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'
THREE ESSAYS
IN THE
EARLY HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
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DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND
THKEE ESSAYS
IN THE
EAELY HISTORY OF ENGLAND
BY
FREDERIC WILLIAM MAITLAND, LL.D.
FORMERLY DOWNING PBOFESSOB OP THE LAWS OF ENGLAND
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE,
OF LINCOLN'S INN, BARRISTEB-AT-LAW.
CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1907
First Edition 1897.
Reprinted 1907.
PREFACE.
THE greater part of what is in this book was written in
order that it might be included in the History of English
Law before the Time of Edward I. which was published by Sir
Frederick Pollock and me in the year 1895. Divers reasons
dictated a change of plan. Of one only need I speak. I knew
that Mr Round was on the eve of giving to the world his
Feudal England, and that thereby he would teach me and
others many new lessons about the scheme and meaning of
Domesday Book. That I was well advised in waiting will be
evident to everyone who has studied his work. In its light
I have suppressed, corrected, added much. The delay has also
enabled me to profit by Dr Meitzen's Siedelung und Agrarwesen
der Germanen 1 , a book which will assuredly leave a deep mark
upon all our theories of old English history.
The title under which I here collect my three Essays is
chosen for the purpose of indicating that I have followed that
retrogressive method ' from the known to the unknown,' of
which Mr Seebohm is the apostle. Domesday Book appears
to me, not indeed as the known, but as the knowable. The
Beyond is still very dark : but the way to it lies through the
Norman record. A result is given to us : the problem is to
find cause and process. That in some sort I have been en-
deavouring to answer Mr Seebohm, I can not conceal from
myself or from others. A hearty admiration of his English
1 Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Westgermanen und Ostgermanen, der Kelten,
Eomer, Fiunen und Slawen, von August Meitzen, Berlin, 1895.
vi Preface.
Village Community is one main source of this book. That the
task of disputing his conclusions might have fallen to stronger
hands than mine I well know. I had hoped that by this time
Prof. Vinogradoff's Villainage in England would have had a
sequel. When that sequel comes (and may it come soon) my
provisional answer can be forgotten. One who by a few strokes
of his pen has deprived the English nation of its land, its
folk-land, owes us some reparation. I have been trying to
show how we can best bear the loss, and abandon as little as
may be of what we learnt from Dr Konrad von Maurer and
Dr Stubbs.
For my hastily compiled Domesday Statistics I have apo-
logized in the proper place. Here I will only add that I had
but one long vacation to give to a piece of work that would
have been better performed had it been spread over many years.
Mr Corbett, of King's College, has already shown me how by
a little more patience and ingenuity I might have obtained
some rounder and therefore more significant figures. But of
this it is for him to speak.
Among the friends whom I wish to thank for their advice
and assistance I am more especially grateful to Mr Herbert
Fisher, of New College, who has borne the tedious labour of
reading all my sheets, and to Mr W. H. Stevenson, of Exeter
College, whose unrivalled knowledge of English diplomatics
has been generously placed at my service.
F. W. M.
20 January, 1897.
CONTENTS,
PAGE
PREFACE *. v
TABLE OF CONTEXTS ....... vii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xiv
ESSAY I.
DOMESDAY BOOK.
Domesday Book and its satellites, 1. Domesday and legal history, 2.
Domesday a geld book,. 3. The danegeld, 3. The inquest and the geld
system, 5. Importance of the geld, 7. Unstable terminology of the
record, 8. The legal ideas of century xi. 9.
1. Plan of the Survey, pp. 9 26.
The geographical basis, 9. The vill as the unit, 10. Modern and
ancient vills, 12. Omission of vills, 13. Fission of vills, 14. The
nucleated village and the vill of scattered steads, 15. Illustration by
maps, 16. Size of the vill, 17. Population of the vill, 19. Contrasts
between east and west, 20. Small vills, 20. Importance of the east, 21.
Manorial and non-manorial vills, 22. Distribution of free men and
serfs, 23. The classification of men, 23. The classes of men and the
geld system, 24. Our course, 25.
2. The Serfs, pp. 2636.
The servus of Domesday, 26. Legal position of the serf, 27. Degrees
of serfdom, 27. Predial element in serfdom, 28. The serf and criminal
law, 29. Serf and villein, 30. The serf of the Leges, 30. Return to
the servus of Domesday, 33. Disappearance of servi, 35.
3. The Villeins, pp. 3666.
The boors or coliberts, 36. The continental colibert, 37. The
English boor, 37. Villani, bordarii, cotarii, 38. The villein's tenement,
40. Villeins and cottiers, 41. Freedom and unfreedom of the villani,
41. Meaning of freedom, 42. The villein as free, 43. The villein as
viii Contents.
unfree, 46. Anglo-Saxon free-holding, 46. Free-holding and seignorial
rights, 47. The scale of free-holding, 49. Free land and immunity, 50.
Unfreedom of the villein, 50. Right of recapture, 50. Rarity of flight,
51. The villein and seignorial justice, 52. The villein and national
justice, 52. The villein and his land, 53. The villein's land and the
geld, 54. The villein's services, 56. The villein's rent, 57. The English
fur rif lanits, 58. Summary of the villein's position, 60. Depression of
the peasants, 61. The Normans and the rustics, 61. Depression of
the sokemen, 63. The peasants on the royal demense, 65.
4. The Sokemen, pp. 6679.
Sochemanni and liberi homines, 66. Lord and man, 67. Bonds
between lord and man, 67. Commendation, 69. Commendation and
protection, 70. Commendation and warranty, 71. Commendation and
tenure, 71. The lord's interest in commendation, 72. The seignory
over the commended, 74. Commendation and service, 74. Land-loans
and services, 75. The man's consuetudines, 76. Nature of consuetudmes,
78. Justiciary conswtudines, 78.
5. Sake and Soke, pp. 80 107.
Sake and soke, 80. Private jurisdiction in the Leges, 80. Soke in
the Leges Henrici, 81. Kinds of soke in the Leges, 82. The Norman
kings and private justice, 83. Sake and soke in Domesday, 84. Meaning
of soke, 84. Meaning of sake, 84. Soke as jurisdiction, 86. Seignorial
justice before the Conquest, 87. Soke as a regality, 89. Soke over
villeins, 90. Private soke and hundredal soke, 91. Huudredal and
manorial soke, 92. The seignorial court, 94. Soke and the earl's third
penny, 95. Soke and house-peace, 97. Soke over houses, 99. Vendible
soke, 100. Soke and mund, 100. Justice and jurisdiction, 102. Soke
and commendation, 103. Sokemen and 'free men,' 104. Holdings of
the sokemen, 106.
6. The Manor, pp. 107 128.
What is a manor ? 107. Manerium a technical term, 107. Manor and
hall, 109. Difference between manor and hall, 110. Size of the maneria,
110. A large manor, 111. Enormous manors Leominster, Berkeley,
Tewkesbury, Taunton, 112. Large manors in the Midlands, 114.
Townhouses and berewicks attached to manors, 114. Manor and soke,
115. Minute manors in the west, 116. Minute manors in the east, 117.
The manor as a peasant's holding, 118. Definition of a manor, 119
The manor and the geld, 120. Classification of men for the geld, 122.
Proofs of connexion of the manor with the geld, 122. Land gelds in a
manor, 124. Geld and hall, 124. The lord and the man's taxes, 125.
Distinction between villeins and sokemen, 125. The lord's subsidiary
liability, 126. Manors distributed to the Frenchmen, 127. Summary, 128.
7. Manor and VUl, pp. 129 150.
Manorial and non-manorial villa, 129. The vill of Orwell, 129. The
Wetherley hundred of Cambridgeshire, 131. The Wetherley sokemen,
34 The sokemen and seignorial justice, 135. Changes in the Wetherley
hundred, 135. Manonalism in Cambridgeshire, 136. The sokemen and
the manors, 137. Hertfordshire sokemen, 138. The small maneria, 138
The Danes and freedom, 139. The Danish counties, 139. The contrast
Contents. ix
between villeins and sokemen, 140. Free villages, 141. Village com-
munities, 142. The villagers as co-owners, 142. The waste land of the
vill, 143. Co-ownership of mills and churches, 144. The system of
virgates in a free village, 144. The virgates and inheritance, 145. The
farm of the vill, 146. Bound sums raised from the villages, 147. The
township and police law, 147. The free village and Norman government,
149. Organization of the free village, 149.
8. The Feudal Superstructure, pp. 150 172.
The higher ranks of men, 150. Dependent tenure, 151. Feudum, 152.
Alodium, 153. Application of the formula of dependent tenure, 154.
Military temire, 156. The army and the land, 157. Feudalism and
army service, 158. Punishment for default of service, 159. The new
military service, 160. The thegns, 161. Nature of thegnship, 163.
The thegns of Domesday, 165. Greater and lesser thegns, 165. The
great lords, 166. The king as landlord, 166. The ancient demesne, 167.
The comital manors, 168. Private rights and governmental revenues,
168. The English state, 170.
9. The Boroughs, pp. 172219.
Borough and village, 172. The borough in century xiii., 173. The
number of the boroughs, 173. The aid-paying boroughs of century xii,
174. List of aids, 175. The boroughs in Domesday, 176. The borough
as a county town, 178. The borough on no man's land, 178. Hetero-
geneous tenures in the boroughs, 179. Burgages attached to rural
manors, 180. The burgess and the rural manor, 181. Tenure of the
borough and tenure of land within the borough, 181. The king and
other landlords, 182.
The oldest burh, 183. The king's burh, 184. The special peace of
the burh, 184. The town and the burh, 185. The building of boroughs,
186. The shire and its borough, 186. Military geography, 187. The
Burghal Hidage, 187. The shire's wall-work, 188. Henry the Fowler
and the German burgs, 189. The shire thegns and their borough
houses, 189. The knights in the borough, 190. Burh-bot and castle-
guard, 191.
Borough and market, 192. Establishment of markets, 193. Moneyers
in the burh, 195. Burh and port, 195. Military and commercial
elements in the borough, 196. The borough and agriculture, 196.
Burgesses as cultivators, 197. Burgage tenure, 198. Eastern and
western boroughs, 199. Common property of the burgesses, 200. The
community as landholders, 200. Rights of common, 202. Absence of
communafism in the borough, 202. The borough community and its
lord, 203. The farm of the borough, 204. The sherift' and the farm of
the borough, 205. The community and the geld, 206. Partition of
taxes, 207. No corporation farming the borough, 208. Borough and
county organization, 209. Government of the boroughs, 209. The
borough court, 210. The law-men, 211. Definition of the borough,
212. Mediatized boroughs, 212. Boroughs on the king's land and
other boroughs, 215. Attributes of the borough, 216. Classification of
the boroughs, 217. National element in the boroughs, 219.
Contents.
ESSAY II.
ENGLAND BEFORE THE CONQUEST.
Object of this essay, 220. Fundamental controversies over Anglo-
Saxon history, 221. The Romanesque theory unacceptable, 222. Feudal-
ism as a normal stage, 223. Feudalism as progress and retrogress, 224.
Progress and retrogress in the history of legal ideas, 224. The contact
of barbarism and civilization, 225. Our materials, 226.
1. Book-land and the Land-book, pp. 226244.
The lands of the churches, 226. How the churches acquired their
lands, 227. The earliest land-books, 229. Exotic character of the
book, 230. The book purports to convey ownership, 230. The book
conveys a superiority, 231. A modern analogy, 232. Conveyance of
superiorities in early times, 233. What had the king to give? 234.
