Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/98

Rh with the manorial organization—that is, with the fact that the country was divided into a number of districts in which central home farms were cultivated by the help of work supplied by villein households.

The most important of villein services is the week-work performed by the peasantry. Every virgater or holder of a bovate has to send a labourer to do work on the lord's farm for some days in the week. Three days is indeed the most common standard for service of this kind, though four or even five occur sometimes, as well as two. It must be borne in mind in the case of heavy charges, such as four or five days' week-work, that only one labourer from the whole holding is meant, while generally there were several men living on every holding—otherwise the service of five days would be impossible to perform. In the course of these three days, or whatever the number was, many requirements of the demesne had to be met. The principal of these was ploughing the fields belonging to the lord, and for such ploughing the peasant had not only to appear personally as a labourer, but to bring his oxen and plough, or rather to join with his oxen and plough in the work imposed on the village: the heavy, costly plough with a team of eight oxen had to be made up by several peasants contributing their beasts and implements towards its composition. In the same way the villagers had to go through the work of harrowing with their harrows, and of removing the harvest in their vans and carts. Carriage duties in carts and on horseback were also apportioned according to the time they took as a part of the week-work. Then came innumerable varieties of manual work for the erection and keeping up of hedges, the preservation of dykes, canals and ditches, the threshing and garnering of corn, the tending and shearing of sheep and so forth. All this hand-work was reckoned according to customary standards as day-work and week-work. But besides all these services into which the regular week-work of the peasantry was differentiated, stood some additional duties. The ploughing for the lord, for instance, was not only imposed in the shape of a certain number of days in the week, but took sometimes the shape of a certain number of acres which the village had to plough and to sow for the lord irrespectively of the time employed on it. This was sometimes termed gafolearth. Exceedingly burdensome services were required in the seasons when farming processes are, as it were, at their height—in the seasons of mowing and reaping, when every day is of special value and the working power of the farm hands is strained to the utmost. At that time it was the custom to call up the whole able-bodied population of the manor, with the exception of the housewives for two, three or more days of mowing and reaping on the lord's fields; to these boon-works the peasantry was asked or invited by special summons, and their value was so far appreciated that the villagers were usually treated to meals in cases where they were again and again called off from their own fields to the demesne. The liberality of the lord actually went so far, in exceptionally hard straits, that some ale was served to the labourers to keep them in good humour.

In the 14th century this social arrangement, based primarily on natural economy and on the feudal disruption of society, began to give way. The gradual, spread of intercourse rendered unnecessary the natural husbandry of former times which sought to produce a complete set of goods in every separate locality. Instead of acting as a little world by itself for the raising of corn, the breeding of cattle, the gathering of wool, the weaving of linen and common cloths, the fabrication of necessary implements of all kinds, the local group began to buy some of these goods and to sell some others, renouncing isolation and making its destiny dependent on commercial intercourse. Instead of requiring from its population all kinds of work and reducing its ordinary occupations to a hard-and-fast routine meeting in a slow and unskilled manner all possible contingencies, the local group began to move, to call in workmen from abroad for tasks of a special nature, and to send its own workmen to look out for profitable employment in other places. Instead of managing the land by the constant repetition of the same

processes, by a customary immobility of tenure and service, by communalistic restrictions on private enterprise and will, local society began to try improvements, to escape from the bounds of champion farming. Instead of producing and collecting goods for immediate consumption, local society came more and more into the habit of exchanging corn, cattle, cloth, for money, and of laying money by as a means of getting all sorts of exchangeable goods, when required. In a word, the time of commercial, contractual, cash intercourse was coming fast. What was exceptional and subsidiary in feudal times came to obtain general recognition in the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, and, for this very reason, assumed a very different aspect. A similar transformation took place in regard to government. The local monarchy of the manorial lords was fast giving way to a central power which maintained its laws, the circuits of its judges, the fiscal claims of its exchequer, the police interference of its civil officers all through the country, and, by prevailing over the franchises of manorial lords, gave shape to a vast dominion of legal equality and legal protection, in which the forces of commercial exchange, of contract, of social intercourse, found a ready and welcome sphere of action. In truth both processes, the economic and the political one, worked so much together that it is hardly possible to say which influenced the other more, which was the cause and which the effect. Government grew strong because it could draw on a society which was going ahead in enterprise and well-being; social intercourse progressed because it could depend on a strong government to safeguard it.

If we now turn to the actual stages by which this momentous passage from the manorial to the commercial arrangement was achieved, we have to notice first of all a rapid development of contractual relations. We know that in feudal law there ran a standing contrast between tenure by custom—villein tenure—and tenure by contract—free tenure. While the manorial system was in full force this contrast led to a classification of holdings and affected the whole position of people on the land. Still, even at that time it might happen that a freeholder owned some land in villeinage by the side of his free tenement, and that a villein held some land freely by agreement with his lord or with a third person. But these cases, though by no means infrequent, were still exceptional. As a rule people used land as holdings, and those were rigidly classified as villein or free tenements. The interesting point to be noticed is that, without any formal break, leasing land for life and for term of years is seen to be rapidly spreading from the end of the 13th century, and numberless small tenancies are created in the 14th century which break up the disposition of the holdings. From the close of the 13th century downwards countless transactions on the basis of leases for terms of years occur between the peasants themselves, any suitably kept set of 14th-century court rolls containing entries in which such and such a villein is said to appear in the 'halimote' and to surrender for the use of another person named a piece of land belonging to the holding. The number of years and the conditions of payment are specified. Thus, behind the screen of the normal shares a number of small tenancies arise which run their economic concerns independently from the cumbersome arrangements of tenure and service, and, needless to add, all these tenancies are burdened with money rents.

Another series of momentous changes took place in the arrangement of services. Even the manorial system admitted the buying off for money of particular dues in kind and of specific performance of work. A villein might be allowed to bring a penny instead of bringing a chicken or to pay a rent instead of appearing with his oxen three times a week on the lord's fields. Such rents were called mal or mail in contrast with the gafol, ancient rents which had been imposed independently, apart from any buying off of customary services. There were even whole bodies of peasants called Molmen, because they had bought off work from the lord by settling with him on the basis of money rents. As time went on these practices of commutation became more and more frequent. There were, for both sides, many advantages in arranging their mutual