Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History. Paul Vinogradoff
system of husbandry manifests itself in many ways: the small holders club together for ploughing; four virgates or yardlands have to co-operate in order to start an eight-oxen plough. The services are often laid upon the whole village and not on separate householders; on the other hand the village, as a whole, enters into agreement with the lord about leases or commutation of services for money.
Each holding is formed of strips which lie intermixed with the component parts of other holdings in different fields, and this fact is intimately connected with the principle of joint ownership. The whole system begins to break up in the thirteenth century, much earlier than in France or Germany. As soon as services get commuted for money rents, it becomes impossible to retain the labouring people in serfdom. Hired labourers and farmers take the place of villains, and the villain's holding is turned into a copyhold and protected by law. Although the passage to modern forms begins thus early, traces of the original communalism may be found everywhere, even in the eighteenth century.
Maine.
Nasse's pamphlet is based on a careful study of authorities, and despite its shortness must be treated as a work of scientific research. But if all subsequent workers have to reckon with it in settling particular questions, general conceptions have been more widely influenced by Sir Henry Maine's lectures, which did not aim at research, and had in view the broad aspects of the subject. Their peculiar method is well known to be that of comparing facts from very different environments—from the Teutonic, the Celtic, the Hindu world; Maine tries to sketch a general process where other people only see particular connexions and special reasons. The chapters which fall within the line of our inquiry are based chiefly on a comparison between Western Europe and India. The agrarian organisation of many parts of India presents at this very day, in full work and in all stages of growth and decay, the village community of which some traces are still scattered in the records of Europe. There and here the process is in the main the same, the passage from collective ownership to individualism is influenced by the same great forces, notwithstanding all the differences of time and place. The original form of agrarian arrangement is due to the settlement of a group of free men, which surrenders to its individual members the use of arable land, meadows, pasture and wood, but retains the ownership and the power to control and modify the rights of using the common land. There can be no doubt that the legal theory, which sees in the modern rights of commoners mere encroachments upon the lord, carries feudal notions back into too early a period.
The real question as conceived by Maine is this—By what means was the free village community turned into the manor of the lord? The petty struggles between townships must have led to the subjugation of some groups by others; in each particular village the headman had the means to use his authority in order to improve his material position; and when a family contrived to retain an office in the hands of its members this at once gave matters an aristocratical turn. In Western Europe external causes had to account for a great deal in the gradual rise of territorial lordship. When the barbarian invaders came into contact with Roman civilisation and took possession of the provincial soil, they found private ownership and great property in full development, and naturally fell under the influence of these accomplished facts; their village community was broken up and transformed gradually into the manorial system27.
Maine traces economic history from an originally free community; Nasse takes the existence of such a community for granted. The statements of one are too general, however, and sometimes too hypothetical, the other has in view husbandry proper rather than the legal development of social classes. Maurer's tenets, to which both go back, present a very coherent system in which all parts hold well together; but each part taken separately is not very well grounded on fact. The one-sided preference given to one element does not allow other important elements to appear; the wish to find in the authorities suitable arguments for a favourite thesis leads to a confusion of materials derived from different epochs. These defects naturally called for protest and rectification; but the reaction against Maurer's teaching has gone so far and comes from such different quarters, that one has to look for its explanation beyond the range of historical research.
Reactionary movement.
