Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (13 page)

The thegns had a much more direct relation to their land than had the great absentee landlords of the previous epoch. They created villages on their estates, taking the place of scattered farms and hamlets, so that their workers could be more easily housed and controlled. Villages were in existence in the period of Roman
dominance, and similar settlements could be found in the Iron Age. Continuity is once more the key. But the village became the defining feature of a large part of the English countryside only in the ninth and tenth centuries. There is no village still in existence (except for those formed during the Industrial Revolution) that was not established by the twelfth century. If you dig deep into the village soil, you will find its ancient roots. Some of them, not the majority, have been in existence for thousands of years. But they are absent from certain territories. Down the middle of England, from Northumberland to Wiltshire, numerous villages are to be found; beyond that great expanse, in the north and in the west, the Iron Age landscape of scattered farms and hamlets survived.

The thegn built his wooden halled residence with smaller outbuildings; this manor was defended with a bank and ditch together with a palisaded fence. He built a small church, also of wood, with a bell tower to call his workers to prayer and to divide their day. Eventually he set up his own court. A well was sunk and before long a mill was built for grinding corn. The country village was not some comfortable and affable idyll; for its poorest residents it was a form of outdoor prison. The agricultural workers lived in buildings that were little more than wooden huts that they shared with their livestock. The ploughman, in a text of the eleventh century, laments his cruel life; he lives in fear of ‘my lord’ and must plough an acre or more in even the coldest weather. The boy who drives the oxen with his goad is hoarse from shouting.

The labourers were slowly reduced in status; for two days each week they performed services for the lord in return for a house and for a smallholding of land from which they could feed their families. Their duties included harvesting and ploughing, carting and haymaking, shearing sheep and constructing the stalls for oxen. Somebody would be ordered to uproot the weeds or to dig a ditch, to run an errand or mend a hedge. Independent farmers still existed, of course, but a large section of the peasantry was ground down by need, misfortune, or misjudgment. Taxes had to be paid. The threat of murrain, to the crops and to the oxen, was constant. Life, for small farmers, was very uncertain. Undoubtedly many of their farms were bought up by the larger landowners. It would be impossible to convey the sheer complexity of the grades and
divisions among the working population. It is enough to understand that this was a society of intricate divisions with nice variations in degrees of freedom and unfreedom, where every single person was susceptible to certain claims from superiors.

The history of the village is so entwined with the history of the fields that they cannot be separated. As villages replaced hamlets, so in many shires large fields divided into strips supplanted the older rectangular fields. The lord of the manor had the most land, of course, but the rest was assigned by lot to the individual villagers. This was the most just and methodical way of sharing out the territory. It was also the only way that the land could be efficiently ploughed, by being made available to large plough-teams. The interest of the community, and of the lord, came before that of the individual. The procedure was also accompanied by a form of crop rotation, so that land left fallow for one year was sown the next. This system of common fields lasted until the passing of the Enclosure Acts in the eighteenth century, maintained by the force of custom and communal arrangement.

Other aspects of English life were also being more sharply defined. Towns, small and large, were acquiring unique identities. Some of them grew out of the Romanized towns, and some of them emerged from the burghs established by Alfred; others occupied the sites of large trading settlements on the coast or along the routes of the rivers, while yet more were simply part of the expansion of the large Christian minsters. By the last three decades of the tenth century they were bursting into life, taking advantage of a general rise in population and prosperity throughout the country.

The towns were crammed with buildings and with workshops. In Canterbury the houses stood 2 feet (0.6 metres) apart, enough room for the rain to drip freely from the eaves. The evidence of glassware and pottery, of metalworking and leatherworking, suggests a true urban community. The populations of Norwich and Lincoln were approximately 6,000, while those of London and York were appreciably higher. The people of other towns may be numbered in hundreds rather than thousands. Yet they were living together without agricultural or proprietary ties; this is nowhere more evident than in the fact that the inhabitants of the towns
were deemed to be free. They had no lord except the king. The hand of the monarch is in fact evident everywhere, since most towns were royal creations with their streets and defences laid out by royal command. They became engines for making money from taxes and trade. Where there is money, there is power and hierarchy. The towns became self-governing, with the administration of their courts and markets in the hands of ‘elders’ or ‘seniors’ who formed themselves into guilds. It was a new form of kinship in a country that was redefining its tribal nature.

It is no accident that the English parish emerges in this period. It is part of the same appetite for definition and control – for discipline – that accompanied the growth of a united kingdom under a powerful king. You cannot separate religion from social restraint. The chapel of the thegn became the parish church, and the parish system itself arose directly out of the manors and villages that had spread across the country. By the twelfth century, the organization was complete. The parish became the centre of communal action. It survived unchanged until the last decades of the nineteenth century. The great minsters and monasteries decayed, or changed their function, and by the ninth century little churches had begun to fill the countryside. They were generally built of timber, unplastered, and enclosed a rectangular space divided into one or two ‘cells’. In the eleventh century the wood was replaced with a fabric of stone, and the interiors of the small churches began to be ornamented and painted.

