Colony Research Group
Genealogy ~ DNA ~ Archaeology
At above is
a photo of the mask from the burial at Sutton Hoo. These date from the 6th
or 7th centuries and are Anglo-Saxon.
over England abbots, priors and abbesses were acquiring estates, sometimes
vast estates, made up entirely of gifts "for the good of my soul and
the souls of my ancestors.""
Battle of Hastings in 1066, the majority of Saxon landowners were
1066 is best remembered, 1086 is the date to which historians are most
indebted, for the Domesday Book, as it is usually called, gives us the
first real glimpse of the villages and villagers of Feudal England. It
provides the first evidence of the existence of many villages."
Domesday Book was an early tax roll. William wanted to know who to tax and
for how much, and thankfully so. By this time, in 1086, the only people
who had surnames were the ones who owned the land, Rowland's upper crust
10%, who, of course, were not the same people as that upper crust 10% had
been prior to the Norman invasion.
90% don't change much, only who they pay taxes to and serve but there is a
lot of political churn in that upper 10%. Looking at one Foxton entry is
Abbess of Chatteris holds 5 hides and 40 acres in Foxetune of the King.
There is land for 8 ploughs, One hide and 40 acres in demesne and there
are 2 ploughs. There are 16 villeins and 11 boardars with 6 ploughs. Half
a mill worth 10s 8d and meadow for all the ploughs. It is worth 6 pounds
and in the time of King Edward was worth 7 pounds. This land is and always
was of the Church."
themselves are not listed in the Domesday Book, because they paid no tax,
so William wasn't interested in them. Here's a picture of an entry from
the Domesday book.
mentions that their acres then are not acres as we know them, but are
rectangular strips measured roughly with a pole of variable length, the
basis of calculation was probably what a team of oxen could plough, or
what a man could mow, in a day. The Braunton Great Field project in North
Devon is one the best preserved of these 'strip farming' areas today, has
early documentation, and has been heavily studied.
used the two entries that represent Foxton in the Domesday Book, then
called Foxetune, to estimate that the village had a total population of 45
men, one of which was listed as a slave. The rest were noted as 21
villeins, 21 bordars and 2 watchmen. Doubling that, 90 adults, and
doubling that, plus a few, for a population of about 200 for a village.
Rowland says this is a very typical village size, and on the whole, the
village size doesn't change much over the years or centuries. In essence,
the British villagers were replacing themselves, but not much more. This
size of 200 is very probably a sustainable number for a "typical
village". Much larger, and the land surrounding the village can't
sustain the population.
What do we
know about these people? Surprisingly, quite a bit.
houses or 'cots' - hovels would be a more appropriate word - were strung
out along both sides of the Town Brook; single roomed structures of
timber, wattle and daub, roofed with straw or reeds laid over branches; no
windows, no chimneys, no floor other than the earth. In fact there was
precious little difference between these huts and those which had
another part of the Brook a thousand years before. The walls were rather
higher. The smells were the same, for the sheep, pigs and chickens in most
cases and for much of the year shared the accommodation with their owners.
When I said that they 'owned nothing', that was not quite true, for they
did own the contents of their hovels. Their furniture consisted of stools,
benches and tables ('boards' to be exact) which they made for themselves.
They likewise made their clothes and footwear, from home-spun wool and
home-tanned skins. They made their wooden platters, bowls and cups, their
tools and implements, the latter with a little help from the smith and the
carpenter in the village.
done in rough but admirably tough earthenware vessels on open wood fires.
The hearth consisted of two or three large stones, out of doors for the
most of the year and only brought indoors in the worst weather owing to
the obvious risk of setting fire to the hut. Large earthenware jars were
used for the storage or grain and meal. They were so big and heavy, even
when empty, that, once placed in the hut, they must have stayed there
until broken, and many of them probably outlived several owners.
course bread, gruel, cheese, vegetables, peas, boiled mutton and boiled
bacon while it lasted, with occasionally a chicken, eggs, perhaps a rabbit
now and then, though it is not at all certain that they were widespread in
England at this date - roast beef never. They ate, that is to say what
drink for young and old was almost certainly ale, a weak brew made from
fermented barley and the water of the Town Brook which flowed past their
door. Since the main street was little better than an elongated dunghill,
there must have been long periods when the Brook was unpleasant to the
taste, to put it mildly. Perhaps the villagers became so accustomed to
this that it was hardly noticed, and they developed unconsciously a
resistance to germs whose existence they did not even suspect.
Contaminated water cannot have constituted the health hazard which it
would be considered today, otherwise the whole population would have been
third of the arable land - not necessarily all one field, was left fallow
(uncultivated) in any one year to provide a crop of weeds and grass on
which some of the sheep and most of the cattle survive the winter. The
meadows were kept specially for the oxen except during three months in
spring when the grass was allowed to grow for a hay crop on which those
same oxen largely fed in the winter. Without the oxen, the agricultural
system would have collapsed."
reviewed the documents from 1086 to 1286 and said that the names contained
therein are only those of nobles, knights and churchmen. No commoners were
found. These documents have to do with land transfers, the right to hold
land or hunt on it and the conditions on which land was held. As for the
church land, the Steward supervised it, often several different pieces.
