BOLDON BOOK 



sented some special form of week-work at a fixed season to which these 

 villeins, tor the rest relieved from that burden, were subjected. 



The question of the status, the social and legal position, of the twelfth- 

 century villein has been examined elsewhere under circumstances which 

 admitted the indispensable condition of the comparative method. Here, 

 where we are confined to a single county and have attempted only to indicate 

 the special conditions attaching to villeinage in Durham, it will be enough to 

 refer the reader to a few general treatises.' One point, however, ought to be 

 emphasized : the villeins were essentially a community whose life at every 

 turn was conditioned by its relation to the land, placed as it was 'in a constant 

 working submission to the manor, in constant co-operation with other plots 

 similarly arranged to help and to serve in the manor.'* Regardless of birth or 

 status, those who had villein land formed part — as tenants of that land — of an 

 intricate agricultural machinery developed under a system of natural economy 

 to provide the lord of the land with the labour necessary to till his demesne 

 and with a fair return as well upon the land in service. It is to this whole 

 complex that the convenient German phrase already quoted so happily 

 applies — the ' engere Gutsverband,' the narrow land-community. 



There remain two classes of the village population consisting of persons 

 who like the villeins were treated as a group or community having equal 

 holdings and subject to uniform obligations, but who show certain interesting 

 points of divergence from the villeins. These are the ' firmarii ' and the 

 cottiers. 



The term ' firmarius ' was generally applied to a person who farmed the 

 demesne or the whole manor, rendering to the lord a stipulated amount of 

 agricultural produce ;' but the practice of farming or letting a manor or vill 

 to the villeins themselves was not unknown.* In Boldon Book the term 

 ' firmarius ' seems more often to embody the second than the first of these 

 notions. At Wardon, for example, there are nine ' firmarii ' who hold 

 eighteen bovates, every bovate containing 13J acres. For every bovate they 

 render ^d. and work twenty days in the autumn with one man, and for every 

 two bovates they harrow four days with one horse. Then they do four boon- 

 days with all their household, except the housewife, within the aforesaid 

 twenty days' work, and they cart corn two days and hay one day. Finally 

 they render one hen and five eggs for every bovate. ' Morton, South 

 Sherburn, Carlton, and Redworth conform to this type. But it should be 

 noticed that what we have before us is not quite the same thing as the case of 

 a vill farmed to the villeins. An instance of that is recorded in Boldon Book 

 and may be introduced here for purposes of comparison. The villeins of 

 South Biddick hold their vill at farm and render 5/. and a few trifling services 

 in addition. Now at Wardon there are no villeins, the agricultural community 



1 Vinogradoff, Villainage in England ; Ashley, Economic Hist., vol. i. ch. i. ; Seebohm, Village Commiini/y^ 

 chs. ii. iii. ; Maitland, Dom. Dk. and Beyond, 1-172 ; Hist, oj Engl. Law, i. bk. ii. ch. ii. par. 3 ; Garnicr, 

 Landed Interest, i. chs. x.-xv. 



* Vinogradoff, op. cit. 17 1. 



' Vinogradoff, oj>. cit. 301-305 ; Maitland, Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 62, 146-147 ; Ashley, Economic Hist., 

 i. 44-45. 



* Dom. Bk. i. Ii7b, cited by Maitland, op. cit. 



' This and similar cases in Boldon Book cast doubt on Professor VinogradofTs dictum, 'Chickens . . . 

 were given as an acknowledgment of bondage, eggs represented the number of acres a tenant held in the fields,' 

 The Gntcti of the Manor, p. 329. 



279 