The church was not always used for sacred purposes. The contemporary literature suggests that it might be used as a meetingplace, a covered market, or even as an alehouse. The parish priests themselves were often illiterate, and many complaints were made about their drunkenness and violence. They were often married. They might be slaves employed by the lord of the manor. They were in any case little better than the lord’s servants, who worked in the fields when they were not in their churches. They carried knives. They exercised control over the villagers in every sense. These ‘Mass priests’, as they were known, were supposed to catechize children, administer the sacraments and repeat the rudimentary truths of the Christian faith. But in many parishes they also were treated as ‘cunning men’ who practised rural magic. They
were as experienced in pagan customs as in Christian practice. It is hard to realize the sheer earthiness of life in these centuries, where people and cattle slept beneath the same roof and where the priest might be an unshaven scoundrel.

The men of the ninth and tenth centuries wore their hair long. If you pulled it you merited a fine, and forcible cutting of the hair was considered to be as criminal as cutting off a nose or ear. The clothes were simple, consisting principally of cloaks and tunics made of woollen cloth; yet the wealthy were heavily adorned with rings and brooches. When some Englishmen were imprisoned in Syria, during the eighth century, the native inhabitants came to see them and to wonder at the beauty of their clothes. The arms and faces of both men and women were tattooed. The richer women wore long flowing tunics, ornamented with gold, and their heads were covered with silk or linen that was wrapped around the neck. Both sexes loved bright colours such as scarlet and green and pink. And both sexes delighted in perfume. Heavy drinking was commonplace, as it has been in all stages of English history. 50 per cent of the people died before the age of thirty, and 90 per cent before the age of fifty. Death was always close at hand.

6

The measure of the king

At the beginning of the twelfth century, in the reign of Henry I, it was declared that the measurement of the yard (0.9 metres) should be ‘the distance from the tip of the king’s nose to the end of his outstretched thumb’. Yet what gave the kings of England such significance and control? They represented the country in a physical, as well as a spiritual, manner. They embodied the country, in its coinage and in its judicial process, in its land tenure and in its religious life. The history of England cannot be written without a careful account of its sovereigns. For many centuries it was impossible to imagine a country without a king. It was believed that a king’s health would affect the health of the kingdom as a whole, and that the private vices of the king could provoke a public calamity. The image of England might be that of the king outstretched.

The origins of kingship cannot be found. We may deduce from the evidence of the Neolithic monuments that there was power in the land from the fourth millennium bc. Who once lay in the great works of Sutton Hoo or Avebury? The kings of the dead have also gone down into the earth.

And then we begin to see flashes of regal pre-eminence. The early Saxon kings claimed that they were descended from the gods, in particular from Woden, and it was believed that they possessed
magical powers. Even the supposedly saintly Edward the Confessor traced his descent from pagan Woden. In some more remote age of the world the king might also have been the high priest of the tribe. It is likely that, his true wife being a goddess, he was allowed to have intercourse with whomever he chose. This may help to account for the excessive promiscuity of later English kings; even until recent times they were always permitted and even expected to keep mistresses.

The Saxon kings were violent men, warlords in all but name, but they clothed themselves in the panoply of divine power. Their banners were carried before them wherever they walked. From the tenth century the kings took on classical and imperial titles such as
caesar
,
imperator
,
basileus
and
Augustus
. In their magnificence we may see traces of ancient British kings, combining wrathfulness and vengeance with spells and rituals. In essence it was the same authority wielded by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

The continuity is there. The promises made by King Edgar at his coronation in 973 were repeated in the coronation charter of Henry I, beginning with the words ‘In the name of the Holy Trinity! I promise three things to the Christian people subject to me! First, that God’s Church and all Christian people of my dominions shall keep true peace!’ The ceremony, devised by Archbishop Dunstan to crown Edgar at Bath, has been at the centre of every subsequent coronation. Much of it was employed, for example, at that of Elizabeth II in 1953. In his writings, particularly in his preface to the soliloquies of St Augustine, King Alfred reflects upon the divine power of the king, who is closer to God than anyone else in the realm; indeed, God Himself can be seen as ‘an exceedingly powerful king’. The damned souls of doomsday are compared to men ‘condemned before some king’.

From generation to generation the same message has been passed. The monarch has been anointed with holy oil, and is invested with divine power; he or she has been elected by God, rather than the people, and has been blessed by the Holy Spirit. That is why, from the tenth century, the king organized and controlled both the monasteries and the bishoprics; the strength and unity of the nation were materially assisted by the union of secular and ecclesiastical authority. The leading clergy were the
king’s servants, assisting him in times of peace and war. He was a Christus.

The main task of the king was indeed to lead his people into battle. By the aggrandizement of land and wealth he rendered the country more powerful and more worthy of God’s grace. All the land was his. He owned all highways and bridges, all monasteries and churches, all towns and rivers, all markets and fairs. That is why from the earliest times England was controlled by a minute and complex system of taxation. The coin itself was minted in the king’s name. The voice of the king was the voice of law; it could be said that he held the laws of the land in his breast. This was also the claim of Richard II, many centuries after his Saxon ancestors.

William the Conqueror did not need to create the role of a powerful and centralizing king, therefore; he simply had to take up the part acquired by him. He adopted his crown three times a year at a ceremony known as the festal crown-wearing; we may imagine a tableau in which the king, in silent possession of his majesty, receives the homage of his great lords. There had been such crown-wearings in the eighth century but the practice may lie further back. These three days of the year – Christmas, Easter and Pentecost – were also the days when the pagan kings of the north used to perform a ritual sacrifice for the sake of the people. So kingship had very ancient roots. It has been said that William borrowed from the customs of the Frankish or Roman or Byzantine civilizations; yet it may be that his true ancestors are to be found in those who ordered the building of Stonehenge.