Peasants Begin to Lose Their Freedom
THE GROWTH OF THE BIG LANDED ESTATES
AND THE INTRODUCTION OF SERFDOM
After the conquest of Britain the survivals of the primitive way of life were very strong among the Anglo-Saxons. But in the 7th-9th centuries great changes were taking place in Anglo-Saxon society; feudalizm was slowly taking root.
You will learn:
- how big landed estates grew up in Britain;
- how free peasants began to lose their land and freedom;
- how the administration of the Anglo-Saxons changed;
- what changes the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity brought about.
An Anglo-Saxon Free Community
The peasants of the village formed a little society – a community. The land of the village belonged to the whole community and each villager had a right to a share of it. From the village meadows the members of the community had a share of hay to feed their cattle in winter-time, in the common forests they cut branches for winter-fuel; they grazed their cattle on the common pasture and fished in the rivers and lakes. However, harvest, cattle, implements of labour and the house with a garden round it was the villager’s private property.
Arable land was held by separate families. It was passed by inheritance to the members of the family but it could not be sold or handed over to another family. The free peasants lived in big families in which the brothers, their sons and grandsons worked jointly. A large family like this held a considerable amount of arable land which was called a “hide”. The hide usually measured 120 acres (about 50 hectares). A family could not afford a plough of its own nor keep the necessary team of oxen. They had to share and borrow and help each other by agreement.
All the disputes of the community members were settled at the folk-moots. These were the meetings of the villagers who lived in one district called the “hundred”. The free community members themselves or their representatives gathered at the moots and settled matters of common interest. At the moots presided over by the elected elder they settled disputes between one village and another and they also administered justice.
The Anglo-Saxons used to have what was called Trial by Ordeal. The usual trial was as follows.[1] When a man was accused of a crime he took an oath to say that he was innocent and he got twelve well-known people to say that he was probably speaking the truth. If he could not find twelve such people he was sent to the ordeal. The accused would have to put his bare hand and arm into boiling water, or to carry a piece of red-hot iron a certain distance. Then the hand was tied up, and at the end of four days it was untied and looked at by the elders. If it was healing, the man was considered innocent, if not, he was pronounced guilty and was punished.
The community united the peasants as they used the pastures, meadows and forests in common, cultivated the land in one and the same way according to the old customs and tackled all other problems in common.
Peasants Begin to Lose Their Freedom
But not all the members of the community were equal, Inequality had already appeared among the Anglo-Saxons before the conquest of Britain. The tribal nobility, that is, military leaders and elders, possessed more land and cattle than other tribesmen. Their land was cultivated by prisoners of war who were their slaves.
However, the bulk of the Anglo-Saxons were made up of free community members. These free peasants worked for themselves and had enough land and cattle to feed their families. The prisoners of war the Anglo-Saxons had were given small plots of land for their own use.
The effect of the conquest of Britain was to increase the wealth[2] of the Anglo-Saxon nobility. The elders and military leaders distributed the land and cattle among the tribesmen in the conquered country and they got more land and cattle than the rank-and-file members of the tribe. The tribal nobility took possession of large tracts of land and became great landowners. The nobles were better armed than the rank-and-file tribesmen. They went to war wearing helmets and coats of mail, bearing swords and axes. A rank’ and-file warrior had only a spear and a round shield.
The famous Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf [3] tells us about the life of the Anglo-Saxons at the time when every man was a warrior. The poem describes the arms and armour of the Anglo-Saxon warriors, their exploits and adventures. It is named after the great legendary warrior, Beowulf. The military leaders of the powerful tribes are called kings in the poem. The first lines of the poem describe how the king, Scyld, was buried in the ship with his arms and armour and treasures. “Then at the fated hour, Scyld, a man most heroic, departed, to go into the keeping of God; his beloved friends carried him to the sea’s flood, as he himself had asked…. There, at the landing-place, the prince’s ship lay, covered with ice and eager to start. They laid then the beloved chieftain inside the ship… . There were brought many treasures, ornaments from far-off lands. Never have I heard that a vessel was more fairly fitted out with war-weapons, swords and coats of mail. In the vessel lay a host of treasures, which were to travel far with him into the power of the flood. .. . They set besides a golden standard high above his head, and let the sea bear him, gave him to the ocean… . Their soul was sad, their spirit sorrowful. Counsellors, mighty men beneath the heavens, cannot say truly who received that load.”
