Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History

Stages in the arrangement of duties.

The liabilities of the peasantry take the shape of produce, labour, and money-rents. Almost in every manor all three kinds of impositions are to be found split up into a confusing variety of customary obligations. It is out of the question to trace at the present time, with the help of fragmentary and later material, what the original ideas were which underlie these complicated arrangements. But although a reduction to simple guiding principles accounting for every detail cannot be attempted, it is easy to perceive that chance and fancy were not everything in these matters. The several duties are brought together so as to form a certain whole, and some of the aims pursued in the grouping may be perceived even now.

Farm-system.

The older surveys often show the operation of a system which is adapted by its very essence to a very primitive state of society; it may be called the farm-system, the word farm being used in the original sense of the Saxon feorm, food, and not in the later meaning of fixed rent, although these two meanings appear intimately connected in history. The farm is a quantity of produce necessary for the maintenance of the lord's household during a certain period: it may be one night's or week's or one fortnight's farm accordingly. A very good instance of the system may be found in an ancient cartulary of Ramsey, now at the British Museum, which though compiled in the early thirteenth century, constantly refers to the order of Henry II's time. The estates of the abbey were taxed in such a way as to yield thirteen full farms of a fortnight, and each of these was to be used for the maintenance of the monks through a whole month. The extension of the period is odd enough, and we do not see its reason clearly; it followed probably on great losses in property and income at the time of Abbot Walter. However this may be, the thirteen fortnights' farms were made to serve all the year round, and to cover fifty-two weeks instead of twenty-six. A very minute description of the single farm is given as it was paid by the manor of Ayllington (i.e. Elton). Every kind of produce is mentioned: flour and bread, beer and honey, bacon, cheese, lambs, geese, chicken, eggs, butter, &c. The price of each article is mentioned in pence, and it is added, that four pounds have to be paid in money. By the side of the usual farm there appears a 'lent' farm with this distinction, that only half as much bacon and cheese has to be given as usual, and the deficiency is to be made up by a money payment. Some of the manors of the abbey have to send a whole farm, some others only one half, that is one week's farm, but all are assessed to pay sixteen pence for every acre to be used as alms for the poor666. This description may be taken as a standard one, and it would be easy to supplement it in many particulars from the records of other monastic institutions. The records of St. Paul's, London, supply information as to a distribution of the farms at the close of the eleventh century, which covered fifty-two weeks, six days, and five-sixths of a day667. The firmae of St. Alban's were reckoned to provide for the fifty-two weeks of the year, and one in advance668. The practice of arranging the produce-rents according to farms was by no means restricted to ecclesiastical management; it occurs also on the estates of the Crown, and was probably in use on those of lay lords generally. Every person a little conversant with Domesday knows the firmae unius noctis, at which some of the royal manors were assessed669. In the period properly called feudal, that is in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the food-revenue had very often become only the starting-point for a reckoning of money-rents. The St. Alban's farms, for example, are no longer delivered in kind; their equivalent in money has taken their place. But the previous state of things has left a clear trace in the division by weeks. Altogether it seems impossible to doubt that the original idea was to provide really the food necessary for consumption. One cannot help thinking that such practice must have come from the very earliest times when a Saxon or a Celtic chieftain got his income from the territory under his sway by moving from one place to another with his retinue and feeding on the people for a certain period. This very primitive mode of raising income and consuming it at the same time may occasionally strike our eye even in the middle of the thirteenth century. The tenants of the Abbot of Osulveston in Donington and Byker are bound to receive their lord during one night and one day when he comes to hold his court in their place. They find the necessary food and beverage for him and for his men, provender for his horses, and so forth. If the abbot does not come in person, the homage may settle about a commutation of the duties with the steward or the sergeant sent for the purpose. If he refuses to take money, they must bring everything in kind670.

Decay of the farm-system.

