LAND-TENURE
rSl
LAND-TENURE
which followed the Carlovingian period was calcu-
lated to make of the feudal conception a stronger
thing than ever. A hierarchy of a military type,
based upon local economic power, was absolutely
necessary at such a time.
Perhaps the best example of the way in which ten- ure had come to be a necessity for men's minds is the grant of Normandy. The story is simple enough. The pirate invasions, though they could not have brought numerous armies, yet sufficiently and con- tinually harried the coasts of northern France. Their action dated from shortly after the death of Charle- magne and continued into the tenth century. The way out of the difficulty is a sj-mbol of all that society then imagined: the chief of the pirates must be lja[> tized; that is, he must accept the whole body of ci\ili- zation if he and his followers desire to settle within it. The pirates have come for gain, they have looted enough, and civilization will only permit them to re- main within its boundaries if they regularize their position by calling themselves, and living as, Gallo- Roman lords of villages; presumably only the leaders could have such a position, their followers would be tenants under them or armed servants in their halls. Waste village estates, village estates acquired by the forced marriages of heiresses, grants from the Royal domain, would presumably form the basis of this settlement. The head chief (RoUo), for instance, must marry the emperor's daughter; and most signif- icant of all is the limit of the territory- granted and the title of the grantee. RoUo is to be a dux, and he is to be the emperor's man, to owe him fidelity, etc. The territorial limits of his jurisdiction are precisely those of an old Roman frontier which has never been allowed to fall into desuetude. RoUo, the dux, holds of the emperor, as his man, the province of the Second Lyonnese (Galliu Lutjdunen^is Secunda). Custom will later give to this district the new name of Normandy, but it will correspond from that day to this with the exact frontiers of the old Roman province. Such a power for absorption has the Roman world even in its worst moment at the end of the fierce Barbaric on- slaught, that the new state is within two generations a model of feudalism. The few hundred chiefs are settled as estate-owners in the Roman scheme, side by side with their more numerous Gallo-Roman equals. Their few thousand followers have become serfs, villeins, or armed horsemen upon their manors. The whole is arranged in a strict hierarchy under the hered- itary dux, the man of his hereditary feudal lord, the king in Paris, and the Second Lyonnese presents a perfect model of the feudal theon.'. Indeed, it is this fusion of numerous Gallo-Roman lords of estates with a few Barbaric lords of estates interspersed among them that develops the feudal theorj' most thoroughly and carries it furthest; for the Norman nobility' — in England, in Sicily, and in Palestine — were the chief organizers of the Middle Ages.
We have just used the words villeins anel serfs, and at this point in our examination of European land- tenure in Christian times, the position of the mass of the people deserves our attention.
The feudal development of which we have been giv- ing a description concerned a small minority. That mmority consisted of the numerous descendants of the great landowners of the Roman Empire and a certain smaller number of Barbarian adventurers who in the troubles of the fifth century (to which must be added other invasions, especially in the ninth) had acquired estates. These estates were the units of the Roman scheme, and feudalism was the organization of their owners upon the system of tenure we have de.scribed. What of the great mass of the population which in Roman times had cultivatecl the land of these landowners as slaves? — Tlicsc also had been transformed in their social constitution during the Christian centuries, and the transformation.
though it i.s most obscure in its process, is quite clear
in its origin and at its end. The Church, between the
fifth centurj' and the tenth, had transformed the
Roman slave into the European peasant. The word
was retained, and serf is but a form of servus, while
villein is but a form of villanus, the agricultural slave
at work upon a villa, or Roman country estate. But
the political position to which those names attached
has utterly changed. Slavery as an institution does
indeed still hnger in the tenth century — there are
traces of it even in the eleventh — but that slavery is
domestic and rare. The man who tills the soil is, at
the end of the process we have been describing, not a
slave at all. On the other hand his position is quite
different from the Roman conception of a citizen or
the modern European conception of the same political
entity.
The Roman estate which has come down, often unchanged even in the details of its boundaries, through all these centuries,we will now call a "manor" (a term probably Norman in origin), for under this name it is alluded to in most textbooks. The medie- val, or feudal, manor had at its head a lord who might be an individual, or a corporation such as a monastery, or an office such as the Crown or the Archbishopric of Canterbury; and these lords were of course the units out of which the feudal hierarchj' was built up. To this lord, the representative of the old Roman slave- owners, was still, in legal phraseologj', due the whole work of the villein. Indeed, it was the definition of a villein that he was one, who, rising in the morning, could not tell of his own will what he should have to do before night.
But even if this legal tradition (which by the tenth century was no more than a form of words) had had actual existence in social fact, the villein would have been a very different person from the Roman slave. He had land of his own, a hou.se of his own hereditable in his family, he could not be bought or sold, and it would appear that so long as his work was done there was no constraint over his person. He was subject to the common justice of the land, and not to the arbi- trary will of his master, and so forth. But much more favourable than this was his actual position, for custom and common opinion had long forbidden him to give more than a fixed number of somewhat com- plicated dues, varying from estate to estate, to his lord. Of the old Roman estate only a portion (differ- ing again from parish to parish) remained absolutely under the lord's control and was called his "demesne", that is "lord's land", from domimum. On this the serf must work so many days of the year under set rules — sometimes two days a week, sometimes three, always excepting holy days. He must also give a cer- tain amount of produce, usually quite small, at stated times, a few eggs at Easter, etc., etc., according to the industry of the place. And he must perform certain services. For the rest, his time was free, and the land apportioned to him was, in nearly every sense, his own. It was his own because it could not be taken from him even under process of debt , nor for t hat mat- ter could his capital be taken from him under process of debt. It was his own because, though dues and work went with it, yet they could not be raised as, or if, he improved the value of his land: custom forbade it. What is called in modern jargon "the unearned increment " was his, and that is the test of property in land. So was the earned increment which was due to his own labour. More than this, the villein had, side by side with the lord, certain common rights which were of the utmost importance. The common land of the manor, which had formerly been the Roman iirojirie- tor's as much as any other part, was now used accord- ing to careful rules. The lord might only put so many cattle onto it, the villeins each .so many Similar strict communal rights accrued to him in the woods of the place, in the fisheries, the use of the water-ways
