CHAPTER III

THE NORMAN CONQUEST

ON Christmas Day, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, was crowned King of England. He professed to claim the Crown not by right of conquest, but as the legitimately Theory of the elected king, the lawful successor of Edward Conquest. the Confessor. Harold, according to William's theory, was a perjured usurper whose guilt was shared by those who had supported him in arms, and in a minor degree by those who had acknowledged him as the rightful king without giving him actual assistance. It followed from this theory that the Norman, ostensibly at least, was to rule not arbitrarily as a conqueror, but in accordance with precedent. On the other hand, William had a swarm of followers who wanted rewards in the substantial shape of land; a need for which ample provision could be made out of the estates forfeited by Harold and the rest of the 'rebels,' mainly in the southern portion of the kingdom. In the course of the next four years, however, revolts in the north and the west gave ample excuse for extensive additional forfeitures and the bestowal of estates upon the Frenchmen.

The theory of the government was not affected by these occurrences; but the practical effect was that the bulk of the estates held by laymen passed into the hands A Practical of Normans, who held their land direct from the Outcome. king, while the balance, in the shape of a considerable number of quite small estates, were left to their Saxon holders as tenants from the king. At the same time, the higher ecclesiastical and monastic appointments were systematically bestowed, not on Englishmen, but on foreigners. Thus,

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although the laws relating to the occupation of land were not supposed to be changed, all the magnates were foreigners who interpreted custom and law after their own fashion ; with something more than an inclination to wrest the interpretations in their own favour, to magnify their own rights, and to minimise the rights of the population. Moreover, it was inevitable that even with the very best intentions, the Norman lawyers should read their own theories of the law into the institutions with which they found themselves dealing; in the same way that, to take a case where the circumstances recurred in a highly exaggerated form, British administrators in India, from Cornwallis onwards, introduced Western conceptions into their administration when they were honestly endeavouring only to systematise the existing law in Bengal and elsewhere.

Now it was in entire accordance with the Norman theory that William, shortly before the close of his reign, gave

Domesday
Book.

orders that commissioners should make that

great survey of the realm which was recorded in the work called Domesday Book, and in certain subsidiary compilations, in the year 1086. The survey was not made in order to simplify the task of future historians, and therefore it left unrecorded and unexplained much that we should have liked to have recorded and explained; because these matters were irrelevant to the very precise and definite purpose for which the survey was undertaken. This purpose was to ascertain the exact taxable value of the land for danegeld. The danegeld, it will be remembered, was the land-tax, originally instituted by Ethelred the Redeless to provide a ransom for buying off the Danes, and subsequently employed as a war-tax. It was the object of the Domesday commissioners to ascertain actual facts, and our chief difficulty in assimilating that invaluable compilation lies in our uncertainty as to the precise meaning of its terminology, which did not present the same difficulty to the compilers.

Domesday Book, then, is our grand authority for the actual condition of England in the year 1086 as seen through the eyes

cation.

of the Norman commissioners, who collected their information on the spot from responsible witnesses, Norman and English. Let us begin with a classification of persons. At the top of the scale is the lord, the landholder who has rights over other persons. At the bottom are the servi, The Domesserfs, who have no rights at all in law, or only day Classifivery elementary ones. Between these, Domesday gives us five groups: liberi homines, sochemanni or sokemen, villani, bordarii, and cotarii or cottars. These evidently fall into two sections, and it will appear that the first pair stand on a superior footing of freedom as being themselves taxpayers, whereas the rest do not pay the king's taxes for which their lord is responsible. The word 'free' has different meanings in different contexts; in a sense, no one who has an overlord at all is absolutely free; in another sense, every one who possesses civil rights is free. An actual slave in the eye of the law is not a person but a thing, a chattel. But on the whole we must regard freedom as a question of degree, and classify as freemen those over whom their lord exercises only a comparatively limited authority, and as unfree those who are in a state of comparative subjection. Prima facie, we must assume that in the Domesday time the villani Free and and the rest of the second group are to be classed Unfree. as unfree, though they have not necessarily lost the civil rights which they possessed as free ceorls before the Norman Conquest. In theory indeed, they have not lost any rights merely as a result of the Conquest.

