13i Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 



thirteenth century. It should be noted also that the Bectitudines speaks 

 distinctly of the tenants in question as freemen. ' 



I cannot, therefore, concede to this part of Mr. Seebohm's argument the 

 weight which he claims for it. He does not seem to me to have proved that 

 the obligations were less in the thirteenth century than in the tenth; on the 

 other hand the evidence seems to me to lean strongly the other way. But 

 he has proved, and it is a fact of great importance, that the character of 

 the obligations, and the status of the peasantry, did not, so far as our infor- 

 mation goes, differ essentially in the tenth century from what we find in 

 the thirteenth. It is, therefore, perfectly legitimate on his part to infer 

 that this condition of the peasantry, found ahke in the thirteenth and in 

 the tenth century, probably existed in the earlier centuries also. The infer- 

 ence is, however, only a probable one, in the absence of direct evidence, and 

 direct evidence is wanting. For the period before the time of Alfred, he is 

 obhged to have recourse to indirect evidence, in the assumption that serf- 

 dom and the " open-field husbandry " went together. 



Up to this point he has traced the open-field system and serfdom step by 

 step, accompanying each other hand in hand. Beyond this point he is not 

 able to trace serfdom, but the open-field system is traced back at least two 

 centuries further, and he says that, as it has always carried serfdom with it 

 in the later period, it may fairly be assumed .to do the same thing in the 

 earlier period. " The community in viUenage," he says (p. 105) " fitted into 

 the open field system as a snail fits into a shell." But it is by no means 

 clear that a free community might not have fitted into this shell equally well, 

 as, indeed, the prevailing theory holds. The only argument to prove that 

 the commtmity could not have been a free one is (p. 177) that the Teutonic 

 custom of dividing estates equally among heirs would have led to endless 

 and intricate subdivisions of land. But this is exactly what we find to have 

 been the case. The vu-gateor " yard-land," which he assumes to have been 

 the regular peasant's holding, and which as a matter of fact was the usual 

 one in the thirteenth century, was the fourth part of a hide; and it is gen- 

 erally held that the hide, not the virgate, was the original holding. And at 

 any rate, in the thirteenth century, we find tenures of half and quarter 

 vir gates, and even smaller aliquot parts, by the side of the regular tenure of 

 the virgate;- exactly the condition of things which Mr. Seebohm says would 

 have come about. 



To carry back, therefore, the open-field system to the seventh and sixth 



1 Sicut omnis liber facere debet. 



2 Tor example, in the manor of Broctrope (Gloucester Cartulary, iii, p. 140), I find 

 among the freeholders two tenants holding entire virgates, and five holding half vu'gates; 

 and among the customary tenants one with a virgate, nine with half -virgates, two with quar- 

 ter virgates, and five with an amount of land equal to a sixteenth of a virgate, these dif- 

 ferences evidently coming from the sub-division of the original hide. For other examples, 

 see my paper on Rural Classes in the Thirteenth Century, Vol. II, of the Transactions of 

 the Academy: that the socage freeholds were originally servile holdings is shown in my 

 paper on the Origin of the Freeholders, Vol. IV, of the Transactions. 