The actual graves found by archaeologists show how rich the tribal chiefs became in the course of the conquest. In 1939 a very important archaeological discovery called “the Sutton Hoo[4] burial” was made in Britain. Sutton Hoo is the name of a private estate in south-east Suffolk on which the discovery was made. It is believed that the treasure that was found in the grave belonged to one of the Anglo-Saxon kings of East Anglia who had probably died around the year 650. The Sutton Hoo burial is the richest as compared to any other Germanic grave of that time in Europe and it is the first royal grave to have come down to us[5] untouched. Articles that were considered necessary for the after-life were buried in a very large ship. Here were found various arms and armour: a splendid sword, a great shield, a helmet, a coat of mail, four spears, an ax with a long iron handle and a golden harness. The grave also contained many things used for feasts, ceremonies and entertainment in the king’s hall. There were numerous silver vessels for food and drinking-horns, gold jewellery, an iron standard, a small six-stringed harp and many other things. The harp is of great interest since it is often mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon legends. The legends tell us that at the feasts after great battles, songs glorifying great heroes and their exploits were sung to the accompaniment of the harp. A reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo harp has been made and like all the other articles of the Sutton Hoo treasure it is on view in the British Museum.
It is interesting to note that the Sutton Hoo treasure was very much like that of King Scyld’s described in the epic poem of Beowulf. And the funeral was the same. The only difference was that Scyld’s funeralship was a sailing vessel and it was launched into the sea, while the Sutton Hoo ship was buried on dry land. (According to archaeologists, earth-burial was a more common practice at that time.)
The Sutton Hoo treasure is a clear proof that much wealth was concentrating in the hands of the tribal chiefs, and with it great influence and power. The chiefs of the victorious tribes became the rulers of small kingdoms. As far back as the 8th century they were already assuming the power of hereditary kings and were no longer elected by their tribesmen.
A constant and bloody struggle went on among the tribal nobility for power. From an old Anglo-Saxon, legend we learn: “A certain king of Mercia, named Warmundus,[6] famous for having founded the city of Warwick, had one son, Offa. Offa was a man of great stature and tremendous strength, but he was blind until his seventh year, and dumb until his thirtieth. Some of the Mercian nobles led by Riganus[7] plotted against Offa and on the ground that he was physically unfit to reign, demanded the kingdom. Riganus himself hoped to be chosen as successor to the throne. The old King Warijiundus, in great confusion, called a council to consider what should be done, as he himself was too old to lead an army into battle. But in this difficulty Offa prayed that he might receive the gift of speech and his request was granted; the difficulty was then solved, for Offa volunteered to lead the king’s army against the rebels.
The two armies met on the opposing banks of a deep river. Offa dashed across the river, and fought against the two sons of the rebel leader, both of whom he killed. The rebel army was completely routed and Offa returned home victorious. His father Warmundus resigned the throne in his favour, and died soon afterwards. He was buried at Gloucester.” The story was probably handed down orally long before it was written down by a monk. But it reflects the actual struggle between military leaders for the royal power which was becoming hereditary at the time.
The kings became the greatest landowners and they granted lands in the conquered country to their warriors. For his military service the king’s warrior would get 5 hides, that is, about 250 hectares of land. Following the king’s example the Anglo-Saxon nobility recruited warriors for themselves too. They also gave pieces of land to their warriors who under their command had to fight for the king when called upon to do so. Those tribesmen who owned the largest amounts of land gradually formed a permanent group of men-at-arms. The Anglo-Saxon laws of the 8th-9th centuries reflected the growing inequality. They said if anyone killed a free peasant he was sentenced to pay the fine, or wergild, as it was called, of 200 shillings; but the wergild representing the value of a noble’s life was 600 shillings.
