Thursday 20 September 2012

Rustics and Clause 16


Rusticus [Latin]
a countryman, rustic, peasant; in plur.: rustici, country people,rustics.

Villein
The word derives from the Latin villanus, meaning ‘one attached to a villa or farmhouse’. Villanus became villein one of the class of serfs in the feudal system.

Synonyms
Villeins [Villani], Bondsmen, Paisant, Cottars [Cotarii], Bordarii, Thrall, Churl, Serf [Servus], Neif [female serf], Nativus

Peasantry - Hull Domesday Project

bordar
A person ranking below villeins and above serfs in the social hierarchy of a manor, holding just enough land to feed a family (about five acres) and required to provide labour on the demesne on specified days of the week.

bordar, or smallholder - Hull Domesday Project


Cottar
The word cottar is often employed to translate the cotarius recorded in the Domesday Book, a class whose exact status has been the subject of some discussion among historians, and is still a matter of doubt. According to Domesday, the cotarii were comparatively few, numbering fewer than seven thousand, and were scattered unevenly throughout England, being principally in the southern counties. They either cultivated a small plot of land, or worked on the holdings of the villani. Like the villani, among whom they were frequently classed, their economic condition may be described as free in relation to every one except their lord.
A cottar or cottier is also a term for a tenant renting land from a farmer or landlord.

Cottager - Hull Domesday Project

Churl
a non-servile peasant denoting the lowest rank of freemen. 

Bracton

On the Free and Unfree

"The first and shortest classification of persons is this, that all men are either free or bond, that is, every man is either free or bond [in bond] ..."

De Legibus Et Consuetudinibus Angliae -
By Henry de Bracton
On Persons Volume 2 Folios 29-38 English Translation
Bracton was trying to compile a book on the Common Laws and Customs of England in order to codify a consensus of what they might be across the country as a whole. Some commentators on the history of this period think different manors may have had different customs distinguishing the free from the unfree and the large number of different words describing the status of the unfree reflected those differences, with some unfree persons having more freedoms (freer) than others.

The proportions between unfree and free varied from estate to estate and region to region. Over the period of the later Middle Ages [ca 1066 - ca 1500] there was a gradual change in the proportion of unfree villein tenants [serfs - nativi/rustici] in the population towards having a much greater proportion of free peasants (freeholders - libere tenentes).

Nativi described serfs who acquired that status by birth: one was born unfree, They were personally unfree because they were born unfree. Such villeins could be bought and sold.

Some peasants who were personally free held land from their lord by unfree status owing all the same obligations as the nativi. These were often freemen who swore away their freedoms in order to acquire land. It was often a question of having land [life] or death by starvation.

Villani had to render heavy rents and labour service to their lords.

Freemen (liber tenentes) were often much more productive agriculturally. The unfree (servi/rustici) required great deal more supervision, as they were technically and essentially forced labour, having less motivation to work hard.

Unfree tenants paid far more for their lands in rent to their lords than the free. Wealthier unfree tenants could acquire sufficient wealth to be able to buy a freehold for life from their lords and pay him a huge premium for this right. Such lands could be sold onto others provided they paid the lord huge transfer fees.

Heriot death duty on the death of a villein.

Freeholders/freemen held heritable tenancies and could plea their causes in the king's courts. Unfree persons could not do this.

Villeins owed villein customs to their lords, particularly the heavy labour services of ploughing, planting, reapage and winnowing, typically calculated as so many days work on their lord's demesne.

Merchet: a fine paid by a tenant or bondsman to his overlord for liberty to give his daughter in marriage.

Tallage: a tax levied by Norman and early Plantagenet monarchs on the towns and demesne lands of the Crown. Also any of various levies or duties, arbitrary taxes levied on feudal dependants at the will of their landlords.

Under strict Roman Law such men who owed such services were mere chattels.

Freemen were free from specific obligations to their lord.

Disputes were dealt with in the lord's own private manorial court which determined the customary laws of the manor. Landlords had jurisdictional rights over their tenants supervised by their own officials. This was called the right of Sake and Soke [Anglo-Saxon term 'Sac and Soc' was used for the right to hold a court thus soka faldae was the duty of seeking the lord's court.

Soke_(legal)

John Hudson (2014). The Formation of English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta. Seignorial Courts: Routledge. pp. 40–. ISBN 978-1-317-89801-6.

