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(i) A Somersetshire manor.(60*) Half the land is in demesne; half is held by 7 bordiers. The only plough beasts are 4 oxen on the demesne; there are 3 beasts that do not plough, 20 sheep, 7 acres of underwood, 20 acres of pasture. It is worth 12s, formerly it was worth 10s. (ii) A Somersetshire manor.(61*) A quarter of the land is in demesne; the rest is held by 2 villeins and 3 bordiers. The men have one team; apparently the demesne has no plough-oxen. No other animals are mentioned. There are 140 acres of wood, 41 acres of moor, 40 acres of pasture. It is worth 12s. 6d. and has been worth 20s. (iii) A Somersetshire manor.(62*) All the land, save 10 acres, is in demesne; 2 bordiers hold the 10 acres. There is a team on the demesne; there are 2 beasts that do not plough, 7 pigs, 16 sheep, 4 acres of meadow, 7 of pasture. Value, 6s. (iv) A Somersetshire manor.(63*) The whole of the arable is in demesne; the only tenant is a bordier. There are 4 plough-oxen and 11 goats and 7 acres of underwood. Value, 6s. (v) A Devonshire manor.(64*) To all seeming all is in demesne and there are no tenants. There are 4 plough-beasts, 15 sheep, 5 goats, 4 acres of meadow. Value, 3s.

We have been at no great pains to select examples, and yet smaller manors may be found, manors which provide arable land for but two oxen. Thus.

(vi) A Devonshire manor.(65*) Value, 3s. All seems to be in demesne; we see no tenants and no stock. (vii) A Somersetshire manor(66*) occupied by one villein. We read nothing of any stock. Value, 15d. (viii) A Somersetshire manor(67*) with 3 bordiers on it. Value, 4s. (ix) A Somersetshire manor(68*) with one bordier on it. Value, 30d.

The lowest value of a manor in this part of the world is, so far as we have observed, one shilling; that manor to all appearance was nothing but a piece of pasture land.(69*) Yet each of those holdings is a mansio, and the Bishop of Winchester's holding at Taunton is a mansio. From one side of England we will journey to the other side; from Devon and Somerset to Essex and Suffolk. We soon observe that in describing the holdings of the 'free men' and sokemen of this eastern district as they were in King Edward's day, our record constantly introduces the term manerium. A series of entries telling us how 'a free man held x hides or carucates or acres' will ever and anon be broken by an entry that tells us how 'a free man held x hides or carucates or acres for a manor'.(70*) We soon give up counting the cases in which the manor is rated at 60 acres. We begin counting the cases in which it is rated at 30 acres and find them numerous; we see manors rated at 24 acres, at 20, at 15, at 12 acres. But this, it may be said, tells us little, for these manors may be extravagantly underrated.(71*) Let us then look at a few of them.

(i) In Espalle Siric held 30 acres for a manor; there were always 3 bordiers and one team and 4 acres of meadow; wood for 60 pigs and 13 beasts. It was then worth 10s.(72*) (ii) In Torentuna Turchetel a free man held 30 acres for a manor; there were always 2 bordiers and one team and a half. It is worth 10s.(73*) (iii) In Bonghea Godric a free man held 30 acres for a manor; there were 1 bordier and 1 team and 2 acres of meadow. It was then worth 8s.(74*) (iv) Three free men and their mother held 30 acres for a manor. There was half a team. Value, 5s.(75*) (v) In Rincham a free man held 30 acres for a manor. There were half a team and one acre of meadow. Value, 5s.(76*) (vi) In Wenham AElfgar a free man held 24 acres for a manor. Value, 4s.(77*) (vii) In Torp a free man held 20 acres for a manor. One team; wood for 5 pigs. Value, 40d.(78*) (viii) In Tudenham AElfric the deacon, a free man, held 12 acres for a manor. One team, 3 bordiers, 2 acres of meadow, 1 rouncey, 2 beasts that do not plough, 11 pigs, 40 sheep. Value, 3s.(79*)

We are not speaking of curiosities; the sixty-acre manor was very common in Essex, the thirty-acre manor was no rarity in Suffolk. Now it is plain enough that the 'lord' of such a manor -- or rather the holder of such a manor, for there was little lordship in the case -- was often enough a peasant, a tiller of the soil. He was under soke and under commendation; commended it may be to one lord rendering soke to another. Sometimes he is called a sokeman.(80*) But he has a manor. Sometimes he has a full team, sometimes but half a team. Sometimes he has a couple of bordiers seated on his land, who help him in his husbandry. Sometimes there is no trace of tenants, and his holding is by no means too large to permit of his cultivating it by his own labour and that of his sons. No doubt in the west country even before the Conquest these petty mansiones or maneria were being accumulated in the hands of the wealthy. The thegn who was the antecessor of the Norman baron sometimes held a group, a geographically discontinuous group, or petty manors as well as some more substantial and better consolidated estates. But still each little holding is reckoned a manor, while in the east of England there is nothing to show that the nameless free men who held the manors which are said to consist of 60, 40, 30 acres had usually more than one manor apiece. When therefore we are told that already before the Conquest England was full of manors, we must reply: Yes, but of what manors?