However, we must be content for the present to refer to those two groups who are neither lords over others, nor tenants-in-chief who have no lord but the king, nor serfs, as free and unfree respectively, without laying down precisely what it is that marks the division between them, between the villanus and the sokeman.

The next point we have to note is that there is what we may call a higher standard of freedom in that part of the country where the Danish element is strong, in fact within the Danelagh. Domesday only carries us as far north as

Counties.

Yorkshire; the more remote lands were beyond the range of the commissioners, so that our evidence applies in effect The Danish to East Anglia and Danish Mercia. Domesday Book shows that in these shires there were very few serfs and a large proportion of free, as compared with unfree, occupiers of the soil. In the south and west, sokemen are rare and serfs numerous. We shall perhaps be justified in drawing the conclusion that the distinction between the sokemen and the class of ceorls now known as villani had not been a very marked one, and that either slightly greater prosperity, or a slightly greater tenacity of rights and privileges among the Danes, had preserved the Danish sokeman from dropping into the lower grade. That the prosperity was more marked in the eastern counties is fairly well testified by the recorded figures of population, for these figures show that in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk the population was about fifty per cent. greater than in the four western counties of Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Wilts, though the latter had the larger area. And these Domesday figures or proportions remained practically the same in records two hundred and three hundred years later.

Serfs.

The serf is clearly marked off from the merely unfree men because he is actually saleable. The old serfdom or slavery, however, tends to disappear with some rapidity. The serf was so far an outcast that he was extremely anxious to be emancipated, and to pass into the ranks of the merely unfree; whereas the lord got very little advantage out of his actual serfdom, and generally had no objection to his purchasing 'freedom.' Hence the status of actual slavery practically disappeared by degrees, while the difference between free and unfree became more marked, and the terms villeinage and serfdom became appropriated to the whole unfree population.

Now when we pass from the serfs, representing the old Villanus and Saxon theow, to the discussion of the unfree Sokeman. and the free classes, we can see that both belong to what had been the class of free ceorls. The same

weregild applies to both; the compensation paid to the kinsmen for the slaying of one of them is two hundred shillings, unless he has attained to thegnhood, in which case the weregild is twelve hundred shillings. The distinction between them is not one which applies to their ordinary civil rights. Nor is it dependent on the amount of land they occupy. The sokeman may have as little as ten acres, while the villanus may have a whole hide of a hundred and twenty acres; and yet the groups are very definitely separated in Domesday, and still more at a later stage.

Now it is possible, not to say probable, that at the time of Domesday the distinction between the villanus and the sokeman did not present itself under ordinary circumstances as one of material importance. To the Domesday commissioners who were concerned with taxation and the collection of taxes, not with social status, it was a matter of first-rate importance whether the land-tax was to be paid by the lord of the soil or by its occupier. The A Tentative fact that the commissioners dwelt upon the dis- Explanation. tinction does not in itself imply that the distinction was much more acutely felt, if it was one of recent institution, than that of the present day between the man who pays his own rates and the man whose landlord pays them. The lord in one way or another got back his equivalent out of the villein, just as the landlord gets back his equivalent in rent. It is, therefore, not surprising that inquiry does not at this stage reveal proofs of any very marked loss of freedom on the part of the villein. As yet there is no evidence of his being ascriptus gleba, tied to the soil,' evidence that if he chose to migrate his lord could forcibly compel him to return. But that is precisely the condition which did arise later; the condition which made the term serfdom applicable to villeinage. How did this change come about in the case of the villein and not in the case of the sokeman? Not impossibly, precisely from this difference which at first appeared to be of importance only from the tax-collector's point of view. The man who paid the tax to the king's officers would naturally