Frederic Seebohm

“ And such is the solidarity of the system secured by the intermixture of the strips and the force of custom, and the power of the community by fair means or foul to enforce its will against individual action, that, to this day, the peasant proprietor of strips, having harvested his corn, dares not to put his own cattle to graze upon his own stubbles till the day when by custom the flocks and herds of the whole community resume the right to pasture over the whole area. ”

“ It is, I think, only when we carry with us the key which the main traits of the open field system afford to the meaning of the Saxon documents, and apply it to the French documents, that we recognize the practical identity between the Saxon 'yardlands' and the French 'mansi.' Not that they were necessarily exactly alike in all respects, but that they both were open field and scattered holdings. ”

“ The peasantry of France were occupiers of land before they were owners, and their peasant proprietorship is in the main the result rather of the abolition or redemption of seignorial dues and rights to which their old holdings were subject than of the purchase of holdings de novo by the peasantry. No doubt there were times in French history when owing to political causes demesne lands of the noblesse were confiscated and put up for sale, and some of these were purchased by the peasantry and added to their holdings. ”

“ If this were so, it becomes also natural that the conveyancers, who knew perfectly well, as the Formulæ show, how to describe a vineyard or a field by boundaries, or by its neighbours on each side, should never describe a mansus in the same way, but only by the name of the colonus or other occupant or occupants of the mansus, just as the virgates were described in English legal documents. If the mansus were composed of two or three blocks of land, their boundaries could easily be given. ”

“ I am not sure how far it has been recognized by either French or English economic students since Arthur Young, that the morcellement of which they complain, and which has no doubt been greatly increased by the division of holdings among heirs, had its root in the open field system of husbandry once so widely spread over Europe. ”

“ In the Domesday survey and in the Rectitudines we find England divided into estates or manors, and the manors consisting of demesne land and land occupied mainly by villani holding virgates or yardlands. The boundaries of the territory of a manor are easily and generally given in the Saxon charters, but the yardlands cannot be described by boundaries because they are bundles of strips scattered over the common lands of the manor. ”

“ After this description of the typical mansus and its services, follows a list of the tenants of other mansi in the same and other hamlets, with the addition faciunt similiter or solvunt similiter. The mansi are not of the same area, but they render equal services. In twenty-seven cases coloni are grouped in mansi, and in nine others in 'half-mansi,' and these solvunt medietatem de integro manso. ”

“ FRENCH PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP UNDER THE OPEN FIELD SYSTEM OF HUSBANDRY
Even since the publication by M. de Tocqueville of his France before the Revolution [1] it has been recognized that the prevalence of peasant holdings in France dates back from a much earlier period than the Revolution.
There never was in France at any epoch a peasantry of labourers working for wages like that of England. ”

“ Turning to the mansus itself he writes:—
'It is clear that the manse hardly ever formed a compact whole. The vineland was seldom close by the arable. It is even doubtful whether the arable of each mansus was in one single holding.' [5]
This is very near to a recognition that the mansus embraced a bundle of strips. ”

“ He is true to French peasant life, even in the recognition how completely the Church had made itself the centre of the open field husbandry. These pictures show how completely the open field husbandry forms even still the framework and environment of the peasant's whole life ”

“ The continuity which M. Fustel de Coulanges has traced so carefully through the documents of Gaul from Roman to Merovingian times in his L'Alleu et le Domaine Rural pendant l'Époque Mérovingienne, was not broken in the next period, and it resulted in the condition of things described in the Polyptique d'Irminon, an example of which has been given. ”

“ These five pay 5 pigs, and the one that my lord abbot made 12 denarii, and these four pay 5 solidi and 4 denarii. Of wood, according to reckoning, 5 leagues altogether in circumference, in which 200 pigs can find mast. ”