Villeinage

“ In obscure differences of this kind may possibly be found the origin of the distinction between the “privileged” and “unprivileged” villeins of later centuries. [48]
[Pg xli]
It must be allowed that there is still very much that is obscure in the early history of villeinage. This obscurity may be expected to disappear as social antiquities come to be studied by scholars who are economists as well as historians. ”

“ One could cite a good many examples pointing to an upward movement. Large estates are left at death by men who are legally villeins. Villeins, especially in the eastern counties, buy up freehold land and found considerable properties. A bond tenant in Lincolnshire marries into a knight’s family. Bond tenants are found leasing the manorial demesne in one block and farming estates of several hundred acres. Nor must we forget that the peasants of the sixteenth century are often very substantial people, and that even when the taint of personal villeinage is still upon them. ”

“ The annual value of Willenhall is set down at 20s. The population consisted of eight families, or, as the return puts it, five bordars and three villeins.
A bordar, or boor, was a squatter living in a hut or cottage on the borders of a manor, having attached a little patch of land, the rent of which was paid to the lord of the manor in the shape of poultry, eggs, and small produce. A villein, or serf, was to all intents and purposes a slave, at the absolute disposal of the lord, except that he could not be detached from the soil on which he was born. ”

“ He was called a tenant-in-villenage, and the part of the manor which he tilled was a villagium, or "village," to distinguish it from the demesne, or part farmed by the lord, which of course usually surrounded the manor-house. We call it "the home farm." The villein paid the land tax, and sometimes even commuted his personal service for rent. A female villein was called a "niefe"—a word derived from the Latin for "native," "because for the most part niefes are bond by nativitie"—that is, are born unfree. ”

“ The land of the lord's demesne—the home farm belonging to the manor-house—was cultivated chiefly by the services of the villata, i.e. of the village community, or tenants in villenage. The land of this village community, i.e. the land in villenage, lay round the village in open fields. In the village were the messuages or homesteads of the tenants in villenage, and their holdings were composed of bundles of scattered strips in the open fields, with rights of pasture over the latter for their cattle after the crops were gathered, as well as on the green commons of the manor or township. ”

“ No doubt the villeins usually do some labour upon the lord’s demesne lands. In particular they help to plough it. A manor, we can see, is generally so arranged that the ratio borne by the demesne oxen to the demesne land will be smaller than that borne by the villeins’ oxen to the villeins’ land. Thus, to give one example out of a hundred, in a Somersetshire manor the lord has four hides and three teams, the villeins have two hides and three teams [183] . But then the lord gets some help in his agriculture from those who are undoubtedly free tenants. ”

“ This was common in other manors, and the 'withdrawal' of villeins played a considerable part in the disappearance of serfdom and the break-up of the system. [124] The following table shows the gradual disappearance of villeins in the Manor of Forncett:
There is no event of greater importance in the agrarian history of England, or which has led to more important consequences, than the dissolution of this community in the cultivation of the land, which had been in use so long, and the establishment of the complete independence and separation of one property from another. ”

“ Each villein plough had to plough and harrow two acres; on this occasion the villeins had a corrody from the bishop, and so they had on occasion of a great boon-work. They were to harrow whenever required; to perform services of carting, for which they got every man a loaf; to make each one booth for the fair of S. Cuthbert; “and when they make lodges” (possibly for the bishop’s hunting) “and cart wood, they are free of other work.” These were the services due from twenty-two out of the thirty-six tenants on the manor of Boldon. ”

“ Tell the tale of your tail, brother."
"We be villeins of Watlington, and so were our folk before us, holding our housen our own for dues and service to our lord. But King Stephen gave the manor to Sir Gilbert du Marais. Then Sir Gilbert built him a castle in Watlington, where castle had never been, and to build it he pulled down our housen and we have no home nor living."
"The foxes ve holes and the birds of the air have nests. Yet I have none, brother."
"Like outlaws we live and like outlaws we die."
"Godric!" the woman said and touched his hand. ”

“ Most villeins did not venture beyond their village except for about ten miles to a local shrine or great fair a couple times a year. At the fair might be soap, garlic, coal, fish, nails, grindstones, iron, salt, shovels, brushes, pails, oil, honey, pots, pans, horses, and pack-saddles. Often one village was divided up among two or more manors, so different manorial customs made living conditions different among the villagers. Villages usually had carpenters, smiths, saddlers, thatchers, carters, fullers, dyers, soapmakers, tanners, needlers, and brassworkers. ”

“ Westminster.—“In the village where the church of St. Peter is situate, the abbot of the same place holds thirteen hides and a half. There is land to eleven ploughs. Nine hides and one virgate belong to the demesne, and there are four ploughs therein. The villanes have six ploughs, and one plough more may be made. There are nine villanes of one virgate each; one villane of one hide; and nine villanes of half a virgate each; and one cottager of five acres; and forty-one cottagers who pay forty shillings a year for their gardens. Meadow for eleven ploughs. Pasture for the cattle of the village. ”

“ Below the lord and the free tenants came the villeins, natives, bondmen, or holders of virgates or yard-lands, each holding a house, a fixed number of acre strips, a share of the meadow and of the profits of the waste. The number of strips so held was usually about thirty; but virgates of fifteen acres or even eighty are not unknown. In any one manor, however, the holdings of all the villeins were equal. Rights of Villeins. Normally the holder of a virgate was unfree; he had no rights in the eye of the law against his lord, who was protected from all suits by the exceptio villenagii ”

