BOLDON BOOK 



course, will not be earlier than the Norman Conquest, but the organization 

 of a great estate with a court tor its tenants will long precede that event, and 

 whatever immediate effect William I.'s financial and administrative measures 

 had upon the English manor must have been lacking in Durham, where that 

 institution followed a free development. 



We may now return to our task of drawing from the evidence of Boldon 

 Book some coherent account of the social and economic life of the bishopric 

 at the close of the twelfth century, and for this purpose we shall pass in review 

 first the various classes of the rural population and then the land on which 

 and by which they lived. The fulcrum of the medieval rural economy was 

 the villein community, those who tilled the soil in common for their own 

 benefit and for that of the lord to whom the land belonged. Whatever other 

 elements might compose the village population — and they were many and 

 various — the villeins with their land remained the core and centre of the 

 community, constituting what German scholars have happily called the 'engere 

 Gutsverband.' A free tenant might hold the demesne at farm from the lord, 

 but it was the villeins who worked the land. On the other hand, the village 

 would contain a cloud of minor tenants, farmers, cottars, bordars, crofters, and 

 perhaps a few bondmen, but the open fields, in which these men had little or 

 no portion, were worked by the villeins, who were obliged to make over a 

 share of the produce to the lord. 



The system upon which the bishop's land was held and worked was 

 essentially the same as that obtaining throughout the greater part of England 

 at this time, and known to modern writers as the open-field system.^ In 

 return for the use of the land the villeins owed their lords certain renders in 

 money and kind and certain days of labour on his demesne, together with 

 other services generally specified. The amount and nature of these renders 

 and services, however, were conditioned by the environment of the community, 

 and seem at the first glance to have differed from vill to vill. An attentive 

 reading of Boldon Book, however, makes it clear that in respect to the nature 

 and rate of their obligations the Durham vills may be arranged in a few 

 definite classes, and by following this order we shall best illustrate the question 

 in hand. First, there are four definite types, namely, pastoral, agricultural, 

 and forest vills, and the nascent boroughs. Beside these there is a fifth class 

 in regard to which Boldon Book gives us less information, recording the profit 

 or value of the vill only, without enumerating its services and renders. 

 Sometimes we are told that the vill is held by a tenant of the bishop, or 

 again the tenant is not named and there is merely a note that such a vill 

 renders so and so much, or finally a vill is described as owing so much 

 military service, generally expressed as the fractional part of a knight's fee. 

 Thus we have three subdivisions of the fifth class. 



Boldon is typical of what, for reasons which will presently appear, we 

 have called the pastoral vill. The community here consists of twenty-two 



^ Durham was a county of open ficlJs and nucleated villages. An acquaintance with the open-field 

 system of agriculture may be assumed in view of the abundant literature of the subject which has appeared in 

 English in the course of the past thirty years. See particularly E. Nassc, The Agricultural Commumly of the 

 Middle Age I, trans. H. Ouvry, 2 ed. 1872; F. Sccbohm, The English Village Community, 4 cd. 1890 ; 

 C.M.Andrews, The Old English Manor, 1 892 ; W. Cunningham, English Industry and Commerce, vol. i. (4 cd. 

 1905) ; W. J. Ashley, Economic History, vol. i. 3 ed. 1894 ; Maitland, Domesday Bk. and Beyond, 1897 ; cf. 

 A. Meitzen, Siedelung und Agrarzcesen, ii. 97-140. 



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