it is certain that many men who in Domesday are classed as "villeins" were for all intents and purposes "free" men, who either merely rendered services, not always necessarily servile, as a condition of holding land, or who, in addition to holding perfectly free land, held also some other land in villeinage, and thus became confused altogether with villeins. There is little doubt that the free holdings in the manors represent, in many cases, free shares in a village community, upon which the manorial structure has been superimposed.1

§ 31. The Evidence of Village Communities.

3

We have, therefore, many reasons for believing that the original condition of the subject manorial villages had been at an earlier period that of free communities. But if so, can we not find traces of such communities in England? Were they all extinct at the time of Domesday? Recent writers certainly incline to the belief that individually and collectively villeins were more free in Saxon than in Norman times, but it has been stoutly denied 3 that there are any free village communities to be found later than the Norman conquest, or, indeed, previous to it. Only communities peopled by villeins are mentioned. But we have already seen that Domesday is an unsatisfactory guide in questions of status, and there is good reason to doubt whether these villein communities were quite so devoid of freedom as the Norman surveyors described them. In the cases of Chippenham and Malmesbury, at least, Mr Gomme 5 gives very remarkable evidence of their being free communities in the time of Domesday, and much later also, and the various other instances which he quotes in his valuable work certainly tend to prove very clearly, by their relics

1 Vinogradoff, p. 353. Cf. Bracton, De Leg., ch. xi. ƒ. 7 (i. p. 53, ed. Twiss). Of course there were also other causes of free tenements, ase.g., commutation, but this is one cause which cannot be overlooked.

2 Vinogradoff, p. 135.

* Seebohm, Village Comm., p. 103; Ashley, Econ. Hist., i. 18, and in his introd. to F. de Coulanges. 4 Vinogradoff, p. 208.

5 Village Comm., pp. 173-200, and see p. 195 specially for the quotation from Domesday.

6 See especially ch. vi. on "Tribal Communities in Britain," ch. vii.

and survivals, that, as Vinogradoff also concludes, the free village community existed in these islands, as it did elsewhere, before the manorial system was superimposed or "tacked on to" it.

§ 32. A Survey of the Origin of the Manor.

1

Having come to this conclusion, which must necessarily influence any view which we take of the manorial system, we may now venture to set forth a comprehensive though brief survey of the origin of the village community, with its seigneurial and communal elements, which we find in historic times. This I do with considerable diffidence-for I am well aware of the conflicting theories already propounded--but a review of the facts, placed in due perspective and exhibiting an orderly development, may have its advantages. To begin with, we see, on looking back into the mists of prehistoric antiquity, that a large 1 nonAryan population existed in these islands in the Neolithic stage of culture. They had already made some small advances in agriculture, and had passed, or were rapidly passing, from the tribal to the village community—a transition which is natural as the development of agriculture necessitates a closer connection with the soil than the more or less unsettled tribal stage allows. Upon the state of society thus formed, or forming, descended successive waves of Aryan invaders in the shape of the Celtic immigrants to Britain. At first, no doubt, the Aryan tribes, with the pride so characteristic of the earlier Aryan races, took but little part in the cultivation of the land, but preferred to leave it to the conquered and subject Iberians, exercising only a loose overlordship over the more remote village communities. (This accounts for the survival, centuries later, of the customs already mentioned, that Transitional types of the village community in Britain, ch. viii. The Final type; also ch. iii. Methods of dealing with British evidence.

5

1 Boyd Dawkins, Early Man, pp. 290, 306. 2 Elton, Origins, p. 145. 3 Boyd Dawkins, Early Man, p. 272.

Cf. the similar transition from tribe to village in India; Tupper, Punjab Customary Law, ii. p. 28. The tribal community persisted longer in Wales; cf. Gomme, V. C., p. 63.