The tribal nobility and king’s warriors owned such large estates that they were unable to cultivate them by themselves. Moreover, they prided themselves on being fighting men, it was beneath their dignity to engage in farming. First they made their slaves work their fields. Gradually the position of the slaves changed. Since slave labour was of very low productivity, their owners gave them small plots of land for their personal use. Now the slave was more interested in his labour because, though he had to spend much of his time working for the lord he could cultivate his own plot the rest of the time.
In the 7th-9th centuries gradual changes were taking place among the members of the community too. The arable land which had been held by separate families now became their private property. It could be not only inherited by the members of one family as before but it could be sold or presented or given in return for debts to another owner. As a result inequality among the members of the community was becoming more pronounced.
Frequent wars and crop failures ruined many peasants. Nearly every year some peasants had to give up farming because they were recruited into the army. Most of the community members were becoming poorer and poorer. Those few members of the community who had grown rich took advantage of the hard conditions of the impoverished peasants. A poor peasant had to ask a rich man for a loan. If he failed to pay his debt back in time, the rich man took his cattle or his plot of land in payment for the debt. Thus, some rich community members enlarged their land possessions at the expense of their impoverished neighbours and became great landowners. Those poor peasants who had lost their land were obliged to ask the rich landowners for a plot of land. The land they were given never became their property. The peasants only used or held these plots of land which were called “land-holdings”. In return for the land these peasants would work a part of their time on the landowner’s estate and would give him a certain portion of the corn they grew on their holdings. In this way many peasants fell into bondage.
There was another way in which peasants were losing their land and freedom. Frequent raids and wars caused the peasants great suffering. Raiders would come and burn their houses, trample over the peasants crops, drive away their cattle and even kill the peasant himself. The unarmed peasants had no one to protect them and nobody cared if they were robbed, wounded or murdered. They would, therefore, go to some great lord in the neighbourhood and hand over their land to him for “protection”. The land then would be given back to these peasants to live on and the landlord would promise to defend them. But now the peasants did not own their land, they merely held it. In return for their land-holdings they had to cultivate the lord’s field and give him a part of their harvest and promise to follow him in battle.
Besides, the Anglo-Saxon nobles with the help of their warriors began to seize the land of the free communities to make the free peasants work for them. The noble would raid a village and proclaim the village land his private property. The peasants usually went on farming the plots of land, but they were not owners of the land any longer. The noble would keep a considerable number of the strips for himself and the peasants would be given small landholdings. Now the peasants’ land-holdings ran alternately with the landlord’s strips and the peasants had to cultivate both the landlord’s land and their own holdings.
The royal power helped to place the free peasants under the power of the rich landowners. The kings had the right to collect dues from the whole population of the country. Quite often they granted this right to their warriors. The kings also granted them the right to administer justice in the neighbourhood. As a result many free peasants found themselves in the power of the neighbouring landowner. Though they lived on their own land, quite often they had to work for their powerful neighbour. A considerable number of peasants became semi-bondsmen in this way and gradually lost their freedom.
Thus, in the 7th-9th centuries feudal relations were beginning to develop among the Anglo-Saxons, that is, a class of rich landowners was forming and the free peasants were gradually losing their land and freedom. But it was a slow process in Britain. Though some peasants were already in bondage and others had plots of land too small to live on, the majority of the population in the 8th-9th centuries consisted of free peasants who cultivated their own land.
[1] The usual trial was as follows. – Суд обычно проходил следующим образом.
[2] The effect of the conquest . . . was to increase the wealth– В результате завоевания . . . выросли богатства
[3] Beowulf [´berəwulf]
[4] Sutton Hoo [´sAtən "hH ]
[5] the first royal grave to have come down to us – первая королевская могила, которая сохранилась до нашего времени
[6] Warmundus [´wLməndəs]
[7] Riganus [´rIgənəs]