Paul Vinogradoff

“ Whether we take the case of a villain receiving a few acres in addition to his holding, or that of a servant recompensed by the grant of a privileged plot, or that of a peasant confirmed in the possession of soil newly reclaimed from the waste, or that of a bondman who has succeeded in liberating his holding from the burdensome labour service of villainage, in all these instances we come across the same fundamental notion of a definite agreement between lord and tenant. ”

“ A villain is to a great extent in the power of his lord, not because he is his chattel, but because the courts refuse him an action against the lord. He may have rights recognised by morality and by custom, but he has no means to enforce them; and he has no means to enforce them because feudalism disables the State and prevents it from interfering. The political root of the whole growth becomes apparent, and it is quite clear, on the one hand, that liberation will depend to a great extent on the strengthening of the State ”

“ The open-field system stands in glaring contradiction with the present state of private rights in Western Europe, and no wonder that it has been abolished everywhere, except on some few tracts of land kept back by geographical conditions from joining the movement of modern civilisation. And even in mediaeval history we perceive that the arrangement does not keep its hold on those occasions when the rights of individuals are strongly felt: it gives way on the demesne farm and on newly reclaimed land. ”

“ It has become a common-place to argue that the practice of surrender and admittance characterises the absolute ownership that the lord has in the land held in villainage, and proceeds from the fact that every holder of servile land is in truth merely an occupier of the plot by precarious tenure. Every change of occupation has to be performed through the medium of the lord who 're-enters' the tenement, and concedes it again as if there had been no previous occupation at all and the new tenant entered on a holding freshly created for his use. ”

“ I do not intend in the least to deny that the freer play of economic and legal forces within the range of free ownership must have produced combinations infinitely more varying, irregular and complicated than those which are to be found in villainage. ”

“ The brilliant achievements of historical monarchy in Germany, the ridiculous misery to which France has been reduced by conceited and impotent politicians, the excesses of terrorist nihilism in Russia, the growing sense of a coming struggle on questions of radical reform—all these facts have worked together to generate a feeling which is far from being propitious to liberal doctrines. Socialism itself has been contributing to it directly by laying an emphatic stress on the conditions of material existence, and treating political life merely as subordinate to economic aims. ”

“ The rights of common usage of meadow and pasture carry us back to practices which must have been originally applied to arable also. When one reads of a meadow being cut up into strips and partitioned for a year among the members of the community by regular rotation or by lot, one does not see why only the grass land should be thus treated while there is no re-allotment of the arable plots. As for the waste, it does not even admit of set boundaries, and the only possible means of apportioning its use is to prescribe what and how many heads of cattle each holding may send out upon it. ”

“ A review of the work already done, and of the names of scholars engaged in it, is certainly an incitement to modesty for every new reaper in the field, but it is also a source of hope. It shows that schools and leading scholars displace one another more under the influence of general currents of thought than of individual talent. The ferment towards the formation of groups comes from the outside, from the modern life which surrounds research, forms the scholar, suggests solutions. ”

“ It is not only the civil progress of the peasantry that we have to notice, but the transformation and partial decay of the landed gentry, the indirect influence of the economic convulsions on politics, ideas, and morality, and, in a more special way, the influence of free competition on soil and people that had been fettered for ages, the passage from 'natural husbandry' to the money system, the substitution of rents for labour, above all, the working of communal institutions under the sway of the lord and in their modern free shape. ”

“ They have occupied so exclusively the point of view whence the manor of the later middle ages is visible that they have disregarded the evidence which comes from other quarters instead of finding an explanation which will satisfy all the facts. The investigation 'from the known to the unknown' has its definite danger, against which one has to be constantly on one's guard: its obvious danger is to destroy perspective and ignore development by carrying into the 'unknown' of early times that which is known of later conditions. ”

“ Is it strange that the social evolution, as observed in this particular curve, does not appear as a continuous crescendo, but as a wavy motion? I do not think it can be strange, if one reflects that the period under discussion embraces both the growth and the decay of feudalism, embraces, that is, the growth of the principle of territorial power on the ruins of the tribal system and also the disappearance of that principle before the growing influence of the State. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the time comes for writing a history of the nineteenth century, one of the most important and attractive chapters will certainly be devoted to the development of historical literature. The last years of a great age are fast running out: great has been the strife and the work in the realm of thought as well as in the material arrangement of life. ”