The king's alienable rights, 234. Royal rights in land, 235. The king's
feorm, 236. Nature of the feorm, 237. Tribute and rent, 239. Mixture
of ownership and superiority, 240. Growth of the seignory, 241. Book-
land and church-right, 242. Book-land and testament, 243.
2. Book-land and Folk-land, pp. 244 258.
What is folk-land? 244. Folk-land in the laws, 244. Folk-land in
the charters, 245. Land booked by the king to himself, 246. The
consent of the witan, 247. Consent and witness in the land-books,
247. Attestation of the earliest books, 248. Confirmation and at-
testation, 250. Function of the witan, 251. The king and the people's
land, 252. King's land and crown land, 253. Fate of the king's land
on his death, 253. The new king and the old king's heir, 254.
Immunity of the ancient demesne, 255. Rights of individuals in
national laud, 255. The alod, 256. Book-land and privilege, 257.
Kinds of land and kinds of right, 257.
3. Sake and Soke, pp. 258292.
Importance of seignorial justice, 258. Theqry of the modern origin
of seignorial justice, 258. Sake and soke in the Norman age, 259.
The Confessor's writs, 259. Cnut's writs, 260. Cnut's law, 261. The
book and the writ, 261. Diplomatics, 262. The Anglo-Saxon writ, 264.
Sake and soke appear when writs appear, 265. Traditional evidence of
sake and soke, 267. Altitonantis, 268. Criticism of the earlier books,
269. The clause of immunity, 270. Dissection of the words of im-
munity, 272. The trinoda necessitas, 273. The dngild, 274. The right
to wites and the right to a court, 275. The Taunton book, 276. The
immunists and the wite, 277. Justice and jurisdiction, 277. The
Frankish immunity, 278. Seignorial and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, 279.
Criminal justice of the church, 281. Antiquity of seignorial courts,
282. Justice, vassalage and tenure, 283. The lord and the accused
vassal, 284. The state, the lord and the vassal, 285. The landrlca as
immunist, 286. The immunist's rights over free men, 288. Sub-
delegation of justiciary rights, 289. Number of the immunists, 289.
Note : The Angild Clause, 290.
Contents. xi
4. Book-land and Loan-land, pp. 293 318.
The book and the gift, 293. Book-land and service, 294. Military
service, 295. Escheat of book-land, 295. Alienation of book-land, 297.
The heriot and the testament, 298. The gift and the loan, 299. The
precarium, 300. The English land-loan, 301. Loans of church land to
the great, 302. The consideration for the loan, 303. S'. Oswald's
loans, 303. Oswald's letter to Edgar, 304. Feudalism in Oswald's
law, 307. Oswald's riding-men, 308. Heritable loans, 309. Wardship
and marriage, 310. Seignorial jurisdiction, 310. Oswald's law and
England at large, 311. Inferences from Oswald's loans, 312. Economic
position of Oswald's tenants, 312. Loan-land and book-land, 313.
Book-land in the dooms, 314. Royal and other books, 315. The gift
and the loan, 317. Dependent tenure, 317.
5. The Growth of Seignorial Power, pp. 318 340.
Subjection of free men, 318. The royal grantee and the land, 318.
Provender rents and the manorial economy, 319. The church and the
peasants, 320. Growth of the manorial system, 321. Church-scot and
tithes, 321. Jurisdictional rights of the lord, 322. The lord and the
man's taxes, 323. Depression of the free ceorl, 324. The slaves, 325.
Growth of manors from below, 325.
Theories which connect the manor with the Roman villa, 326. The
Rectitudines, 327. Discussion of the Rectitudines, 328. The Tidenham
case, 329. The Stoke case, 330. Inferences from these cases, 332.
The villa and the vicus, 333. Manors in the land-books, 334. The
mansus and the manens, 335. The hide, 336. The strip-holding and
the villa, 337. The lord and the strips, 338. The ceorl and the
slave, 339. The condition of the Danelaw, 339.
6. The Village Community, pp. 340 356.
Free villages, 340. Ownership by communities and ownership by
individuals, 341. Co-ownership and ownership by corporations, 341.
Ownership and governmental power, 342. Ownership and subordinate
governmental power, 343. Evolution of sovereignty and ownership,
343. Communal ownership aa a stage, 344. The theory of normal
stages, 345.
Was land owned by village communities ? 346. Meadows, pastures
and woods, 348. The bond between neighbours, 349. Feebleness of
village communalism, 349. Absence of organization, 350. The German
village on conquered soil, 351. Development of kingly power, 351. The
free village in England, 352. The village meeting, 353. What might
have become of the free village, 353. Mark communities, 354. Inter-
commoning between vills, 355. Last words, 356.
xii Contents.
ESSAY TIL
THE HIDE.
What was the hide? 357. Importance of the question, 357. Hide
and manse in Bede, 358. Hide and manse in the land-books, 358.
The large hide and the manorial arrangement, 360. Our course, 361.
1. Measures and Fields, pp. 362 399.
Permanence and change in agrarian history, 362. Rapidity of
change in old times, 363. Devastation of villages, 363. Village
colonies, 365. Change of field systems, 365. Differences between
different shires, 366. New and old villages, 367.
History of land- measures, 368. Growth of uniform measures, 369.
Superficial measure, 370. The ancient elements of land measure, 372.
The German acre, 373. English acres, 373. Small and large acres, 374.
Anglo-Saxon rods and acres, 375. Customary acres and forest acres,
376. The acre and the day's work, 377. The real acres in the fields,
379. The culturae or shots, 379. Delimitation of shots, 380. Real and
ideal acres, 381. Irregular length of acres, 383. The sdiones or beds,
383. Acres divided lengthwise, 384. The virgate, 385. Yard and
yard-land, 385. The virgate a fraction of the hide, 385. The yard-land
in laws and charters, 386.
The hide as a measure, 387. The hide as a measure of arable, 388.
The hide of 120 acres, 389. Real and fiscal hides, 389. Causes of
divergence of fiscal from real hides, 390. Effects of the divergence, 392.
Acreage of the hide in later days, 393. The carucate and bovate, 395.
The ox-gang, 396. The fiscal carucate, 396. Acreage tilled by a plough,
397. Walter of Henley's programme of ploughing, 398.
2. Domesday Statistics, pp. 399 490.
Statistical Tables, 400403.
Domesday's three statements, 399. Northern formulas, 404. Southern
formulas, 405. Kentish formulas, 406. Relation between the three
statements, 406. Introduction of statistics, 407. Explanation of
statistics, 407. Acreage, 407. Population, 408. Danegeld, 408. Hides,
carucates, sulungs, 408. Reduced hidage, 410. The teamlands, 410.
The teams, 411. The values, 411. The table of ratios, 411. Im-
perfection of statistics, 412. Constancy of ratios, 413.
The team, 413. Variability of the caruca, 414. Constancy of the
caruca, 414. The villein's teams, 415. The villein's oxen, 416. Light
and heavy ploughs, 417. The team of Domesday and other docu-
ments, 417.
The teamland, 418. Fractional parts of the teamland, 418. Land
for oxen and wood for swine, 419. The teamland no areal unit, 419.
The teamlands of Great and the teams of Little Domesday, 420. The
Leicestershire formulas, 420. Origin of the inquiry touching the team-
lands, 421. Modification of the inquiry, 423. The potential teams, 423.
Normal relation between teams and teamlands, 424. The land of
Contents. xiii
deficient teams, 425. Actual and potential teamlands, 426. The land
of excessive teams, 427. Digression to East Anglia, 429. The teamland
no areal measure, 431. Eyton's theory, 431. Domesday's lineal measure,
432. Measured teamlands, 433.
Amount of arable in England, 435. Decrease of arable, 436. The
food problem, 436. What was the population ? 436. What was the
field-system ? 437. What was the acre's yield ? 437. Consumption of
beer, 438. The Englishman's diet, 440. Is the arable superabundant I
441. Amount of pasturage, 441. Area of the villages, 443. Produce and
value, 444. Varying size of acres, 445. The teamland in Cambridge-
shire, 445.
The hides of Domesday, 446. Eelation between hides and teamlands,
447. Uuhidated estates, 448. Beneficial hidation, 448. Effect of
privilege, 449. Divergence of hide from teamland, 450. Partition of
the geld, 451. Distribution of hides among counties and hundreds, 451.
The hidage of Worcestershire, 451. The County Hidage, 455. Its
date, 456. The Northamptonshire Geld Roll, 457. Credibility of The
County Hidage, 458. Reductions of hidage, 458. The county quotas,
459. The hundred and the hundred hides, 459. Comparison of
Domesday hidage with Pipe Rolls, 460. Under-rated and over-rated
counties, 461 Hidage and value, 462. One pound, one hide, 465.
Equivalence of pound and hide, 465. Cases of under-taxation, 466.
Kent, 466. Devon and Cornwall, 467. Cases of over-taxation, 468.
Leicestershire, 468. Yorkshire, 469. Equity and hidage, 470. Dis-
tribution of hides and of teamlands, 471. Area and value as elements
of geldability, 472. The equitable teamland, 473. Artificial valets, 473.
The new assessments of Henry II., 473.
Acreage of the fiscal hide, 475. Equation between hide and acres,
475. The hide of 120 acres, 476. Evidence from Cambridgeshire, 476.
Evidence from the Isle of Ely, 476. Evidence from Middlesex, 477.
Meaning of the Middlesex entries, 478. Evidence in the Geld Inquests,
478. Result of the evidence, 480. Evidence from Essex, 480. Acreage
of the fiscal carucate, 483. Acreage of the fiscal sulung, 484. Kemble's
theory, 485. The ploughland and the plough, 486. The Yorkshire
carucates, 487. Relation between teamlands and fiscal carucates, 487.
The fiscal hide of 120 acres, 489. Antiquity of the large hide, 489.
3. Beyond Domesday, pp, 490 520.
The hide beyond Domesday, 490. Arguments in favour of small
hides, 490. Continuity of the hide in the land-books, 491. Examples
from charters of Chertsey, 492. Examples from charters of Malmesbury,
492. Permanence of the hidation, 493. Gifts of villages, 494. Gifts
of manses in villages, 495. The largest gifts, 496. The Winchester
estate at Chilcombe, 496. The Winchester estates at Dowuton and
Taunton, 498. Kemble and the Taunton estate, 499. Difficulty of
identifying parcels, 500. The numerous hides in ancient documents,
501. The Burghal Hidage, 502. The Tribal Hidage, 506. Bede's
hidage, 508. Bede and the land-books, 509. Gradual reduction of
hidage, 510. Over-estimates of hidage, 510. Size of Bede's hide, 511.
Evidence from lona, 512. Evidence from Selsey, 513. Conclusion in
favour of the large hide, 515. Continental analogies, 515. The German
Hufe, 515. The Konigshufe, 516. The large hide on the continent,
517. The large hide not too large, 518. The large hide and the
manor, 519. Last words, 520.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.
B. = Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, London, 1885-7-93.
D. B. = Domesday Book.
E. = Earle, Land Charters, Oxford, 1888.
E. H. R. = English Historical Review.
H. & S. = Haddan and Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents,
vol. iii, Oxford, 1871.
K. = Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Mvi Saxonici, London, 1839-48.
T. = Thorpe, Diplomatarium Anglicanum, London, 1865.
ADDENDUM.
p. 347, note 4. Instances of the periodic reallotment of the whole land of a
vill, exclusive of houses and crofts, seem to have been not unknown in the north
of England. Here the reallotment is found in connexion with a husbandry
which knows no permanent severance of the arable from the grass-land, but
from time to time ploughs up a tract and after a while allows it to become
grass-land once more. See F. W. Dendy, The Ancient Farms of Northumber-
land, Archaeologia Aeliaua, Vol. xvi. I have to thank Mr Edward Bateson for
a reference to this paper.
ESSAY I.
DOMESDAY BOOK.
AT midwinter in the year 1085 William the Conqueror wore Domesday
his crown at Gloucester and there he had deep speech with his its satei-
wise men. The outcome of that speech was the mission through- lltes '
out all England of barons/ ' legates ' or 'justices ' charged with
the duty of collecting from the verdicts of the shires, the
hundreds and the vills a descriptio of his new realm. The out-
come of that mission was the descriptio preserved for us in two
manuscript volumes, which within a century after their making
had already acquired the name of Domesday Book. The second
of those volumes, sometimes known as Little Domesday, deals
with but three counties, namely Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk,
while the first volume comprehends the rest of England. Along
with these we must place certain other documents that are
closely connected with the grand inquest. We have in the
so-called Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiae, a copy, an imperiect
copy, of the verdicts delivered by the Cambridgeshire jurors,
and this, as we shall hereafter see, is a document of the highest
value, even though in some details it is not always very trust-
worthy 1 . We have in the so-called Inquisitio Eliensis an
account of the estates of the Abbey of Ely in Cambridgeshire,
Suffolk and other counties, an account which has as its ultimate
source the verdicts of the juries and which contains some
1 Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiae, ed. N. E. Hamilton. When, as some-
times happens, the figures in this record differ from those given in Domesday
Book, the latter seem to be in general the more correct, for the arithmetic is
better. Also it seems plain that the compilers of Domesday had, even for
districts comprised in the Inquisitio, other materials besides those that the
luquisitio contains. For example, that document says nothing of some of the
royal manors. [Since this note was written, Mr Eound, Feudal England,
pp. 10 ff. has published the same result after an elaborate investigation.]
Domesday Book.
particulars which were omitted from Domesday Book 1 . We
have in the so-called Exon Domesday an account of Cornwall
and Devonshire and of certain lands in Somerset, Dorset and
Wiltshire ; this also seems to have been constructed directly or
indirectly out of the verdicts delivered in those counties, and it
contains certain particulars about the amount of stock upon
the various estates which are omitted from what, for distinction's
sake, is sometimes called the Exchequer Domesday 2 . At the
beginning of this Exon Domesday we have certain accounts
relating to the payment of a great geld, seemingly the geld of
six shillings on the hide that William levied in the winter of
1083-4, two years before the deep speech at Gloucester 3 .
Lastly, in the Northamptonshire Geld Roll 4 we have some
precious information about fiscal affairs as they stood some few
years before the survey 5 .
Domesday Such in brief are the documents out of which, with some
idstory a small help from the Anglo-Saxon dooms and land-books, from
the charters of Norman kings and from the so-called Leges of
the Conqueror, the Confessor and Henry I., some future historian
may be able to reconstruct the land-law which obtained in the
conquered England of 1086, and (for our records frequently
speak of the tempus Regis Edwardi) the unconquered England
of 1065. The reflection that but for the deep speech at Glou-
cester, but for the lucky survival of two or three manuscripts,
he would have known next to nothing of that law, will make
him modest and cautious. At the present moment, though
much has been done towards forcing Domesday Book to
yield its meaning, some of the legal problems that are raised
by it, especially those which concern the time of King Edward,
have hardly been stated, much less solved. It is with some
hope of stating, with little hope of solving them that we begin
this essay. If only we can ask the right questions we shall
1 This is printed in D. B. vol. iv. and given by Hamilton at the end of his
Inq. Com. Cantah. As to the manner in which it was compiled see Bound,
feudal England, 133 ff.
2 The Exon Domesday is printed in D. B. vol. iv
3 Round, Domesday Studies, i. 91 : 'I am tempted to believe that these geld
rolls in the form in which we now have them were compiled at Winchester after
the close of Easter 1084, by the body which was the germ of the future
Exchequer.'
4 Printed by Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, i. 184.
B Round, Feudal England, 117.
Domesday Book.
have done something for a good end. If English history is to
be understood, the law of Domesday Book must be mastered.
We have here an absolutely unique account of feudalism in
two different stages of its growth, the more trustworthy, though
the more puzzling, because it gives us particulars and not
generalities.
Puzzling enough it certainly is, and this for many reasons.
Our task may be the easier if we state some of those reasons at
the outset.
To say that Domesday Book is no collection of laws or Domesday
treatise on law would be needless. Very seldom does it state
any rule in general terms, and when it does so we shall usually
find cause for believing that this rule is itself an exception, a
local custom, a provincial privilege. Thus, if we are to come by
general rules, we must obtain them inductively by a comparison
of many thousand particular instances. But further, Domesday
Book is no register of title, no register of all those rights and
facts which constitute the system of land-holdership. One great
purpose seems to mould both its form and its substance ; it is a
geld-book.
When Duke William became king of the English, he found Danegeid.
(so he might well think) among the most valuable of his newly
acquired regalia, a right to levy a land-tax under the name of
geld or danegeld. A detailed history of that tax cannot be
written. It is under the year 991 that our English chronicle
first mentions a tribute paid to the Danes 1 ; 10,000 was then
paid to them. In 994 the yet larger sum of 16,000 2 was
levied. In 1002 the tribute had risen to 24,000 3 , in 1007 to
30,000 4 , in 1009 East Kent paid 3,000 5 ; 21,000 was raised
in 1014 6 ; in 1018 Cnut when newly crowned took 72,000
besides 11,000 paid by the Londoners 7 ; in 1040 Harthacnut
took 21,099 besides a sum of 11,048 that was paid for thirty-
two ships 8 . With a Dane upon the throne, this tribute seems to
have become an occasional war-tax. How often it was levied
we cannot tell ; but that it was levied more than once by the
Confessor is not doubtful 9 . We are told that he abolished it
1 Earle, Two Chronicles, 130-1. 2 Ibid. 132-3. 8 Ibid. 137.
4 Ibid. 141. 6 Ibid. 142. 6 Ibid. 151. 7 Ibid. 160-1.
8 Ibid. 167.
9 There is a valuable paper on this subject, A Short Account of Danegeld [by
P. C. Webb] published in 1756.
12
Domesday Book.
in or about the year 1051, some eight or nine years after his
accession, some fifteen before his death. No sooner was William
crowned than 'he laid on men a geld exceeding stiff. ' In the
next year ' he set a mickle geld ' on the people. In the winter
of 1083-4 he raised a geld of 72 pence (6 Norman shillings)
upon the hide. That this tax was enormously heavy is plain.
Taking one case with another, it would seem that the hide was
frequently supposed to be worth about 1 a year and there were
many hides in England that were worth far less. But grievous as
was the tax which immediately preceded the making of the
survey, we are not entitled to infer that it was of unprecedented
severity. It brought William but 415 or thereabouts from
Dorset and 510 or thereabouts from Somerset 1 . Worcestershire
was deemed to contain about 1200 hides and therefore, even if
none of its hides had been exempted, it would have contributed
but 360. If the huge sums mentioned by the chronicler had
really been exacted, and that too within the memory of men
who were yet living, William might well regard the right to
levy a geld as the most precious jewel in his English crown.
To secure a due and punctual payment of it was worth a
gigantic effort, a survey such as had never been made and a record
such as had never been penned since the grandest days of the
old Roman Empire. But further, the assessment of the geld
sadly needed reform. Owing to one cause and another, owing
to privileges and immunities that had been capriciously granted,
owing also, so we think, to a radically vicious method of com-
puting the geldable areas of counties and hundreds, the old
assessment was full of anomalies and iniquities. Some estates
were over-rated, others were scandalously under-rated. That
William intended to correct the old assessment, or rather to
sweep it away and put a new assessment in its stead, seems
highly probable, though it has not been proved that either
he or his sons accomplished this feat 2 . For this purpose, how-
ever, materials were to be collected which would enable the
royal officers to decide what changes were necessary in order
that all England might be taxed in accordance with a just and
uniform plan. Concerning each estate they were to know the
1 D. B. iv. 26, 489.
8 In 1194 the tax for Richard's ransom seems, at least in Wiltshire, to have
been distributed in the main according to the assessment that prevailed in 1084;
Rolls of the King's Court (Pipe Roll Soc.) i. Introduction, p. xxiv.
Domesday Booh
number of geldable units (' hides ' or ' carucates ') for which it
had answered in King Edward's day, they were to know the
number of plough oxen that there were upon it, they were to
know its true annual value, they were to know whether that
value had been rising or falling during the past twenty years.
Domesday Book has well been called a rate book, and the task
of spelling out a land law from the particulars that it states
is not unlike the task that would lie before any one who
endeavoured to construct our modern law of real property out
of rate books, income tax returns and similar materials. All
the lands, all the land-holders of England may be brought before
us, but we are told only of such facts, such rights, such legal
relationships as bear on the actual or potential payment of geld.
True, that some minor purposes may be achieved by the king's
commissioners, though the quest for geld is their one main
object. About the rents and renders due from his own demesne
manors the king may thus obtain some valuable information.
Also he may learn, as it were by the way, whether any of his
barons or other men have presumed to occupy, to 'invade,'
lands which he has reserved for himself. Again, if several
persons are in dispute about a tract of ground, the contest may
be appeased by the testimony of shire and hundred, or may be
reserved for the king's audience ; at any rate the existence of
an outstanding claim may be recorded by the royal commis-
sioners Here and there the peculiar customs of a shire or a
borough will be stated, and incidentally the services that certain
tenants owe to their lords may be noticed. But all this is done
sporadically and unsystematically. Our record is no register
of title, it is no feodary, it is no custumal, it is no rent roll ; ifc
is a tax book, a geld book.
We say this, not by way of vain complaint against its The survey
meagreness, but because in our belief a care for geld and for all ^"i
that concerns the assessment and payment of geld colours far tem<
more deeply than commentators have usually supposed the
information that is given to us about other matters. We
should not be surprised if definitions and distinctions which at
first sight have little enough to do with fiscal arrangements, for
example the definition of a manor and the distinction between
a villein and a ' free man,' involved references to the apportion-
ment and the levy of the land-tax. Often enough it happens
that legal ideas of a very general kind are defined by fiscal
Domesday Book.
rules ; for example, our modern English idea of ' occupation '
has become so much part and parcel of a system of assessment
that lawyers are always ready to argue that a certain man must
be an ' occupier ' because such men as he are rated to the relief
of the poor. It seems then a fair supposition that any line that
Domesday Book draws systematically and sharply, whether it
be between various classes of men or between various classes of
tenements, is somehow or another connected with the main
theme of that book geldability, actual or potential.
Weight of Since we have mentioned the stories told by the chronicler
the dane- . , ... .
geld. about the tribute paid to the Danes, we may make a comment
upon them which will become of importance hereafter. Those
stories look true, and they seem to be accepted by modern
historians. Had we been told just once that some large number
of pounds, for example 60,000, was levied, or had the same
round sum been repeated in year after year, we might well have
said that such figures deserved no attention, and that by
60,000 our annalist merely meant a big sum of money.
