Domesday Book & Beyond VOL.III
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Domesday Book & Beyond VOL.III By Frederic William Maitland Domesday Book and Beyond THE HIDE What was the hide? What was the hide? However unwilling we may be to face this dreary old question, we can not escape it. At first sight it may seem avoidable by those who are interested in the general drift of national life, but have no desire to solve petty problems or face unnecessary difficulties. The history of weights and measures, some may say, is probably very curious and no doubt is worth study; but we, who shall be amply satisfied if we understand the grand movements and the broad traits, must leave this little province, as we must leave much else, to antiquarian specialists. Unfortunately, however, that question about the hide is ‘pre-judicial’ to all the great questions of early English history. Importance of the question. If our choice lay between and acres, or again between a long and a short hundred, then indeed we might refuse to take part in the conflict. But between the advocates of big hides of acres or thereabouts and the advocates of little hides of acres or thereabouts there should be no peace. In the construction of early English history we shall adopt one style of architecture if we are supplied with small hides, while if our materials consist of big hides an entirely different ‘plan and elevation’ must be chosen. Let us take one example. We find the kings giving away manses or hides by fives and tens. What are they really doing? Are they or are they not giving away whole villages? Obviously this question is pre-judicial to many another. Our whole conception of the Anglo-Saxon kingship will be profoundly affected by our attribution or our denial to the king of an alienable superiority over villages that are full of free landowners. This question, therefore, we should have upon our hands even if we thought that we could rear the fabric of political and constitutional history without first laying an economic foundation. But the day for such castles in the air is passing. Howbeit, we must not talk in this pompous way of castles or foundations. We are not going to lay foundations, nor even to choose a site. We hope to test a few materials and perhaps to show how a site may some day be acquired. Hide and manse in Bede. From the Norman Conquest so far back as we can go, a certain possessory unit or a certain typical tenement is being thrust upon our notice by the laws, the charters, the historians. We may begin with Bede. When he is going to speak of the area or the capacity of a tract of land, be it large or be it small, he refers to a certain unit or type, namely, the land of one family (terra unius familiae). The abbess Hild acquires the land of one family and erects a religious house upon it; king Oswy gives away twelve tracts of land, each of which consists of ‘the possessiones of ten families’; the kingdom of the South Saxons contains the land of , families. We see that already Bede is thinking rather of the size or capacity of a tract of soil than of the number of households that happen to be dwelling there. ‘The measure (mensura) of the Isle of Wight is, according to the English mode of reckoning, families.’ ‘The isle of Thanet is no small island: that is to say, according to the customary English computation, it is of families.’ Some apology is due from a scholar who writes in Latin and who writes thus; so Bede tells us that he is using the English mode of reckoning; he is literally translating some English term. Hide and manse in the land-books. When his own book is rendered into English that term will reappear. Usually it reappears in the form híd, but occasionally we have hiwisc or hiwscipe. There seems no room for doubt that hiwisc and the more abstract hiwscipe mean a household, and very little room for doubt that híd springs from a root that is common to it and them and has the same primary meaning. Elsewhere we may find an equivalence between the hide and the hiwisc:—‘If a Welsh man thrives so that he has a hiwisc of land and can render the king’s gafol, then his wergild is shillings; but if he attains only to a half-hide then his wergild is shillings.’ In the charters also we may now and then find that the land to be conveyed is a hiwisc, or is the land of one familia. However, the common English term is hide, while the scribes of the land-books, who as yet are above inventing a Latin hida, ring the changes on half-a-dozen phrases. We begin with terra unius manentis, terra unius casati, terra unius tributarii, which keep clearly before our eyes the fact or the theory that the normal householder, the normal taxpayer, will possess one of these units. At a little later time the more convenient mansa (sometimes mansio or mansiuncula) becomes popular, and we may see also that men are beginning to speak of manents, casates, tributaries ‘of land,’ much as they would speak of acres or perches of land. So far as we can see, all these terms are being used as though they were absolutely equivalent. If a clerk has to describe several different tenements, he will write of manentes in one clause and casati in the next, merely because a repetition of the same term would be inelegant. In Kentish charters we read more of the aratrum and the sullung than of the manse and the hide; but apparently we have here other names for what is a similar and in some sort an equivalent unit; and it is by no means unknown that Kentish tenements will be called manses and hides. The large hide and the manorial arrangement. Now if we ask whether the type to which reference is thus made is a tenement comprising about six-score acres of arable land, we are asking a question of the gravest importance. For let us look at some of the consequences which will flow from an affirmative answer. Let it be granted that, long before the Norman Conquest, the hide has become an unit in an unwieldy system of taxation, which has been governed by false assumptions and vitiated by caprice, until the fiscal hide in a given case may widely diverge from its original or indeed from any fixed type. None the less, this system has for its base the theory that the typical man of Anglo-Saxon law, the typical householder or taxpayer, has a hide, has land enough for a team of oxen, has arable acres. The language of the charters supposes that this is so. No doubt the supposition is, as every supposition of this kind must be, untrue; but still it must have a core of truth, and in the remotest age this core will be at its largest. Men will not fall into a habit of speaking of arable acres or thereabouts as the tenement of one family or of one householder, unless as a matter of fact the tenement of one family or of one householder has in a preponderant number of cases some such content as this. Suppose, for example, that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the sixth century had been composed chiefly of lords, whose estates ranged from acres to some much larger quantity, and of ‘semi-servile’ cultivators, the average size of whose tenements was acres, such a usage of words as that which we are considering could never have struck root. Either the small tenement of the cultivator or the big tenement of his lord must have been taken as the typical ‘manse,’ the typical ‘land of one householder.’ Let us at once press home this argument, though at present it involves a hypothesis, for in the dull disquisitions that follow we may be cheered by the thought that great questions are at stake. If in the oldest time the typical ‘land of one householder’ had arable acres, the manorial system was not prevalent, not dominant, in England. It will be admitted on all hands that this would be much too large a tenement for a serf or a semi-servile colonus. On the other hand, it is much too small a tenement for any one who is going to play the part of a manorial lord, unless we use the term manorial in so wide a sense that it becomes useless. For how many tenants will this manorial lord, who is to be taken as the typical householder, have upon his acres? If his arrangements are at all like those revealed to us by Domesday Book, he will keep at least one-third of his land in demesne, and there will remain but acres for the coloni. Shall we give him three coloni, or four or five? We can hardly give him a larger number. Furthermore, it is quite clear that this ‘manorial lord’ will not own a village. The villages as we see them in the earliest charters and thence onward into Domesday Book contain five, ten, fifteen hides. Our manorial lord must be content to take his hide in little scraps scattered about among the scraps of some ten or twenty other ‘manorial lords’ whose hides are similarly dispersed in the open field of a village. All this seems to follow inevitably if once we are satisfied that the hide of the old days had arable acres or thereabouts; for the hide is the land of one typical householder.