This is an exceptional instance: generally the farm has to be sent to the lord's residence, probably after a deduction for the requirements of the manor in which it was gathered. When it had reached this stage the system is already in decay. It is not only difficult to provide for the carriage, but actually impossible to keep some of the articles from being spoilt. Bread sent to Westminster from some Worcestershire possession of the minster would not have been very good when it reached its destination. The step towards money-payments is natural and necessary.

Before leaving the food-rents we must take notice of one or two more peculiarities of this system. It is obvious that it was arranged from above, if one may use the expression. The assessment does not proceed in this case by way of an estimate of the paying or producing strength of each unit subjected to it, i.e. of each peasant household. The result is not made up by multiplying the revenue from every holding by the number of such holdings. The whole reckoning starts from the other end, from the wants of the manorial administration. The requirements of a night or of a week are used as the standard to which the taxation has to conform. This being the case, the correspondence between the amount of the taxes and the actual condition of the tax-payer was only a very loose one. Manors of very different size were brought into the same class in point of assessment, and the rough distinctions between a whole farm and half-a-farm could not follow at all closely the variety of facts in real life, even when they were supplemented by the addition of round sums of money.

Assessment under the farm-system.

These observations lead at once to important questions; how was the farm-assessment distributed in every single manor, and what was its influence on the duties of the single householder? It seems hardly doubtful, to begin with, that the food-rent changed very much in this respect. Originally, when the condition of things was more or less like the Osulvestone example, the farm must have been the result of co-operation on the part of all the householders of a township, who had to contribute according to their means to furnish the necessary articles. But the farm of St. Paul's, London, even when it is paid in produce, is a very different thing: it is the result of a convention with the firmarius, or may be with the township itself in the place of a firmarius671. It depends only indirectly on the services and payments of the peasantry. Part of the flour, bread, beer, etc., may come from the cultivation of the demesne lands; another portion will appear as the proceed of week-work and boon-work performed by the villains, and only one portion, perhaps a very insignificant one, will be levied directly as produce. In this way there is no break between the food-rent system and the labour-system. One may still exist for purposes of a general assessment when the other has already taken hold of the internal arrangement of the manor.

Labour-service system.

Most of our documents present the labour arrangement in full operation. Each manor may be regarded as an organised group of households in which the central body represented by the lord's farm has succeeded in subordinating several smaller bodies to its directing influence. Every satellite has a movement of its own, is revolving round its own centre, and at the same time it is attracted to turn round the chief planet, and is carried away in its path. The constellation is a very peculiar one and most significant for the course of medieval history. Regarded from the economic standpoint it is neither a system of great farming nor one of small farming, but a compound of both. The estate of the lord is in a sense managed on a great scale, but the management is bound up with a supply and a distribution of labour which depend on the conditions of the small tributary households. It would be impossible now-a-days to say for certain how much of the customary order of week-work and boon-work was derived from a calculation of the requirements of the manorial administration, and how much of it is to be regarded as a percentage taken from the profits of each individual tenant672. Both elements probably co-operated to produce the result: the operations performed for the benefit of the lord were ordered in a certain way partly because so many acres had to be tilled, so much hay and corn had to be reaped on the lord's estate; and partly because the peasant virgaters or cotters were known to work for themselves in a certain manner and considered capable of yielding so much as a percentage of their working power. But although we have a compromise before us in this respect, it must be noted that the relation between the parts and the whole is obviously different under the system of labour services from what it was under the farm-system. It has been pointed out that the food-rent arrangement was imposed from above without much trouble being taken to ascertain the exact value and character of the tributary units subjected to it. This later element is certainly very prominent in the customary labour-system, which on the whole appears to be constructed from below. Is it necessary to add that this second form of subjection was by no means the lighter one? The very differentiation of the burden means that the aristocratical power of the landlord has penetrated deep enough to attempt an exact evaluation of details.

Money-rents system.