(81*) Now were the differences between various manors a mere difference in size and in value, a student of law might pass them by. Our notion of ownership is the same whether it be applied to the largest and most precious, or to the smallest and most worthless of things. But in this case we have not to deal with mere differences in size or value. The examples that we have given will have proved that few, if any, propositions of legal import will hold good of all maneria. We must expressly reject some suggestions that the later history of our law may make to us. 'A manor has a court of its own': -- this is plainly untrue. To say nothing of extreme cases, of the smallest of the manors that we have noticed, we cannot easily believe that a manor with less than ten tenants has a court of its own, yet the number of such manors is exceedingly large. 'A manor has freehold tenants': -- this of course we must deny, unless we hold that the villani are freeholders. 'A manor has villein or customary tenants': -- even this proposition, though true of many cases, we cannot accept. Not only may we find a manor the only tenants upon which are liberi homines,(82*) but we are compelled to protest that a manor need not have any tenants at all. 'A manor must contain demesne land': -- this again we cannot believe. In one case we read that the whole manor is being farmed by the villeins so that there is nothing in demesne,(83*) while in other cases we are told that there is nothing in demesne and see no trace of any recent change.(84*) Thus, one after another, all the familiar propositions seem to fail us, and yet we have seen good reason to believe that manerium has some exact meaning. It remains that we should hazard an explanation. A manor is a house against which geld is charged. To the opinion that in some way or another the definition of a manor is intimately connected with the great tax we shall be brought by phrases such as the following: 'Richard holds Fivehide of the Earl which Brihtmaer held in King Edward's time for forty acres and for a manor.'(85*) -- 'Two free men who were brothers, Bondi and AElfric, held it for two hides and for two manors.'(86*) When we say that a man holds land 'as' or 'for' (pro) forty acres, we mean that his holding, be its real size what it may, is rated to the geld at forty acres. If we add the words 'and as (or for) one manor,' surely we are still speaking of the geld. For one moment the thought may cross our minds that, besides a tax on land, there has been an additional tax on 'halls,' on houses of a certain size or value; but this we soon dismiss as most unlikely. To raise but one out of many objections: had there been such a house-tax, it would have left plain traces of itself in those 'Geld inquests' of the southwestern counties that have come down to us. Rather we regard the matter thus: -- The geld is a land-tax, a tax of so much per hide or carucate. In all likelihood it has been assessed according to a method which we might call the method of subpartitioned provincial quotas. The assumption has been made that a shire or other large district contains a certain number of hides; this number has then been apportioned among the hundreds of that shire, and the number allotted to each hundred has been. apportioned among the vills of that hundred. The common result is that some neat number of hides, five, ten or the like is attributed to the vill.(87*) This again has been divided between the holdings in that vill. Ultimately it is settled that for fiscal purposes a given holding contains, or must be deemed to contain, this or that number of hides, virgates, or acres. Thus far the system makes no use of the manerium. But it now has to discover some house against which a demand may be made for every particular penny of geld. Despite the 'realism' of the system, it has to face the fact that, after all, taxes must be paid by men and not by land. Men live in houses. It seeks the tax-payer in his house. Now, were all the occupiers of land absolute owners of the land that they occupied, even were it true that every acre had some one person as its absolute owner, the task would be simple. A schedule of five columns, such we are familiar with, would set forth 'Owner's Name,' 'Place of Residence,' 'Description of Geldable Property,' 'Hidage,' 'Amount due.' But the occupier is not always the owner; what is more, there is no absolute ownership. Two, three, four persons will be interested in the land; the occupier will have a lord and that lord a lord; the occupier may be a serf, a villein, a sokeman; there is commendation to be considered and soke and all the infinite varieties of the power to 'withdraw' the land from the lord. Rude and hard and arbitrary lines must be drawn. Of course the state will endeavour to collect the geld in big sums. It will endeavour to make the great folk answer for the geld which lies on any land that is in any way subject to their power; thus the cost of collecting petty sums will be saved and the tax will be charged on men who are solvent. The central power may even hold out certain advantages to the lord who will become responsible for the geld of his tenants or justiciables or commended men. The hints that we get in divers counties that the lord's 'inland' has borne no geld seem to point in this direction, though the arrangements about this matter seem to have varied from shire to shire.