A.D. 1070.]

DOOMSDAY BOOK.

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authority, and for our knowledge of the great fact that submission to a superior is not degradation, but duty; and that the holder of the smallest manor in that confederacy of equals was on a level, as regards his "gentleness," with the king upon the throne, while in reference to his holding he was the most obedient of his servants.

We have dwelt at greater length upon these earlier annals than their intrinsic importance perhaps deserves. But some knowledge is required of the changes through which we ran in the days of the Britons and of the Heptarchy, because, however we may disguise it from ourselves, a great portion of our English nature is traceable even in those days. We still look upon Alfred as our countryman, and when we perceive before our eyes the general dislike of centralization, and the feeling of local independence, we recognise the same sentiment which pervaded our ancestors when they stood up in defence of their parochial rights and county franchises. We may probably gather a lesson of wisdom not inapplicable to the present time from the contemplation of the self-government in the towns which survived the Saxon incursion and the Norman conquest; and of the territorial divisions in the country, which have given union and strength to their inhabitants in resisting tyranny; from the time when the "men of Kent" bade defiance to the legions of Cæsar, and the "men of York" rallied round the unfortunate Edgar Atheling because he was the last of the sons of Cerdic.

§ 15. When England was divided among the conquerors, and every acre of ground was assigned to some acknowledged and legalized proprietor, it became an object with William to have his acquisitions registered in some imperishable form, and to inquire into the capabilities of his territories to bear a proper amount of assessment. He therefore deputed certain commissioners to go into the different counties, and ascertain, from the evidence of persons acquainted with the facts, the extent and value of every estate in the kingdom in the reign

of Edward the Confessor, and what it might fairly be valued at under the Norman rule. In the year 1085, nineteen years after the battle of Hastings, the commissioners gave in their report. It is still preserved in the Chapter-house at Westminster, and is known as the Doomsday Book, the most precious document of those early times; for it remains exactly as it was presented to the king, without omission or interpolation; and gives a minute and clear description not only of the landed gentry, but of all ranks and conditions of the population. From this survey the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Durham were excepted, either as being so devastated by the conquerors as not to be worth visiting, or as being held by the Scots. But, with regard to all the other English shires, it is as complete and intelligible as the absence of plans and measurements allows it to be. The difference of names between the Normans and Saxons enables us to see the prodigious changes which had followed the conquest. The "Barons" have the foreign appellations derived from their French holdings, and constitute the high nobility, with vast masses of land and numbers of manors. The " thanes," who appear in this melancholy record generally as subtenants of the barons, are easily recognised by their patronymics as unmixed English, and are considered to have been the original nobles and proprietors of the soil, now reduced in rank, and admitted as rentpaying occupiers of the lands which were so lately their own. These two, however, along with the freeholders throughout the land, composed the upper class or freemen of the country; and though they differed among themselves in wealth and dignity, had all, equally, the superiority over the other divisions of the people.

These comprised, first, a class of landowners, who held their properties subject to a superior lord, and the fulfilment of certain conditions. They were called Sockmen—either, as some antiquaries suppose, from a Saxon word meaning free,

A.D. 1070.]

NOBILITY AND SERFS.

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or more likely from the old word for a plough, because their tenure was in right of their cultivating the fields. While the conditions of their occupancy were fulfilled, they and their heirs were guaranteed the possession of their estates. Next came the "villeins," inhabitants of the "vill" or farm. These were merely tenants at will, and had no rights of ownership which they could transmit to their descendants. In addition also to the uncertainty of their occupancy, the services on which they held their lands were of the lowest and most humiliating kind. They were, however, all within the protection of the law, and could appeal if the ascertained boundaries of their oppressor's authority were passed. They were attached to the soil, it is true, and were conveyed along with it to any new owner who might acquire it; but the rights of the new proprietor were as well defined as those of the old -the same services were rendered, the same amount of labour performed, and their condition in this respect did not greatly differ from that of the tenants and labourers of a modern estate, who continue to work and reside on it, however often it may change hands. Last of all were the "theowes," or thralls, called in Latin "servi," which gives our English. word "serfs."

