§ 1. Book-land and the Land-book.
Reading edition
The lands of the churches.
Now these charters or land-books are, with hardly any exceptions, ecclesiastical title-deeds. Most of them are deeds whereby lands were conveyed to the churches; some are deeds whereby lands were conveyed to men who conveyed them to the churches. Partial, one-sided and in details untrustworthy though the testimony that they bear may be, there is still one general question that they ought to answer and we ought to ask. Domesday Book shows us many of the churches as the lords of wide and continuous tracts of land. Now about this important element in the feudal structure the land-books ought to tell us something. They ought to tell us how the churches acquired their territories; they ought to tell us what class of men made gifts of land to the churches; they ought to tell us whether those gifts were of big tracts or of small pieces. For example, let us remember how Domesday Book shows us that four minsters, Worcester, Evesham, Pershore and Westminster, were lords of seven-twelfths of Worcestershire, that the church of Worcester was lord of one quarter of that shire and lord of the triple hundred of Oswaldslaw. How did that church become the owner of a quarter of a county, to say nothing of lands in other shires? We ought to be able to answer this question in general terms, for among the charters that have come down to us there is no series which is longer, there is hardly a long series which is of better repute, than the line of the land-books which belonged to the church of Worcester. They come to us for the more part in the form of a cartulary compiled not long after the Conquest by the monk Heming at the instance of Bishop Wulfstan[858].
How the churches acquired their lands.
Now the answer that they give to our question is this:—With but few exceptions, the donors of these lands were kings or under-kings, kings or under-kings of the Mercians, kings of the English, and the gifts were large gifts. Very often the charter comprised a tract of land which in Domesday Book appears as a whole vill or as several contiguous vills. Seldom indeed is the subject-matter of the gift described as being a villa or a vicus:—the king merely says that he gives so many manses or the land of so many manentes at a certain place. Still, if we compare these charters with Domesday Book, we shall become convinced that very often the land given was of wide extent. For example, Domesday Book tells us that the church of Worcester holds Sedgebarrow (Seggesbarue) where it has four hides for geld, but eight plough teams. How was this acquired? The monks answer that three centuries ago, in 777, Aldred the under-king of the Hwiccas gave them viculum qui nuncupatur aet Segcesbaruue iiii. mansiones, that land having been giving to him by Offa king of the Mercians in order that the soul of the subregulus might have something done for it[859]. In the Conqueror’s reign the Archbishop of Canterbury held a great estate in Middlesex of which Harrow was the centre, and which contained no less than 100 hides. Already in 832 the archbishop or his church had 104 hides at Harrow[860]. Here we will state our belief, its grounds will appear in another essay, that the ‘manses’ that the kings throw about by fives and tens and twenties, are no small holdings, but hides each of which contains, or is for fiscal purposes deemed to contain, some 120 acres of arable land together with stretches, often wide stretches, of wood, meadow and waste, the extent of which varies from case to case. From the seventh century onwards the kings are giving large territories to the churches. One instance is beyond suspicion, for Bede attests it. In 686 or thereabouts Æthelwealh king of the South Saxons gave to Bishop Wilfrid the land of eighty-seven families in the promontory of Selsey, and among its inhabitants were two hundred and fifty male and female slaves[861]. This gift comprised a spacious tract of country; it comprised what then were, or what afterwards became, the sites of many villages[862]. But to whichever of our oldest churches we turn, the story that it proclaims in its title-deeds is always the same:—We obtained our lands by means of royal grants; we obtained them not in little pieces, here a few acres and there a few, but in great pieces. Canterbury and Winchester echo the tale that is told by Worcester. Another example may be given. It is one that has been carefully examined of late. In 739 King Æthelheard of Wessex gave to Forthhere bishop of Sherborne twenty cassati at the place called ‘Cridie.’ Thereby he disposed of what now are ‘the parishes of Crediton, Newton St. Cyres, Upton Pyne, Brampford Speke, Hittesleigh, Drewsteignton, Colebrooke, Morchard Bishop, Sandford, Kennerleigh and the modern parish of Sherwood, part of Cheriton Bishop, and possibly the whole of Clannaborough.’ He disposed of the whole and more than the whole of the modern ‘hundred’ of Crediton[863]. Then, to choose one last instance, it is said that already in 679 Osric of the Hwiccas gave to an abbess centum manentes qui adiacent civitati quae vocatur Hát Bathu[864]. It is not unlikely that this means that a king newly converted to Christianity disposed by one deed of many square leagues of land, namely, of the hundred of Bath[865]. The kingdom of the Hwiccas was not boundless. If Osric executed a few more charters of this kind he would soon have ‘booked’ it all.