(88*) On the pipe rolls of a later day we see that the geld charged against the magnates is often 'pardoned.' For one reason the king cannot easily tax the rich; for another he cannot easily tax the poor; so he gets at the poor through the rich. The small folk will gladly accept any scheme that will keep the tax-collector from their doors, even though they purchase their relief by onerous promises of rents and services. The great men, again, may find advantage in such bargains; they want periodical rents and services, and in order to obtain them will accept a certain responsibility for occasional taxes. This process had gone very far on the eve of the Conquest. Moreover the great men had enjoyed a large liberty of paying their geld where they pleased, of making special compositions with the king, of turning some wide and discrete territory into a single geld-paying unit, of forming such 'manors' as Taunton or Berkeley or Leominster. In King Edward's day the occupiers of the soil might, so it seems to us, be divided by the financier into three main classes. In the first class we place the man who has a manor. He has, that is, a house at which he is charged with geld. He may be a great man or a small, an earl or a peasant; he may be charged at that house with the geld of a hundred hides or with the geld of fifteen acres. In the second class we place the villeins, bordiers, cottiers. The geld apportioned to the land that they occupy is demanded from their lord at his manor, or one of his manors. How he recoups himself for having to make this payment, that is his concern; but he is responsible for it to the king, not as guarantor, but as principal debtor. But then, at least in the east and north, there are many men who fall into neither of these classes. They are not villeins, they are sokemen or 'free men'; but their own tenements are not manors; they belong to or 'lie in' some manor of their lord. These men, we think, can be personally charged with the geld; but they pay their geld at their lord's hall and he is in some measure bound to exact the payment. Anything that could be called a strict proof of this theory we cannot offer; but it has been suggested by many facts and phrases which we cannot otherwise explain. In the first place, our record seems to assume that every holding either is a manor or forms part of a manor.(89*) Then we are told how lands 'geld' at or in some manor or at the caput manerii. Thus lands which lie many miles away from Tewkesbury, but which belong to the manor of Tewkesbury, 'geld in Tewkesbury.'(90*) Sometimes the same information is conveyed to us by a phrase that deserves notice. A piece of land is said to 'defend itself' in or at some manor, or, which is the same thing, to have its wara or render its wara, that is to say, its defence, its answer to the demand for geld, there.(91*) 'In Middleton two sokemen had 16 acres of land and they rendered their wara in the said Middleton, but they could give and sell their land to whom they pleased.'(92*) When we are told that certain lands are in warnode Drogonis or in warnode Archiepiscopi, it is meant that the lands belong to Drogo or the Archbishop for the purpose of 'defence' against the geld.(93*) It is not sufficient that land should be taxed, it must be taxed 'in' some place, which may be remote from that in which, as a matter of physical fact, it lies.(94*) One clear case of a free tenant paying his geld to his lord is put before us: -- 'Leofwin had half a hide and could withdraw with his land and he paid geld to his lord and his lord paid nothing.'(95*) Besides this we have cases in which the lord enjoys the special privilege of collecting the geld from his tenants and keeping it for his own use.(96*) A remarkable Kentish entry tells us that at Peckham the archbishop had an estate which had been rated at six sullungs, and then that 'of the land of this manor a certain man of the archbishop held a half-sullung which in King Edward's day gelded with these six sullungs, although being free land it did not belong to the manor save for the purpose of the scot.'(97*) Here we have land so free that the one connexion between it and the manor to which it is attributed consists in the payment of geld -- it gelds along with the other lands of the manor. In the great lawsuit between the churches of Worcester and Evesham about the lands at Hamton, the former contended that these lands should pay their geld along with the other estates of the bishop.