The serfs were nothing more nor less than slaves. They could hold no property, and they possessed no rights. Who they can have originally been has perplexed the historians, as it seems so unnatural a thing for one part of a nation to have reduced another to so low a condition. It is generally believed that they were the descendants of the ancient Britons, and of other persons taken in war, on whom the curse of slavery continued to press after the course of time had buried the original antagonism between the races, and when the thrall, the villein, the sockman, and the thane all spoke the same language. It may perhaps have been some consolation to the wretched "theowe" to see the descendants of the Saxon conquerors reduced to wait in the antechamber of the new

invaders; and perhaps the dispossessed Franklins, on seeing the numbers whom their pride or ignorance had kept in this degradation so long, may have wished that they had had the wisdom, in the days of their prosperity, to raise so powerful a body to the condition of freemen, that they might have gained their assistance in the protection of their common country. But a slave has only injuries to avenge, and no country to defend.

§ 16. King William therefore looked over the pages of Doomsday Book, and saw the position in which he and his followers stood. His military array consisted of sixty thousand horsemen, bound to come forward at his call, and at the expense of the barons, on whom he had bestowed the knights'fees throughout the land. It was a military brotherhood, whose mutual aid was the duty of all. The thane in his reduced position of tenant-the sockman holding his few fields on binding covenants, which it was forfeiture of his land to break the villein in his scattered hamlet, unable to leave the scene of his daily labour, and the serf sunk out of the sphere of humanity altogether-these could offer no opposition to the steel-clad warrior, even if they had had the inclination. But the capacity of resistance was destroyed in other respects. For stronger than the armed array, more fatal to the aspiration of freedom than the Norman castles which rose in every valley, was the enmity of the Norman clergy. The poor old English priests, who had been inspired by the love of country, and hated the thought of seeing their wives and children at the proud feet of a conqueror, had all either died or been dispossessed. Lanfranc had long been Archbishop of Canterbury, and used his great influence to strengthen the hands of a foreign priesthood, knowing that no national movement can be permanently successful if it does not enlist on its side the feelings of religion. Thus king and archbishop saw with equal satisfaction the subjugation of the AngloSaxon Church, and the confiscation of bishopric and monastery

A.D. 1070-1087.]

NORMAN TYRANNY.

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for the benefit of alien ecclesiastics: the archbishop, because it advanced the authority of his spiritual chief at Rome; and the king, because it weakened the power of resistance to his tyranny in England.

That tyranny had become nearly insupportable. He had devastated large tracts of country to turn them into harbourage for his deer-animals, the chronicler tells us, which "he loved as if he had been their father." He had burned down great numbers of villages and even churches in the district called the New Forest, and cleared out spaces for the convenience of the hunt at such an expense of human suffering, that the pardonable superstition of the peasantry saw an avenging providence in the death which befel his son and other descendants amid those blood-stained alleys. In other parts of the country he had pursued the same policy-whether entirely from the love of sport, or partly to open communication with the different hamlets studding the recesses of the jungle, may be doubted; but from whatever cause the action proceeded, the cruelty was the same. And having placed in this manner the whole nation at his feet-peers, barons, tenants, villeins, serfs, and clergy, he proceeded to show to other nations that a king of England was a greater man than a duke of Normandy had been, and in 1087 he crossed over with a large expedition to make war on his liege lord the King of France.

§ 17. By this time he was sixty years of age, fat and unwieldy, and more furiously passionate than even in his younger days. Fatigue and exposure brought on a fever, which kept him to his bed at Rouen. Philip the First insulted him by a jibe on his size, and compared him to a woman in childbirth. "By the splendour of God," cried the Conqueror, "I will hold my churching in Notre Dame with so many candles, that France will be on fire." He mounted his horse in fulfilment of this threat, and advanced towards the city of Mantes. He claimed the whole country of the Vexin, of which it was