“ And it is not difficult to see, that the legal is a modification of the economic use of terms, that it reduces to one-sided simplicity those general facts which the evidence of every day life puts before us in a loose and complex manner: that land is really free which is not placed in a constant working submission to the manor, in constant co-operation with other plots, similarly arranged to help and to serve in the manor. However heavy the rent, the land that pays it has become independent in point of husbandry, its dependence appears as a matter of agreement, and not an economic tie. ”

“ I think that many features in the constitution of the thirteenth century manor show its gradual growth and comparatively recent origin. The so-called manorial system consists, in truth, in the peculiar connexion between two agrarian bodies, the settlement of villagers cultivating their own fields, and the home-estate of the lord tacked on to this settlement and dependent on the work supplied by it. I take only the agrarian side, of course, and do not mention the political protection which stands more or less as an equivalent for the profits received by the lord from the peasantry. ”

“ If we examine the open-field system and its relation to the holdings of individual peasants, we see, as it were, the framework of a peasant community that has swerved from the path of its original development. The gathering of scattered and intermixed strips into holdings points to practices of division or allotment: these practices are the very essence of the whole, and they alone can explain the glaring inconveniencies of scattered ownership coupled with artificial concentration. But redivision of the arable is not seen in the documents of our period. ”

“ In criminal and in police law villains are treated substantially as free persons: they have even a share, although a subordinate one, in the organisation of justice. The procedure in questions of status is characterised by outrageous privileges given to the lord against a man in 'a villain nest,' and by distinct favour shown to those out of the immediate range of action of the lord. The law is quite as much against giving facilities to prove a man's servitude as it is against granting that man any rights when once his servitude has been established. ”

“ Why should he put up with the inconvenience of holding a bundle of strips lying far apart from each other, more or less dependent because of their narrowness on the dealings of neighbours, who may be untidy and unthrifty? Instead of having one block of soil to look to and a comparatively short boundary to maintain, every occupier has a number of scattered pieces to care for, and neighbours, who not only surround, but actually cut up, dismember, invade his tenement. ”

“ Might we not start from the original similarity between ancient demesne and ordinary manors, and thus explain how the rule as to the necessary constitution of the manorial court was formed? It seems to me a mere application of the higher rule that a court over free people must contain free people, to a state of things where the distinction between free and unfree was not drawn at the same level as in the feudal epoch, but was drawn at a lower point. ”

“ Thus, even among the freeholders, landholding is often what I shall take leave to call 'shareholding,' Now, whatever ultimate explanation we may give of this fact, it has one obvious meaning. That part of the free population which holds in regular shares is not governed entirely by the rules of private ownership, but is somehow implicated in the village community. ”

“ With the growth of population, of inequalities, of social competition, the relations of dependency are seen constantly gaining on the field of freedom. The spread of commendation leads not only to a change in the distribution of ranks, but to a dismemberment of political power, to all kinds of franchises and private encroachments on the State. ”

“ The very foundation of the mediaeval system, its organisation of work according to equalised holdings and around a manorial centre, is in course of time undermined by the process of commutation. Villains are released from ploughings and reapings, from carriage-duties and boon work by paying certain rents; they bargain with the lord for a surrender of his right of arbitrary taxation and arbitrary amercement; they take leases of houses, arable and meadows. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The equal virgates are in fact an obstacle to a proportionate repartition of the land among the population, because there is nothing to insure that the differences of growth and requirements arising between different families will keep square with the relations of the holdings. In one case the family plot may become too large, in another too scanty an allowance for the peasant household working and feeding on that plot. And ultimately, as we have seen, the indivisible nature of the holding looks to some extent like an artificial one, and one that is more apparent than real. ”

“ But if we keep to the main distinctions, and to the contrast which the authorities themselves draw between the component elements of the peasant class, its great bulk will arrange itself into two groups: the larger one will consist of those ordinarily designated as villains; a smaller, but by no means an insignificant or scanty one, will present itself as free, more or less protected by law, and more or less independent of the bidding of the lord and his steward. ”

