THE NORMAN MANOR, 411 TWELVE pages of references to authorities, together
with a good array of notes at the foot of each page, furnish ample reason for the publication of Mr. Lipson's Introduction to the Economic History of England. It deals, indeed, with a subject which has been much written about of late ,years. But this has been done for the most part in forms not likely to appeal to readers who are not professed students of the subject. The authorities quoted or referred to must be looked for in Calendars of State Papers, in learned reviews, in separate works on particular industrial periods. Mr. Lipson has now attempted to reduce this chaos into something like a con- tinuous narrative, and, so far as we are able to judge, he has done his work well. His starting-point is the Norman Con- quest, and the choice of this date makes the manor the first subject to be considered. But though the term did not come into use till after 1066, the manorial system was much older. Mr. Lipson devotes some space to an examination of two rival theories of its origin, the Roman and the Teutonic. According to the one, the manor sprang from the Roman system of land- holding, which, as its defenders assert, "was adopted by the English invaders as the basis of their settlement." According to the other, the Saxon settlements borrowed nothing from Rome. They were communities of peasant proprietors who gradually "developed into the villeins of Domesday Book." Mr. Lipson considers the issue between these two schools a matter of the greatest historical importance, since it "involves the fundamental question whether the starting-point of our history is the freedom or servitude of the great part of the nation." By his own showing, however, too much has been made of this distinction. No doubt in one case there is a decline from an original freedom to a later servitude, and in the other a growth from an original servitude to a later free. dom. But in both cases it is with the servitude that the real advance begins. There are neither peasant proprietors nor free village communities in Domesday Book. Nor is the distinction between the Roman and the Teutonic theories anything like as great as the supporters of each maintain. Even Mr. Lipson, after he has gone carefully into the argu- ments by which both are defended, comes to the conclusion that "neither an economic nor a feudal interpretation unfolds a complete view of manorial development." And two pages later he says : "The manor was a varied and heterogeneous • An Introduction to the Economic History of England. By B. Lipson, I. "The Middle Ages." London A. and C. Black. (7.. 64. net.]
growth which cannot be explained by any single hypothesis of social development:"
Even if we accept the doctrine that from the seventh century to the eleventh "a nation of free oultivatore became gradually transformed into one of dependent serfs," the change was inevitable It was due in part to fiscal causes. The economic independence of the small owners had disappeared under the burden of Danegeld, and by this end similar means the villages of free peasants became manors of unfree villeins. But the change was not always to the disadvantage of the peasant. The State was not yet equal to the work of protect- ing its subjects, and its place was taken by the lord. Men wanted security not merely for their lives but for their pro- perty. "If a violent neighbour wrested their land from them, or in other ways encroached upon their rights," they needed the help of a powerful superior. The recurrent invasions of the Northmen introduced a new class—the soldiers, whose sole business was to fight. The tiller was thus released, as a rule, from any military obligation and" sank to the bottom of the new social hierarchy." The manor thus constituted was sometimes a home farm, cultivated by the dependants of the lord, and sometimes a centre of jurisdiction, in which case it was simply a portion of the hundred which had passed into private hands. Sometimes, again, it consisted of scattered settlements "controlled from a single centre where their tribute was paid." In all these forms the manor took fresh life after the Conquest. "With the coming of the Normans, an age, first of construction and organization, and then of definition, succeeded an age of social chaos and cross-relation- ships." These were "replaced by a single relationship based on land." Attendance at the lord's Court was a duty imposed on every tenant ; the freeholders, who had existed down to the Conquest, rapidly disappeared; and the condition of the villeins grew harder. Slavery came to an end, but increased services were exacted from the tenants. It was part of the price paid for fuller association with the European commonwealth. The manor was "an estate owned by a lord and occupied by a community of dependent cultivators." The lord's demesne was the home farm, cultivated by the tenants, and furnishing the lord and his household with the means of living. It was something more, however, than a farm. It contained the manor house, in which the lord usually lived, and from which he managed the estate. This Was no trifling business, for "at every turn the lives of the villagers were controlled by their economic dependency upon the labour arrangements of the lord's demesne." Of the tenants the villeins were the most numerous, and their position was one of great economic im- portance. It was the existence of a numerous class of small but relatively well-to-do peasants that gave stability to the manorial, system. In theory the villein was only u, tenant at will, bound to give an undefined part of his time to the cultivation of the lord's demesne. In practice, however, "custom was the life of the manor and very little was left to arbitrary caprice." But the villein was annexed to the soil; he could not sell any of hie stock, or apprentice his son to a handicraft, or give his daughter in marriage, without the lord's consent. The "vital and essential" principle of villeinage was its connexion with the land, and this could always be ended at the will of the lord. But, as a rule, the lord was at least "as anxious to retain his tenants on the manor for'the cultivation of the demesne as the tenants could be to retain their homesteads."
Until recent years the break-up of the manor has been generally attributed to the Black Death. A pestilence which in little over a year carried off something like half the
population had necessarily large economic results. But Mr. Lipson thinks that it came less as a cause than
as an impetus to causes already in action. The primary object of villeinage was to "provide labour for the culti- vation of the home farm," and the forces which under- mined it were two "commutation of services, and the alienation of the demesne." Even from the lords' point of view, the system of forced labour had many drawbacks. "Customary servants," says a contemporary writer, "neglect their work and it is necessary to guard against their fraud." The supervision required for this purpose involved the employ- ment of many officials, and the cessation of the need for them was an immediate money gain to the lord. The benefit to the villein was still greater. "His time became his own," and he Was able to give the whole of it to the cultivation of his holding.
The way had been prepared for commutation of services by the practice of estimating their value in money, even while the exaction of them was still genera. As the lord learned to think of the work done for him in terms of money, he came to appreciate the convenience of taking payment in place of work. At first the change seems not to have been always welcomed by the tenants ; but the growth of a labour class was hastened by the Black Death, and the consequent rise of wages. "Reapers, for example, whose statutory rate was two or three pence per day, now often received fivepenee or sixpence." The position of the villein was made worse, not only in comparison with that of the free labourer, but by an increase in the services demanded of him. So long as the work was done the lord did not ask by whom it was done, and the burden was ordinarily distributed among the members of, the villein's honsehold. But when the Black Death "carried off half the nation, the surviving tenants found their work actually doubled, not from any increased pressure on the part of the lord, but because the burden now fell entirely on their own shoulders." The lords soon discovered that with a rising wage-rate corti- mutation was not to their advantage, and they made great efforts to retain, and. sometimes to reintroduce, the old system. But the causes which had enabled them to do this no longer existed. When the manorial system came into being the tenant had seldom any inducement to leave his holding for "the unknown world beyond." After the Black Death he had to meet the old responsibilities with a household shorn of half its members, and the sudden rise in wages gave a new attraction to the position of the free labourer. The manorial rolls bring "vividly before our eyes the social die- order now prevailing. Everywhere the tenants were abandon- ing their holdings, confident that they controlled the labour market." The Government did their best to stop this movement by the "Ordinance of Labourers" put out in 1349, and the "Statute of Labourers" passed in 1351. But the rivalry of the landlords "foiled all attempts to keep wages down. . . . The Statute of Labourers failed, in fact, because Cvo masters were running after one man."
The alienation of the demesne was also a result not so much of the Black Death as of economic forces which it set in motion. "The mediaeval organization of labour had, in fact, almost completely broken down, and with it the system by which the owner of the soil was also a farmer." The lord of the manor became more and more a landlord in the modern sense. The demesne was frequently let on lease as one large farm. On the other hand, there were many instancee in which the tenant of the demesne went on paying his rent in kind long after com- mutation had become general in the case of all other tenants.
"While the lords were content to receive money payments from the rest of their tenants, they still clung to the thought
that the demesne ought to furnish them with food for their household." The separation of the home farm from the demesne was of later date. The exception to this practice was the monastic estates. At the time of the Dissolution the monks, for the most part, were still farming their demesnes. A French writer has described the Peasants Revolt as "one of the most significant and interesting events in the whole of mediaeval history." But as regards the manorial system kr. Lipson holds that its importance has been much exaggerated. There are no real grounds for assuming that the insurrection accelerated the disappearance of villeinage on any large scale or materially affected the current of economic progress. Where villeinage was in possession it played its part as one of the grievances which led to the revolt, but where, as in Sent, there was no villeinage the revolt secured equal support without it. The passing of the Statute of Labourers and the imposition of a specially obnoxious Poll Tax are enough of themselves to explain the outbreak. "The great mass of the villeins were discontented, not because the lords had tried to make their obligations heavier, but because circumstances had rendered them less compliant and submissive." The position of the free labourer had greatly and suddenly improved, while theirs had remained
unchanged. The rise and fall of the manorial system is only one of the many questions with which Mr. Lipson deals, and he is equally interesting on such subjects as the growth of towns and the history of Merchant and Craft Guilds.
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