Mediaeval Socialism | Page 6

of society by the idea of Tenure. For,
through all Western civilisation, from the seventh century to the
fourteenth, the personal equation was largely merged in the territorial.
One and all, master and man, lord and tenant, were "tied to the soil."
Within the manor there was first the land held in demesne, the
"in-land"--this was the perquisite of the lord himself; it was farmed by
him directly. Only when modern methods began to push out the old
feudal concepts do we find this portion of the estate regularly let out to
tenants, though there are evidences of its occasionally having been

done even in the twelfth century. But besides what belonged thus
exclusively to the lord of the manor, there was a great deal more that
was legally described as held in villeinage. That is to say, it was in the
hands of others, who had conditional use of it. In England these tenants
were chiefly of three kinds--the villeins, the cottiers, the serfs. The first
held a house and yard in the village street, and had in the great arable
fields that surrounded them strips of land amounting sometimes to
thirty acres. To their lord they owed work for three days each week;
they also provided oxen for the plough. But more than half of their time
could be devoted to the farming of their property. Then next in order
came the cottiers, whose holding probably ran to not more than five
acres. They had no plough-work, and did more of the manual labour of
the farm, such as hedging, nut-collecting, &c. A much greater portion
of their time than was the case with the villeins was at the disposal of
their master, nor indeed, owing to the lesser extent of their property,
did they need so much opportunity for working their own land. Lowest
in the scale of all (according to the Domesday Book of William I, the
first great land-value survey of all England, they numbered not more
than sixteen per cent. of the whole population) came the slaves or serfs.
These had almost exclusively the live stock to look after, being
engaged as foresters, shepherds, swineherds, and servants of the
household. They either lived under the lord's own roof, or might even
have their cottage in the village with its strip of land about it, sufficient,
with the provisions and cloth provided them, to eke out a scanty
livelihood. Distinct from these three classes and their officials (bailiffs,
seneschals, reeves, &c.) were the free tenants, who did no regular work
for the manor, but could not leave or part with their land. Their services
were requisitioned at certain periods like harvest-time, when there
came a demand for more than the ordinary number of hands. This sort
of labour was known as boon-work.
It is clear at once that, theoretically at least, there was no room in such
a community for the modern landless labourer. Where all the workers
were paid by their tenancy of land, where, in other words, fixity and
stability of possession were the very basis of social life, the fluidity of
labour was impossible. Men could not wander from place to place
offering to employers the hire of their toil. Yet we feel sure that, in

actual fact, wherever the population increased, there must have grown
up in the process of time a number of persons who could find neither
work nor maintenance on their father's property. Younger sons, or more
remote descendants, must gradually have found that there was no scope
for them, unless, like an artisan class, they worked for wages. Exactly
at what date began the rise of this agricultural and industrial class of fee
labourers we cannot very clearly tell. But in England--and probably the
same holds good elsewhere--between 1200 and 1350 there are traces of
its great development. There is evidence, which each year becomes
more ample and more definite, that during that period there was an
increasingly large number of people pressing on the means of
subsistence. Though the land itself might be capable of supporting a far
greater number of inhabitants, the part under cultivation could only just
have been enough to keep the actually existing population from the
margin of destitution. The statutes in English law which protest against
a wholesale occupation of the common-land by individuals were not
directed merely against the practices of a landlord class, for the makers
of the law were themselves landlords. It is far more likely that this
invasion of village rights was due to the action of these "landless men,"
who could not otherwise be accommodated. The superfluous
population was endeavouring to find for itself local maintenance.
Precisely at this time, too, in England--where the steps in the evolution
from mediaeval to modern conditions have been more clearly worked