George Macaulay Trevelyan (1973). History of England. Longman. ISBN 978-0-582-48471-9.
History Of England Sixth Impression : Trevelyan Macaulay George p. 92

Rent may be paid as food-rent, money-rent or as labour on the lord's demesne.

Right of jurisdiction; this allowed the lords to oversee the villeins in almost all aspects of their lives while they lived within the lord’s manor. The other right included the right to hunt game freely; villeins were not allowed to hunt game and were only given limited access to the forests.

The unfree were bound to work for one lord and could not move to another manor unless they ran away; if they ran away they risked losing their livelihoods and personal protection as well as that for their family. The manor and those tied to its soil (the unfree) would be sold onto anyone who purchased the manor.

The villein was obliged to use the lord’s and manor's resources such as his own mill, for which service he would pay a heavy rate for. Although lords generally imposed heavy taxes on villeins, they were generally apprehensive of losing them if they demanded too much from them.

Villeins also had limited access to the non-arable lands. These included the forests and the meadows from which they could fetch firewood or graze their cattle. However, villeins were generally prohibited from hunting for game, as this was the domain of the lords and nobility.

Rights of ‘estover’

Planting and harvesting, raising and slaughtering live stock.

A knight's fief was typically a manor. Some manors were fractional parts of a knight's fief.

Villeins had to plough the fields belonging directly to their masters, harvest the corn, gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain; they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood, cutting firewood, fixing the castle’s walls, and cleaning the moat. The serf was also required to give payments, on top of the payments of crops the lord already receives at harvest time, at special times of the year—Christmas, Easter, ECT.

The lands granted to knights in England were called manors and the knight would live in a Manor House on his fief.

Knights may employ soldiers, serjeants, to who they may grant [sub-infeudate] lands in turn for a sworn oath of loyalty.

the nobles or barons were the second wealthiest and the most powerful after the king in the chain. The nobles were awarded or leased land, called fiefs or fiefdoms, from the king whom they swore their loyalty to. Those who received the fiefs were called the king's vassals. The king was the vassal's lord. The vassals served him by providing him with armies and knights for protection. The lords owed homage and fealty to the king. They were obligated to supply a certain number of knights for the king. The number of knights a vassal owed his king usually depended on the size of the fief. The holder of a great fief might owe the king the service of dozens or even hundreds of knights. This level of vassalage was called lords, nobles, tenants-in-chief, or barons.

https://www.thoughtco.com/fresh-meat-and-fish-1788843

Alongside the rights of estover (the right to take wood), pannage (the right to turn out pigs in the autumn to eat corns and other nuts), piscary (the right to fish) and pasture (the right to pasture cattle, horses, sheep or other animals on the common land), the right of turbary was one of the 'rights of common' .

Commoners' rights. The right of a commoner to take resources from a piece of common land is called a right of common. A right of common can be: pasturage - the right to put livestock out to feed on the land, usually grass but can be heather or other vegetation.

http://contestedcommons.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/files/WinchesterSymposiumPaper.pdf


pasture, pannage, turbary, estovers, piscary and common in the soil (Gadsden, 1988: § 3.59-
3.85). After common of pasture, the most significant of the other rights were common of
turbary, which gave the right to cut turf and to dig peat, principally for fuel, and common of
estovers, which gave the right to take wood for necessary purposes, expressed in the
vernacular by the four rights of ‘housebote’ (for the repair of buildings), ‘firebote’ (fuel for
the fire), ‘ploughbote’ (wood for farm implements) and ‘hedgebote’ (materials for the repair
of hedges). Rights of turbary and estovers were generally attached to houses or land and their
exercise was governed by clear principles. First and foremost, they were only to be used in
support of the ‘dominant tenement’, the land or dwelling to which they belonged. From this
flowed certain clear limitations: produce from the common was not to be sold or taken out of
the manor, and the quantity of the resource which could be taken was limited to what was
necessary to fulfil the reasonable needs of the dominant tenement (the term ‘estovers’ derived
ultimately from the Latin est opus, ‘it is necessary’). This meant, for example, that
commoners in rural manors were expected to resist the temptation to dig peat for sale to fuelhungry townspeople nearby.

https://goo.gl/sV9cv9

https://goo.gl/Z4yFiK

The governance of a fief was quite time consuming and was often delegated to a bailiff or reeve to manage.

https://goo.gl/3XTBKd

https://goo.gl/SWyXXy

https://goo.gl/59EbYB

https://goo.gl/SeqUGB


References

Rosamond Faith (1999). "Chapter 10: Villeinage". The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship. A&C Black. pp. 245–. ISBN 978-0-7185-0204-1.

