CHAPTER IV

THE MANOR AND THE MANORIAL SYSTEM

§ 25. The Interest of the Question as to the Origin of the Manor.

THE question of the origin of the English manor, however abstract and academic it may at first appear, is in reality one of the most interesting of all social topics. When the manor is clearly distinguished as a social factor in the historical period, it always involves two elements-the seigneurial and the communal, the lord on the one hand, and on the other his dependants, who do their work and hold their land in common. The question, therefore, at once arises as to which of these two elements is the older? Is the manor the result of the subjection of an originally free community to an overlord, or was there always, even in the beginnings of social life, a dependent and servile population who tilled the land for the benefit of others? According

as history decides one way or the other, it will influence our views on the land question in general, including the discussions even of the present day. From one point of view we shall be inclined to think that the present system of private property in land is the system which, in one form or another, has existed from the beginning, and is the outcome of social forces which have their justification in the earliest pages of history. From another point of view we may hold that property in land did not exist at all in early times, but that the land was held in common for the good of all, while the ownership of it was vested only in the nation, so that the present system of private ownership is the degenerate outcome of centuries of appropriation of common property by individuals, whose title to it was in many cases more or less doubtful. Hence reformers like Henry George maintain that we ought to revert to common ownership of land as being the only natural condition and

basis of social and economic life, though, on the other hand, so great an authority as Sir Henry Maine has declared that the change from common to private ownership is the sign of an advancing civilisation. Whatever view we hold, it is obvious that the question of the origin of the manor and of property in land is of more than usual interest.

§ 26. The Mark Theory and the Manor.

During the present century, owing to the valuable labours of a number of German and English historians,' some writers have come to the conclusion (though it is much disputed) that in very early times, before the Germanic tribes, afterwards called English, had crossed over to England, or perhaps even before they had settled down in Europe, all land was held in common by various communities. Each community contained a few families, or possibly a whole tribe. The land occupied by this community had been cleared away from the original forests or wastes where they had settled, and was separated from that of other communities by a boundary or mark, a name which in course of time came to be applied not to the boundary but to the land itself thus portioned off.2 Within this mark was the primitive village or township, where each member of the community had his house, and where each had a common share in the land. This land was of three kinds :-(1) The forest and waste land, from which the mark had been originally cleared, useful for rough natural pasture, but quite uncultivated; (2) The pasture land, including, perhaps, meadows, sometimes enclosed and sometimes open, in which each mark-man looked after his own hay, and stacked it for the winter. This land was sometimes divided into allotments for each member; (3) The arable land, which also was divided into allotments for each mark-man. But a man's rights, whether in the allotments or in the common pastures and forests, were of the nature of usufruct only, his title to absolute ownership being merged in the general title of the

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1 Including Kemble, K. Maurer, Stubbs, Freeman, Gneist, Maine, and especially G. F. von Maurer and Hanssen. For a careful summary of the views of each see Vinogradoff's able Introduction in his Villeinage in England. 2 Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. p. 49, ch. iii., who gives a good summary of the mark system. Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. 49,

tribe, which, however, he of course shared with the rest.1 To settle any question relating to the division or use of the land, such as the choice of the meadow, the rotation of crops, or the allotment of the shares of land, or to decide any other business of common importance, the members of the mark, or mark-men, met in a common council called the mark-moot 2-an institution of which relics are said to have survived for many centuries. This council, and the mark generally, formed, it was said, the political, social, and economic unit of the early English tribes, but now this view is not supported by scholars, except as regards agricultural arrangements. The mark probably did not exist in the form just sketched out when these tribes first occupied England, though there may have been some modification of it introduced. It had probably already undergone considerable transformation towards what is called the manorial system and private ownership. But those who hold the mark theory maintain that many traces of it still remain even now. Our commons,5 still numerous in spite of hundreds of enclosures, the manorial courts, and the names. of places ending in -ing-a termination which implies a family settlement are evidences which remain among us even at the close of the nineteenth century. And, of course, it is to the mark system that the communal element in our early and medieval English agriculture is supposed to be due.

§ 27. Criticisms of the Mark Theory.

Leaving for the moment the consideration of the truth or inaccuracy of the mark theory, we find, at any rate at the time when the Saxon settlement in England had been completed, that a very different system prevailed, namely, the manorial system. The word "manor" is a Norman word for the Saxon "township" or community, and it differs 1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., i. p. 49.