But, as will have been seen, he varies his figures from year to
year and is not always content with a round number; he
speaks of 21,099 and of 11, 048 \ We can hardly therefore
treat his statements as mere loose talk and are reluctantly
driven to suppose that they are true or near the truth. If this
be so, then, unless some discovery has yet to be made in the
history of money, no word but ' appalling ' will adequately
describe the taxation of which he speaks. We know pretty
accurately the amount of money that became due when Henry I.
or Henry II. imposed a danegeld of two shillings on the hide.
The following table constructed from the pipe rolls will show
the sum charged against each county. We arrange the shires
in the order of their indebtedness, for a few of the many
caprices of the allotment will thus be visible, and our table may
be of use to us in other contexts 2 .
1 The statement in ^Ethelred, n. 7 (Schmid, p. 209) as to a payment of
22,000 is in a general way corroborative of the chronicler's large figures.
2 The figures will be given more accurately on a later page.
Domesday Book.
APPROXIMATE CHARGE OF A DANEGELD OF Two SHILLINGS ON THE
HIDE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY.
Wiltshire
Norfolk
Somerset
Lincoln
Dorset
Oxford
Essex
Suffolk
Sussex
Bucks
Berks
Gloucester
S. Hants
Surrey
York
Warwick
N. Hants
Salop
Now be it understood that these figures do not show the The geld ot
amount of money that Henry I. and Henry II. could obtain by
a danegeld. They had to take much less. When it was last
levied, the tax was not bringing in 3500, so many were tha
churches and great folk who had obtained temporary or perma-
nent exemptions from it. We will cite Leicestershire for
example. The total of the geld charged upon it was almost
exactly or quite exactly 100. On the second roll of Henry II.'s
reign we find that 25. 7s. 6d. have been paid into the trea-
sury, that 22. 8s. 3d. have been ' pardoned ' to magnates and
templars, that 51. 8s. 2d. are written off in respect of waste,
and that 16s. Od. are still due. On the eighth roll the
account shows that 62. 12s. *ld. have been paid and that
37. 6s. 9d. have been ' pardoned.' No, what our table displays
is the amount that would be raised if all exemptions were
disregarded and no penny forborne. And now let us turn
back to the chronicle and (not to take an extreme example)
read of 30,000 being raised. Unless we are prepared to bring
389
330
278
Cambridge
Derby and Nottingham
Hertford
114
110
110
266
Bedford
110
248
Kent
105
242
Devon
104
236
Worcester
101
235
Leicester
100
210
Hereford
94
205
Middlesex
85
202
Huntingdon
71
190
Stafford
44
180
Cornwall
23
177
Rutland
12
160
Northumberland
100
129
Cheshire 1
120
118
Total
5198
1 Cheshire pays no geld to the king. This loss is compensated by a sum
which is sometimes exacted from Northumberland.
Domesday Book.
against the fathers of English history a charge of repeated,
wanton and circumstantial lying, we shall think of the danegeld
of yEthelred's reign and of Cnut's as of an impost so heavy that
it was fully capable of transmuting a whole nation. Therefore
the lines that are drawn by the incidence of this tribute will be
deep and permanent; but still we must remember that primarily
they will be fiscal lines.
Unstable Then again, we ought not to look to Domesday Book for a
logy of the settled and stable scheme of technical terms. Such a scheme
rvey ' could not be established in a brief twenty years. About one
half of the technical terms that meet us, about one half of the
terms which, as we think, ought to be precisely defined, are, we
may say, English terms. They are ancient English words, or
they are words brought hither by the Danes, or they are Latin
words which have long been in use in England and have
acquired special meanings in relation to English affairs. On
the other hand, about half the technical terms are French.
Some of them are old Latin words which have acquired special
meanings in France, some are Romance words newly coined in
France, some are Teutonic words which tell of the Frankish
conquest of Gaul. In the one great class we place scira,
hundredum, wapentac, hida, berewica, inland, haga, soka, saka,
geldum, gablum, scotum, heregeat, gersuma, thegnus, sochemannus,
burns, coscet ; in the other comitatus, carucata, virgata, bovata,
arpentum, manerium, feudum, alodium, homa.gium, relevium,
baro, vicecomes, vavassor, villanus, bordarius, colibertus, hospes.
I i, is not in twenty years that a settled and stable scheme can
be formed out of such elements as these. And often enough it
is very difficult for us to give just the right meaning to some
simple Latin word. If we translate miles by soldier or warrior,
this may be too indefinite ; if we translate it by knight, this
may be too definite, and yet leave open the question whether
we are comparing the miles of 1086 with the cniht of uncon-
quered England or with the knight of the thirteenth century.
If we render vicecomes by sheriff we are making our sheriff too
little of a vicomte. When comes is before us we have to choose
between giving Britanny an earl, giving Chester a count, or
offending some of our comites by invidious distinctions. Time
will show what these words shall mean. Some will perish in
the struggle for existence; others have long and adventurous
careers before them. At present two sets of terms are rudely
Plan of the Survey.
intermixed; the time when they will grow into an organic
whole is but beginning.
To this we must add that, unless we have mistaken the Legal ideas
general drift of legal history, the law implied in Domesday
Book ought to be for us very difficult law, far more difficult
than the law of the thirteenth century, for the thirteenth
century is nearer to us than is the eleventh. The grown man
will find it easier to think the thoughts of the school-boy than
to think the thoughts of the baby. And yet the doctrine that
our remote forefathers being simple folk had simple law dies
hard. Too often we allow ourselves to suppose that, could we
but get back to the beginning, we should find that all was
intelligible and should then be able to watch the process
whereby simple ideas were smothered under subtleties and
technicalities. But it is not so. Simplicity is the outcome of
technical subtlety ; it is the goal not the starting point. As we
go backwards the familiar outlines become blurred ; the ideas
become fluid, and instead of the simple we find the indefinite.
But difficult though our task may be, we must turn to it.
1. Plan of the Survey.
England was already mapped out into counties, hundreds or The geo-
wapentakes and vills. Trithings or ridings appear in Yorkshire
and Lincolnshire, lathes in Kent, rapes in Sussex, while leets
appear, at least sporadically, in Norfolk 1 . These provincial
peculiarities we must pass by, nor will we pause to comment at
any length on the changes in the boundaries of counties and of
hundreds that have taken place since the date of the survey.
Though these changes have been many and some few of them
have been large 2 , we may still say that as a general rule the
political geography of England was already stereotyped. And
we see that already there are many curious anomalies, 'de-
tached portions ' of counties, discrete hundreds, places that are
extra-hundredal 3 , places that for one purpose are in one county
1 D. B. ii. 109 b : ' Hundret de Grenehou 14 letis.' Ib. 212 b : ' Hundret et
Dim. de Clakelosa de 10 leitis.' Bound, Feudal England, 101.
2 Some of them are mentioned by Ellis, Introduction, i. 34-9.
3 D. B. i. 184 b : ' Haec terra non geldat nee consuetudinem dat nee in
aliquo hundredo iacet ' ; i. 157 ' Haec terra nunquatn geldavit nee alicui
10 Domesday Book.
and for another purpose in another county 1 . We see also that
proprietary rights have already been making sport of arrange-
ments which in our eyes should be fixed by public law. Earls,
sheriffs and others have enjoyed a marvellous power of taking a
tract of land out of one district and placing it, or ' making it
lie' in another district 2 . Land is constantly spoken of as
though it were the most portable of things; it can easily be
taken from one vill or hundred and be added to or placed in or
caused to lie in another vill or hundred. This ' notional mova-
bility ' of land, if we may use such a term, will become of
importance to us when we are studying the formation of manors.
The vm as For the present, however, we are concerned with the general
phicaiumt. truth that England is divided into counties, hundreds or wapen-
takes and vills. This is the geographical basis of the survey.
That basis, however, is hidden from us by the form of our
record. The plan adopted by those who fashioned Domesday
Book out of the returns provided for them by the king's
commissioners is a curious, compromising plan. We may say
that in part it is geographical, while in part it is feudal or
proprietary. It takes each county separately and thus far it
is geographical ; but within the boundaries of each county it
arranges the lands under the names of the tenants in chief who
hold them. Thus all the lands in Cambridgeshire of which
Count Alan is tenant in chief are brought together, no matter
that they lie scattered about in various hundreds. Therefore
it is necessary for us to understand that the original returns
reported by the surveyors did not reach the royal treasury in
this form. At least as regards the county of Cambridge, we
can be certain of this. The hundreds were taken one by one ;
they were taken in a geographical order, and not until the
hundredo pertinet nee pertinuit ' ; i. 357 b ' Hae duae carucatae non sunt in
numero alicuius hundred! neque habent pares in Lincolescyra.'
1 D. B. i. '207 b : ' Jacet in Bedefordscira set geldum dat in Huntedonscire ' ;
i. 61 b ' Jacet et appreciata est in Gratentun quod est in Oxenefordscire et
tamen dat scotum inBerchescire'; i. 132 b, the manor of Weston 'lies in ' Hitchin
which is in Hertfordshire, but its wara 'lies in' Bedfordshire, i.e. it pays geld,
it ' defends itself in the latter county ; i. 189 b, the wara of a certain hide ' lies
in ' Hinxton which is in Cambridgeshire, but the land belongs to the manor of
Chesterford and therefore is valued in Essex. D. B. i. 178 : five hides ' geld and
plead ' in Worcestershire, but pay their farm in Herefordshire.
2 D. B. i. 157 b : ' Has [terras in Oxenefordscire] coniunxit terrae suae in
Glowecestrescire' ; i. 209 b ' foris misit de hundredo ubi se defendebat T. B. E.' ;
i. 50 ' et misit foras comitatum et misit in Wiltesire.' See also Ellis, i. '66.
Plan of the Survey. 11
justices had learned all that was to be known of Staplehow
hundred did they call upon the jurors of Cheveley hundred for
their verdict. That such was their procedure we might have
guessed even had we not been fortunate enough to have a copy
of the Cambridgeshire verdicts ; for, though the commissioners
seem to have held but one moot for each shire, still it is plain
that each hundred was represented by a separate set of jurors 1 .
But from these Cambridgeshire verdicts we learn what other-
wise we could hardly have known. Within each hundred the
survey was made by vills 2 . If we suppose the commissioners
charging the jurors we must represent them as saying, not ' Tell
us what tenants in chief have lands in your hundred and how
much each of them holds/ but ' Tell us about each vill in your
hundred, who holds land in it.' Thus, for example, the men of
the Armingford hundred are called up. They make a separate
report about each vill in it. They begin by stating that the
vill is rated at a certain number of hides and then they proceed
to distribute those hides among the tenants in chief. Thus, for
example, they say that Abington was rated at 5 hides, and that
those 5 hides are distributed thus 3 :
hides virgates
Hugh Pincerna holds of the bishop of Winchester 2| %
The king
Ralph and Robert hold of Hardouin de Eschalers 1 1^
Earl Roger 1
Picot the sheriff ^
Alwin Hamelecoc tlie bedel holds of the king
5
Now in Domesday Book we must look to several different
pages to get this information about the vill of Abington, to
one page for Earl Roger's land, to another page for Picot's land,
1 See Hound, Feudal England, p. 118. Mr Eound seems to think that the
commissioners made a circuit through the hundreds. I doubt they did more
than their successors the justices in eyre were wont to do, that is, they held in
the shire-town a moot which was attended by (1) the magnates of the shire who
spoke for the shire, (2) a jury from every hundred, (3) a deputation of villani
from every township. See the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Clamores (i. 375)
where we may find successive entries beginning with (a) Scyra testatur, (b) West-
reding testatur, (c) Testatur wapentac. Strikingly similar entries are found on
the eyre rolls. As Sir F. Pollock (Eng. Hist. Rev. xi. 213) remarks, it is mis-
leading to speak of the Domesday ' survey'; Domesday Inquest would be better.