I have had occasion so many times already to speak of the process of commutation, that there is no call now to explain the reasons which induced both landlords and peasants to exchange labour for money-rents. I have only to say now that the same remark which applied to the passage from produce 'farms' to labour holds good as to the passage from labour to money payments. There is no break between the arrangements. In a general way the money assessment follows, of course, as the third mode of settling the relation between lord and tenant, and we may say that rentals are as much the rule from the fourteenth century downwards as custumals are the rule in the thirteenth and earlier centuries. But if we take up the Domesday of St. Paul's of 1222, or the Glastonbury Inquest of 1189, or even the Burton Cartulary of the early twelfth century, in every one of these documents we shall find a great number of rent-paying tenants673, and even a greater number of people fluctuating, as it were, between labour and rent. In some cases peasants passed directly from the obligation of supplying produce to the payment of corresponding rents in money. The gradual exemption from labour is even more apparent in the records. It is characteristic that the first move is generally a substitution of the money arrangement with the tacit or even the expressed provision that the assessment is not to be considered as permanent and binding674. It remains at the pleasure of the lord to go back to the duties in kind. But although such a retrogressive movement actually takes place in some few cases, the general spread of money payments is hardly arrested by these exceptional instances675.

One more subject remains to be discussed. Is there in the surveys any marked difference between different classes of the peasantry in point of rural duties?

Influence of social distinction on the distribution of duties.

An examination of the surveys will show at once that the free and the servile holdings differ very materially as to services, quite apart from their contrast, in point of legal protection and of casual exactions such as marriage fines, heriots, and the like. The difference may be either in the kind of duties or in their quantity. Both may be traced in the records. If we take first the diversities in point of quality we shall notice that on many occasions the free tenants are subjected to an imposition on the same occasion as the unfree, but their mode of acquitting themselves of it is slightly different—they have, for instance, to bring eggs when the villains bring hens. The object cannot be to make the burden lighter; it amounts to much the same, and so the aim must have been to keep up the distinctions between the two classes. It is very common to require the free tenants to act as overseers of work to be performed by the rest of the peasantry. They have to go about or ride about with rods and to keep the villains in order. Such an obligation is especially frequent on the boon-days (precariae), when almost all the population of the village is driven to work on the field of the lord. Sometimes free householders, who have dependent people resident under them, are liberated from certain payments; and it may be conjectured that the reason is to be found in the fact that they have to superintend work performed by their labourers or inferior tenants676. All such points are of small importance, however, when compared with the general opposition of which I have been speaking several times. The free and the servile holdings are chiefly distinguished by the fact that the first pay rent and the last perform labour.

Free and servile duties as rent and labour.

Whenever we come to examine closely the reason underlying the cases when the classification into servile and free is adopted, we find that it generally resolves itself into a contrast between those who have to serve, in the original sense of the term, and those who are exempted from actual labour-service. Being dependent nevertheless, these last have to pay rent. I need not repeat that I am speaking of main distinctions and not of the various details bound up with them. In order to understand thoroughly the nature of such diversities, let us take up a very elaborate description of duties to be performed by the peasants in the manor of Wye, Kent, belonging to the Abbey of Battle677. Of the sixty-one yokes it contains thirty are servile, twenty-nine are free, and two occupy an intermediate position. The duties of the two chief classes of tenants differ in many respects. The servile people have to pay rent and so have the free, but while the first contribute to make up a general payment of six pounds, each yoke being assessed at seven shillings and five-pence, the free people have to pay as much as twenty-three shillings and seven-pence per yoke. Both sets have to perform ploughings, reapings, and carriage duties, but the burden of the servile portion is so much greater in regard to the carriage-work, that the corresponding yokes sometimes get their very name from it, they are juga averagiantia, while the free households are merely bound to help a few times during the summer. Every servile holding has a certain number of acres of wood assigned to it, or else corresponding rights in the common wood, while the free tenants have to settle separately with the lord of the manor. And lastly, the relief for every unfree yoke is fixed at forty pence, and for every free one is equal to the annual rent. This comparison of duties shows that the peasants called free were by no means subjected to very light burdens: in fact it looks almost as if they were more heavily taxed than the rest. Still they were exempted from the most unpopular and inconvenient labour-services.

