PART II

THE SOCIAL SYSTEMS OF THE

MIDDLE AGES

(See EXPLANATION OF TECHNICAL WORDS, supra, p. xxvi)

CHAPTER V

THE CUSTOMS OF FEUDAL SOCIETY

BEFORE we enter on a consideration of the different systems of life which obtained in the British Isles in the twelfth century, one thing should be thoroughly understood. All early social systems, wherever we find them, appear to be founded in the first instance on a communal unit, the tribe, the sept, clan, greater family, group family, or joint family, and finally on the family in its smallest and most precise form, the rights and responsibilities of the individual being decided not by his independent personal value, but by his status as a member of the communal unit. All relations of life are social, whatever the form of society.

Early Society based on Kinship.-Underlying all these groups is the idea of kinship, either real or fictitious, between all the members, from the highest to the lowest; as the unit, tribe, group family, or family, settle definitely on a certain tract of land, every member of the kinship becomes ipso facto entitled to a share in the use of the land and in the other things acquired by the community, in proportion to joint responsibility for the debts and liabilities of the kinship. All persons outside the conception of the kinship have no rights at all, except as dependants of the community, who act through the chief, and in the first instance through the general assembly.

It is the early form of pure and real democracy and socialism, the chief being no more than primus inter pares,

his rights strictly limited and defined. He has a larger share appointed to him of the use of the common land, but he has no individual right except that of customary superintendence over other men's possessions.

Very soon indeed individual avarice, individual energy and ambition, individual fitness for leadership and supremacy, modify the conditions of this primitive democracy. The different communities vary in government, landownership, contract, legal procedure, morals.

At the date of Henry's accession in 1154, Northern and Western Scotland, Ireland, Man, and in some respects Wales, had been but little touched by Roman or outside European influences, except so far as Western Europe and the Isles themselves had been affected, by receiving Christianity from the tribal churches of Ireland and Wales, and by the Scandinavian invasions of the ninth to the eleventh centuries. We may expect to find in these parts various modifications of the ancient tribal community as described twelve centuries before by Tacitus and Cæsar.

We shall find at least three distinct phases of it in the Islands Irish, Welsh, and Scandinavian of Man, the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Western Isles.1 This archaic form of community co-exists in its fullness only with the pastoral life, and dies or develops in proportion to the degree in which the pastoral life gives way to arable land cultivation and

commerce.

With this archaic condition, the earliest historical type of society of the early world, the type to which all political and social institutions tend instinctively to revert, it would be most natural, and it would seem imperative to begin this account of medieval societies. It is in fact extremely inconvenient not so to begin.

But I shall not follow this course, for any history of the Islands ought to begin with England, whose story has been throughout of so much greater importance to the world than that of the rest of the Islands. We shall begin, therefore, with a very slight notice of the later modification which, adopted very early by the rulers of England from the Continent, has in one form or another, military, political, or

legal, throughout the centuries been in conflict with and has for the most part driven out and destroyed the older form of society.

England and the Feudal System. -Unlike the other parts of the Islands, England and, under her influence, SouthEastern Scotland and the eastern borders of Wales, had been moved by 1154 a very long way from the society described by Tacitus and Cæsar. We find here, superimposed upon the other earlier types, a new and late type of community, a society not based on kinship, in which there is little or no community of landownership, of profits and losses, of rights and responsibilities, in which the powers of the chiefs were held in check by no social customs observed by all, but by the strong arm of a federal authority which created them, an authority often alien to the people ruled-a society founded on war and conquest, which we are in the habit of calling the feudal system; a society bound together, in the first instance, by military duties owed to a superior landowner from whom, and not from the community, the user of land is granted in return for military services. This form of society in the twelfth century is also being very speedily modified by many causes, and its military aspect is ceasing to be of primary importance.

The Causes of Change.-The pivot of change which brought about the introduction of this society, the change which turned the chief with his limited powers into an absolute king, destroyed the power of the general assembly, and gradually substituted individual for communal responsibility, was, I take it, military necessity. But the agent of the change was the influence of Roman models, the constitution of the Roman state and of the Roman church, the international, interdependent pyramid of which the Pope was the head, and of which the feudal system was an offgrowth. Where Rome comes the pastoral life gives way to corngrowing, and the tribal to the feudal system.

As each horde of barbarian invaders poured down on Europe in the early centuries, their nomadic course came to an end with their contact with corn-growing Rome. In their successive conflicts with the great military power the

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weakness of the tribal formation showed itself, as the absence of unity among their independent units nullified the effect of their victories, pointing them to the necessity for unity and better discipline in war. The two forces, the tradition of imperial Rome and the needs of ceaseless war, react on one another to produce the effect: an imperial federation, a federal empire as from without; an interlocking local responsibility as from within; a system under which the lord of the feud or tract of land protected the man who derived title from him, and the man in turn acknowledged the ownership of the lord, and followed him to battle; Germanismo, as the Italian historian calls it—a growth, like all human institutions which modify natural instinct, born of the necessity of self-preservation.

The first result of such necessities, a unity which only comes with conquest and only co-exists with war, is that for an organised army in the place of an argumentative horde, some one person shall be in command, responsible for action and freed at the moment of action from the deadly influence of need to consult all the people. In every period of peace the tendency asserts itself to resist federal authority, each independent clan splitting up and breaking off into an independent force, isolated with its own particular head, its own customs, and its own separate military authority. War alone shows the necessity of unity, with the result that in the end safety is found only in an organisation which pre-supposes the continuance of armed force, recognising the secret of military strength in unity of design and swiftness of execution.

Under these influences, which culminated in the alliance between Charlemagne and the Roman Church, the greater military powers of the West gradually replaced the lateral social organisations of the tribe by a system which subordinated local authority to a central one, taking little account of tribal kinship, and at the same time strengthening the powers of the local authority in proportion to its dependence on the federal power.

The Kingship.-The warfare with the peoples of the European continent, which, owing to his continental possessions, always threatened the English king, called for a

military system more effective than the levy of the tribal community, and enforced by more potent sanction than the distraint of cattle, an army which could be used for offensive war out of the Islands. In adopting such a system, which was coming into use for military purposes 2 before William made his little expedition in 1066, the English king only imitated continental models, which had long existed and which had already affected the English kingship and English society. Onwards from the Domesday survey of 1088, the feudal units of political and social life, the manor and the shire, replaced in England gradually the sub-kingdom, the tribal divisions, and the sub-divisions of the clan and sept.

As a consequence of the change, though nominally elective, the king took office not so much as the result of genuine election or of priority of birth as of superiority of force, his authority being limited only by his military power. After the Conquest, in the instances of William Rufus, Henry I., Stephen, and John, though there may have been a pretence of a submission of the king's claims to the people, the pretender really becomes king by virtue solely of his military superiority, his possession of the king's treasure, and through the support given to him by his consecration from the Church.

The General Assembly.-As a result of this military framework the great assembly of the tribes, called to decide matters of great moment, the Witan, the Althing, the Folkmoot, fell utterly into disuse. The tendency of all large assemblies of freemen, whether a Parliament of talkers, a Witanagemot of administrators, a municipal body of free burgesses, or an assembly of the people of a local division, is to delegate to smaller and more convenient committees of their number the actual work to be done. Hence we find Parliament frequently giving itself up to the tyranny of a Cabal, to the control of a few men whose sole qualification for office is their careful manipulation of technical rules and their power to play on the good instinct of the populace, the Witan delegating its authority in work to the few business advisers of the king, the body of free burgesses allowing their powers to pass to the close hereditary corporation, and the shire moot to the officers and nominees of the central authority.