During this time, the court was also overseen by a representative of the
Lord, typically his Steward.
would be wrong to say that anything like a minor revolution has occurred,
or is in progress, since the time written about in the last chapter. The
System is still in being - very much so - but the structure within the
system has changed and is changing. These are now visible quite marked
distinctions within the mass of the peasantry. Some are free and some are
not. Some are relatively well-off and some are wretchedly poor. To what
extent this is due to a change of heart on the part of the People who
Mattered; how much is due to the influence of the Church; how much to the
increasing importance of the role of money in the economy; how much if at
all to a resurgence of effort and ambition on the part of some of the
peasantry - I do not know, or pretend to know. Perhaps it is all of the
factors and many more, combining together to form what we call progress.
Man is marching forward. By the year 1300 he has come a long way, but
still has an awful long way to go.
distinction which emerges from the records to dispel any notions of
equality is that some of the land is held by men who are free; there are
22 of them, holding 340 acres between them. The rest of the land, some 500
acres is held by villeins, and it is clear that 'villein' no longer means
'villager' but 'bondman', i.e. one who is bound. He is frequently referred
to as 'native', i.e. one who is born to that status. All the free men pay
cash rents for their holdings, but three of them still owe certain
services to the lord. All the bondmen pay for their holdings by working
for the lord, the work being assessed at a cash value of about 10
shillings a year, but 15 of them pay cash rents as well, mostly 3 pence a
year which would seem to be the rent for the land on which their houses
stand. Generally speaking, the more land a man held, the lower the rent
per acre. There is no uniformity as between manor and manor, between man
and man or between the same jobs done by different men."
it that in the space of two paragraphs, Rowland tells us that in many
cases the lot of the peasant has improved, but that 2/3 of the land is
worked by slaves, or men who are bound to "work" by birth. That,
in essence, is the definition of slavery. The Domesday Book tells us that
there were about 25,000 slaves in England in 1086. Normally, when I think
of slavery, I think of Africans and Native Americans, having to do with
America. When I think of Europe, I think of the Moors and the Christians,
more generally in the Mediterranean. I think of the slaves of the Romans.
But I don't think of the native people of England enslaving each other -
which is exactly what happened. This 'slavery' evolved, and doesn't have
to do with color, race or ethnicity. It seems that it had to do with
economy, pure and simple, but it would surely be interesting to know
exactly how certain people became enslaved in perpetuity, such that the
station flowed to their children who had no choice in the matter. And for
that matter, how did the 22 people who were not 'bond' escape it, or were
they never enslaved, and if not, why not?
Or in some
perverse way, was someone who was bound 'safer' than someone who was not.
Did people trade their 'freedom', which might not have been worth much,
wonders how the Bailiff and the Reever ever kept track of whom owed what
to whom - meaning of course to the Lord, not to each other. Neither of
these men could typically write. Much must have been committed to memory.
was one respect in which all the peasants had gained equality. By the year
1250 or thereabouts, they had all acquired surnames. By the middle of the
13th century the increasing amount of documentation for legal and fiscal
purposes made it necessary to distinguish between one John and Matilda
from another, clearly and permanently. So surnames became universal. They
are of interest to us, not merely because we still have them, but because
in their origin they tell us something about the persons who born them.
They tell for instance, where a person came from, and thereby indicate
more mobility amongst the peasantry than one would have expected - Harston,
Kersey, Totington, Barley, Teversham, Luton, Cornwallis, Cambridge
(mostly, be it noted, the names of free men). They tell of a man's
occupation - Smith, Woodward, Vaccar (cowherd), Brewer, Barbar (shepherd),
Capellan (chaplain), Husewif, Dikeman, Nutrex (food seller), Miller,
Peyntour, Reckener, Beggar, Reeve, Palmer, Carter, etc. They tell
whereabouts in the village he lived - Attegate, Attehill, Attewell,
Headwell, West, Hurway, Hille, etc. They tell who his father was, or whose
"man" he was - Andrews, King, Legat, Eustace, Knyt, Marshall,
etc. They all tell something about a manor his origin, though it is no
longer always possible to decipher it. Some names were, at the time,
complimentary - Wiseman, Gudlock, Felice, Godemoder - and some were not -
Hoverhawe, Gosse, Pettorix."
another type of record was being used, the Pipe Rolls.
Rolls are the oldest series of English governmental documents, and were
created by the most ancient department of the English government, the
Exchequer, which existed by 1110. The earliest survivor dates from the
reign of Henry I, and is second only to Domesday Book itself in its
antiquity as a public record. They were created principally to record the
accounts of the sheriffs of the counties of England, which they made
annually before the barons of the Exchequer, but came also to include the
accounts of other officials.