2 See Eound, Feudal England, p. 44.
8 Inquis. Com. Cantab. 60.
12 Domesday Book.
and we may easily miss the important fact that this vill of
Abington has been rated as a whole at the neat, round figure of
5 hides. And then we see that the whole hundred of Arming-
ford has been rated at the neat, round figure of 100 hides, and
has consisted of six villa rated at 10 hides apiece and eight vills
rated at 5 hides apiece 1 . Thus we are brought to look upon
the vill as a unit in a system of assessment. All this is
concealed from us by the form of Domesday Book,
stability of When that book mentions the name of a place, when it
says that Roger holds Sutton or that Ralph holds three hides
in Norton, we regard that name as the name of a vill ; it may
or may not be also the name of a manor. Speaking very
generally we may say that the place so named will in after
times be known as a vill and in our own day will be a civil
parish. No doubt in some parts of the country new vills have
been created since the Conqueror's time. Some names that
occur in our record fail to obtain a permanent place on the roll
of English vills, become the names of hamlets or disappear
altogether; on the other hand, new names come to the front.
Of course we dare not say dogmatically that all the names
mentioned in Domesday Book were the names of vills; very
possibly (if this distinction was already known) some of them
were the names of hamlets ; nor, again, do we imply that the villa,
of 1086 had much organization ; but a place that is mentioned
in Domesday Book will probably be recognized as a vill in the
thirteenth, a civil parish in the nineteenth century. Let us
take Cambridgeshire by way of example. Excluding the Isle
of Ely, we find that the political geography of the Conqueror's
reign has endured until our own time. The boundaries of the
hundreds lie almost where they lay, the number of vills has
hardly been increased or diminished. The chief changes
amount to this : A small tract on the east side of the county
containing Exning and Bellingham has been made over to
Suffolk ; four other names contained in Domesday no longer
stand for parishes, while the names of five of our modern
parishes one of them is the significant name of Newton
are not found there 2 . But about a hundred and ten vills that
1 See the table in Bound, Feudal England, p. 50. I had already selected
this beautiful specimen before Mr Bound's book appeared. He has given several
others that are quite as neat.
2 Of course we take no account of urban parishes.
Plan of the Survey. 13
were vills in 1086 are vills or civil parishes at the present day,
and in all probability they then had approximately the same
boundaries that they have now.
This may be a somewhat too favourable example of Omission
of vills.
permanence and continuity. Of all counties Cambridgeshire
is the one whose ancient geography can be the most easily
examined ; but wherever we have looked we have come to the
conclusion that the distribution of England into vills is in the
main as old as the Norman conquest 1 . Two causes of difficulty
may be noticed, for they are of some interest. Owing to what
we have called the ' notional movability ' of land, we never can
be quite sure that when certain hides or acres are said to be in
or lie in a certain place they are really and physically in that
place. They are really in one village, but they are spoken of
as belonging to another village, because their occupants pay
their geld or do their services in the latter. Manorial and fiscal
geography interferes with physical and villar geography. We
have lately seen how land rated at five hides was comprised, as
a matter of fact, in the vill of Abington ; but of those five
hides, one virgate ' lay in ' Shingay, a half-hide ' lay in '
Litlington while a half- virgate ' lay and had always lain ' in
Morden 2 . This, if we mistake not, leads in some cases to an
omission of the names of small vills. A great lord has a
compact estate, perhaps the whole of one of the small southern
hundreds. He treats it as a whole, and all the land that he has
there will be ascribed to some considerable village in which he
has his hall. We should be rash in supposing that there were
no other villages on this land. For example, in Surrey there
is now-a-days a hundred called Farnham which comprises the
parish of Farnham, the parish of Frensham and some other
villages. If we mistake not, all that Domesday Book has to
say of the whole of this territory is that the Bishop of Winchester
holds Farnham, that it has been rated at 60 hides, that it has
been worth the large sum of 65 a year and that there are so
many tenants upon it 3 . We certainly must not draw the
inference that there was but one vill in this tract. If the
bishop is tenant in chief of the whole hundred and has become
1 Eyton's laborious studies have made this plain as regards some counties
widely removed from each other ; still, e.g. in his book on Somerset, he has now
and again to note that names which appear in D. B. are obsolete.
8 Inq. Com. Cant. 00-1. D. B. i. 31.
14 Domesday Book.
responsible for all the geld that is levied therefrom, there is
no great reason why the surveyors should trouble themselves
about the vills. Thus the simple Episcopus tenet Fernelnini
may dispose of some 25,000 acres of land. So the same bishop
has an estate at Chilcombe in Hampshire ; but clearly the
name Ciltecumbe covers a wide territory for there are no less
than nine churches upon it 1 . We never can be very certain
about the boundaries of these large and compact estates.
Fission of A second cause of difficulty lies in the fact that in com-
paratively modern times, from the twelfth century onwards, two
or three contiguous villages will often bear the same name and
be distinguished only by what we may call their surnames
thus Guilden Morden and Steeple Morden, Stratfield Saye,
Stratfield Turgis, Stratfield Mortimer, Tolleshunt Knights,
Tolleshunt Major, Tolleshunt Darcy. Such cases are common ;
in some districts they are hardly exceptional. Doubtless they
point to a time when a single village by some process of
colonization or subdivision become two villages. Now Domes-
day Book seldom enables us to say for certain whether the
change has already taken place. In a few instances it marks
off the little village from the great village of the same name 2 .
In some other instances it will speak, for example, of Mordune
and Mordune Alia, of Emingeforde and Emingeforde Alia, or
the like, thus showing both that the change has taken place,
and also that it is so recent that it is recognized only by very
clumsy terms. In Cambridgeshire, since we have the original
verdicts, we can see that the two Mordens are already distinct ;
the one is rated at ten hides, the other at five 3 . On the other
hand, we can see that our Great and Little Shelford are rated
as one vill of twenty hides 4 , our Castle Camps and Shudy
Camps as one vill of five hides 5 . Elsewhere we are left to
guess whether the fission is complete, and the surnames that
many of our vills ultimately acquire, the names of families
which rose to greatness in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
will often suggest that the surveyors saw but one vill where we
see two 6 . However, the broad truth stands out that England
' D. B. i. 41. We shall return to this matter hereafter.
2 A good many cases will be found in Essex and Suffolk.
8 Inq. Com. Cantab. 51, 53. 4 Ibid. 47. B Ibid. 29.
* Maitland, Surnames of English Villages, Archaeological Review, iv. 233.
Plan of the Survey. 15
was divided into vills and that in general the vill of Domesday
Book is still a vill in after days 1
The ' vill ' or ' town ' of the later middle ages was, like the The nucie-
' civil parish' of our own day, a tract of land with some houses and the &g
on it, and this tract was a unit in the national system of police [ e ^ f scat '
and finance 2 But we are not entitled to make for ourselves steads,
any one typical picture of the English vill. We are learning
from the ordnance map (that marvellous palimpsest, which
under Dr Meitzen's guidance we are beginning to decipher)
that in all probability we must keep at least two types before
our minds. On the one hand, there is what we might call the
true village or the nucleated village. In the purest form of
this type there is one and only one cluster of houses. It is a
fairly large cluster ; it stands in the midst of its fields, of its ter-
ritory, and until lately a considerable part of its territory will
probably have consisted of spacious 'common fields.' In a country
in which there are villages of this type the parish boundaries
seem almost to draw themselves 3 . On the other hand, we may
easily find a country in which there are few villages of this
character. The houses which lie within the boundary of the
parish are scattered about in small clusters; here two or
three, there three or four. These clusters often have names of
their own, and it seems a mere chance that the name borne
by one of them should be also the name of the whole parish or
vill 4 . We see no traces of very large fields. On the face of
the map there is no reason why a particular group of cottages
should be reckoned to belong to this parish rather than to the
next. As our eyes grow accustomed to the work we may
arrive at some extremely important conclusions such as those
which Meitzen has suggested. The outlines of our nucleated
villages may have been drawn for us by Germanic settlers,
whereas in the land of hamlets and scattered steads old
Celtic arrangements may never have been thoroughly effaced.
1 We do not mean to imply that there were not wide stretches of waste land
which were regarded as being ' extra- villar,' or common to several vills.
" Hist. Eng. Law, i. 547.
3 This of course would not be true of cases in which the lands of various
villages were intermixed in one large tract of common field. As to these
'discrete vills,' see Hist. Eng. Law, i. 549.
4 This name-giving cluster will usually contain the parish church and so will
eujoy a certain preeminence. But we are to speak of a time when parish
churches were novelties.
16 Domesday Book,
Towards theories of this kind we are slowly winning our way.
In the meantime let us remember that a villa of Domesday
Book may correspond to one of at least two very different
models or may be intermediate between various types. It
may be a fairly large and agrarianly organic unit, or it may
be a group of small agrarian units which are being held
together in one whole merely by an external force, by police
law and fiscal law 1 .
Two little fragments of 'the original one inch ordnance
m ap ' will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of
written discourse. The one pictures a district on the border
between Oxfordshire and Berkshire cut by the Thames and
the main line of the Great Western Railway ; the other a
district on the border between Devon and Somerset, north of
Collumpton and south of Wiveliscombe. Neither is an extreme
example. True villages we may easily find. Cambridgeshire,
for instance : would have afforded some beautiful specimens, for
many of the ' open fields ' were still open when the ordnance
map of that county was made. But throughout large tracts of
England, even though there has been an ' inclosure ' and there
are no longer any open fields, our map often shows a land of
villages. When it does so and the district that it portrays is a
purely agricultural district, we may generally assume without
going far wrong that the villages are ancient, for during at
least the last three centuries the predominant current in our
agrarian history has set against the formation of villages and
towards the distribution of scattered homesteads. To find the
purest specimens of a land of hamlets we ought to go to Wales
or to Cornwall or to other parts of ' the Celtic fringe ' ; very
fair examples might be found throughout the west of England.
Also we may perhaps find hamlets rather than villages wherever
there have been within the historic period large tracts of forest
land. Very often, again, the parish or township looks on our
map like a hybrid. We seem to see a village with satellitic
hamlets. Much more remains to be done before we shall be
able to construe the testimony of our fields and walls and
hedges; but at least two types of vill must be in our eyes when
we are reading Domesday Book 2 .
1 See Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Germanen, especially ii.
119 ff.
* Wiieii the hamlets beur names with such ancient sullixes as -ton,, -uam, -by,
r /_- C r <> w n> a /.(- It ^^T
fi< /,/
# / />// l-w f I I
Fir I i^$ /-
r A r
''""'
\.Bet^ueen pp. 16 17]
A LAND OF VILLAGES
On the border between Oxfordshire and Berks/tire.
^^^=f^ a
.'\ /\L'l>< -Wf" 1 '' .y&t'yHj ^.fe-/vT%CV." f
^
A LAND OF HAMLETS
tlm border between tiumersvt and Devon.
Plan of the Survey. 17
To say that the villa of Domesday Book is in general the Size of the
vill of the thirteenth century and the civil parish of the nine-
teenth is to say that the areal extent of the villa varied widely
from case to case. More important is it for us to observe that
the number of inhabitants of the villa varied widely from case
to case. The error into which we are most likely to fall will
be that of making our vill too populous. Some vills, especially
some royal vills, are populous enough; a few contain a hundred
households; but the average township is certainly much smaller
than this 1 . Before we give any figures, it should first be
observed that Domesday Book never enables us to count heads.
