Such was the early village community in England, a community of free landholders. But a change began early to come over it.[15] The king would grant to a church all the rights he had in the village, reserving only the trinoda necessitas, these rights including the feorm or farm, or provender rent which the king derived from the land—of cattle, sheep, swine, ale, honey, &c.—which he collected by visiting his villages, thus literally eating his rents. The churchmen did not continue these visits, they remained in their monasteries, and had the feorm brought them regularly; they had an overseer in the village to see to this, and so they tightened their hold on the village. Then the smaller people, the peasants, make gifts to the Church. They give their land, but they also want to keep it, for it is their livelihood; so they surrender the land and take it back as a lifelong loan. Probably on the death of the donor his heirs are suffered to hold the land. Then labour services are substituted for the old provender rents, and thus the Church acquires a demesne, and thus the foundations of the manorial system, still to be traced all over the country, were laid. Thegns, the predecessors of the Norman barons, become the recipients of grants from the churches and from kings, and householders 'commend' themselves and their land to them also, so that they acquired demesnes. This 'commendation' was furthered by the fact that during the long-drawn out conquest of Britain the old kindred groups of the English lost their corporate sense, and the central power being too weak to protect the ordinary householder, who could not stand alone, he had to seek the protection of an ecclesiastical corporation or of some thegn, first for himself and then for his land. The jurisdictional rights of the king also passed to the lord, whether church or thegn; then came the danegeld, the tax for buying off the Danes that subsequently became a fixed land tax, which was collected from the lord, as the peasants were too poor for the State to deal with them; the lord paid the geld for their land, consequently their land was his. In this way the free ceorl of Anglo-Saxon times gradually becomes the 'villanus' of Domesday. Landlordship was well established in the two centuries before the Conquest, and the land of England more or less 'carved into territorial lordships'.[16] Therefore when the Normans brought their wonderful genius for organization to this country they found the material conditions of manorial life in full growth; it was their task to develop its legal and economic side.[17]
As the manorial system thus superimposed upon the village community was the basis of English rural economy for centuries, there need be no apology for describing it at some length.
The term 'manor', which came in with the Conquest,[18] has a technical meaning in Domesday, referring to the system of taxation, and did not always coincide with the vill or village, though it commonly did so, except in the eastern portion of England. The village was the agrarian unit, the manor the fiscal unit; so that where the manor comprised more than one village, as was frequently the case, there would be more than one village organization for working the common fields.[19]
The manor then was the 'constitutive cell' of English mediaeval society.[20] The structure is always the same; under the headship of the lord we find two layers of population, the villeins and the freeholders; and the territory is divided into demesne land and tributary land of two classes, viz. that of the villeins and that of the freeholders. The cultivation of the demesne (which usually means the land directly occupied and cultivated by the lord, though legally it has a wider meaning and includes the villein tenements), depends to a certain extent on the work supplied by the tenants of the tributary land. Rents are collected, labour superintended, administrative business transacted by a set of manorial officers.
We may divide the tillers of the soil at the time of Domesday into five great classes[21] in order of dignity and freedom:
1. Liberi homines, or freemen.
2. Socmen.
3. Villeins.
4. Bordarii, cotarii, buri or coliberti. 5. Slaves.
The two first of these classes were to be found in large numbers in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire. It is not easy to draw the line between them, but the chief distinction lay in the latter being more burdened with service and customary dues and more especially subject to the jurisdictional authority of the lord.[22] They were both free, but both rendered services to the lord for their land. Both the freemen and the slaves by 1086 were rapidly decreasing in number.
The most numerous class[23] on the manors was the third, that of the villeins or non-free tenants, who held their land by payment of services to the lord. The position of the villein under the feudal system is most complicated. He both was and was not a freeman. He was absolutely at the disposal of the lord, who could sell him with his tenement, and he could not leave his land without his lord's permission. He laboured under many disabilities, such as the merchet or fine for marrying his daughter, and fines for selling horse or ox. On the other hand, he was free against every one but his lord, and even against the lord was protected from the forfeiture of his 'wainage' or instruments of labour and from injury to life and limb.[24]
His usual holding was a virgate of 30 acres of arable, though the virgate differed in size even in the same manors; but in addition to this he would have his meadow land and his share in the common pasture and wood, altogether about 100 acres of land. For this he rendered the following services to the lord of the manor:
1. Week work, or labour on the lord's demesne for two or three days a week during most of the year, and four or five days in summer. It was not always the villein himself, however, who rendered these services, he might send his son or even a hired labourer; and it was the holding and not the holder that was considered primarily responsible for the rendering of services.[25]
2. Precarii or boon days: that is, work generally during harvest, at the lord's request, sometimes instead of week work, sometimes in addition.
3. Gafol or tribute: fixed payments in money or kind, and such services as 'fold soke', which forced the tenants' sheep to lie on the lord's land for the sake of the manure; and suit of mill, by which the tenant was bound to grind his corn in the lord's mill.
With regard to the 'boon days' in harvest, it should be remembered that harvest time in the Middle Ages was a most important event. Agriculture was the great industry, and when the corn was ripe the whole village turned out to gather it, the only exceptions being the housewives and sometimes the marriageable daughters. Even the larger towns suspended work that the townsmen might assist in the harvest, and our long vacation was probably intended originally to cover the whole work of gathering in the corn and hay. On the occasion of the 'boon-day' work, the lord usually found food for the labourers which, the Inquisition of Ardley