BOOKS.
•
DOMESDAY BOOK AND BEYOND.*
WITHIN two years of The History of English Law before the Reign of Edward I. being published—a work of which by far the greater share belongs to Mr. Maitland—we find him pro- ducing another book of extensive research and original historical judgment. Yet there is no sign of haste about it ; and if there is any appearance of indecision, it is due not to the learned author having left his researches unfinished or his argument undeveloped, but to his reluctance to assert his own conclusions more positively as against well-meaning predecessors whose conjectures he has put out of court. Lack of due self-esteem is the most venial and amiable of faults in a learned man, but we cannot wholly acquiesce in it when it is carried to the point of concealing from all but fellow-workers in the same special matter the definiteness and the importance of his results. The difference between our knowledge of Domesday Book before and since Mr. Round's and Mr. Maitland's work is a difference not between less advanced and more advanced explanation, but between darkness and light. A dozen years ago we knew little of Domesday, and quite half of that little was wrong. Now we know much, and still better, we know what to look for. Mr.
• Donseadny Book and Beyond : Three Rue ye in the /brig Mutton of Mngland. By Frederic William Maitland. Cambridge: University Pres..
Round led the way in forcing the barriers; Mr. Maitland has now set the gates wide open.
The main reason why Domesday Book was so long neglected, and why the tradition of its method perished so quickly that it was already as mysterious in the fifteenth century as in the nineteenth, seems to be that it looks backward rather than forward. It is not a piece of new constructive work on a system devised by the Conqueror; its object was, on the con- trary, to show exactly the results of the old system of raising the King's tax or " geld," and how far the existing distribu- tion of resources had made that system inadequate and unfair. Doubtless a constructive reform, in fact a new assessment on revised returns, but on the same general plan, was in the mind of William and his advisers. But this project was never carried out. The methods of taxation drifted into quite other lines, and, while Domesday remained an authentic record of tenures (such tenures as were dignified enough for it to record), the fiscal arrangements which it assumes at every step fell out of sight and out of understanding. Correct interpretation of Domesday was no more necessary for any practical purpose to the lawyers of the Tudor time than it is to us ; and those lawyers were the collectors of such and so much legal history as, mainly through Blackstone, has passed into the common stock of professional learning. The law, and even the history of the law, from the thirteenth century onwards, can do well enough without Domesday, save for occasional verifications on a question, for example, whether a particular manor is of the Crown's " ancient demesne."
But the history of early mediaeval economics, of Anglo- Norman and Anglo-Saxon land-law, of Anglo-Saxon social conditions, can by no means do without Domesday. The region described as " beyond " in Mr. Maitland's title is fall of doubt and peril. The Dark Ages before the Norman Conquest are dark indeed to the modern historian of law. For our ancestors of the ninth and tenth centuries were not even frankly barbarous. They indited their charters in a turgid and pedantic Latin, mixed in the latter time with serape of Byzantine Greek ; at last they named a plain English village, when they must, with some such futile apology as " quam istius regionis manentes rustico more ac lndibnndo onomate vocitant let Stoce ; " and generally they made it as difficult as possible for posterity to guess what they were really talking about. As for the documents written in English, and of all degrees of authenticity and authority, which are collectively known as Anglo-Saxon laws, they are so fragmentary and scattered as to be enigmatic at many points; and the most ancient and genuine are often the most obscure. The charters and dooms will not help us much to understand Domesday ; but Domesday—if we can only make it out first by its own light—may help us very much to understand the dooms and charters, and may thus give us a firm base for that reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon polity which is still far from having been effected. A reader who cares to follow these matters at all need hardly be told that, so far, Kemble and his rather numerous followers on the one hand, Mr. Seebohm and some zealous, if not numerous, followers on the other, stand at opposite extremes. A people of freemen, though the poorer sort were certainly much depressed even before the Conquest, says Kemble, corrected in several points, but confirmed on the main issue, by the wise and cautious judgment of Bishop Stubbs. A people of serfs cultivating their lords' estates ever since the Roman occupa- tion, says Mr. Seebohm. The most notable addition to the controversy before the present work has been Mr. Yinogradoff's Villainage in England. He only touches on the interpretation of Domesday, but, on the mediaeval evidence, he holds in the main to the Germanic view. Now comes Mr. Maitland leading, as the Scots say, the Domesday evidence. He leads it not as a following for any other man, but as an independent power. There is no doubt, however, that his alliance is with the Germanists and not with the Romanists. Kemble was led by his enthusiastic genius into much exaggeration, and, especially in the political and constitutional field, into positive errors. No one will now dispute this. But Mr. Seebohm's rival theory is much further from historic truth. Mr. Seebohm's servile manor derived from the Roman villa ; his doctrine that the mediaeval common-field system is essentially connected with servile holdings; his division of the whole English people at and before the date of the Conquest, with
merely local and insignificant exceptions, into lords and bondmen,—all this ingenious structure of hypothesis falls to ruin under the attack in force delivered by Mr. Maitland at the head of the Domesday juratores and the returns which they made, little thinking of anybody's theories present or future, to the Conqueror's inquest. It is in our opinion a matter of proof positive ; and we feel bound to say so plainly, while fully admitting the value of Mr. Seebohm's work on some points, because Mr. Maitland has been too modest to say it himself.
The cogency of Mr Maitland's argument cannot be shown within our limits, for the argument is cumulative. It de- pends on the piecing together of a great many details, and the application of many tests. We can only indicate its main lines. Mr. Maitland starts from the fact that Domesday Book is not a modern census or a book of social statistics. It is a rate-book, an instrument for the King's exchequer; it will overlook distinctions, however important to the student of politics or economics, which have nothing to do with the King's revenue. The thing to be known about a man is not his personal rank, but whether he pays the King's geld with his own hand or by the hand of his lord. We cannot even draw a clear line, in the eleventh century, between the worse sort of free and the better sort of unfree men. That the "villani" of Domesday were for the most part not bondmen seems probable ; the fixed difference between the " villanus " and the " sokemannus " can only be that the sokeman is directly answerable for his quota of geld and the villein is not. " Villanus " is in itself a neutral term in the Domesday time ; probably it stands for an English linesman. What, again, is the Domesday " manerium" P Certainly not the complex legal entity denoted by the word " manor " in our modern law-books. Private jurisdiction existed before the Conquest, probably a considerable time before ; but the small importance of many Domesday " manors " makes it impossible to believe that the holder of a " manor " was always entitled to seignorial jurisdiction either in the time of Edward the Confessor or in the time of King William. Besides, the " manerium " of court rolls and custumale for two and three centuries later is a physical and not a meta- physical thing. The history of Castle Combe affords an example of " manerium " being an actual mansion-house as late as 1454. Still, not every substantial house was a " manerium." Mr. Maitland's solution is that the distinctive quality of the Domesday " manerium " lies in being a house where geld has to be demanded and paid : the tenant of a " manerium " is a person the King's officers have to look to. With seignorial jurisdiction, village community, common- field or other agriculture, this " manor" has no constant or necessary connection at all. The supposed relations of " manerium " to " tun " and " ham," and of all three to com- munities of servile labourers, have no warrant of evidence. Coincidence between the manor and the township, whether in extent or in tenure, is not only not uniform, but not everywhere normal. In the eastern counties it is distinctly the case that the lands within a township are seldom held of one and the same lord. And the eastern counties are too large a portion of mediaeval England in weight and substance to be dismissed as a local exception. Further, while in the East we find a village system independent of the manor, in the West we find a system in which there are not villages at all in the same sense, but scattered hamlets or farms, and common-field cultivation is rare. This is no guesswork ; Mr. Maitland shows how it can be read from so recent a witness as that of the old one-inch Ordnance map. The custom of calling even a solitary house by a name ending in "town "—the English equivalent of villa—exists to this day in South Devon, it can hardly be by chance. But these western counties which have not compact villages and great common fields are also those which at and shortly before the date of the Conquest had the largest servile population ; we mean the folk who are called not villeins but bondmen or theows, Beryl, and who under Anglo-Saxon custom were undoubtedly serfs, if not slaves. Theories which make common-field holdings the badge of servility should be able to show common fields where serfage abounds, isolated holdings where free tenants abound ; but the facts are just the other way.
It must be said, however, that if Mr. Maitland has cast down the servile vill according to Mr. Seebohm, he has trampled on
the rains of the "mark system" as Kemble taught it and his less wary followers used to accept it. Free villages there were, it seems, and many of them, or, in Mr. Maitland's more accurate phrase, villages full of free landholders. But a cluster of freemen is not the same thing as a free and self-governing communal unit, or a corporation exercising rights of property distinct from those of its individual members. Bishop StUbbs pointed out more than twenty years ago that there is no evidence of a primary township court ; and Professor Mait- land confirms the tendency of all recent research in archaic history when he denies that any true corporate organisation is to be found in the early stages of either the village or the borough. Corporate ownership and privileges are produced by a relatively modern and refined application of ideas which have been formed in the course of dealing with individual ownership and privileges.
The third division of the book, in which Mr. Maitland, armed with the spoils of Domesday, goes forth to subdue the wilderness of Anglo-Saxon land measures and revenue, will be taken for granted, we suspect, by all save a few thoroughgoing students. But those few will find it moat interesting. Mr. Maitland has not only established his own position, but given himself almost superfluous pains to show how and why mis- takes have been made by others. Let the uninitiated reader imagine the Antipodean antiquaries of A.D. 2700 at work on an estimate of English landed values in the Victorian age, and doing their best to reconcile rate-books, death duty valuations, and auction prices ; let him also suppose them trying to recover the practice of conveyancing as it existed before the Torrens system of registration from copies of con- ditions of sale accidentally preserved; and he will have some notion of the chances of error and confusion that beset the student of Domesday. Some have taken the desperate course of denying that the Anglo-Saxon',hide, the Domesday unit of assessment, was ever a real measure of land at all. Mr. Mait- land, we think, has completed the proof of what we take leave to call the sound doctrine. All things medieval are subject to startling exceptions; nevertheless there is a normal measure to be found. Acres themselves were variable (how should they not be, when there was no such thing as survey- ing, and no proper measuring instruments P); but the normal hide (as those have always believed who were content to stand by the best Anglo-Norman witnesses) was a long hundred of acres, and it was normally divided into four virgates of thirty acres each. Thus far Mr. Seebohm is confirmed. But the hide is primary, not the virgate ; the hide is not made by the addition of virgates, but virgates by sub-division of the hide ; and this is quite incompatible with the servile theory, as those who know Mr. Seebohm's book will perceive. The "fiscal hides " of Domesday, the hides a man pays geld for as distinct from the arable land he really occupies (which last is described in terms of plough- lands, or land for so many ploughs), are determined by an artificial, and also very rough, system of assessing counties and hundreds in round numbers. We do not know how old the assessment was; we do know that longl before the Conquest, in many counties, it had not any intelligible re- lation to the real productive capacity of the land. Mr. Round and Mr. Maitland share the credit of having dis- covered the method of assessment, and shown how conven- tional it was. We have not space to describe Mr. Maitland's dealing with the obscure documents of its earlier history, though it is not the least ingenious part of his work.
Moreover we have it now finally established that the ex- tensive grants made to sees and religious houses, and occasionally great men, by the charters of Anglo-Saxon kings were as a rule grants of superiority, of what later lawyers would call seignory, or in some cases regalities, and of the profitable incidents of lordship, and were not what we should now call grants of the land itself. The grantee took the revenues, the customary dues, the fees and fines that arose from the courts held on the land, sometimes even the geld that otherwise the King would have taken. But this made no difference to the owners and tillers of the soil except that whatever payments and services were, in the modern phrase, due and of right accustomed had now to be rendered to the new lord. It is true that other people have suggested this before Mr. Maitland, and the same may be said of other points in the book besides those on which Mr. Round's and Mr. Maitland's work ham coincided. But those other people, after all, only made more or less plausible suggestions which might be disputed. Mr. Maitland has given us solid and in- disputable proofs, and settled the lines on which further research must proceed for at least a generation to come.
Previous page