It states the number of the tenants of various classes, soche-
manni, villani, bordarii, and the like, and leaves us to suppose
that each of these persons is, or may be, the head of a house-
hold. It also states how many servi there are. Whether we
ought to suppose that only the heads of servile households are
reckoned, or whether we ought to think of the servi as having
no households but as living within the lord's gates and being
enumerated, men, women and able-bodied children, by the
head this is a difficult question. Still we may reach some
results which will enable us to compare township with town-
ship. By way of fair sample we may take the Armingford
hundred of Cambridgeshire, and all persons who are above the
rank of servi we will include under the term 'the non-servile
population 2 /
ARMINGFORD HUNDRED.
Non-servile
population
Servi
Total
Abington
19
19
Bassiugbourn
35
3
38
Clapton
19
19
Croydon
29
29
-worth, -wick, -thorpe, this of course is in favour of their antiquity. On the
other hand, if they are known merely hy family names such as Styles's, Nokes's,
Johnson's or the like, this, though not conclusive evidence of, is compatible with
their modernity. Meitzen thinks that in Kent and along the southern shore the
German invaders founded but few villages. The map does not convince me that
this inference is correct.
1 When more than five-and-twenty team-lands or thereabouts are ascribed to
a single place, we shall generally find reason to believe that what is being
described is not a single vill. See above, p. 13.
2 Inq. Com. Cant. 51 fol. In a few cases our figures will involve a small
element of conjecture.
M. 2
18 Domesday Book.
Hatley
18
3
21
Litlington
37
6
43
Melbourn
62
1
63
Meldreth
44
7
51
Morden
43
11
54
Morden Alia
50
50
Shingay
18
18
Tadlow
27
4
31
Wendy
12
4
16
Whaddon
44
6
50
Total 457 45 502
Here in fourteen vills we have an average of thirty-twc
non-servile households for every vill. Now even in our own
day a parish with thirty-two houses, though small, is not
extremely small. But we should form a wrong picture of the
England of the eleventh century if we filled all parts of it with
such vills as these. We will take at random fourteen vills in
Staffordshire held by Earl Roger 1 .
Non-servile
population Servi Total
Claverlege 45 45
Nordlege 909
Alvidelege 13 13
Halas 40 2 42
Chenistelei 11 11
Otne 718
Nortberie 20 1 21
Erlide 8 2 10
Gaitone 16 16
Cressvale 808
Dodintone 303
Modreshale 505
Almentoue 808
Metford 7 1 8
Total 200 7 207
Here for fourteen vills we have an average of but fourteen
non-servile households and the servi are so few that we may
neglect them. We will next look at a page in the survey of
Somersetshire which describes certain vills that have fallen to
the lot of the bishop of Coutances 2 .
1 D. B. i. 248. We have tried to avoid vills in which it is certain or probable
that some other tenant in chief had an estate.
2 D. B. i. 88. We have tried to make sure that no tenant in chief save the
Plan of the Survey. 19
Non-servile
population
Servi
Total
"Winemeresham
8
3
11
Chetenore
3
1
4
Widicumbe
21
6
27
Harpetrev
10
2
12
Hotune
11
11
Lilebere
6
1
7
Wintreth
4
2
6
Aisecome
11
7
18
Clutone
22
1
23
Temesbare
7
3
10
Nortone
16
3
19
Cliveham
15
1
16
Ferenberge
13
6
19
Cliveware
6
6
Total
153
36
189
Here we have on the average but eleven non-servile house-
holds for each village, and even if we suppose each servus to
represent a household, we have not fourteen households. Yet
smaller vills will be found in Devonshire, many vills in which
the total number of the persons mentioned does not exceed ten
.and near half of these are servi. In Cornwall the townships,
if townships we ought to call them, are yet smaller ; often we
can attribute no more than five or six families to the vill even
if we include the servi.
Unless our calculations mislead us, the density of the Population
population in the average vill of a given county varies some- of the vUli
what directly with the density of the population in that county ;
at all events we can not say that where vills are populous, vills
will be few. As regards this matter no precise results are
attainable; our document is full of snares for arithmeticians.
Still if for a moment we have recourse to the crude method of
dividing the number of acres comprised in a modern county by
the number of the persons who are mentioned in the survey of
that county, the outcome of our calculation will be remarkable
and will point to some broad truth 1 . For Suffolk the quotient
bishop had land in any of these vills, and this we think fairly certain, except as
regards Harptree and Norton. There are now two Harptrees, East and West,
and four or more Nortons.
1 We take the figures from Ellis, Introduction, ii. 417 S.
22
20 Domesday Book.
Contrast is 46 or thereabouts ; for Norfolk but little larger 1 ; for Essex
east? and 61, for Lincoln 67 ; for Bedford, Berkshire, Northampton,
Leicester, Middlesex, Oxford, Kent and Somerset it lies between
70 and 80, for Buckingham, Warwick, Sussex, Wiltshire and
Dorset it lies between 80 and 90 ; Devon, Gloucester, Wor-
cester, Hereford are thinly peopled, Cornwall, Stafford, Shropshire
very thinly. Some particular results that we should thus attain
would be delusive. Thus we should say that men were sparse
in Cambridgeshire, did we not remember that a large part of
our modern Cambridgeshire was then a sheet of water. Per-
manent physical causes interfere with the operation of the
general rule. Thus Surrey, with its wide heaths has, as we
might expect, but few men to the square mile. Derbyshire has
many vills lying waste; Yorkshire is so much wasted that it
can give us no valuable result; and again, Yorkshire and
Cheshire were larger than they are now, while Rutland and
the adjacent counties had not their present boundaries. For
all this however, we come to a very general rule : the density
of the population decreases as we pass from east to west. With
this we may connect another rule : land is much more valuable
in the east than it is in the west. This matter is indeed hedged
in by many thorny questions ; still whatever hypothesis we may
adopt as to the mode in which land was valued, one general
truth comes out pretty plainly, namely, that, economic arrange-
ments being what they were, it was far better to have a
team-land in Essex than to have an equal area of arable
land in Devon.
Small vills. Between eastern and western England there were differences
visible to the natural eye. With these were connected unseen
and legal differences, partly as causes, partly as effects. But
for the moment let us dwell on the fact that many an English
vill has very few inhabitants. We are to speak hereafter of
village communities. Let us therefore reflect that a community
of some eight or ten householders is not likely to be a highly
organized entity. This is not all, for these eight or ten house-
1 Very possibly this figure is too low. There is reason to think that some of
the free men and sokemen of these counties get counted twice or thrice over
because they hold land under several different lords. On the other hand Ellis
(Introduction, ii. 491) would argue that the figure is too high. But the words
Alii ibi tenent which occur at the end of numerous entries mean, we believe, not
that there are in this vill other unenumerated tillers of the soil, but that the vill
is divided between several tenants in chief.
Plan of the Survey. 21
holders will often belong to two, three or four different social
and economic, if not legal, classes. Some may be sokemen,
some villani, bordarii, cotarii, and besides them there will be a
few servi. If a vill consists, as in Devonshire often enough it
will, of some three villani, some four bordarii and some two
servi, the 'township-moot,' if such a moot there be, will be a
queer little assembly, the manorial court, if such a court there
be, will not have much to do. These men can not have many
communal affairs ; there will be no great scope for dooms or for
by-laws ; they may well take all their disputes into the hundred
court, especially in Devonshire where the hundreds are small.
Thus of the visible vill of the eleventh century and its material
surroundings we may form a wrong notion. Often enough in
the west its common fields (if common fields it had) were not
wide fields; the men who had shares therein were few and
belonged to various classes. Thus of two villages in Gloucester-
shire, Brookthorpe and Harescombe, all that we can read is
that in Brostrop there were two teams, one villanus, three
bordarii, four servi, while in Hersecome there were two teams,
two bordarii and five servi 1 . Many a Devonshire township can
produce but two or three teams. Often enough our ' village
community' will be a heterogeneous little group whose main
capital consists of some 300 acres of arable land and some
20 beasts of the plough.
On the other hand, we must be careful not to omit from our Impor-
view the rich and thickly populated shires or to imagine or to the east.
speak as though we imagined that a general theory of English
history can neglect the East of England. If we leave Lincoln-
shire, Norfolk and Suffolk out of account we are to all appear-
ance leaving out of account not much less than a quarter of the
whole nation 2 . Let us make three groups of counties: (1) a
South-Western group containing Devon, Somerset, Dorset and
Wiltshire: (2) a Mid- Western group containing the shires of
Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Salop, Stafford and Warwick :
(3) an Eastern group containing Lincolnshire, Norfolk and
Suffolk. The first of these groups has the largest ; the third
the smallest acreage. In Domesday Book, however, the figures
which state their population seem to be these 3 :
1 D. B. i. 162 b.
2 Ellis's figures are : England 283, 242 : the three counties 72,883.
3 We take these figures from Ellis.
22 Domesday Book.
South -Western Group : 49,155
Mid- Western Group: 33,191
Eastern Group: 72,883
These figures are so emphatic that they may cause us for a
moment to doubt their value, and on details we must lay no
stress. But we have materials which enable us to check the
general effect. In 1297 Edward I. levied a lay subsidy of a
ninth 1 . The sums borne by our three groups of counties were
these :
South- Western Group : 4,038
Mid-Western Group: 3,514
Eastern Group : 7,329
There is a curious resemblance between these two sets of figures.
Then in 1377 and 1381 returns were made for a poll-tax 2 . The
number of polls returned in our three groups were these :
1377 1381
South- Western Group : 183,842 106,086
Mid- Western Group : 158,245 115,679
Eastern Group : 255,498 182,830
No doubt all inferences drawn from medieval statistics are
exceedingly precarious ; but, unless a good many figures have
conspired to deceive us, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were
at the time of the Conquest and for three centuries afterwards
vastly richer and more populous than any tract of equal area
in the West.
Manorial Another distinction between the eastern counties and the
and non- r TT> i j T
manorial rest ot England is apparent. In many shires we shall find that
the name of each vill is mentioned once and no more. This is
so because the land of each vill belongs in its entirety to some
one tenant in chief. We may go further : we may say, though
at present in an untechnical sense, that each vill is a manor.
Such is the general rule, though there will be exceptions to it.
On the other hand, in the eastern counties this rule will become
the exception. For example, of the fourteen vills in the
Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire there is but one of
1 Lay Subsidy, 25 Edw. I. (Yorkshire Archaeological Society), pp. xxxi-xxxv.
Fractions of a pound are neglected.
2 Powell, The Eising in East Anglia, 120-3. The great decrease between
1377 and 1381 in the number of persons taxed, we must not try to explain.
Plan of the Survey. 23
which it is true that the whole of its land is held by a single
tenant in chief. In this county it is common to find that three
or four Norman lords hold land in the same vill. This seems true
not only of Cambridgeshire but also of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk,
Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, and some parts of Yorkshire.
Even in other districts of England the rule that each vill has a
single lord is by no means unbroken in the Conqueror's day
and we can see that there were many exceptions to it in the
Confessor's. A careful examination of all England vill by vill
would perhaps show that the contrast which we are noting is
neither so sharp nor so ancient as at first sight it seems to be :
nevertheless it exists.