The earliest books.
Let us then examine with some care the charters that come to us from the earliest period, a period which shall begin with the year 600 and end with the year 750. From this time we have some forty charters sufficiently genuine for our present purpose. With hardly an exception the grantor is a king or an under-king, while the grantee is a dead saint, a church, a bishop, an abbot, or a body of monks. If the grantee is a layman, the gift is made to him in order that he may found a minster. If this purpose is not expressed, it is to be understood. Thus in 674 or thereabouts Wulfhere king of the Mercians gives five manses to his kinsman Berhtferth as a perpetual inheritance. Berhtferth is to have full power to give them to whom he pleases, and we are not told that he proposes to devote them to pious uses. Nevertheless, the king makes the gift ‘for the love of Almighty God and of his faithful servant St. Peter[866].’ In other cases the lay donee is to hold the land ‘by church right’ or ‘by minster right[867].’ Indeed there seems to be no single deed of this period which does not purport upon its face to be in some sort an ecclesiastical act, an act done for the good of the church[868].
Exotic character of the book.
These charters are documents of ecclesiastical origin; they are also documents of foreign origin. The bishops and abbots have brought or have imported models from abroad. The ‘books’ that they induce the kings to sign are full of technical phrases which already have an ancient history. By way of illustration we will notice one point at which there is an instructive resemblance and an instructive contrast. On the Continent a grantor of lands ends his conveyance with a ‘penal stipulation.’ If an heir of his controverts the deed, he is to pay a certain sum, and none the less the conveyance is to remain in full force. In England we can not thus stipulate for a pecuniary penalty; the land-book is still so purely an ecclesiastical affair that the punishment of its violator must be left to the church and to God. So instead of stipulating that he shall pay money, we stipulate that he shall be excommunicated and, if impenitent, damned, but we do not forget to add that none the less the conveyance shall remain as valid and effectual as ever. ‘If anyone,’ says Eadric of Kent, ‘shall attempt to go against this gift, let him be separated from all Christianity and the body and blood of Jesus Christ, manentem hanc donationis chartulam[869] in sua nihilominus firmitate.’ Such words may look somewhat out of place in their new surroundings; but they are part of a venerable formula[870].
The book purports to confer ownership.
But what is the model to which in the last resort these documents go back? A conveyance by a Roman landowner. He has in the land full and absolute dominium and is going to transfer this to another. Let us observe that the recorded motive which prompts a king to set his cross, or rather Christ’s cross, to a land-book is a purely personal motive. He wishes to save his soul, he desires pardon for his crimes[871]. Of the welfare of his realm he says nothing; but his soul must be saved. Sometimes he will give land to an under-king or to an ealdorman, for they also have souls and may desire salvation[872]. He is acting as a private landowner might act. Then he uses terms and phrases which belong to the realm of pure private law. He asserts in the most energetic of all the words that the law of the lower empire could provide that he is a landowner and that he is going to transfer landownership. The land in question is tellus mea[873] or it is terra iuris mei[874]. Then it is the very land itself that he gives, the land of so many manses, ‘with all the appurtenances, fields, pastures, woods, marshes.’ It is no mere right over the land that he gives, but the very soil itself. Next let us observe the terms in which the act of conveyance is stated:—perpetualiter trado et de meo iure in tuo transscribo terram ... ut tam tu quam posteri tui teneatis, possideatis et quaecunque volueris de eadem terra facere liberam habeatis potestatem[875]. The Latin language of the time had no terms more potent or precise than these. Or again: aliquantulam agri partem ... Waldhario episcopo in dominio donare decrevimus[876]. Or again: aeternaliter et perseverabiliter possideat abendi vel dandi cuicumque eligere voluerit[877]. But it is needless to multiply examples.
Does the book really confer ownership?
