The Local Government 109
And, as already shown, the peasants constituted the
manor court; they judged. The steward was not judge,
he only presided. Such an organisation plus a system of
tenures and services fixed in manorial custom, which as
early as the twelfth century began to be embodied in
writing in the manorial rolls, bespeak a peasantry that
even on their unfree side, their relations with their lords,
were not wholly unfree.
But the manor had not obliterated the vill or township,
even where the two coincided. The organisation, if it
may be called such, of the vill is very obscure; but it
was the administrative and police unit for any authority
higher up, even to the king. It was used in assessing and
collecting taxes, in the care of roads, oversight of vaga-
bonds, and, most important, the whole nexus of obliga-
tions comprised now under the term frankpledge.x From
where we left tithing and collective pledge late in Cnute's
reign2 to their reappearance early in Henry L's, their
history is almost wholly lost. But the decisive thing had
happened: the two obligations had been made equally
compulsory and the institutions welded together, and
undoubtedly after 1066. Dangers arising from Anglo-
Saxon hostility to Normans, frequent manslaughter, a
king strong enough to use any materials at hand, and
keen-sighted enough to know and appraise the novel and
obscure local customs of his new kingdom—these things
wrought the last great development in the frankpledge*
Now, except in a fringe of border counties, the whole
body of peasantry and some of the freeholders were
bound together in tithings, without choice of pledges or
associates, and were not only forced to pursue supposed
criminals, but bound to produce at court anyone of their
number who might be charged with one of the more
serious crimes; and along with these main duties minor
1 The manor "consisted, as a rule, of a village community with wide
though peculiar self-government and of a manorial administration^ super-
imposed on it, influencing and modifying the life of the community but
not creating it." Vinogradoff, op. cit., 473.
2 See above, pp. 67-69.