Note A.: VILLAGE-COMMUNITIES AND MANORS.

Although no question has been more discussed by German and English scholars, the exact mode in which the Manor or Fief arose out of pre-existing social forms is still a very obscure problem. In a work published ten years ago (‘Village Communities in the East and West’), I gave an abridged account of all that was then known or had been conjectured on the subject, but additions are being constantly made to our knowledge—in some small degree, I hope, owing to the book I have named—and much information may be expected from Russia, where the growth of lordships and of the chief incidents of villenage are of relatively recent date, and where there appears to be materials for an authentic history of this social transformation. I trust that Mr. Mackenzie Wallace will not long withhold those results of special investigation which he promised in the preface to his work on Russia. On another aspect of the subject, a forthcoming work of Mr. Frederick Seebohm, which I have had the privilege of seeing, will throw a great deal of light.

This, however, is a walk of investigation in which the caution given in a Note on ‘The Gens’ to Chapter VIII. is especially necessary. We must make full allowance for the imitativeness of mankind. A great number of Village-Communities to Edition: current; Page: [330] be found in the various parts of the world, and a great number of Manors which still exist in England in extreme decay, must have been originally mere reproductions of a model which had grown into favour. Much of the waste land of India, at most held previously in vague tribal ownership, was colonised by groups of men who settled down in Village-Communities because they knew no other form of common cultivation, and the waste places of Europe were extensively brought under tillage by colonists arranged in manorial groups under religious bodies or powerful men who had obtained large grants of land. There are, and have been from time immemorial, parts of the world in which settlers would as naturally plant themselves in these groups, as English or Scottish emigrants in Canada or New Zealand would now establish themselves on separate farms to be cultivated by themselves and their children, or by hired labour. All, then, that we can hope to discover is the typical form. Now the typical Village-Community—a body of self-styled kinsmen, having a government of their own, and engaged under fixed rules in common cultivation—is too peculiar a group to have arisen by accident, or to have had its origin in individual caprice. The evidence seems conclusive that it first grew up in remote barbarism, though in barbarism probably not older than the period at which mankind began to cultivate cereals, or to combine that cultivation with the pasturing of flocks and herds. It may give an idea of the wide diffusion of the Village-Community in its more archaic shapes if I mention that it has been observed not only in the largest part of India, but in the Fiji Islands (by Sir Arthur Gordon), and among the Berbers of North Africa (by M. Ernest Renan), and that what appears to be a Edition: current; Page: [331] distinct form of it, followed by the more southerly tribes of North American Indians, is described by Mr. Morgan in the fourth volume of the United States Survey of the Rocky Mountain region, which appeared last year. Nor is it possible for me to doubt that the typical Manor arose out of the Village-Community. Everybody who has made for himself a clear mental picture of the last group will see that it contains everything which is found in the earliest Manors, with no differences except those which come from the substitution of individual for popular authority. Everything which the lord can do can be done by the council of village elders, or by the village-headman, these last, however, being responsible to the community, while the lord tends more and more to become a mere owner, just as the King of France came to be called by the lawyers the King-Proprietor of all French land. But beyond this account of the relation between the Types, it would not be safe to go. Both the type of the Village-Community and the type of the Manor have been extensively copied,1 and here and there in surprisingly recent times. Their wide extension by colonisation is, I suppose, the source of a paradoxical opinion which I have seen, that their most distinctive peculiarities are altogether modern.

The question of the origin of Manors or Fiefs established in Western Europe, and then spread far and wide by artificial agency, is wrapt in obscurity. I argued in a former work that everything which contributed to what we call feudalism must have sprung Edition: current; Page: [332] either from barbarous custom or from Roman law (‘Ancient Law,’ pp. 364 et seq.); but from which source were the germs of manorial authority derived? On the one hand, the examination of the Theodosian Code shows that the great estates of the Roman proprietary—their villæ, cultivated by coloni and slaves—contracted a certain resemblance to the Manor, which I myself am, on the whole, disposed to explain by the number of cultivators of barbarous origin with which they were filled. I have always distrusted the implied assertion of the Roman lawyers that the multitudinous Roman slaves had no institutions at all; and I imagine that a vast property, crowded with barbarians, would naturally fall under a system of management not unlike the mechanism of one of the most widespread of barbarous institutions. It is certainly significant that the Germanic draftsmen of Codes and Charters always used the word ‘villa’ for what we call a village-community. While I certainly cannot accept the conclusion to which some learned Frenchmen incline, that the Manors of the continent are in their origin nothing but Roman villæ, still it seems only reasonable to suppose that in the former Roman provinces the organisation of the villæ did assist in causing the cultivating groups to take the manorial form rather than that of self-governed village-communities. It is to be noted at the same time that the oldest of the barbarous codes, the Lex Salica, knows nothing in its earlier and genuine portions of manorial authority. The potestas dominica of which it speaks is ‘royal’ power. It knows the village-community under the name of villa (see the Title 45, ‘De Migrantibus’), and in describing one of its even now marked characteristics, its rigid exclusiveness, it implies that the community is one of freemen entitled to sue before the free Court of the Hundred. The Edition: current; Page: [333] Manor appears, however, to have been known to the compilers of the later Leges Barbarorum.

The difficulty of attributing the origin of English Manors to the Roman Villa need hardly be stated. The particular Teutonic tribes which conquered Britain came from homes so northerly that they can hardly have so much as seen a great Roman estate, and, even if they had, it is not easy to understand adventurous warriors settling down as serfs or villeins in their oversea conquests. This subject, however, is one of those most fully treated in Mr. Seebohm’s volume.

It may be convenient that I should give in full the passage from Bracton stating the legal theory of villenage which prevailed in his day. ‘The tenement changes not the condition of a free man any more than of a slave. For a free man may hold in mere villenage, doing whatever service thereto belongs, and shall not the less be free, since he does this in regard of the villenage and not in regard of his person. . . . Mere villenage is a tenure rendering uncertain and unlimited services, where it cannot be known at eventide what service hath to be done in the morning—that is, where the tenant is bound to do whatever is commanded him’ (fo. 26a). Again: ‘Another kind of tenement is villenage, whereof some is mere and other privileged. Mere villenage is that which is so held that the tenant in villenage, whether free or bond, shall do of villein service whatever is commanded him, and may not know at nightfall what he must do on the morrow, and shall ever be held to uncertain dues; and he may be taxed at the will of the lord for more or for less, . . . yet so that if he be a free man he doth this in the name of villenage and not in the name of personal service; . . . but if he be a villein [by blood] he shall do all these things in regard as Edition: current; Page: [334] well of the villenage as of his person’ (fo. 208b). The only difference in the services was that the merchetum on marrying a daughter, being an incident of personal servitude (as a fine paid to the lord for depriving him of a slave), was not demandable from the free man holding in villenage’ (F. Pollock, ‘Notes on Early English Land Law,’ ‘Law Magazine and Review’ for May 1882). The whole of Mr. Pollock’s valuable paper deserves consideration.

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