io8 The Norman Conquest

size, compactness, and freedom from control. But when
these greatest of private powers after the Conquest are
compared with the houses of Godwin or Leofric in Ed-
ward's time, the contrast is sufficiently striking.

2. Manor, Vill, and Tithing—Administrative and
Police Obligations.—Besides its court, the manor had
other features of a governmental or semi-governmental
character. In this period it is impossible to draw the line
sharply between what may be considered technically a
part of government, whether in public or private hands,
and what was not. Duties and responsibilities shaded
off from what was clearly governmental into what had to
do with private affairs and economic relations. But it
cannot be too much emphasised that one must not over-
look these humble matters if he is to know the capacity
and training of some seventy per-cent of the English
population and their fitness for greater things. The lord
of the manor was no absolute monarch in his little domain
whatever theoretical rights and economic advantages he
may have had. Among those who helped in his admin-
istration were many of the villeins themselves, and he and
his more personal officers were always restrained by man-
orial custom, His

staff comprised the stewards and seneschals who had to act as
overseers of the whole, to preside in the manorial courts, to
keep accounts, to represent the lord on all occasions; the
reeves who, though chosen by the villagers, acted as a kind of
middlemen between them and the lord and had to take the
lead in the organisation of all the rural services; the beadles
and radknights or radmen who had to serve summonses and
to carry orders; the various warders, such as the hayward,
who had to superintend hedges, the woodward for pastures
and wood, the sower and the thresher; the graves of moors and
dykes who had to look after canals, ditches, and drainage; the
ploughmen and herdsmen, employed for the use of the domanial
plough-teams and herds.1
1 Vinogradoff in Cambridge Medieval History; in., 481.