No doubt then, if we bring to the interpretation of these instruments the ideas of an earlier or of a later time, the ideas of ancient Rome or of modern Europe, we see the king as a landowner conferring on the churches landownership pure and simple. The fact on which our constitutional historians have laid stress, namely, that sometimes (for we must not overstate the case) the king says that the bishops and his great men are consenting to his deed, important though it may be in other contexts, is of little moment here. The king is put before us as the owner of the land conveyed; it is, he says, terra mea, terra iuris mei. The rule, if rule it be, that he must not give away his land without the consent of bishops and nobles in no way denies his ownership. However, we are at the moment more concerned with the fact, or seeming fact, that what he gives to the churches is ownership and nothing less.
The book really conveys a superiority.
But if we loyally accept this seeming fact and think it over, to what conclusions shall we not be brought, when we remember how wide were the lands which the churches acquired from the kings, when we think once more how by virtue of royal gifts the church of Worcester acquired a quarter of a county? When these lands were given to the church were they waste lands? It is plain that this was not the common case. Already there were manses, there were arable fields, there were meadows, there were tillers of the soil. One of two conclusions seems to follow. Either the king really did own these large districts, and the tillers of the soil were merely his slaves or coloni, who were conveyed along with the soil, or else the clear and emphatic language of the charters sadly needs explanation. Now if we hold by the letter of the charters, if we say that the king really does confer landownership upon the churches, there will be small room left for any landowners in England save the kings, the churches and perhaps a few great nobles. This is a theory which for many reasons we can not adopt; no one can adopt it who is not prepared to believe that Britain was conquered by a handful of chieftains without followers. The only alternative course seems that of saying that many of the land-books even of the earliest period, despite their language, convey not the ownership of land, but (the term must be allowed us) a ‘superiority’ over land and over free men.
A modern analogy.
Let us for a moment remember that the wording of a modern English conveyance might easily delude a layman or a foreigner. An impecunious earl, we will say, sells his ancient family estate. We look at the deed whereby this sale is perfected. The Earl of A. grants unto B. C. and his heirs all the land delineated on a certain map and described in a certain schedule. That in substance is all that the deed tells us. We look at the map; we see a tract of many thousand acres, which, besides a grand mansion, has farm-houses, cottages, perhaps, entire villages upon it. The schedule tells us the names of the fields and of the farm-houses. Like enough no word will hint that any one lives in the houses and cottages, or that any one, save the seller, has any right of any kind in any part of this wide territory. But what is the truth? Perhaps a hundred different men, farmers and cottagers, have rights of different kinds in various portions of the tract. Some have leases, some have ‘agreements for leases,’ some hold for terms of years, some hold from year to year, some hold at will. The rights of these tenants stand, as it were, between the purchaser and the land that he has bought. He has bought the benefit, and the burden also, of a large mass of contracts. But of these things his conveyance says nothing[878]. And so again, in the brief charters of the thirteenth century a feoffor will say no more than that he has given manerium meum de Westona, as though the manor of Weston were some simple physical object like a black horse, and yet under analysis this manerium turns out to be a complex tangle of rights in which many men, free and villein, are concerned.
Conveyance of superiority in early times.
But it will be said that all this is the result of ‘feudalism.’ It implies just that dismemberment of the dominium which is one of feudalism’s main characteristics. Undoubtedly in the twelfth century the free tenant in fee simple who holds land ‘in demesne’ can have, must have, a lord above him, who also holds and is seised of that land and who will speak of the land as his. But we are now in the age before feudalism, in the seventh and eighth centuries. Are we to believe that the free owner of Kemble’s ‘ethel, hid, or alod’ might have above him, perhaps always had above him, not merely a lord (for a personal relation of patronage between lord and man is not to the point), but a landlord: one who would speak of that ‘ethel, hid or alod’ as terra iuris mei: one who to save his soul would give lsquo;that land to a church and tell the bishop or abbot to do whatever he pleased with it? If we believe this, shall we not be believing that so far as English history can be carried there is no age before ‘feudalism’.
Illustrations.
