VILLENAGE IN ENGLAND.* THE' question will naturally be asked why
a Russian scholar and professor should be attracted to the study of such a subject as villenage in England, and to the arduous perusal
* Vittentmu in England. By Paal Vinortrade11, Professor in the University of Muscovy. Oxterd : Clarendon Press. 1892.
of English mediteval documents. The answer may be given in the Professor's own words :—" Questions entirely sur- rendered to antiquarian research in the West of Europe are still topics of contemporary interest with us." In Russia the passage from serfdom to freedom has only recently been effected, and the forces of such a social revolution are by no means exhausted. In that vast country-
" Government and society have to deal even now with problems that must be solved in the light of history, if in any light at all, and not by instinct groping in the dark. All such practical problems verge towards one main question : how far legislation an and should act upon the social development of the agrarian world. Are economic agencies to settle for themselves who has to till land, and who shall own it? Or can we learn from Western history what is to be particularly avoided, and what is to be aimed ? I do not think that anybody is likely to maintain in the present day that, for instance, a study of the formation and dis- solution of the village community in the West would be meaning- less for politicians and thinkers who have to concern themselves with the actual life of the village community in the East."
To this eminently practical view must be added the attraction offered by the scientific direction of historical studies in the present day, in which anthropology and social science are assuming an increasingly important part, and this attraction is further enhanced by the high quality of the literature connected with the subject. Nowhere can the earlier stages of agrarian progress, and the ascent from territorial bondage to freedom, be better studied than in England ; for in this country, thanks to the presence of a strong central authority, legal and fiscal documents, dating from early medialval times, which give not only generalities, but illustrate details, are comparatively abundant. Annals and statutes, cartularies, surveys, Court-rolls, and manorial records offer a fund of material for investigation not to be found elsewhere. It is only by the investigation and analysis of the phenomena of a particular period or nation that generali- sations can be arrived at that will help us towards the laws of human development. Hence, from a study of the general lea.tures of the English medimval system, as embodied in the abundant records of the feudal period, it may be possible to work back to the imperfectly described pre-feudal age. This Is what Professor Vinogradoff has attempted in the two essays contained in this volume, which we are glad to learn are to open the way for another work on the origins of English peasant life in the Norman and pre-Norman times. This translation from the Russian form, in which the work
originally appeared, has been made by the author, and is is marvel of clear and idiomatic English, and shows no sign of being the work of a foreigner. In the introduction will be found a compendious resume of what has been already done, and a discussion of the views put forward by various scholars. Professor Vinogradoff shrewdly remarks that "schools and leading scholars displace one another more
under the inflaence of general currents of thought than of individull talent," and in his analysis and summary of the work accomplished this idea is never lost sight of.
The first essay is on the "Peasantry of the Feulial Age." Professor Vinogradoff institutes primarily an inquiry into the legal status of the villein. The efforts of the lawyers of the Middle Ages were directed to a construction of a theory of villenage on the lines of the Roman law of slavery. Under the influence of this theory, which acted to the prejudice of the peasantry, the extinction of their natural rights was threatened. Yet the legal fabric they thus strove to raise gave way at every point, owing to the insuperable force of custom and to the persistence of a strain of freedom, coming down from earlier times. He then discusses the question of • the position of the peasant with regard to the Manor. The whole question is a dipmlt one, and surrounded by complexities and anomalies. Por many generations prior to the Conquest the peasant had been dependant on an overlord, and more or less associated with the land. The effect of feudalism was to completely associate territorial with personal dependence. The Manor was imposed on a condition of things already existing, and by no means easy to appreciate. Chaps. iv. and in which our author epitomises his results, may be read witla great profit, and will be found extremely valuable. To state his conclusions very briefly, he considers that the Conquest tended to bring the free and unfree peasantry into one mould or class of villenage, and that this class was saved from a descent into slavery by the feudal institution of the Manor,—for the territorial association with a Manor pre- vented the peasant from becoming the chattel of his lord. He also considers that the division of medireval peasantry into freeholders and villeins is an artificial and a late one, and that a number of important groups stood between the two.
The title of the second essay, " The Manor and the Village Community," suggests at once a subject of great interest and equal intricacy, which is handled in these pages with ability.
Professor Vinogradoff treats of the Open-Field System and Holdings, Rights of Commons, Rural Work and Rents, the relations between the Lord of the Manor, his servants and tenants, and the functions and actions of the Manorial Courts. The conclusions he arrives at, and which are set forth in a final chapter of the very highest value, are at variance with those of Mr. Seebohm and the Manorial School, and are more in accordance with those held by Mr. Gomme, and with the evolutionary tendencies of thought of the present day.
Mr. Seebohm, it is well known, places the Village Commu- nity within the sphere of Roman civilisation, and ascribes the size and distribution of the scattered strips of arable land, a bundle of which composed a holding, to the exigencies of the manorial eight-ox plough; whilst the terraces and lynches still to be seen on our hill-sides are the results of its use. Our author points out that this division prevails in the far West and far East of Europe ; in England, where large ploughs were used ; and in Russia, where they till with one horse. He insists that there was nothing in the manorial arrangement to call for such a system, but that the manorial element warped and distorted it from its early form. At the time of our earliest records, the bundles of strips forming a holding no longer changed hands every year, as did the meadow-land. In this respect the system had become crystallised, but its primal object was equality :—
"It is not the fact that peasant holdings are made subservient to the wants of the lord's estate that can explain why early agri- culture is in the main a culture of open fields, and involves a marvellous interchange of rights. The absence of any logical connexion between these two things settles the question as to historical influence. The open-field arrangement is, I repeat it, no lax or indifferent system, but stringent and highly peculiar. And so it cannot but proceed from some pressing necessity. It is evidently communal in its very essence. Every trait that makes it strange and inconvenient from the point of view of individualistic interests, renders it highly appropriate to a state of things ruled by communal conceptions. It is difficult to prevent trespassers upon an open plot, but the plot must be open if many people besides the tiller have rights over it, pasture rights, for instance. It involves great loss of time and difficulty in supervision to work a property that lies in thirty separate pieces, all over the territory of a village, but such a disposition is remarkably well adapted for the purpose of assigning to fellow- villagers equal shares in the arable. It is grievous to depend on your neighbours for the proceeds and results of your own work, but the tangled web of rights and boundaries becomes simple if we consider it as the arrangement of land by an agricultural com- munity which has allotted the places where its members have to work. Rights of common usage, communal apportionment of shares in the arable, communal arrangement of ways and times of cultivation, these are the chief features of open-field husbandry, and all point to one source,—the village community. It is not a manorial arrangement, though it may be adapted to the manor. If more proof were needed, we have only to notice the fact that open.field cultivation is in full work in countries where the manor has not been established, and in times when it has not as yet been formed."
The book shows great research and learning, and will add additional fame to Professor Vinogradoff's already brilliant reputation. No future investigator can afford to neglect it, nor to ignore the evidence leading to the author's conclusions that the commune of peasants is older and more deeply
founded than the manor. In bringing these inadequate remarks on a very fine piece of work to a close, it seems un- gracious to have to say that the paltry character of the index reduces its value as a book for reference, but such is, unhappily, the fact.
Previous page