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2 Stubbs, i. p. 51. The word mearemot (found A.D. 971) was instanced by Kemble, but Anglo-Saxon scholars do not think that mark in this connexion means more than a "boundary.” Cf. Earle, Land Charters, p. 45. * Stubbs, p. 84. 6 lb. 5 Ib., p. 84. p. 75. 7 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ch. v. p. 81; Taylor, Words and Places, 132. So Ordericus Vitalis, iv. 7; see Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ch. v. p. 89, and ch. ix. p. 273.

▲ Ib.,

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from the mark in that the mark was a group of households or persons organised and governed on a communal and democratic basis, while in the manor we find an autocratic organisation and government, whereby a group of tenants (not independent "markmen ") acknowledge the superior position and authority of a "lord of the manor." The great feature of the manor is, in fact, this subjection to a lord, who owned absolutely a certain portion of the land therein and had rights of rent (paid in services, food, or money, or in all three) over the remainder. On the other hand the tenants had certain rights as against the lord,1 but these and the questions connected with these we must leave till later.

Such are the distinctive features of the mark and the manor. The point to be now considered is: how did the one result from the other? It seems very probable that the manorial system must have been the result of conquest, but if so, who were the conquerors that imposed it upon their subjects? Were they the Anglo-Saxons, or the Romans, or the pre-Roman invaders of Britain ? If the conquerors were the Saxons, then it follows that they themselves had already developed beyond the mark system before they came to these islands. It was at one time thought that the manorial system grew up in the later periods of the Saxon conquest, but received the form, with which mediæval documents make us familiar, only shortly before the Norman rule, and assumed many of its features under Norman influence. But it is now more generally accepted that the manorial system was in existence as the prevailing form of social organisation very soon after the Saxon invasion.2

1 Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, pp. 174, 176.

2 This is the net result of Mr Seebohm's valuable labours. He thinks that the Roman villa presents all the essential features of an English manor, and thus implies that the Saxon lords of the manors merely stepped into the shoes of their Roman predecessors. In an essay more recent than his book on the Village Community, he seems inclined to ante-date the feudal side of the manorial system still further. "The British village community was already a good deal feudalised" before the Saxon conquest; possibly (under the influence of Belgic Gauls of the S. E.) even before the Roman conquest. See his valuable critique of Vinogradoff in the English Historical Review, Vol. VII., No. 27 (July 1892).

Certainly we have hardly any satisfactory evidence of the
mark itself in England, though, as we noted just above,
are found.
survivals of its influence

And, indeed, many authorities of great weight have gone so far as to deny that the mark ever had any existence, whether in England or Europe, except in the mistaken theories of Those who reject the mark theory do Teutonic historians. so largely because they argue that the servile and dependent cultivators of the manorial system lead us back, not to an originally free, but to an originally servile population. They deny that the communal element is ever seen where it can be proved that the cultivating group are proprietors; it is only found among dependants or tenants, not among free men. "Where the cultivating group are in any real sense proprietors they have no corporate character, and where they have a corporate character they are not proprietors." They combat, moreover, the very facts and quotations from ancient writers upon which advocates of the mark theory base their inferences. Apart from the powerful work of Mr F. Seebohm in his Village Community, perhaps the most concise and certainly the most violent attack upon the holders of the mark theory is that made by Fustel de Coulanges in his essay on the Origin of He first challenges the meaning Property in Land.2 given to certain passages of Cæsar and Tacitus 3 by G. F. von Maurer, and then tries to show that in early German law mark means "a boundary" primarily, and secondly a piece of private property, and that private property in land

1 W. J. Ashley, criticising Maine in Note A to his own Introduction to F. de Coulanges' Origin of Property in Land, p. xlvii.

2 It first appeared in Revue des Questions Historiques, April 1889, and is published separately in English in Mr Ashley's translation above referred to. 3 The main passages are Cæsar, B. G., vi. 21-23, and Tacitus, Germ., c. 26, upon which e.g. our English authority Stubbs bases his remarks in Const. Hist., I. c. ii. But it seems to me that de Coulanges, although he makes out a good case against von Maurer on some points, emphasises unduly Cæsar's words cogunt, compel, and principes, chiefs, in saying they mean "chiefs arbitrarily disposing of the soil of which alone they are owners.' But in their natural sense the words merely imply that the people fall in with the arrangements made by their "chief men," and for all we know, the people may merely have deputed certain chief men to carry out the customary division of land desired by the community.