the merchet of our extents and Court rolls. As I said, it has great importance from the point of view of social history. Still it would be wrong to consider it as an unfailing test of status. Although it is often treated expressly as a note of serfdom²⁹⁸, some facts point to the conclusion that its history is a complex one. In the first place this merchet fine occurs in the extents sporadically as it were. The Hundred Rolls, for instance, mention it almost always in Buckinghamshire, and in some hundreds of Cambridgeshire. In other hundreds of this last county it is not mentioned. However much we lay to the account of casual omissions of the compilers, they are not sufficient to explain the general contrast. It would be preposterous to infer that in the localities first mentioned the peasants were one and all descended from slaves, and that in those other localities they were one and all personally free. And so we are driven to the inference, that different customs prevailed in this respect in places immediately adjoining each other, and that not all the feudal serfs descended from Saxon slaves paid merchet.

If, on the one hand, not all the serfs paid merchet, on the other there is sufficient evidence to show that it was paid in some cases by free people. A payment of this kind was exacted sometimes from free men in villainage, and even from socage tenants. I shall have to speak of this when treating of the free peasantry; I advert to the fact now in order to show that the most characteristic test of personal servitude does not cover the whole ground occupied by the class, and at the same time spreads outside of its boundary.

This observation leads us to several others which are not devoid of importance. As soon as the notion arose that personal servitude was implied by the payment of merchet,—as soon as such a notion got sanctioned by legal theory, the fine was extended in practice to cases where it did not apply originally. We have direct testimony to the effect that feudal lords introduced it on their lands in places where it had never been paid²⁹⁹, and one cannot help thinking that such administrative acts as the survey of 1279-1280, the survey represented by the Hundred Rolls, materially helped such encroachments. The juries made their presentments in respect of large masses of peasantry, under the preponderating influence of the gentry and without much chance for the verification of particular instances. The description was not false as a whole, but it was apt to throw different things into the same mould, and to do it in the interest of landed proprietors. Again, the variety of conditions in which we come across the merchet, leads us to suppose that this term was extended through the medium of legal theory to payments which differed from each other in their very essence: the commutation of the 'jus primae noctis,' the compensation paid to the lord for the loss of his bondwoman leaving the manor, and the fine for marriage to be levied by the township or the hundred, were all thrown together. Last, but not least, the vague application of this most definite of social tests corroborates what has been already inferred from terminology, namely, that the chief stress was laid in all these relations, not on legal, but on economic distinctions. The stratification of the class and the determination of the lord's rights both show traits of legal status, but these traits lose in importance in comparison with other features that have no legal meaning, or else they spread over groups and relations which come from different quarters and get bound up together only through economic conditions.

Servile customs.

The same observations hold good in regard to other customs which come to be considered as implying personal servitude³⁰⁰. Merchet was the most striking consequence of unfreedom, but manorial documents are wont to connect it with several others. It is a common thing to say that a villain by birth cannot marry his daughter without paying a fine, or permit his son to take holy orders, or sell his calf or horse, that he is bound to serve as a reeve, and that his youngest son succeeds to the holding after his death³⁰¹. This would be a more or less complete enumeration, and I need not say that in particular cases sometimes one and sometimes another item gets omitted. The various pieces do not fit well together: the prohibition against selling animals is connected with disabilities as to property, and not derived directly from the personal tie³⁰²; as for the rule of succession, it testifies merely to the fact that the so-called custom of Borough English was most widely spread among the unfree class. The obligation of serving as a reeve or in any other capacity is certainly derived from the power of a lord over the person of his subject; he had it always at his discretion to take his man away from the field, and to employ him at pleasure in his service. Lastly, the provision that the villain may not allow his son to receive holy orders stands on the same level as the provision that he may not give his daughter in marriage outside the manor: either of these prohibited transactions would have involved the loss of a subject.

Control over the movements of the peasantry.

We must place in the same category all measures intended to prevent directly or indirectly the passage of the peasantry from one place to the other. The instructions issued for the management of the Abbot of Gloucester's estates absolutely forbid the practice of leaving the lord's land without leave³⁰³. Still, emigration from the manor could not be entirely stopped; from time to time the inhabitants wandered away in order to look out for field-work elsewhere, or to take up some craft or trade. In this case they had to pay a kind of poll-tax (chevagium), which was, strictly speaking, not rent: very often it was very insignificant in amount, and was replaced by a trifling payment in kind, for instance, by the obligation to bring a capon once a year³⁰⁴. The object was not so much to get money as to retain some hold over the villain after he had succeeded in escaping from the lord's immediate sway. There are no traces of a systematic attempt to tax and ransom the work of dependents who have left the lord's territory—nothing to match the thorough subjection in which they were held while in the manor. And thus the lord was forced in his own interest to accept nominal payments, to concentrate his whole attention on the subjects under his direct control, and to prevent them as far as possible from moving and leaving the land. In regulations for the management of estates we often find several paragraphs which have this object in view. Sometimes the younger men get leave to work outside the lord's possessions, but only while their father remains at home and occupies a holding. Sometimes, again, the licence is granted under the condition that the villain will remain in one of his lord's tithings³⁰⁵, an obligation which could be fulfilled only if the peasant remained within easy reach of his birth-place. Special care is taken not to allow the villains to buy free land in order to claim their freedom on the strength of such free possession³⁰⁶. Every kind of personal commendation to influential people is also forbidden³⁰⁷.