“ What is more, the law of Kent thus favourable to the peasantry connects itself distinctly with the ancient customs of Saxon ceorls: the quaint old English proverbs enrolled in it look like sayings which have kept it in the memory of generations before it was transmitted to writing. The peculiarities in the treatment of wardship, of dower, of inheritance, appear not only in opposition to the feudal treatment of all these subjects, but in close connexion with old Saxon usage. ”

“ Roman villas and their labourers passed from one lord to the other—that is all. The ceorls of Saxon times are the direct descendants of Roman slaves and coloni, some of them personally free, but all in agrarian subjection. Indeed, social development is a movement from serfdom to freedom, and the village community of its early stages is connected not with freedom, but with serfdom. ”

“ The life of the villain is chiefly dependent on custom, which is the great characteristic of medieval relations, and which stands in sharp contrast with slavery on the one hand and with freedom on the other. ”

“ A most interesting fact, and one to be taken up hereafter, is the way of treating the privileged group as the normal one. Villain socmen are the men of ancient demesne; villains are the exception, they appear only on the lord's demesne, and seem very few, so far as we can make a calculation of numbers. Villain socmen enjoy a certainty of condition which becomes actual tenant-right when the manor passes from the crown into a private lord's hand. As to its origin there can be no doubt—ancient demesne is traced back to Saxon times in as many words and by all our authorities. ”

“ Can it really be true that the great bulk of free men was originally in territorial subjection, or rather that there never was such a thing as a great number of free men of German blood, and that the German conquest introduced only a cluster of privileged people which merged into the habits and rights of Roman possessors? ”

“ Yet a money rent need not be in every case the result of a commutation of labour services, although such may be its origin in most cases. We have at least to admit the possibility and probability of another pedigree of rent-paying peasants. They may come from an old stock of people whose immemorial custom has been to pay rent in money or in kind, and who have always remained more or less free from base labour. This we should have to consider as at all events a theoretic possibility, even if we restricted our study to the terminology connected with rent ”

“ Contrast between labour and rent.
The one-sided conception of feudal law builds up the entire structure of social divisions on the principle of the lord's will. Custom, however sacred, is not equivalent to actionable right, and a person who has nothing but custom to lean upon is supposed to be at the will and mercy of his lord and of base or servile condition. But we find even in the domain of legal doctrine other notions less convenient for the purpose of classification, and more adapted to the practice of daily life. ”

“ They belong to a rural community. But even in a community the arrangement adopted seems peculiar. We must not disregard some important contradictions. The holdings are not all equal, but are grouped on a scale of three, four, five divisions—virgates, bovates, and cotlands for instance. And the question may be put: why should an artificial arrangement contrived for the sake of equality start from a flagrant inequality which looks the more unjust, because instead of those intermediate quantities which shade off into each other in our modern society we meet with abrupt transitions? ”

“ The true heriot is akin in name and in character to the Saxon 'here-geat'—to the surrender of the military outfit supplied by the chief to his follower. In feudal times and among peasants it is not the war-horse and the armour that are meant, ox and harness take their place, but the difference is not in the principle, and one may even catch sometimes a glimpse of the process by which one custom shades off into the other. ”

“ Suppose we get in one case the explanation of a custom or institution which recurs in many other cases; are we entitled to generalise our explanation? This seems methodically sound as long as the contrary cannot be established, for the plain reason that the variety of local facts is a variety of combinations and of effects, not of constitutive elements and of causes. The agents of development are not many, though their joint work shades off into a great number of variations. ”

“ It has become a commonplace to oppose medieval serfdom to ancient slavery, one implying dependence on the lord of the soil and attachment to the glebe, the other being based on complete subjection to an owner. There is no doubt that great landmarks in the course of social development are set by the three modes hitherto employed of organising human labour: using the working man (1) as a chattel at will, (2) as a subordinate whose duties are fixed by custom, (3) as a free agent bound by contract. ”

“ At the same time one cannot but wish to try and get certain knowledge of an historical fact, which, as far as the history of England is concerned, appears as the first manifestation of the Teutonic race in its stupendous greatness. ”

“ Let us test these various suppositions by the facts recorded in our surveys. At first sight it may seem possible to account for the freehold virgates by reference to the process which converted 'workland' into 'molland.' We have seen above that if a lord began to demand money instead of work, the result might, in some cases, be the evolution of new tenures which gradually lost their villain character and became recognised as genuine freeholds. ”