Late years have witnessed everywhere in Europe a movement of thought which would have been called reactionary some twenty years ago28. Some people are becoming very sceptical as to principles which were held sacred by preceding generations; at the same time elements likely to be slighted formerly are coming to the front in great strength nowadays. There have been liberals and conservatives at all times, but the direction of the European mind, saving the reaction against the French Revolution and Napoleon, has been steadily favourable to the liberal tendency. For two centuries the greatest thinkers and the course of general opinion have been striving for liberty in different ways, for the emancipation of individuals, and the self-government of communities, and the rights of masses. This liberal creed has been, on the whole, an eminently idealist one, assuming the easy perfectibility of human nature, the sound common sense of the many, the regulating influence of consciousness on instinct, the immense value of high political aspirations for the regeneration of mankind. In every single attempt at realising its high-flying hopes the brutal side of human nature has made itself felt very effectually, and has become all the more conspicuous just by reason of the ironical contrast between aims and means. But the movement as a whole was certainly an idealist one, not only in the eighteenth but even in the nineteenth century, and the necessary repressive tendency appeared in close alliance with officialism, with unthinking tradition, and with the egotism of classes and individuals. Many events have contributed of late years to raise a current of independent thought which has gone far in criticising and stemming back liberal doctrines, if not in suppressing them. The brilliant achievements of historical monarchy in Germany, the ridiculous misery to which France has been reduced by conceited and impotent politicians, the excesses of terrorist nihilism in Russia, the growing sense of a coming struggle on questions of radical reform—all these facts have worked together to generate a feeling which is far from being propitious to liberal doctrines. Socialism itself has been contributing to it directly by laying an emphatic stress on the conditions of material existence, and treating political life merely as subordinate to economic aims. In England the repressive tendency has been felt less than on the Continent, but even here some of the foremost men in the country are beginning, in consequence of social well-known events, to ask themselves: Whither are we drifting? The book which best illustrates the new direction of thought is probably Taine's 'Origines de la France Contemporaine.' It is highly characteristic, both in its literary connexion with the profound and melancholy liberalism of Tocqueville, and in its almost savage onslaught on revolutionary legend and doctrine.
In the field of historical research the fermentation of political thought of which I have been speaking has been powerfully seconded by a growing distrust among scholars for preconceived theories, and by the wish to reconsider solutions which had been too easily taken for granted. The combined action of these forces has been curiously experienced in the particular subject of our study. The Germanist school had held very high the principle of individual liberty, had tried to connect it with the Teutonic element in history, had explained its working in the society described by Tacitus, and had regretfully followed its decay in later times. For the representatives of the New School this 'original Teutonic freedom' has entirely lost its significance, and they regard the process of social development as starting with the domination of the few and the serfdom of the many. The votaries of the free village community have been studying with interest epochs and ethnographical variations unacquainted with the economic individualism of modern Europe, they have been attentive in tracing out even the secondary details of the agrarian associations which have directed the husbandry of so many centuries, but the New School subordinates communal practice to private property and connects it with serfdom. We may already notice the new tendency in Inama-Sternegg's Wirthschaftsgeschichte29: he enters the lists against Maurer, denies that the Mark ever had anything to do with political work, reduces its influence on husbandry, and enhances that of great property. The most remarkable of French medievalists—Fustel de Coulanges—has been fighting all along against the Teutonic village community, and for an early development of private property in connexion with Roman influence. English scholarship has to reckon with similar views in Seebohm's well-known work.
Seebohm.
Let
I do not mention some well-known books treating of medieval husbandry and social history, because I am immediately concerned only with those works which discuss the formation of the medieval system. Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, and Six Centuries of Work and Wages, begins with the close of the thirteenth century, and the passage from medieval organisation to modern times. Ochenkovsky, Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung Englands am Ende des Mittelalters, and Kovalevsky, England's Social Organisation at the close of the Middle Ages (Russian), start on their inquiry from even a later period.
Is it necessary to say that I am speaking of general currents of thought and not of the position of a man at the polling booth? An author may be personally a liberal and still his work may connect itself with a stream of opinion which is not in favour of liberalism. Again, one and the same man may fall in with different movements in different parts of his career. Actual life throws a peculiar light on the past: certain questions are placed prominently in view and certain others are thrown into the shade by it, so that the individual worker has to find his path within relatively narrow limits.
The last great German work on our questions, Lamprecht, Deutsches Wirthschaftsleben im Mittelalter, is nearer Maurer than Sternegg.