SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



name as the land. To some extent therefore the subdivision has been a 

 matter of inheritance and family arrangement. But the obvious outsiders are 

 far too numerous for this explanation to be adequate to the whole situation. 

 Moreover the tendency tow^ards subdivision is not the only influence at work. 

 The tendency towards aggregation is also observable. As at Gorleston, a 

 great many have tenancies in more than one of the original holdings, some 

 in three or four. It is highly improbable, therefore, that the original uni- 

 form holding, which was the legal unit, remained also the economic unit, 

 i.e. that the co-tenants cultivated the original holding in common. Their 

 partnership was only a sharing of a common obligation to the lord. Each 

 occupied separate strips belonging to one of the original sets of strips which 

 made up a villein's holding, and as he prospered he acquired the adjacent 

 strips belonging to another set." The hypothesis at any rate is a tempting 

 one, and it is strengthened by what we learn of the rest of the prior's land at 

 Hadleigh. Besides his villein tenants he had free tenants, a few of whom 

 owed services, but the great majority of whom paid a purely money rent. 

 Here there is no uniformity in the holdings, but there is much subdivision 

 and aggregation going on, and there are many co-tenancies arising often out 

 of partible inheritance. But the striking thing is that the men whose names 

 appear most often as partners in villein holdings are tenants or co-tenants of 

 the largest amount of free land. 



The fact that many freemen were occupying land on a villein tenure 

 seems to show that the special economic conditions originally associated with 

 villein tenure were on the point of passing away. But the prior had still 

 another kind of land at his disposal, i.e. the 300 acres of arable in his 

 demesne, and out of this he was creating new tenancies, some of which 

 suggest further economic developments. Richard the Smith, who is already 

 one of ten co-tenants in one villein holding, one of eight in another, and one 

 of four in a free co-tenancy, builds a forge on the demesne for which he 

 renders a plough-share worth 6d. every Christmas, and pays a rent of \od. 

 for a ' certain way ' next to his messuage. Vincent the Fuller, who occupies 

 a third of a former freeman's holding in arable land, pays a rent of i zd. for 

 a messuage and 6d. for a dye house on a demesne. He also takes a small 

 piece of land, eight perches by two, for which he pays i Sd'., and which is 

 very likely a drying ground for his cloth ; and there are two men with 

 foreign names living in cottages of which he is a co-tenant and has probably 

 had built for them. There are three other fullers occupying land in 

 Hadleigh, and a fourth who is co-tenant in cottages." 



One more example may be taken, where the circumstances were entirely 

 different from either of the foregoing cases. The village of Hawstead had 

 remained, what it still is, an entirely agricultural community, and at the time 

 of the Conquest its landholders had been mainly freemen, of whom there were 

 thirty occupying some 500 acres among them. They could give and sell 

 their land, but were commended to the abbot and under his jurisdiction. 

 There were also two large estates of two carucates and one carucate respec- 

 tively and three villeins and twenty-one bordars who helped to cultivate them. 



" It is probable, however, thjf the common course of cultivation was still preserved, and that each tenant 

 had access to his strips for the purpose of ploughing, reaping only at fixed times along with all the other tenants. 

 " ' An Extent of the Manor of Hadleigh,' Suff. Arch. Inst, xi, pt. j. 



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