We will glance for a moment at two transactions which took place near the end of the seventh century. Bede tells how Æthelwealh king of the South Saxons was persuaded to become a Christian by Wulfhere king of the Mercians. The Mercian received the South Saxon as his godson and by way of christening-gift gave him two provinces, namely the Isle of Wight and the territory of the Meanwari in Wessex, perhaps the hundreds of Meon in Hampshire[879]. Then the same Bede tells us that the same Æthelwealh gave to Bishop Wilfrid a land of eighty-seven families, to wit, the promontory of Selsey: he gave it with its fields and its men, among whom were two hundred and fifty male and female slaves[880]. A modern reader will perhaps see here two very different transactions. In the one case he sees ‘the cession of a province’ by one king to another, and possibly he thinks how Queen Victoria ceded Heligoland to her imperial grandson:—the act is an act of public law, a transfer of sovereignty. In the other case he sees a private act, the gift of an estate for pious uses. But Bede and his translator saw little, if any, difference between the two gifts: in each case Bede says ‘donavit’; the translator in the one case says ‘forgeaf,’ in the other ‘geaf and sealde.’ Now it will hardly be supposed that the Isle of Wight had no inhabitants who were not the slaves or the coloni of the king, and, that being so, we are not bound to suppose that there were no free landowners in the promontory of Selsey. May it not be that what Æthelwealh had to give and gave to Wilfrid was what in our eyes would be far rather political power than private property.
What had the king to give?
But over the free land of free landowners what rights had the king which he could cede to another king or to a prelate, saying withal that the subject of his gift was land? He had, as we think, rights of two kinds that were thus alienable; we may call them fiscal rights and justiciary rights, though such terms must be somewhat too precise when applied to the vague thought of the seventh and eighth centuries. Of justiciary rights we shall speak below. As to the rights that we call fiscal, we find that the king is entitled to something that he calls tributum, vectigal, to something that he calls pastus, victus, the king’s feorm; also there is military service to be done, and the king, when making a gift, may have a word to say about this.
The king’s alienable rights.
Now it must at once be confessed that the charters of this early period seldom suggest any such confusion between political power and ownership as that which we postulate. Still from time to time hints are given to us that should not be ignored. Thus a Kentish king shortly after the middle of the eighth century gave to the church of Rochester twenty ploughlands, not only ‘with the fields, woods, meadows, pastures, marshes and waters thereto pertaining,’ but also ‘with the tributum which was paid thence to the king[881].’ Such a phrase would hardly be appropriate if the king were giving land of which he was the absolute owner, land cultivated for him by his slaves.
Military service as a burden on land.
A little more light is thrown on the matter by the first rude specimens of a clause that is to become common in after times, the clause of immunity. Already in the seventh century Wulfhere of Mercia, having made a gift of five manses, adds: ‘Let this land remain free to all who have it, from all earthly hardships, known or unknown, except fastness and bridge and the common host[882].’ So in 732 a king of Kent says: ‘And no royal due shall be found in it henceforth, saving such as is common to all church lands in this Kent[883].’ Æthelbald of Mercia says: ‘By my royal power I decree that it be free for ever from all tribute of secular payments, labours and burdens, so that the said land may render service to none but Almighty God and the church[884].’ Yet more instructive, if we may rely upon it, is the foundation charter of Evesham Abbey. Æthelweard has given twelve manses: he then says, ‘I decree that for the future this land be free from all public tribute, purveyance, royal works, military service (ab omni publico vectigali, a victu, ab expeditione, ab opere regio) so that all things in that place which are valuable and useful may serve the church of St. Mary, that is to say, the brethren serving [God] there; save this, that if in the island belonging to the said land there shall chance to be an unusual supply of mast, the king may have pasture for fattening one herd of pigs, but beyond this no pasture shall be set out for any prince or potentate[885].’ Now in the first place, these charters speak as though military service is due from land:—I (says the king) declare this land to be free from the ‘fyrd,’ from the expeditio—or—I declare that it is free from all earthly burdens, except military service and the duty of repairing bridge and burh. We are not saying that there is already military tenure, but we do say that already the ‘fyrd’ is conceived as a burden on land, in so much that the phrase ‘This land is—or is not—to be free of military service’ has a meaning. But after all, land never fights: men fight. Of what men then is the king speaking when he says that the land is, or is not, free from the expeditio? Not of the donees themselves, for they are bishops and monks and serve in no army but God’s. Not of the slaves who are on the land, for they are not ‘fyrd-worthy.’ He is speaking of free men who live on the land; he is declaring that when he has, if so modern a term be suffered, ‘attorned’ them to the church, they will still have to serve in warfare, or he is declaring that they will be free even from this duty to the state in order that the land may be the more absolutely at the service of God and His stewards.
