Mediaeval Socialism | Page 6

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 out than elsewhere--increase of trade helped to further the same development. Money, species, in greater abundance was coming into circulation. The traders were beginning to take their place in the national life. The Guilds were springing into power, and endeavouring to capture the machinery of municipal government.