6 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



sheep, swine, ale, honey, &c. — which he collected by visiting 

 his villages, thus literally eating his rents. The churchmen 

 did not continue these visits, they remained in their monas- 

 teries, and had the feorm brought them regularly ; they 

 had an overseer in the village to see to this, and so they 

 tightened their hold on the village. Then the smaller people, 

 the peasants, make gifts to the Church. They give their land, 

 but they also want to keep it, for it is their livelihood ; so they 

 surrender the land and take it back as a lifelong loan. 

 Probably on the death of the donor his heirs are suffered to 

 hold the land. Then labour services are substituted for the 

 old provender rents, and thus the Church acquires a demesne, 

 and thus the foundations of the manorial system, still to be 

 traced all over the country, were laid. Thegns, the pre- 

 decessors of the Norman barons, become the recipients of 

 grants from the churches and from kings, and householders 

 ' commend ' themselves and their land to them also, so that 

 they acquired demesnes. This ' commendation ' was furthered 

 by the fact that during the long-drawn out conquest of Britain 

 the old kindred groups of the English lost their corporate 

 sense, and the central power being too weak to protect the 

 ordinary householder, who could not stand alone, he had to 

 seek the protection of an ecclesiastical corporation or of some 

 thegn, first for himself and then for his land. The juris- 

 dictional rights of the king also passed to the lord, whether 

 church or thegn ; then came the danegeld, the tax for buying 

 off the Danes that subsequently became a fixed land tax, 

 which was collected from the lord, as the peasants were too 

 poor for the State to deal with them ; the lord paid the geld 

 for their land, consequently their land was his. In this way 

 the free ceorl of Anglo-Saxon times gradually becomes the 

 ' villanus ' of Domesday. Landlordship was well established 

 in the two centuries before the Conquest, and the land of 

 England more or less ' carved into territorial lordships '.^ 

 ' VinogradofF, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 345. 