A better known contrast there is. The eastern counties are The distri-
the home of liberty 1 . We may divide the tillers of the soil free'meu
into five great classes ; these in order of dignity and freedom and serfs ~
are (1) liberi homines, (2) sochemanni, (3) villani, (4) bordarii,
cotarii etc., (5) servi. The two first of these classes are to be
found in large numbers only in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire,
Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. We
shall hereafter see that Cambridgeshire also has been full of
sokemen, though since the Conquest they have fallen from their
high estate. On the other hand, the number of servi increases
pretty steadily as we cross the country from east to west. It
reaches its maximum in Cornwall and Gloucestershire ; it is
very low in Norfolk, Suffolk, Derby, Leicester, Middlesex,
Sussex ; it descends to zero in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.
This descent to zero may fairly warn us that the terms with
which we are dealing may not bear precisely the same meaning
in all parts of England, or that a small class is apt to be reckoned
as forming part of a larger class. But still it is clear enough
that some of these terms are used with care and express real
and important distinctions.
Of this we are assured by a document which seems to The classi-
reproduce the wording of the instructions which defined the msn. "
duty of at least one party of royal commissioners 2 . We are
about to speak of the mode in which the occupants of the soil
are classified by Domesday Book, and therefore this document
1 See the serviceable maps in Seebohm, Village Community, 86. But they
seem to treat Yorkshire unfairly. It has 5-5 per cent, of sokemen.
2 This is found at the beginning of the Inquisitio Eliensis ; D. B. iv. 4 Leg. Hen. 7G 2.
The Serfs. 31
perhaps we ought to add that there is also a class of six-
hundred-men 1 . A serf becomes such either by birth or by
some event, such as a sale into slavery, that happens in his
lifetime 2 . Servile blood is transmitted from father to child ;
some lords hold that it is also transmitted by mother to child 3 .
If a slave is to be freed this should be done publicly, in court,
or church or market, and lance and helmet or other the arms of
free men should be given him, while he should give his lord
thirty pence, that is the price of his skin, as a sign that he is
henceforth ' worthy of his hide.' On the other hand, when a
free man falls into slavery then also there should be a public
ceremony. He should put his head between his lord's hands
and should receive as the arms of slavery some bill-hook or
the like 4 . Public ceremonies are requisite, for the state is
endangered by the uncertain condition of accused criminals; the
lords will assert at one moment that their men are free and at
the next moment that these same men are slaves 5 . The descent
of a free man into slavery is treated as no uncommon event ;
the slave may well have free kinsfolk 6 . But, to come to the
fundamental rule, the villanus, the meanest of free men, is a
two-hundred-man, that is to say, if he be slain the very
substantial wergild of 200 Saxon shillings or 4 must be paid
to his kinsfolk 7 , while a man-b<5t of 30 shillings is paid to his
lord 8 . But if a servus be slain his kinsfolk receive the com-
paratively trifling sum of 40 pence while the lord gets the
man-b(5t of 20 shillings 9 . That the serf's kinsfolk should
receive a small sum need not surprise us. Germanic law has
1 Leg. Hen. 76 3. 2 Ibid. 76 3.
3 Ibid. 77 ; see Hist. Eng. Law, i. 405.
4 Ibid. 78 2. The difficult strublum we leave untouched.
5 Ibid. 78 2 from Cnut, n. 20. On this see Jastrow's comment, op. cit.
p. 80.
6 Ibid. 70 5. 7 Ibid. 70 1 ; 76 4. 8 Ibid. 69 2.
9 Ibid. 70 4 : 'Si liber servum occidat similiter reddat parentibus 40 den. et
duas mufflas et unum pullum [al. billum] mutilatum.' The mufflae are thick
gloves. Compare Ancient Laws of Wales, i. 239, 511 ; the bondman has no
galanas (wergild) but if injured he receives a saraad ; 'the saraad of a bondman
is twelve pence, six for a coat for him, three for trousers, one for buskins, one
for a hook and one for a rope, and if he be a woodman let the hook-penny be for
an axe.' If we read billum instead of pullum the English rule may remind us
of the Welsh. His hedger's gloves and bill-hook are the arms appropriate to
the serf, ' servitutis arma ' ; cf. Leg. Hen. 78 2. As to the man-hot see Lieber-
mann, Leg. Edwardi, p. 71.
32 Domesday Book.
never found it easy to carry the principle that the slave is a
chattel to extreme conclusions ; but the payment seems trifling
and half contemptuous ; at any rate the life of the villein is
worth the life of twenty-four serfs 1 . Then again, it is by no
means certain that a lord can not kill his serf with impunity.
' If,' says our text, ' a man slay his own serf, his is the sin and
his is the loss ' : we may interpret this to mean that he has
sinned but sinned against himself 2 . Then again, for the evil
deeds of his slave the master is in some degree responsible.
If my slave be guilty of a petty theft not worthy of death, I
am bound to make restitution ; if the crime be a capital one
and he be taken handhaving, then he must ' die like a free
man 3 .' If my slave be guilty of homicide, my duty is to set
him free and hand him over to the kindred of the slain, but
apparently I may purchase his life by a sum of 40 shillings, a
sum much less than the wer of the slain man 4 . We must not
be too hard on the owners of delinquent slaves. There are
cases, for example, in which, several slaves having committed
a crime, one of them chosen by lot must suffer for the sins of
all 5 . Our author is borrowing from the laws of several different
centuries and does not arrive at any neat result ; nor must we
wonder at this, for the problems presented to jurisprudence by
the crimes and delicts of slaves are very intricate. Then again,
we have the rule that if free men and serfs join in a crime, the
whole guilt is to be attributed to the free: he who joins
with a slave in a theft has no companion 6 . On the whole,
though the slave is likely to have as a matter of fact a
peculium of his own, a peculium out of which he may be able
to pay for his offences and even perhaps to purchase his
liberty 7 , the servus of our Leges seems to be in the main a
rightless being. We look in vain for any trace of that idea of
the relativity of servitude which becomes the core of Bracton's
1 In Leg. Hen. 81 3 (a passage which seems to show that by his master's
favour even the servus may sometimes sue for a wrong done to him) we have
this sum : villanus : cothsetus : servus :: 30 : 15 : 6.
2 Ibid. 75 4: suum peccatum est et dampnum.' See also 70 10, an
exceedingly obscure passage.
3 Ibid. 59 23.
4 Ibid. 70 5 ; but for this our author has to go back as far as Inc.
8 Ibid. 59 25.
6 Ibid. 59 24 ; 85 4 : ' solus furatur qui cum servo furatur. '
7 Ibid. 78 3 ; 59 25.
The Serfs. 33
doctrine 1 . At the same time we observe that many, perhaps
most, of the rules which mark the slavish condition of the
serf are ancient rules and rules that are becoming obsolete.
In the twelfth century the old system of wer and bot is
already vanishing, though an antiquarian lawyer may yet
try to revivify it. When it disappears altogether before the
new law, which holds every grave crime to be a felony, and
punishes almost every felony with death 2 , many grand differ-
ences between the villein and the serf will have perished. The
gallows is a great leveller.
If now we recur to the days of the Conquest, we cannot doubt Return to
that the law knew a definite class of slaves, and marked them | he
off by many distinctions from the villani and cotarii, and even (
from the coliberti. Sums that seem high were being paid for
men whose freedom was being purchased 3 . At Lewes the toll
paid for the sale of an ox was a halfpenny ; on the sale of a
man it was fourpence 4 . In later documents we may sometimes
see a distinction well drawn. Thus in the Black Book of
Peterborough, compiled in 1127 or thereabouts, we may read
how on one of his manors the abbot has eight herdsmen
(bovarii), how each of them holds ten acres, has to do labour
services and render loaves and poultry. And then we read that
each of them must pay one penny for his head if he be a free
man (liber homo), while he pays nothing if he be a servus 5 .
This is a well-drawn distinction. Of two men whose economic
position is precisely the same, the one may be free, the other a
slave, and it is the free man, not the slave, who has to pay a
head-penny. Now when the Conqueror's surveyors, or rather
the jurors, call a man a servus they are, so it seems to us,
thinking rather of his legal status than of his position in the
economy of a manor. At any rate we ought to observe that the
economic stratification of society may cut the legal stratification.
We are accustomed perhaps to suppose that while the villani
have lands that are in some sense their own, while they support
themselves and their families by tilling those lands, the servus
has no land that is in any sense his own, but is fed at his lord's
board, is housed in his lord's court, and spends all his time in
1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 398, 402. a jjist. Eng. Law, ii. 457.
3 See the Bath manumissions, Kemble, Saxons, i. 507 ff. Sometimes a
pound or a half-pound is paid.
4 !> B. i. 26. s Chron. Petrob. 163.
M. 3
34 Domesday Book.
the cultivation of his lord's demesne lands. Such may have
been the case in those parts of England where we hear of but
few servi ; those few may have been inmates of the lord's house
and have had no plots of their own. But such can hardly have
been the case in the south-western counties ; the servi are too
many to be menials. Indeed it would seem that these servi
sometimes had arable plots, and had oxen, which were to be
distinguished from the demesne oxen of their lords not indeed
as a matter of law, but as a matter of economic usage 1 . It is
plain that the legal and the economic lines may intersect one
another; the menial who is fed by the lord and who must give
his whole time to the lord's work may be a free man ; the slave
may have a cottage and oxen and a plot of arable land, and
labour for himself as well labouring for his lord. Hence a
perplexed and uncertain terminology : the servus who has land
and oxen may be casually called a villanus 2 , and we cannot be
sure that no one whom our record calls a servus has the wer-
gild of a free man. Nor can we be sure that the enumeration
of the servi is always governed by one consistent principle. In
the shires of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester we read of
numerous ancillae in Worcestershire of 677 servi and 101
ancillae 3 and this may make us think that in this district all
the able-bodied serfs are enumerated, whether or no they have
cottages to themselves 4 . We may strongly suspect that the
king's commissioners were not much interested in the line that
separated the villani from the servi, since the lord was as directly
answerable for the geld of any lands that were in the occu-
pation of his villeins as he was for the geld of those plots that
were tilled for him by his slaves. That there should have been
1 D. B. i. 105 b, Devon : ' Bolf tenet de B[alduino] Boslie... Terra est 8 carucis.
In dominio est 1 caruca et dimidia et 7 servi cum 1 caruca.' D. B. iv. 265 :
'Balduinus habet 1 mansionem quae vocatur Bosleia...hanc possunt arare 8
carrucae et modo tenet earn Boffus de Balduiuo. Inde habet B. 1 ierdinum et
1 carrucam et dimidiam in dominio et villani teuent aliam terrain et habent ibi
1 carrucam. Ibi habet B. 7 servos.' In the Exeter record these seven serfs seem
to get reckoned as being both servi and villani. So in the account of Bentis,
D. B. iv. 204-5, the lord is said to have one quarter of the arable in demesne
and two oxen, while the villani are said to have the rest of the arable and one
team ; but the only villani are 8 coliberti and 4 servi.
- See last note. 3 Ellis, Introduction, ii. 504-6.
4 See, for example, the following Herefordshire entry, D. B. i. 180 b : ' Iu
dominio sunt 2 carucae et 4 villain et 8 bordarii et prepositus et bedellus. Inter
omnes habent 4 carucas. Ibi 8 inter servos et ancillas et vaccarius et daia.'
The Serfs. 35
never a ihetiw in all Yorkshire and Lincolnshire is hardly credible,
and yet we hear of no servi in those counties.
