A Short History of English Agriculture | Page 4

population of
some of the villages at the time of the Norman Conquest was numerous,
100 households or 500 people; but the average townships contained
from 10 to 20 households.[13] There was also the single farm, such as
that at Eardisley in Herefordshire, described in Domesday, lying in the
middle of a forest, perhaps, as in other similar cases, a pioneer
settlement of some one more adventurous than his fellows.[14]
* * * * *
Such was the early village community in England, a community of free
landholders. But a change began early to come over it.[15] The king
would grant to a church all the rights he had in the village, reserving
only the trinoda necessitas, these rights including the feorm or farm, or
provender rent which the king derived from the land--of cattle, sheep,
swine, ale, honey, &c.--which he collected by visiting his villages, thus
literally eating his rents. The churchmen did not continue these visits,
they remained in their monasteries, and had the feorm brought them
regularly; they had an overseer in the village to see to this, and so they
tightened their hold on the village. Then the smaller people, the

peasants, make gifts to the Church. They give their land, but they also
want to keep it, for it is their livelihood; so they surrender the land and
take it back as a lifelong loan. Probably on the death of the donor his
heirs are suffered to hold the land. Then labour services are substituted
for the old provender rents, and thus the Church acquires a demesne,
and thus the foundations of the manorial system, still to be traced all
over the country, were laid. Thegns, the predecessors of the Norman
barons, become the recipients of grants from the churches and from
kings, and householders 'commend' themselves and their land to them
also, so that they acquired demesnes. This 'commendation' was
furthered by the fact that during the long-drawn out conquest of Britain
the old kindred groups of the English lost their corporate sense, and the
central power being too weak to protect the ordinary householder, who
could not stand alone, he had to seek the protection of an ecclesiastical
corporation or of some thegn, first for himself and then for his land.
The jurisdictional rights of the king also passed to the lord, whether
church or thegn; then came the danegeld, the tax for buying off the
Danes that subsequently became a fixed land tax, which was collected
from the lord, as the peasants were too poor for the State to deal with
them; the lord paid the geld for their land, consequently their land was
his. In this way the free ceorl of Anglo-Saxon times gradually becomes
the 'villanus' of Domesday. Landlordship was well established in the
two centuries before the Conquest, and the land of England more or
less 'carved into territorial lordships'.[16] Therefore when the Normans
brought their wonderful genius for organization to this country they
found the material conditions of manorial life in full growth; it was
their task to develop its legal and economic side.[17]
As the manorial system thus superimposed upon the village community
was the basis of English rural economy for centuries, there need be no
apology for describing it at some length.
The term 'manor', which came in with the Conquest,[18] has a technical
meaning in Domesday, referring to the system of taxation, and did not
always coincide with the vill or village, though it commonly did so,
except in the eastern portion of England. The village was the agrarian
unit, the manor the fiscal unit; so that where the manor comprised more

than one village, as was frequently the case, there would be more than
one village organization for working the common fields.[19]
The manor then was the 'constitutive cell' of English mediaeval
society.[20] The structure is always the same; under the headship of the
lord we find two layers of population, the villeins and the freeholders;
and the territory is divided into demesne land and tributary land of two
classes, viz. that of the villeins and that of the freeholders. The
cultivation of the demesne (which usually means the land directly
occupied and cultivated by the lord, though legally it has a wider
meaning and includes the villein tenements), depends to a certain
extent on the work supplied by the tenants of the tributary land. Rents
are collected, labour superintended, administrative business transacted
by a set of manorial officers.
We may divide the tillers of the soil at the time of Domesday into five
great classes[21] in order of dignity and freedom:
1. Liberi homines, or freemen. 2. Socmen. 3. Villeins. 4. Bordarii,
cotarii, buri or coliberti. 5. Slaves.
The two first of these classes were to be found in large numbers in
Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire,