The Origin of Property in Land: With an introductory chapter on the English manor by W. J. Ashley

Fustel de Coulanges

The Origin of Property in Land

With an introductory chapter on the English manor by W. J. Ashley

Published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4064066423841

Table of Contents

PREFACE.

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. THE ENGLISH MANOR.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

Conclusion.

PREFACE.

Table of Contents

The Essay by the late M. Fustel de Coulanges, here translated, appeared in the Revue des Questions Historiques for April, 1889. It seemed especially suitable for translation; since it presented in a comparatively brief compass all the main arguments of that great historian against the various attempts which have been made to support the theory of primitive agrarian communism by an appeal to historical records. The translation has been made with the consent of Madame Fustel de Coulanges; and it has benefited by the suggestions of M. Guiraud, an old pupil of the author, and now Chargé de Cours at the Sorbonne. The presentation of the Essay in an English dress has been deemed a suitable occasion to estimate the bearing of its arguments on early English social history, and to review in the light of it the evidence now accessible as to the origin of the English manor.

W. J. A.

M. A.

Toronto

,

January 21, 1891.

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

THE ENGLISH MANOR.

Table of Contents

In spite of all the labour that has been spent on the early history of England, scholars are at variance upon the most fundamental of questions: the question whether that history began with a population of independent freemen or with a population of dependent serfs. Nothing less than this is at issue in the current discussions as to the existence of the mark and the origin of the manor; as well as in the discussions, at first sight of less significance, as to the character of our mediæval constitution. Neither for the government of the parish nor for the government of the nation is it possible to construct an historical theory which does not rest, consciously or unconsciously, on some view as to the position of the body of the people.

The opinion almost universally accepted four or five years ago was to this effect: that the English people, when it came to Britain, was composed of a stalwart host of free men, who governed themselves by popular national councils, administered justice by popular local assemblies, and lived together in little village groups of independent yeomen. It was, indeed, recognised that there were gradations of rank—eorl and ceorl, and the like,—and that some individuals were unfortunate enough to be slaves. But these and similar facts were not supposed to affect the general outlines of the picture; and even those writers who expressed themselves most guardedly as to this primitive Teutonic polity, proceeded by the subsequent course of their narrative to assume it as their starting point. And looking back on the intellectual history of the last fifty years, we can easily trace the forces which assisted in giving this view currency. To begin with, the historical movement of this century was undoubtedly the offspring of Romanticism; and with Romanticism the noble independence of the unlettered barbarian was an article of faith. Moreover, the discovery of modern constitutionalism in the forests of Germany harmonised with a comfortable belief, which was at one time very common. This was the belief to which Kingsley gave such eloquent expression, that the barbarian invasions were the predestined means of bringing into the effete civilisation of Rome the manly virtues of the North. For England the theory had the additional charm, during a period of democratic change, of satisfying that most unscientific but most English desire, the desire for precedent. An extension of the suffrage rose far above mere expediency when it became a reconquest of primitive rights.

But, though we can understand how it was that historians came to discover the imposing figure of the free Teuton, it does not necessarily follow that they were mistaken. The disproof must be accomplished, if at all, by erudition equal to that by which the doctrine has been supported; and it has been the task of M. Fustel de Coulanges to assail with enormous learning and a cogent style almost every one of those propositions as to early mediæval constitutional history, which we were beginning to deem the secure achievements of German science.

There was a great contrast, both in their character and in the reception afforded to them, between the earlier and the later works of M. Fustel. He gained his reputation, in 1864, by his Cité Antique, a book wherein, unlike his later insistence on the complexity of institutions, he used one simple idea—that of the religion of the family—to solve most of the problems presented by ancient civilisation. It gained immediately an extraordinary success; especially in England, where it fell in with all that current of thought which was then beginning to turn into the direction of social evolution, comparative politics, and the like. For a year or so, the final piece of advice which schoolmasters gave to men who were going up for scholarships at the Universities was to read the Cité Antique.

Then for several years M. Fustel was not heard from, at any rate in England; although it might have been seen by occasional articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes and elsewhere that he was devoting himself to the early Middle Ages. In 1875 appeared the first volume of a Histoire des Institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, reaching to the end of the Merovingian period. But further investigation and the controversy to which the book gave rise made him resolve to go over the ground again more minutely in a series of volumes. Meanwhile he issued in 1885 his Recherches sur quelques problèmes d’histoire. With the modest declaration that before attempting to write the history of feudalism—un corps infiniment vaste, à organes multiples, à faces changeantes, à vie complexe—it was necessary to consider some preliminary questions, he threw down the gauntlet to the dominant school. He challenged the whole theory of primitive German life which was fondly supposed to rest on the authority of Cæsar and Tacitus; he showed how little evidence there was for the supposed existence of popular courts of justice; he traced the growth of the class of coloni or semi-servile peasants under the later Roman empire, in a way which suggested that they must have played a far more important part in subsequent social development than is usually assigned to them; and, finally, he denied altogether the existence of that free, self-governing village community with common ownership of the village lands, which Maurer had made familiar to us as the mark. His antagonism to German scholars was evidently sharpened by national antipathy: like his countrymen in many other departments of science, he was bent on proving that France could beat Germany with its own peculiar instruments of patient scholarship and minute research. It is turning the tables with a vengeance, when the Frenchman shakes his head, with much apparent reason, over the inexplicable rashness of his German brethren.

Having thus cleared the way, M. Fustel began to put together his materials for the great work of his life, the Histoire des Institutions Politiques, in its new form. He had issued one volume and prepared for publication a second when he was prematurely lost to the world. His pupils have, indeed, been able to put together a third volume from his manuscript and from earlier articles; and a fourth and fifth are promised us. But these fragmentary sketches, written many of them under the shadow of approaching death, are only slight indications of what M. Fustel might have done for mediæval history. Nevertheless, his work, incomplete as it is, is of the utmost weight and significance; in my opinion, it has done more than that of any other scholar to bring back the study of mediæval society, after long aberrations, to the right lines. We have to continue the work of inquiry along those lines, and in his spirit. It is now, said he, in the Preface to the Recherches, "twenty-five years since I began to teach; and each year I have had the happiness to have four or five pupils. What I have taught them above everything else has been to inquire. What I have impressed upon them is not to believe everything easy, and never to pass by problems without seeing them. The one truth of which I have persistently endeavoured to convince them is that history is the most difficult of sciences." And again, in the Introduction to L’Alleu, "Of late years people have invented the word sociology. The word history had the same sense and meant the same thing, at least for those who understood it. History is the science of social facts; that is to say, it is sociology itself. The motto he had chosen, a motto, says one of his pupils, which sums up his whole scientific life, was Quaero."

It is curious to observe how slow English scholars have been to realise the importance of these recent volumes. Is it because theories of mediæval history, which are not more than twenty or thirty years old, have already hardened into dogma, and we shrink from the reconstruction which might be necessary were we to meddle with any of the corner-stones? Some consolation, however, may be found in the fact that a considerable effect has been produced by the work of an English investigator, who was quite independently arriving, though from a different point of view, at very similar conclusions. Mr. Seebohm’s English Village Community, it is no exaggeration to say, revealed to us, for the first time, the inner life of mediæval England. By making us realise not only how uniform was the manorial system over the greater part of England, but also how burdensome were the obligations of the tenants, it forced us to reconsider the accepted explanation of its origin. For the explanation generally accepted was that manors had come into existence piecemeal, by the gradual subjection, here in one way, there in another, of the free landowners to their more powerful neighbours. Mr. Seebohm made it appear probable that the lord of the manor, instead of being a late intruder, was from the first, so far as England was concerned, the owner of the soil and the lord of those who tilled it; that the development has been in the main and from the first an advance from servitude to freedom; and not an elevation after long centuries of increasing degradation.

Mr. Seebohm has not, perhaps, been so convincing in the explanation he has to offer of the origin of the manor; but there is now a marked tendency to accept what is, after all, his main contention—that the manorial system was in existence, not as an exceptional phenomenon, but as the prevailing form of social organisation very soon, at any rate, after the English Conquest. There is absolutely no clear documentary evidence for the free village community in England. As to the word mark, not even Kemble, who first introduced it to English readers, could produce an example of its use in English documents in the sense of land owned by a community; and Anglo-Saxon scholars now point out that his one doubtful instance of mearcmót [A.D. 971] and his three examples of mearcbeorh are most naturally explained as having to do with mark merely in the sense of a boundary.[1] Not only is there no early evidence; the arguments based on supposed survivals into later times seem to melt away on close examination. It has, for instance, been maintained that even in the Domesday Survey there are traces of free communities. But the supposed Domesday references are of the scantiest, and certainly would not suggest the mark to anyone who was not looking for it. Most of them seem easily susceptible of other interpretations; in some of them we probably have to do with two or three joint-owners, in others very possibly with villages where the lord has been bought out.[2] Another and more usual argument is derived from the Court Baron, which was described by later legal theory as absolutely essential to a manor, and yet of such a constitution that it could not be held unless there were at least two free tenants to attend it. But legal historians are beginning to regard the Court Baron as not at all primitive, but rather as a comparatively late outcome of feudal theory.[3]

It must be granted that there is little direct evidence prior to the 9th century in disproof of the free community; but all the indirect evidence seems to tell against it. Gibbon long ago pointed out that the grant by the King of the South Saxons to St. Wilfrid, in the year 680, of the peninsula of Selsey (described as the land of 87 families), with the persons and property of all its inhabitants, showed that there, at any rate, there was a dependent population; especially as Bede goes on to tell us that among these inhabitants there were 250 slaves. And there are two still more considerable pieces of evidence to which due attention has hardly been given. The one is that the great majority of the early grants of land, beginning as early as 674, expressly transfer with the soil the cultivators upon it, and speak of them by precisely the same terms, cassati and manentes, as were in contemporary use on the Continent to designate prædial serfs.[4] The other is that, as in the rest of Western Europe the whole country was divided into villæ, each villa being a domain belonging to one or more proprietors, and cultivated by more or less servile tenants,[5] so in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, written in 731, the ordinary local division is also villa, often specifically described as villa regia or villa comitis. He does indeed use vicus or viculus a dozen times; but in three of these cases the word regis or regius is added, and in two the term villa is also used in the same chapter for the same place.[6] These five examples, it may further be noticed, occur in a narrative of the events of the middle of the seventh century,—a period near enough to Bede’s own time for his evidence to be valuable, and yet within a century and a half after the conquest of the districts in question.

The absence, however, of direct evidence in proof of the original free community in England, and the presence of much indirect evidence in its disproof, have hitherto been supposed to be counterbalanced by the well-ascertained existence of the mark among our German kinsfolk, and by the results of the comparative method, especially as applied to India. Let us take the markgenossenschaft first. It is a little difficult to discover the exact relation between Kemble and Maurer; but the obvious supposition is that it was from Maurer that Kemble derived