“ Henceforth every door step held a friend; not a coif or a blouse passed without a greeting. The village, as a village, lived in the open street. Villerville had the true French genius for society; the very houses were neighborly, crowding close upon the narrow sidewalk. Conversation, to be carried on from a dormer-window or from opposite sides of the street, had evidently been the first architectural consideration in the mind of the builders; doors and windows must be as open and accessible as the lives of the inhabitants. ”

“ The very few entries which tell us of the labour of the villeins are quite insufficient to condemn the whole class to unlimited, or even to very heavy work. On a manor in Herefordshire there are twelve bordiers who work one day in the week [186] . On the enormous manor of Leominster there are 238 villani and 85 bordarii. The villani plough and sow with their own seed 140 acres of their lord’s land and they pay 11 pounds and 52 pence [187] . On the manor of Marcle, which also is in Herefordshire, there are 36 villani and 10 bordarii with 40 teams. ”

“ The position of privileged people, either servants or freeholders, must be discussed by itself, as an exceptional case. And, lastly, the question will have to be put—to what extent were all these elements welded together in the village community, and under the sway of the manorial court?
Field systems.
The chief features of the field-system which was in operation in England during the middle ages have been sufficiently cleared up by modern scholars, especially by Nasse, Thorold Rogers, and Seebohm, and there is no need for dwelling at length on the subject. ”

“ The common system of husbandry manifests itself in many ways: the small holders club together for ploughing; four virgates or yardlands have to co-operate in order to start an eight-oxen plough. The services are often laid upon the whole village and not on separate householders; on the other hand the village, as a whole, enters into agreement with the lord about leases or commutation of services for money. ”

“ The cultivation of the demesne depends to a certain extent on the work supplied by the tenants of the tributary land. Rents are collected, labour supervised, and all kinds of administrative business transacted, by a set of manorial officers or servants. The entire population is grouped into a village community which centres round the manorial court or halimote, which is both council and tribunal. My investigation will necessarily conform to this typical arrangement. The holding of the peasant is the natural starting-point: it will give us the clue to the whole agrarian system. ”

“ Long stretches of dark blue and crimson cloth are seen in the meadows outside the walls, destined to be cut into the jackets and breeches of the military. Villeneuvette has retained much of its curious patriarchal organisation. There is no village outside the embattled walls; of the ninety-eight cottages all are given rent free to the artisans, and nothing more is exacted of them save respect for rules of decency and cleanliness. ”

“ Every house has a cherished manure heap in its back yard, symmetrically shaped, with the projecting edges of the straw neatly braided: it is a source of family pride as well as profit. But it is chiefly the odor of world-old human occupation, otherwise indescribable, that pervades the air of Villeneuve, and makes the mildest of foreign sojourners long for the application of a little dynamite to its ancient houses. Our towns are perhaps the ugliest in the world, but how open to the sun and wind they are! ”

“ Both ceorls and geburs disappear as separate classes, and it is clear that the greater part of them must have passed into the rank of villeins.
In the terminology of the Domesday Inquest we find the villeins as the most numerous element of the English population. Out of about 240,000 households enumerated in Domesday 100,000 are marked as belonging to villeins. They are rustics performing, as a rule, work services for their lords. ”

“ The villein, when in this mood, had two great temptations, the cities with their franchise, which even his master did not dare infringe,359 and the forest, where he was out of reach. Noblemen sometimes allowed their villeins to become merchants and go from city to city. ”

“ Villenage—The Servi in Germany, mentioned by Cæsar and Tacitus, the predecessors of the Socmen or socage tenants in the feudal monarchy—Villeins in gross and villeins belonging to the land of the Lord—The condition of villeins—The different ways by which a man may become a villein—The means by which villenage or its effects may be suspended. ”

“ But now, in the fifteenth century, it had been not only a town but a great town for more than a century--a town, that is, in which men live entirely, almost ignorant of the fields, observing only other men, and forgetting the sky. The keen edge of such a life, its bitterness, the mockery and challenge whereby its evils are borne, its extended knowledge, the intensity of its spirit--all these are reflected in Villon, and first reflected in him. ”

“ The Surveys often mark the different epochs of cultivation—the old and the new essarts [731] . The documents show333 also that the spread of the area under cultivation was effected in different ways; sometimes by a single settler with help from the lord [732] , and sometimes by the entire village, or at any rate by a large group of peasants who club together for the purpose [733] . In the first case there was no reason for bringing the reclaimed space under the sway of the compulsory rotation of crops or the other regulations of communal agriculture. ”

“ The villeins, poor churls, spend their days with shovel, mattock, or in mechanic toil. Doubtless, they can grow wheat, raise pigs, weave cloth, or build houses better than their masters, but in the use of arms how utterly are they inferior. ”

“ Manorial extents and inquests give in themselves only a one-sided picture of mediaeval village life, because they describe it only from the point of view of the holding: people who do not own land are very seldom noticed, and among the population settled on the land only those persons are named who 'defend' the tenement in regard to the lord. ”

“ On large tracts of land these villages would form separate open field groups. Although the economic evidence is not within our reach in early times, we have indications of separate village meetings under the manorial court even from the legal point of view taken by the court-rolls. ”

“ Every householder has a more or less considerable following (sequela) [664] , and it was by no means necessary for the head of the family to perform all manorial work in his own person. He had to appear or to send one workman on most occasions and to come with all his people on a few days—the boon-days namely. The description of the precariae is generally the only occasion when the extents take this into account, namely, that there was a considerable population in the village besides those tenants who were mentioned by name [665] . ”