Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/526

Rh transacted the conveyancing business, enforced the jurisdiction of the franchises. Its suitors were freeholders and villeins alike, and if they did not always act jointly, we have at least no means of distinguishing between the different parts they played. Gradually, however, a differentiation took place, and three main types of courts came into being, the Customary Court, the Court Baron and the Court Leet; but we need not here concern ourselves with the technical distinctions involved by this differentiation of courts.

All these details have a simple and reasonable meaning when we consider them from the point of view of an all-round arrangement of each locality for the settlement of all its affairs, administrative, fiscal, jurisdictional, as well as economic and civil. This confusing variety has to be explained by the fact that, notwithstanding all strivings to make the manor complete and self-sufficient in this petty local sphere, it could not cut itself off from the general fabric of the kingdom. Through the channels which connected it with the central authorities came disturbing elements; the privileges of free tenants, the control over the use of franchises, the interference of royal courts and royal officers. All these factors rendered manorial arrangements more complex and less compact than they might otherwise have been; but, of course, these very elements insured its further development towards more perfect forms of organisation and prevented it from degenerating into despotism or into caste.

The manor is peculiarly an English institution, although it may serve to illustrate Western European society in general. Feudalism, natural husbandry, the sway of the military class, the crystallisation of powers and rights in local centres, are phenomena which took place all over Western Europe and which led in France, in Germany, in Italy and Spain to similar though not identical results. It is interesting to watch how in these bygone times and far-off customs some of the historical traits which even now divide England from its neighbours are forming themselves at the very time when the close relationship between the European countries is clearly visible. The disruption of the nation into local organisms is more complete in France and in Germany than in England, which, through the fact of the Norman Conquest and the early rise of Norman royalty and Norman aristocracy, was welded into a national whole at a period when its southern neighbours were nearly oblivious of national union. Even so, the English manor was more systematically arranged and more powerfully united than the French Seigneurie or the German Grundherrschaft. The French baron ruled in an arbitrary manner over his serfs and was almost powerless in regard to his free vassaux, while the German Grundherr had a most confusing complex of social groups to deal with, a complex more akin to the classes of England which existed on the day when King Edward the Confessor was "alive and dead" than to the England of Henry II and