THE EAST ANGLIAN SYSTEM 353 



number of new settlers, who were also conquerors, must have 

 wrought agrarian changes. Foremost among the problems which 

 would naturally arise was that of providing the new-comers with 

 land. One readily surmises that the humbler among the in- 

 vaders became small freeholders, and that the more powerful 

 came into control of many acres along with the tenants already 

 settled thereupon. From the latter appropriation arose the petty 

 manor. Upon the new lords — Danes, or perhaps at times Anglo- 

 Saxons who had profited by disturbed conditions — fell the 

 task of rating the holdings of their new tenants with an eye to 

 uniformity of size within each manor. To them, in short, was 

 due the creation of East Anglian tenementa and eriungs! 



One naturally asks why incoming Danes brought into existence 

 in East Angha a unit different in aspect from the virgate and 

 bovate found elsewhere within the Danelaw. The reply is 

 that the midland system of Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire 

 was much the same system as prevailed in Scandinavian 

 countries.^ Danes and Anglo-Saxons agreed in their method 

 of tilHng township fields. Hence when the Danes settled in 

 northeastern England there was no need of a readjustment, 

 either on the part of freemen or on the part of conquerors who 

 may have developed into manorial lords. No difference, there- 

 fore, would in the future be perceptible between the field system 

 of the northern Danelaw and that of Wessex. In East Anglia, 

 however, the Danes probably found a field system divergent, 

 then as later, from that of the midlands. To this they adapted 

 themselves, being without doubt the minority of the population. 

 It was, hke their own, a system of open fields, and at the time 

 of their arrival had become one of scattered parcels. In tem- 

 perament and customs they were not hostile to the process of 

 subdivision and dispersion, and they may even have contributed 

 to the disintegration which after the re-rating once more set in 

 throughout East Anglia. But how far the responsibiUty for this 

 later movement rests with them is uncertain and does not parti- 

 cularly affect the hypothesis sketched above. According to that 

 hypothesis, to state it once more in taking leave of the subject, 



^ Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarwesen, i. 22. 



