History of England 1-6

The labourers were slowly reduced in status; for two days each week they performed services for the lord in return for a house and for a smallholding of land from which they could feed their families. Their duties included harvesting and ploughing, carting and haymaking, shearing sheep and constructing the stalls for oxen. Somebody would be ordered to uproot the weeds or to dig a ditch, to run an errand or mend a hedge. Independent farmers still existed, of course, but a large section of the peasantry was ground down by need, misfortune, or misjudgment. Taxes had to be paid. The threat of murrain, to the crops and to the oxen, was constant. Life, for small farmers, was very uncertain. Undoubtedly many of their farms were bought up by the larger landowners. It would be impossible to convey the sheer complexity of the grades and divisions among the working population. It is enough to understand that this was a society of intricate divisions with nice variations in degrees of freedom and unfreedom, where every single person was susceptible to certain claims from superiors.

The history of the village is so entwined with the history of the fields that they cannot be separated. As villages replaced hamlets, so in many shires large fields divided into strips supplanted the older rectangular fields. The lord of the manor had the most land, of course, but the rest was assigned by lot to the individual villagers. This was the most just and methodical way of sharing out the territory. It was also the only way that the land could be efficiently ploughed, by being made available to large plough-teams. The interest of the community, and of the lord, came before that of the individual. The procedure was also accompanied by a form of crop rotation, so that land left fallow for one year was sown the next. This system of common fields lasted until the passing of the Enclosure Acts in the eighteenth century, maintained by the force of custom and communal arrangement.

Other aspects of English life were also being more sharply defined. Towns, small and large, were acquiring unique identities. Some of them grew out of the Romanized towns, and some of them emerged from the burghs established by Alfred; others occupied the sites of large trading settlements on the coast or along the routes of the rivers, while yet more were simply part of the expansion of the large Christian minsters. By the last three decades of the tenth century they were bursting into life, taking advantage of a general rise in population and prosperity throughout the country.

The towns were crammed with buildings and with workshops. In Canterbury the houses stood 2 feet (0.6 metres) apart, enough room for the rain to drip freely from the eaves. The evidence of glassware and pottery, of metalworking and leatherworking, suggests a true urban community. The populations of Norwich and Lincoln were approximately 6,000, while those of London and York were appreciably higher. The people of other towns may be numbered in hundreds rather than thousands. Yet they were living together without agricultural or proprietary ties; this is nowhere more evident than in the fact that the inhabitants of the towns were deemed to be free. They had no lord except the king. The hand of the monarch is in fact evident everywhere, since most towns were royal creations with their streets and defences laid out by royal command. They became engines for making money from taxes and trade. Where there is money, there is power and hierarchy. The towns became self-governing, with the administration of their courts and markets in the hands of ‘elders’ or ‘seniors’ who formed themselves into guilds. It was a new form of kinship in a country that was redefining its tribal nature.

It is no accident that the English parish emerges in this period. It is part of the same appetite for definition and control – for discipline – that accompanied the growth of a united kingdom under a powerful king. You cannot separate religion from social restraint. The chapel of the thegn became the parish church, and the parish system itself arose directly out of the manors and villages that had spread across the country. By the twelfth century, the organization was complete. The parish became the centre of communal action. It survived unchanged until the last decades of the nineteenth century. The great minsters and monasteries decayed, or changed their function, and by the ninth century little churches had begun to fill the countryside. They were generally built of timber, unplastered, and enclosed a rectangular space divided into one or two ‘cells’. In the eleventh century the wood was replaced with a fabric of stone, and the interiors of the small churches began to be ornamented and painted.