Gomme, V. C., p. 71.

suggest, even in the later manors, a much looser tie between lord and dependants than afterwards existed.) But as time went on we know that the Celtic invaders, especially the most recent of them (p. 13), themselves made very considerable progress in agriculture, and thus the agrarian bond between the subject and the conquering races became closer and closer. Then came the Roman occupation, but we have already seen that, after making full allowance for the undoubted extent of Roman influence in other directions, its effect upon the village community and its agriculture can only have been on a level with our own influence upon the villages of India. When the Romans took away their military and administrative forces, the Celtic and nonAryan communities remained much as they had been before the Romans came.1 The Roman did not enter into the life of the village community as did Celt or Saxon. He was above it and not of it. But when the Saxons came, their influence was felt at once. Terrible as they were in their destruction of the upper classes, especially those of the towns, they did not seek to destroy the peasantry of the rural districts,2 any more than the successive conquerors of India (who could be to the full as cruel as the Saxons ever were) have obliterated the villagers of the Punjab.3 On the contrary, their own agrarian development (p. 39) was much the same as that of the land they invaded. The village community received, therefore, certainly no check from this fresh invasion. What happened was that the Celt and Iberian were debased in status in some cases, where the conquerors made their first settlements, but were left in the remoter parts of the country pretty much as before, though with a continual tendency to fresh debasement as time went on and the conquest proceeded. They helped to form the large and mixed class of servile dependants whom we find later. The Saxons themselves. brought slaves and dependants with them, for it is absurd to suppose them all free and equal. And no doubt the 1 Cf. Gomme, V. C., pp. 60, 63. 2 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xxxviii. * Lord Metcalfe, quoted by Gomme, V. C., p. 60.

There were almost certainly larger and smaller private estates; Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. I. ch. v. pp. 52, 73. For slaves, cf. p. 78.

leaders and their chief followers occupied from the first period of the invasion a high position in the social and economic scale.1 But there were also large numbers of free Saxon soldiers 2 who settled down on the land which they and their chiefs had taken, and it is to this classand to the Danes who came later—that we owe the numerous "free tenants" of the later manor. It is pretty evident also that the amount of freedom was greater in Saxon times than in Norman, and consequently greater in the earlier portion of the Saxon period than in the later. Much also was left to custom and tradition in the relations of lord and dependant. Then finally came the Norman conquest, with its stricter feudalism, its inelastic ideas of status and tenure, and its great work of firm organisation and consolidation. The tie between the lord and his dependants had been growing closer, more personal, and, if we may say so, more "residentiary," all through the Saxon period, and the Norman conquest accentuated this development, raising the lord, debasing the dependant, and fusing into one the numerous varying grades of villeinage. And so we arrive at last at the manor of historic times, with all those various influences and survivals within it that were the heritage of Iberian, Celt, and Saxon, but which history could not record.

$ 33. The Feudal System.

In the next period we shall find this manorial system consolidated and organised under the Norman rule, and may therefore defer a detailed description of a typical manor till then. Here we may add, however, that the manor, especially in its social, judicial, political, and noneconomic relations, is closely connected with the feudal system. But it must be remembered that feudalism, and all that it implied, had already begun in England some considerable time before the Norman conquest; and as the manor afforded a convenient unit, political as well as social,

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., Vol. I. pp. 73, 55, 149.

2 The division of the land among the conquering host is seen in Stubbs, ut ante, pp. 71, 72. Vinogradoff, Villeinage, p. 135,

3

1

for the estimation of feudal duties and services, the lord of the manor tended to become more and more a feudal chief. In the primitive Saxon constitution the political unit had been the free man, but later, as land passed from being public to private property, the sign of freedom became the possession of land. The landless man had to select a lord, and the "land becomes the sacramental tie of all public relations." The lords of the manors became nominally the protectors, but really the masters, of the freemen around them, who were poor, and only had a small piece of land. The practice of commendation 2 for judicial or defensive purposes, and the granting of judicial powers to the larger landowners, all tended in the same direction, while the frequent incursions of the Danes probably threw the smaller free tenants still more under the influence of the greater local landowners, who would offer them their protection in return for manorial services. When, therefore, William the Norman conquered England, he did not, as is still often supposed, impose a feudal system upon the people. The system was there already, developed from the manors, and the Norman kings only organised and crystallised it still further.4

1 Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. ch. vii. p. 167.

3

2 Stubbs, i. 79, and the valuable note there relating to the practice in Domesday.

3 E.g., sac and soc (Stubbs, i. 184).

4 Cf. Pearson, Hist. of Eng., i. 283, 284.