This being so, we encounter some difficulty if we would put Disappear-
just the right interpretation on a remarkable fact that is visible
in Essex. The description of that county tells us not only how
many villani, bordarii and servi there are now, but also how
many there were in King Edward's day, and thus shows what
changes have taken place during the last twenty years. Now
on manor after manor the number of villeins and bordiers, if of
them we make one class, has increased, while the number of
servi has fallen. We take 100 entries (four batches of 25
apiece) and see that the number of villani and bordarii has
risen from 1486 to 1894, while the number of servi has fallen
from 423 to 303. We make another experiment with a hundred
entries. This gives the following result :
1066 1086
Villani 1273 1247
Bordarii 810 1241
Servi 384 312
This decrease in the number of servi seems to be pretty evenly
distributed throughout the county 1 . We shall not readily
ascribe the change to any mildheartedness of the lords. They
are Frenchmen, and in all probability they have got the most
they could out of a mass of peasantry made malleable and
manageable by the Conquest. We may rather be entitled to
infer that there has been a considerable change in rural
economy. For the cultivation of his demesne land the lord
begins to rely less and less on the labour of serfs whom he feeds,
more and more upon the labour of tenants who have plots of
their own and who feed themselves. From this again we may
perhaps infer that the labour services of the villani and bordarii
are being augmented. But at any rate it speaks ill of their
fate, that under the sway of foreigners, who may fairly be sus-
pected of some harshness and greed, their inferiors, the true
1 Mr Eound has drawn attention to the great increase of bordarii : Antiquary
(1882) vi. 9. In the second of our two experiments the cases were taken from the
royal demesne and the lands of the churches. The surveys of Norfolk and
Suffolk profess to enumerate the various classes of peasants T. E. E. ; but
commonly each entry reports that there has been no change. Without saying
that we disbelieve these reports, we nevertheless may say that a verdict which
asserts that things have always (semper) been as they now are may easily be the
outcome of nescience.
32
36 Domesday Book.
servi, are somewhat rapidly disappearing. However, it is by no
means impossible that with a slavery so complete as that of the
English theow the Normans were not very familiar in their own
country 1 .
3. The Villeins.
The boors Next above the servi we see the small but interesting class
berts. f buri, biirs or coliberti. Probably it was not mentioned in the
writ which set the commissioners their task, and this may well
be the reason why it appears as but a very small class. It has
some 900 members; still it is represented in fourteen shires:
Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon,
Cornwall, Buckingham, Oxford, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford,
Warwick, Shropshire in short, in the shires of Wessex and
western Mercia. Twice over our record explains a piece of
rare good fortune that buri and coliberti are all one 2 . In
general they are presented to us as being akin rather to the
servi than to the villani or bordarii, as when we are told, ' In
demesne there is one virgate of land and there are 3 teams and
11 servi and 5 coliberti, and there are 15 villani and 15 bordarii
with 8 teams V But this rule is by no means unbroken ; some-
times the coliberti are separated from the servi and a precedence
over the cotarii or even over the bordarii is given them. Thus
of a Wiltshire manor it is written, ' In demesne there are 8
teams and 20 servi and 41 villani and 30 bordarii and 7 coliberti
and 74 cotarii have among them all 27 teams 4 .' Again of a
Warwickshire manor, ' There is land for 26 teams ; in demesne
are 3 teams and 4 servi and 43 villani and 6 coliberti and 10
bordarii with 16 teams 5 .' A classification which turns upon
legal status is cut by a classification which turns upon economic
condition. The colibertus we take to be an unfreer man (how
there come to be degrees of freedom is a question to be asked
by and by) than the cotarius or the bordarius, but on a given
manor he may be a more important person, ibr he may have
1 Hist. Eng. Law, i. 53-4.
2 D. B. i. 38, Coseharn : ' 8 burs i. coliberti.' Ib. 38 b Dene : ' et coliberti
[vel bures interlined].'
3 D. B. i. 65, Wintreburne. 4 D. B. i. 75, Bridetcme et Bere.
5 D. B. i. 239 b, Etone.
The Villeins. 37
plough beasts while the cotarius has none, he may have two
oxen while the bordarius has but an ox.
In calling him a colibertus the Norman clerks are giving him The Conti-
a foreign name, the etymological origin of which is very dark 1 ; fort*
but this much seems plain, that in the France of the eleventh
century a large class bearing this name had been formed out
of ancient elements, Roman coloni and Germanic liti, a class
which was not rightless (for it could be distinguished from the
class of servi, and a colibertus might be made a servus by way of
punishment for his crimes) but which yet was unfree, for the
colibertus who left his lord might be pursued and recaptured 2 .
As to the Englishman upon whom this name is bestowed we
know him to be a gebur, a boor, and we learn something of him
from that mysterious document entitled ' Rectitudines Singu-
larum Personarum 3 .' His services, we are told, vary from The En-
place to place ; in some districts he works for his lord two 8 1S
days a week and during harvest-time three days a week; he
pays gafol in money, barley, sheep and poultry; also he has
ploughing to do besides his week-work; he pays hearth-
penny ; he and one of his fellows must between them feed a
dog. It is usual to provide him with an outfit of two oxen, one
cow, six sheep, and seed for seven acres of his yardland, and also
to provide him with household stuff; on his death all these
chattels go back to his lord. Thus the boor is put before us
as a tenant with a house and a yardland or virgate, and two
plough oxen. He will therefore play a more important part in
the manorial economy than the cottager who has no beasts.
But he is a very dependent person ; his beasts, even the poor
furniture of his house, his pots and crocks, are provided for him
by his lord. Probably it is this that marks him off from the
ordinary villanus or ' townsman,' and brings him near the serf.
In a sense he may be a free man. We have seen how the law,
whether we look for it to the code of Cnut or to the Leges
Henrici, is holding fast the proposition that every one who
1 Guerard, Cartulaire de L'Abbaye de S. Pere de Chartres, vol. i. p. xlii.
2 The position of the colibcrti is discussed by Guerard, loc. cit., and by
Lamprecht, Geschichte des Franzosischen Wirthschaftslebens (in Schmoller's
Forschungen, Bd i.), p. 81. Guerard says, ' Les coliberts peuvent se placer a peu
pies indifferemment ou au dernier des homines libres, ou a la tete des homines
engages dans les liens de la servitude.'
3 Schmid, App. in. c. 4.
38 Domesday Book.
is not a theowman is a free man, that every one is either a
liber homo or a servus. We have no warrant for denying to
the boor the full wergild of 200 shillings. He pays the hearth-
penny, or Peter's penny, and the document that tells us this
elsewhere mentions this payment as the mark of a free man 1 .
And yet in a very true and accurate sense he may be unfree,
unfree to quit his lord's service. All that he has belongs to his
lord; he must be perpetually in debt to his lord; he could
hardly leave his lord without being guilty of something very
like theft, an abstraction of chattels committed to his charge.
Very probably if he flies, his lord has a right to recapture him.
On the other hand, so dependent a man will be in a very strict
sense a tenant at will. When he dies not only his tenement
but his stock will belong to the lord ; like the French colibert
he is mainmortable. At the same time, to one familiar with the
cartularies of the thirteenth century the rents and services
that this boor has to pay and perform for his virgate will not
appear enormous. If we mistake not, many a villanus of
Henry III.'s day would have thought them light. Of course
any such comparison is beset by difficulties, for at present
we know all too little of the history of wages and prices.
Nevertheless the intermediation of this class of buri or coliberti
between the serfs and the villeins of Domesday Book must
tend to raise our estimate both of the legal freedom and of the
economic welfare of that great mass of peasants which is now to
come before us 2 .
villani, That great mass consists of some 108,500 villani, some
cotarii. ' 82,600 bordarii, and some 6,800 cotarii and coscets 3 . Though
in manor after manor we may find representatives of each of
these three classes, we can see that for some important purpose
they form but one grand class, and that the term villanus may
be used to cover the whole genus as well as to designate one of
1 Rectitudines, c. 3.
2 Occasionally the coliberti of D. B. are put before us as paying rents in
money or in kind. Thus D. B. i. 38, Hants : ' In Coseham sunt 4 hidae quae
pertinent huic manerio ubi T. B. E. erant 8 burs i. coliberti cum 4 carucis
reddentes 50 sol. 8 den. minus.' D. B. i. 179 b, Heref. : ' Villani dant de
consuetudine 13 sol. et 4 den. et [sex] coliberti reddunt 3 sextarios frumeuti et
ordei et 2 oves et dimidiam cum agnis et 2 den. et unum obolum.' D. B. i. 165 :
'et in Glouucestre 1 burgensis reddens 5 den. et 2 coliberti reddentes 34 den.' In
a charter coming from Bishop Denewulf (K. 1079) we read of three wite-theow-
men who were boor-born and three who were theow-born.
3 Ellis, Introduction, ii. 511-14.
The Villeins. 39
its three species. In the Exon Domesday a common formula,
having stated the number of hides in the manor and the number
of teams for which it can find work, proceeds to divide the land
and the existing teams between the demesne and the villani
the villani, it will say, have so many hides and so many teams.
Then it will state how many villani, bordarii, cotarii there are.
But it will sometimes fall out that there are no villani if that
term is to be used in its specific sense, and so, after having been
told that the villani have so much land and so many teams, we
learn that the only villani on this manor are bordarii 1 . The
lines which divide the three species are, we may be sure, much
rather economic than legal lines. Of course the law may
recognise them upon occasion 2 , but we can not say that the
bordarius has a different status from that of the villanus. In
the Leges both fall under the term villani ; indeed, as hereafter
will be seen, that term has sometimes to cover all men who are
not servi but are not noble. Nor must we suppose that the
economic lines are drawn with much precision or according to
any one uniform pattern. Of villani and bordarii we may read
in every county ; cotarii or coscets in considerable numbers are
found only in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex, Wiltshire, Dorset,
Somerset, Berkshire, Hertford and Cambridge, though they are
not absolutely unknown in Buckingham, in Devon, in Hereford,
Worcester, Shropshire, Yorkshire. We can not tell how the
English jurors would have expressed the distinction between
bordarii and cotarii, for while the cot is English, the borde is
French. If we are entitled to draw any inference from the
distribution of the cottiers, it would be that the smallest of
small tenements were to be found chiefly along the southern
shore ; but then there are no cotarii in Hampshire, plenty in
Sussex, Surrey, Wiltshire and Dorset. Again, in the two shires
last mentioned some distinction seems to be taken between the
coscets and the cotarii, the former being superior to the latter 3 .
Two centuries later we find a similar distinction among the
tenants of Worcester Priory. There are cotmanni whose rents
1 For examples see D. B. iv. 211 and the following pages.
2 Leg. Hen. 81, 3: ' Quidam villani qui sunt eiusmodi leierwitam et
blodwitam et huiusmodi minora forisfacta emerunt a dominis suis, vel quomodo
merueruut de suis et in suos, quorum fietgefoth vel overseunessa est 30 den. ;
cothseti 15 den. ; servi 6 den.'
3 D. B. i. 71, Haseberie : ' 5 villani et 13 coscez et 2 cotarii.' Ibid. 80 b ;
Chinestauestone : ' 18 villaui et 14 coscez et 4 cotarii.'
40 Domesday Book.
and services are heavier, and whose tenements are presumably
larger than those of the cotarii, though the difference is not
very great 1 .
Size of the The vagueness of distinctions such as these is well illustrated
tenement, by the failure of the term bordarius (and none is more prominent
in Domesday Book) to take firm root in this country 2 . The suc-
cessors of the bordarii seem to become in the later documents
either villani with small or cottiers with large tenements.
Distinctions which turn on the amount of land that i 