The king’s feorm.
Then military service, along with the duty of repairing bridges and fastnesses, belongs to a genus of dues, of which unfortunately we get but a vague description. There are vectigalia publica, opera regia, onera saecularia, there is tributum, there is victus. How much of the information that we get about these matters from later days we may carry back with us to the earliest period it is difficult to say. Apparently the king, the under-king, even the ealdorman, has a certain right of living at the expense of his subjects, of making a progress through the villages and quartering himself, his courtiers, his huntsmen, his dogs and horses upon the folk of the townships, of exacting a ‘one night’s farm’ from this village, a ‘two nights’ farm’ from that. The men who have to bear these exactions may well be free men and free landowners; still over them the king has certain rights and rights that he can give away. According to our interpretation of the charters, it is often enough such rights as these that the king is giving when he says that he is giving terram iuris mei. He declares, it will be observed, that the land is to be free from vectigalia and opera to which it has heretofore been subject. But does he mean by this to benefit the occupiers of the soil? No, he has no care whatever to relieve them. Bent on saving his soul, his care is that the land shall be wholly devoted to the service of God. As we understand the matter, whatever vectigalia and opera the king has hitherto exacted from these men the church will now exact. The king has conveyed what he had to convey, a superiority over free landowners.
Nature of the feorm.
It is permissible to doubt whether modern historians have fully realized the extent of the rights which the king had over the land of free landowners. In the middle of Ine’s laws, which follow each other in no rational order, we suddenly come upon an isolated text, which says this: ‘For 10 hides “to foster” 10 vessels of honey, 300 loaves, 12 ambers of Welsh ale, 30 of clear [ale], 2 old [i.e. full grown] oxen or 10 wethers, 10 geese, 20 hens, 10 cheeses, an amber full of butter, 5 salmon, 20 poundsweight of fodder and a hundred eels[886].’ The context throws no light upon the sentence; but in truth no sentence in Ine’s laws has a context. What is its meaning? We can not but think that this foster is the king’s victus[887]. Once a year from every ten hides he is entitled to this feorm. Perhaps it is a ‘one night’s feorm’; for it may be enough to support a king of the seventh century and a modest retinue during twenty-four hours. Still it will be no trifling burden upon the land, even if we suppose the hide to have 120 arable acres or thereabouts. Suppose that the king transfers his right over a single hide to some bishop or abbot, the donee will be entitled to receive from that hide a rent which can not be called insignificant. We dare not argue that this law is a general law for the whole of Wessex. It may refer only to some newly settled and allotted districts. There are other hints in these laws of Ine of some large land-settlement, an allotment of land among great men who have become bound to bring under cultivation a district theretofore waste[888]. But it is difficult to dissociate the foster of these laws from the victus of the charters, and, quite apart from this disputable passage, we have plenty of proof that the king’s victus was an incumbrance which pressed heavily upon the lands of free landowners[889]. If in England the duty of feeding the king as he journeys through the country developed into a regular tax or rent this would not stand alone. That duty plays a considerable part in the Scandinavian law-books, and in the Denmark of the thirteenth century we may find arrangements which are very like that set forth in Ine’s law. Every hundred (herad), taken as a whole, has to contribute something towards the king’s support. Often it is a round sum of money; but often it will consist of provisions necessary to maintain the king’s household during a night or two or three nights (servicium unius noctis, servicium duarum noctium). Then the ‘service of two nights’ is accurately defined. It consists of, among other things, 26 salted pigs, 14 live pigs, 16 salted oxen, 16 salted sheep, 360 fowls, 180 geese, 360 cheeses, corn, malt, fodder, butter, herrings, stock-fish, pepper and salt. This revenue stands apart from the revenue derived from the crown lands; it is regarded as a tax rather than a rent; but it is to this extent rooted in the soil, that the amount due from each hundred (herad) is fixed[890]. There is a great deal to make us think that at a quite early time in England such arrangements as this had been made. If we look at the charters we find that the king is always giving away manses in fives and tens, fifteens and twenties. This symmetry, this prevalence of a decimal system, we take to be artificial; already the manse, or hide, is a fiscal unit, a fraction of a district which has to supply the king with food or with money in lieu of food[891]
Tribute and rent.
