72 THE MANORIAL POPULATION
England, and from ecclesiastical estates, but were forced to see
that the conditions of the north and west would not fit into their
rtheory. As a result they propounded the view that commutation
took place more easily and at an earlier date in these areas than
in the south. They also are mainly responsible for the theory that
the peasantry was considerably depressed in status after the
Conquest, and that many who were free became serfs. We are
no longer able to accept these views in their entirety, for the
researches of Professor Stenton, Mr Jolliffe and Mr Douglas
alone have made it clear that in large areas " the typical manor "
never became at all common. Professor Kosminsky writes:1
Stenton's researches have shown that in the Northern Danelaw
(East Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lin-
colnshire and Rutland) the typical manor, with serfdom and labour
dues, was never a predominating institution. Gray's well-known
work, English Field Systems (1915), revealed the existence in medieval
England of a whole variety of local field types, and thereby forces us to
consider the possibility of local variations in the structure and
organisation of rural institutions as well----Jolliffe's article further
subtracted from the area of the "typical" manor the extreme North
of England—Northumbria, which includes Lancashire, the Lothians
and the highlands of Yorkshire.
Then again there must be added the work done by Mr Douglas
in East Anglia, and in view of all this we are forced to realise the
truth of his contention*that
the social history of this epoch must no longer concern itself with
"English Society in the Eleventh Century", but rather with a
number of diverse social structures varying greatly from district to
district----Research, therefore, is tending to become more localised
in its scope, and the interest and importance of this period is that
therein the Norman government is attempting to apply a uniform
feudal theory to the whole of England. This affected materially the
upper ranks of society throughout England, but, underneath, the
peasant substructure in each district long remained substantially
unchanged; and only slowly and imperfectly was it made to conform
to the new order.2
Our knowledge, therefore, of conditions on the land between
the time of the Conquest and the early thirteenth century is still
very fragmentary, and it would be rash to venture any wide
1 Econ. Hist. Rev. vol. v, No. 2, p. 28.
2 Feudal Documents, xviii, and cf. cbcviii.