Altogether, the study of rural work and rents leads to the same conclusion as the analysis of the legal characteristics of villainage. The period from the Conquest onwards may be divided into two stages. In later times, that is from the close of the thirteenth century downwards, the division between the two great classes of tenants and tenements, a contrast strictly legal, is regulated by the material test of the certainty or uncertainty of the service due, and the formal test of the mode of conveyance. In earlier times the classification depends primarily on the economic relation between the manorial centre and the tributary household, labour is deemed servile, rent held to be free. It is only by keeping these two periods clearly distinct, that one is enabled to combine the seemingly conflicting facts in our surveys. If we look at the most ancient of these documents, we shall have to admit that a rent-paying holding is free, nevertheless it would be wrong to infer that when commutation became more or less general, classification was settled in the same way. A servile tenement no longer became free because rent was taken instead of labour; it was still held 'at the will of the lord,' and conveyed by surrender and admittance. When all holdings were fast exchanging labour for rent, the old notions had been surrendered and a new basis for classification found in those legal incidents just mentioned. The development of copyhold belongs to the later period, copyhold being mostly a rent-paying servile tenure. Again, if we turn to the earlier epoch we shall have to remember that the contrast between labour and rent is not to be taken merely as a result of commutation. Local distinctions are fitted on to it in a way which cannot be explained by the mere assumption that every settlement of a rent appeared in the place of an original labour obligation. The contrast is primordial, as one may say, and based on the fact that the labour of a subject appears directly subservient to the wants and arrangements of the superior household, while the payment of rent severs the connexion for a time and leaves each body to move in its own direction till the day when the tributary has to pay again.

Difference in quantity between the impositions of free and unfree population.

There can be no doubt also that the more ancient surveys disclose a difference in point of quantity between free and servile holdings, and this again is a strong argument for the belief that free socage must not be considered merely as an emancipated servile tenancy. Where there has been commutation we must suppose that the labour services cannot have been more valuable than the money rent into which they were changed. The free rent into which labour becomes converted is nothing but the price paid for the services surrendered by the lord. It must have stood higher, if anything, than the real value of the labour exchanged, because the exchange entailed a diminution of power besides the giving up of an economic commodity. No matter that ultimately the quit-rents turned out to the disadvantage of the lord, inasmuch as the buying strength of money grew less and less. This was the result of a very long process, and could not be foreseen at the time when the commutation equivalents were settled. And so we may safely lay down the general rule, that when there is a conspicuous difference between the burdens of assessment of free and unfree tenants, such a difference excludes the idea that one class is only an emancipated portion of the other, and supposes that it was from the first a socially privileged one. The Peterborough Black Book, which, along with the Burton Cartulary, presents the most curious instance of an early survey, describes the services of socmen on the manors of the abbey as those of a clearly privileged tenantry678. The interesting point is, that these socmen are even subjected to week-work and not distinguishable from villains so far as concerns the quality of their services. Nevertheless the contrast with the villains appears throughout the Cartulary and is substantiated by a marked difference in point of assessment: a socman has to work one or two days in the week when the villain is made to work three or four.

Three main points seem established by the survey of rural work and rents.

1. Notwithstanding many vexatious details, the impositions to which the peasantry had to submit left a considerable margin for their material progress. This system of customary rules was effectively provided against general oppression.

2. The development from food-farms to labour organisation, and lastly to money-rents, was a result not of one-sided pressure on the part of the landlords, but of a series of agreements between lord and tenants.

3. The settlement of the burdens to which peasants were subjected depended to a great extent on distinctions as to the social standing of tenants which had nothing to do with economic facts.