Whatever be the origin of the king’s feorm—and if we find it in the voluntary gifts which yet barbarous Germans make to their kings, we may none the less have to admit that it has been touched by the influence of the Roman tributum—it becomes either a rent or a tax. We may call it the one, or we may call it the other, for so long as the recipient of it is the king, the law of the seventh and eighth centuries will hardly be able to tell which it is[892]. The king begins to give it away: in the hands of his donees, in the hands of the churches, it becomes a rent. This is not all, however, that the king has to give, or that the king does give, when he says that he is giving land. That he may be giving away the profits of justice, that he may be giving jurisdiction itself, we shall argue hereafter. But probably he has even in early days yet other things to give, and at any rate in course of time he discovers that such is the case. He can give the right to take toll, he can give market rights[893]. It is by no means impossible that he has forest rights, some general claim to place uncultivated land under his ban, if he would hunt therein, and some general claim to the nobler kinds of fish[894]. Then again, in the eleventh century we find men owing services to the king which he still receives rather as king than as landlord, and the sporadic distribution of these services seems to show that they are not of modern origin. Such are, for example, the ‘inwards’ and the ‘averages’ which are done by the free men of Cambridgeshire[895]. We are told in a general way that the thegn owes fyrdfare, burh-bót and lang="ang" xml:lang="ang">brycg-bót, but that from many lands—the lands comprised within no privilege, no franchise—‘a greater land-right arises at the king’s ban’; for there is the king’s deer-hedge to be made, there are warships to be provided, there are sea-ward and head-ward[896]. Every increase in the needs of the state, in the power of the state, gives the king new rights in the land, consolidates his seignory over the land. If a fleet be formed to resist the Danes, the king has something to dispose of, a new immunity for sale. If a geld be levied to buy off the Danes, the king can sell a freedom from this tax, or he can tell the monks of St. Edmundsbury that they may levy the tax from their men and keep it for their own use[897]. This, we argue, is not a new abuse, a phenomenon which first appears in the evil feudal time when men began to confuse imperium with dominium, kingship with landlordship, office with property, tax with rent. On the contrary, we must begin with confusion. In some of the very earliest land-books that have come down to us what the king really gives, when he says that he is giving land, is far rather his kingly superiority over land and landowners than anything that we dare call ownership[898]
Mixture of ownership and superiority.
Not that this is always the case. Very possible is it that from the first the king had villages which were peopled mainly by his theows and læts, and intertribal warfare may have increased their number. But the charters, for all their apparent precision, will not enable us to distinguish between these cases and others in which the villages are full of free landowners and their slaves. The charters are not engendered by the English facts; they are foreign, ecclesiastical, Roman. By such documents, to our thinking, the king gives what he has to give. In one case it may be a full ownership of a village or of some scattered steads; in another it may be a superiority, which when analyzed will turn out to be a right of exacting supplies of provender from the men of the village; in a third, and perhaps a common case, the same village will contain the mansi serviles of the king’s slaves and the mansi ingenuiles of free landowners. He no more thinks of distinguishing by the words of his charter his governmental power over free men and their land from his ownership of his slaves and the land that they are tilling, than his successor of the eleventh or twelfth century will think of making similar distinctions when he bestows a ‘manor’ or an ‘honour.’
The king’s superiority.
We have been suggesting and shall continue to suggest that at a very early time, a time beyond which our land-books will not carry us, the king is beginning to discover that the whole land which he rules is in a certain and a profitable sense his land. He can give it away; he can barter it in exchange for spiritual benefits, and this he can do without wronging the free landholders who are in possession of that land, for what he really gives is the dues (it is too early to say the ‘service’) that they have owed to him and will henceforth owe to his donee. Let us remember that his successors will undoubtedly be able to do this. In a certain sense, Henry II., for example, will have all England to give away. If we were to put an extreme case, we might have to reckon with possible rebellions; but every single hide of England Henry can give without wronging any one. Suppose that C has been holding a tract as the king’s tenant in chief by service worth £5 a year, Henry can make a grant of that land to B, and by this grant C will not be wronged. Henceforth C will hold of B, and B of the king. Suppose that, on the occasion of this grant, services worth £2 a year are reserved, then the king has it in his power to grant the land yet once more: to grant it, let us say, to the Abbot of A, who is to hold in frankalmoin; C will not be wronged, B will not be wronged. What the king has done with one hide he can do with every hide in England; piece by piece he can give all England away. We have been suggesting and shall continue to suggest that at a very early time, even in the first days of English Christianity, the king is beginning to discover that he has some such power as that which his successors will exercise. This barbarous chieftain learns that his political sway over the folk involves a proprietary and alienable element of which he can make profit. It involves a right to feorm and a right to wites. The beef and the cheese and the Welsh ale that he might have levied from a district he invests, if we may so speak, in what he is being taught to regard as the safest and most profitable of all securities. He obtains not only remission of his sins, but also the friendship and aid of bishops and clergy. And so large stretches of land are ‘booked’ to the churches. It is to be feared that if the England of the sixth century had been visited by modern Englishmen, the Saxon chieftains would have been awakened to a consciousness of their ‘booking’ powers by offers of gin and rifles.
