Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History. Paul Vinogradoff
is mostly in touch with those parts of Eichhorn's theory which could be accepted by later Germanists; other important tenets of the Romantic School are left in the shade or rejected, and as a whole Kemble's teaching is essentially Germanistic. Kemble's 'Saxons in England' takes its peculiar shape and marks an epoch in English historical literature, mainly because it presents the first attempt to utilise the enormous material of Saxon Charters, in the collection of which Kemble has done such invaluable work. With this copious and exact, but very onesided, material at his disposal, our author takes little notice of current tales about the invasion of Great Britain by Angles and Saxons. Such tales may be interesting from a mythological or literary point of view, but the historian cannot accept them as evidence. At the same time one cannot but wish to try and get certain knowledge of an historical fact, which, as far as the history of England is concerned, appears as the first manifestation of the Teutonic race in its stupendous greatness. Luckily enough we have some means to judge of the invasion in the names of localities and groups of population. Read in this light the history of Conquest appears very gradual and ancient. It began long before the recorded settlements, and while Britain was still under Roman sway. The struggle with the Celts was a comparatively easy one; the native population was by no means destroyed, but remained in large numbers in the lower orders of society. Notwithstanding such remnants, the history of the Anglo-Saxon period is entirely Teutonic in its aspect, and presents only one instance of the general process by which the provinces of the Empire were modified by conquerors of Teutonic race.
The root of the whole social system is to be found in the Mark, which is a division of the territory held jointly by a certain number of freemen for the purposes of cultivation, mutual help and defence. The community began as a kinship or tribe, but even when the original blood ties were lost sight of and modified by the influx of heterogeneous elements, the community remained self-sufficient and isolated. The whole fabric of society rested on property in land: as its political divisions were based on the possession of common lands, even so the rank of an individual depended entirely on his holding. The Teutonic world had no idea of a citizen severed from the soil. The curious fact that the normal holding, the hide, was equal all over England (33½ acres) can be explained only by its origin; it came full-formed from Germany and remained unchanged in spite of all diversities of geographical and economical conditions.
The transformation of medieval society is, for Kemble, intimately connected with the forms of ownership in land. The scanty population of ancient times had divided only a very small part of the country into separate holdings. The rest remained in the hands of the people to supply the wants of coming generations. The great turn towards feudalism was given by the fact that this reserve-fund lapsed into the hands of a few magnates: the mass of free people being deprived of its natural sphere of expansion was forced to seek its subsistence at the hands of private lords (loaf-givers). From the point of view of personal status the same process appears in the decrease of freedom among the people and in the increase of the so-called Gesíð. According to Teutonic principles a man is free only if he has land to feed upon, strength to work, and arms to defend himself. The landless man is unfree; and so is the Gesíðcundman, the follower, however strong and wealthy he may be through his chief's grace. The contrast between the free ceorls tilling their own land and the band of military followers, who are always considered as personally dependent—this contrast is a marked one. From the first this military following had played an important part in German history. Most raids and invasions had been its work, and sometimes whole tribes were attracted into its organisation, but during the first period of Saxon history the free people were sufficiently strong to hold down the power of military chiefs within certain bounds. Not so in later development. With the growth of population, of inequalities, of social competition, the relations of dependency are seen constantly gaining on the field of freedom. The spread of commendation leads not only to a change in the distribution of ranks, but to a dismemberment of political power, to all kinds of franchises and private encroachments on the State.
I may be excused for marshalling all these well-known points before the public by the consideration that they must serve to show how intimately these views are connected with the general principles of a great school. The stress laid by Kemble on property in land ought to be noticed especially: land gets to be the basis of all political and social condition. This is going much further than Palgrave ever went; though not further than Eichhorn. What actually severs Kemble from the Romantics is his estimate of the free element in the people. He does not try to picture a kind of political Arcadia in Saxon England, but there is no more talk about the rightless condition of the ceorls or the predominance of aristocracy. The Teutonic race towers above everything. Although the existence of Celts after the Conquests is admitted, neither Celtic nor Roman elements appear as exercising any influence in the course of history. Everything takes place as if Germanic communities had been living and growing on soil that had never before been appropriated. Curiously enough the weakest point of Kemble's doctrine seems to lie in its very centre—in his theory of social groups. One is often reminded of Grimm by his account of the Mark, and it was an achievement to call attention to such a community as distinct from the tribal group, but the political, legal, and economical description of the Mark is very vague. As to the reasoning about gilds, tithings, and hundreds, it is based on a constant confusion of widely different subjects.
Generally speaking, it is not for a lawyer's acuteness and precision that one has to look in Kemble's book: important distinctions very often get blurred in his exposition, and though constantly protesting against abstract theories and suppositions not based on fact, he indulges in them a great deal himself. Still Kemble's work was very remarkable: his extensive, if not very critical study of the charters opened his eyes to the first-rate importance of the law of real property in the course of medieval history: this was a great step in advance of Palgrave, who had recognised law as the background of history, but whose attention had been directed almost exclusively to the formal side—to judicial institutions. And Kemble actually succeeded in bringing forward some of the questions which were to remain for a long time the main points of debate among historians.
K. Maurer.
The development of the school was evidently to proceed in the direction of greater accuracy and improved methods. Great service has been done in this respect by Konrad Maurer21. He is perhaps sometimes inclined to magnify his own independence and dissent from Kemble's opinions, but he has undoubtedly contributed to strengthen and clear up some of Kemble's views, and has gone further than his predecessor on important subjects. He accepts in the main Kemble's doctrines as to the Mark, the allotment of land, the opposition of folkland and book-land, and expounds them with greater fulness and better insight into the evidence. On the other hand he goes his own way as to the Gesíðs (Gefolgschaft), and the part played by large estates in the political process. Maurer reduces the importance of the former and lays more stress on the latter than Kemble22. Altogether the German scholar's investigations have been of great moment, and this not only for methodical reasons, but also because they lead to a complete emancipation of the school from Eichhorn's influence.
Freeman.
As to the Conquests, Germanist views have been formulated with great authority by Freeman. A comparison of the course of development in Romance countries with the history of England, and a careful study of that evidence of the chronicles which Kemble disregarded, has led the historian of the Norman Conquest to the conclusion, that the Teutonic invaders actually rooted out most of the Romanised Celtic population of English Britain, and reduced it to utter insignificance in those western counties where they did not destroy it. It is the only inference that can be drawn from the temporary disappearance of Christianity, from the all but complete absence of Celtic and Latin words in the English tongue, from the immunity of English legal and social life from Roman influence. The Teutonic bias which was given to the history of the island by the Conquest of Angles and Saxons has not been altered by the Conquest of the Normans. The foreign colouring imparted to the language is no testimony of any radical change in the internal structure of the people: it remained on the surface, and the history of the island remained English, that is, Teutonic. Even feudalism, which appears in its full shape after William the Bastard's invasion, had been prepared in its component parts by the Saxon period. In working out particulars Freeman had to reckon largely with Kemble's work and to strike the balance between
Ueber angelsächsische Rechtsverhältnisse, in the Munich Kritische Ueberschau, i. sqq. (1853).
K. Maurer is very near Waitz in this respect.