History of England 1-6

The shire was originally a military district, but it also served royal purposes as a centre of taxation and a source of justice. Each shire had a court, and a burgh or major town; it could muster its own army, and was ruled on behalf of the king by a shire-reeve whose name became sheriff. The shire was then divided into ‘hundreds’; each hundred was supposed in theory to support one hundred households or to supply one hundred fighting men in times of war. The hundreds were further subdivided into ‘tithings’ made up of ten households. The administration of the entire country could be devolved upon small groups of individuals who led the ‘hue and cry’ against thieves and who were responsible for each other’s conduct. It was the essential basis of local government in England for at least the next thousand years.

The men of the hundred met in the open air at ancient places of assembly, and some of the hundreds are named after a prehistoric tumulus or barrow in the immediate neighbourhood. Hundredsbarrow and Loosebarrow, for example, are to be found in Dorset. The hundred of Doddingtree in Wiltshire is ‘Dudda’s tree’. The hundred of Brixton is derived from ‘Brihtsige’s stone’. This suggests that the roots of the hundreds go very deep, and that they reflect the primeval organization of the country. Since they still survive unaltered, although now rarely used for administrative purposes, they are another indication that we live in a prehistoric landscape. The rural district council is very old indeed.

In the tenth century the lie of the land was being changed. The country had been generally divided into very large estates governed by king, noble, or bishop; these estates of many thousands of acres are likely to have been the original territories of a tribe, their boundaries preserved by the burial mounds of ancient leaders. Yet in the reign of Athelstan they were being fragmented. Parcels of land were being granted to the clients of the king, or noble, in reward for service; an approximate size of the grant was 600 acres (243 hectares), upon which the new proprietor built his residence and organized his agricultural workforce. In the tenth century the new lords were known as thegns; they became the lords of the manor in the fourteenth century, the squires of the eighteenth century, and the country gentlemen of the nineteenth century.

The thegns had a much more direct relation to their land than had the great absentee landlords of the previous epoch. They created villages on their estates, taking the place of scattered farms and hamlets, so that their workers could be more easily housed and controlled. Villages were in existence in the period of Roman dominance, and similar settlements could be found in the Iron Age. Continuity is once more the key. But the village became the defining feature of a large part of the English countryside only in the ninth and tenth centuries. There is no village still in existence (except for those formed during the Industrial Revolution) that was not established by the twelfth century. If you dig deep into the village soil, you will find its ancient roots. Some of them, not the majority, have been in existence for thousands of years. But they are absent from certain territories. Down the middle of England, from Northumberland to Wiltshire, numerous villages are to be found; beyond that great expanse, in the north and in the west, the Iron Age landscape of scattered farms and hamlets survived.

The thegn built his wooden halled residence with smaller outbuildings; this manor was defended with a bank and ditch together with a palisaded fence. He built a small church, also of wood, with a bell tower to call his workers to prayer and to divide their day. Eventually he set up his own court. A well was sunk and before long a mill was built for grinding corn. The country village was not some comfortable and affable idyll; for its poorest residents it was a form of outdoor prison. The agricultural workers lived in buildings that were little more than wooden huts that they shared with their livestock. The ploughman, in a text of the eleventh century, laments his cruel life; he lives in fear of ‘my lord’ and must plough an acre or more in even the coldest weather. The boy who drives the oxen with his goad is hoarse from shouting.