John Hudson (22 March 2012). The Oxford History of the Laws of England Volume II: 871-1216. OUP Oxford. pp. 426–. ISBN 978-0-19-163003-3.

John Gillingham (2000). The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. pp. 267–. ISBN 978-0-85115-732-0.

Christopher Dyer (2001). "Chapter 12 Towns and Cottages in Eleventh Century England". Everyday Life in Medieval England. A&C Black. pp. 241–. ISBN 978-0-8264-1982-8.

Christopher Harper-Bill (1997). Anglo-Norman Studies XIX: Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1996. J.S. Moore, 'Quot homines?: the population of Domesday England': Boydell & Brewer Ltd. ISBN 978-0-85115-707-8.

English Serfdom and Villeinage: Towards a Reassessment
John Hatcher
Past & Present No. 90 (Feb., 1981), pp. 3-39
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
https://www.jstor.org/stable/650715

https://opendomesday.org/

Mirror of Justices p. 165
https://archive.org/details/mirrorjustices00whitgoog/page/n236

peasants - Hull Domesday Project

freeman - Hull Domesday Project

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/villein

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/villein.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeoman#Middle_Ages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villein_(feudal)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom










Carl Stephenson (1956-05-01). Mediaeval Feudalism. Cornell University Press. pp. 33–. ISBN 978-0-8014-9013-2.

Paul Vinogradoff (1892). Villainage in England, Essays in English Mediaeval History, by Paul Vinogradoff. Clarendon Press.

Paul Vinogradoff. Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History. Cambridge University Press. pp. 10–. ISBN 978-1-108-01963-7.

http://archive.org/details/villainageineng00vinouoft

http://archive.org/details/cu31924024908356


Clause 16


Clause 16 of the Constitutions states
The sons of rustics shall not be ordained without the consent of their lord, in whose land they are known to have been born.
This seems to be a rewrite in feudal language of a well-known and ancient canon of the Church
Canon 4
...
And no slave shall be received into any monastery to become a monk against the will of his master. And if any one shall transgress this our judgment, we have decreed that he shall be excommunicated, that the name of God be not blasphemed. But the bishop of the city must make the needful provision for the monasteries.
...

Pope Gregory I, The Great
Gregory (Epistle 10.9) orders two years, with special precautions in the case of slaves who wished to become monks
Huddleston, Gilbert. "Pope St. Gregory I ("the Great")." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909. 22 Oct. 2012.
Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. New Testament 1 Peter 2:18


Comment From Lyttleton




F. W. Maitland (1987). "The Serfs". Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England. Cambridge University Press. pp. 26–. ISBN 978-0-521-34918-5.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Domesday Book and Beyond, by Frederic William Maitland

George Lyttelton Baron Lyttelton (1771). The History of the Life of King Henry the Second, W. Sandby and J. Dodsley.

Thomas Littleton (1841). Littleton his Treatise of Tenures: A new edition to which are added the ancient treatise of the olde tenures and the customs of Kent by T. E. Tomlins. S. Sweet. pp. 3–.


Vill

A term used in the Domesday Book
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary In medieval England, the smallest administrative unit under the feudal system, a subdivision of a hundred roughly corresponding to the Anglo-Saxon tithing and the modern parish; a feudal township.

The Vill in Medieval England
Warren O. Ault
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
Vol. 126, No. 3 (Jun. 8, 1982), pp. 188-211
Published by: American Philosophical Society
https://www.jstor.org/stable/986507


David Roffe (2015). Decoding Domesday. Chapter 6: The Vill and Taxation: Boydell & Brewer Ltd. pp. 183–. ISBN 978-1-78327-019-4.
https://goo.gl/uaX8PN



Farm of the Manor and Community of the Vill in Domesday Book
Robert S. Hoyt
Speculum
Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr., 1955), pp. 147-169
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Medieval Academy of America
DOI: 10.2307/2848463
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2848463


Frederick Pollock (Sir)); Frederic William Maitland. The History of English Law. S3. The Vill and The Township: CUP Archive. pp. 560–. pp 624-
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/pollock-the-history-of-english-law-before-the-time-of-edward-i-vol-1/simple
https://goo.gl/KZQcGm
§ 3.: The Vill and The Township
§ 4.: The Tithing
§ 5.: Seignorial Jurisdiction
§ 6.: The Manor
§ 7.: The Manor and the Township



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