Book-land and church right.
In its original form and when put to its original purpose the land-book is no mere deed of gift; it is a dedication. Under the sanction of a solemn anathema, a tract of land is devoted to the service of God. A very full power of disposing of it is given to the bishop or the abbot, who is God’s servant. As yet the law has none of those subtle ideas which in after ages will enable it to treat him as ‘a corporation sole’ or as ‘a trustee,’ nor can the folk-law meddle much with the affairs of God. The bishop or abbot must be able to leave the land to whom he pleases, to institute an heir. Thus ‘book-land’ stands, as it were, outside the realm of the folk-law. In all probability the folk-law of this early period knows no such thing as testamentary power. Testamentary power can only be created by the words of a book, by an anathema. But laymen are not slow to see that they can make use of this new institution for purposes of their own, which are not always very pious purposes. By a pretext that he is going to construct a minster, a man will obtain a book garnished with the crosses of bishops. One day calling himself an abbot and the next day calling himself a king’s thegn, a layman among ecclesiastics, an ecclesiastic among laymen, he will shirk all duties that are owed to state and church. Already Bede complains of this in a wise and famous letter. He advocates a resumption of these inconsiderate and misplaced gifts, and reproves the prelates for subscribing the books[899]. His letter may have done good; but laymen still obtained books which authorized them to hold land ‘by church right.’ Thus Offa of Mercia gave to an under-king lands at Sedgebarrow ‘in such wise that he might have them during his life, and in exercise of full power might leave them to be possessed by church right[900].’ Thereupon the subregulus, as a modern English lawyer might say, executed this power of appointment in favour of the church of Worcester. The same Offa gave land to his thegn Dudda so that by church right he might enjoy it during his life and leave it on his death to whom he would[901]
Book-land and testament.
We must wait for a later age before we shall find the kings freely booking lands to their thegns without any allusion to ecclesiastical purposes. Indeed it may be said that the Anglo-Saxon land-book never ceases to be an ecclesiastical instrument. True that in the tenth century the kings are booking lands to their thegns with great liberality; true also that there is no longer any pretence that the land so booked will go to endow a church; but let us observe these books and let us not ignore the recitals that they contain. Why does the king make these grants? He says that it is because he hopes for an eternal reward in the everlasting mansions. This has perhaps become an empty phrase: but it has a history. Also it is needed in order to make the deed a logical whole. Let us observe the sequence of the clauses:—‘Whereas the fashion of this world passeth away but the joys of heaven are eternal; therefore I give land to my thegn so that he may enjoy it during his life and leave it on his death to whomsoever he pleases, and if any one shall come against this charter may he perish for ever; I have confirmed this gift with the sign of Christ’s holy cross[902].’ Some piety in the harangue (arenga) is necessary in order to lead up to the anathema and the cross; it justifies the intervention of the bishops, who also will make crosses and thereby will be denouncing the church’s ban against any one who violates the charter. And who, we may ask, is likely to violate the charter? The donee’s kinsfolk may be tempted to do this if the donee makes use of that testamentary power which has been granted to him (as, for instance, by leaving the land to a church) more especially because it may be very doubtful whether in impeaching such a testament they will not have the folk-law on their side. Such in brief outline is—so we think—the history of book-land. It is land (or rather in many cases a superiority) held by royal privilege[903] under the sanction of the anathema.