(98*) Let us observe the first question that the commissioners are to ask of the jurors. What is the name of the mansio? Every piece of geldable land is connected with some mansio, at which it gelds. Let us observe how the commissioners and the jurors proceed in a district where the villae and the mansiones or maneria are but rarely coincident. The jurors of the Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire are speaking of their country vill by vill. They come to the vill of Abington.(99*) Abington, they say, was rated at five hides. Of these five hides the king has a half-hide; this lies in Litlington. Earl Roger has one virgate; this lies in his manor of Shingay. Picot the sheriff has a half-virgate; this lies and has always lain in Morden. In what sense important to the commissioners or their master can a bundle of strips scattered about in the fields of Abington be said to lie in Litlington, in Shingay, or in Morden? We answer that it gelds there. Hence the importance of the hall. It is the place where geld is demanded and paid. A manor without a hall is a thing to be carefully noted, otherwise some geld may be lost.(100*) A man's land has descended to his three sons: if 'there is only one hall,' but one demand for geld need be made; if 'each has his hall,' there must be three separate demands. When we are told that two brothers held land and that each had his house (domus) though they dwelt in one court (curia), a nice problem is being put before us: -- Two halls, or one hall -- Two manors or one manor?(101*) The petty maneria of Suffolk, what can they be but holdings which geld by themselves? The holders of them are not great men, they have no tenants or just two or three bordiers; sometimes they can not 'withdraw' their lands from their lords. But still they pay their own taxes at their own houses. In supposing that forces have been at work which tend to make the lord responsible for the taxes of his men, we are not without a warrant in the ancient dooms. 'If a king's thegn or a lord of land (landrica) neglects to pay the Rome penny, let him forfeit ten half-marks, half to Christ, half to the king. If a "townsman" withholds the penny, let the lord of the land pay the penny and take an ox from the man, and if the lord neglects to do this, then let Christ and the king receive the full b髏 of 12 ores.'(102*) The right of doing justice is also the duty of doing justice. It is natural that the lord with soke should become a tax-gatherer, and he will gladly guarantee the taxes if thereby he can prevent the king's officers from entering his precinct and meddling with his justiciables. At no time has the state found it easy to collect taxes from the poor; over and over again it has been glad to avail itself of the landlord's intermediation.(103*) Our theory that while the lord is directly and primarily responsible for the geld of his villeins, he is but subsidiarily responsible for the geld of those of his sokemen or 'free men' who are deemed to belong to his manor, is founded in part on what we take to have been the wording of King William's writ,(104*) in part on the form taken by the returns made thereto. The writ draws a marked line between the villein and the sokeman. The king wishes to know how much land each sokeman, each liber homo, holds; he does not care that any distinction should be drawn between the lord's demesne lands and the lands of the villeins. And, on the whole, his commands are obeyed. A typical entry in the survey of East Anglia will first describe in one mass the land held by the lord and his villeins, will tell us how many carucates this land is rated at, how many teams there are on the demesne, and how many the men have, then it will enumerate sheep and pigs and goats, and then, as it were in an appendix, it will add that so many sokemen belong to this manor and that between them they hold so many carucates or acres.(105*) In Suffolk even the names of these humble tenants are sometimes recorded.(106*) And then, we have seen(107*) that there is some doubt as to whether or no these men are or are not to be reckoned as part of the manor for all purposes. We have to say that the manor 'with the free men,' or 'without the free men', is worth so much. After all, we are only supposing that the fashion in which the danegeld was put in charge resembled in some of its main outlines the fashion in which a very similar tax was put in charge under Richard I. In 1194, the land-tax that was levied for the payment of the king's ransom seems to have been assessed according to the hidage stated in Domesday Book.(108*) Then in 1198 a new assessment was made. We are told that the king ordained that every baron should with the sheriff's aid distrain his men to pay the tax cast upon them, and that if, owing to the baron's default, distresses were not made, then the amount due from the baron's men should be seized from the baron's own demesne and he should be left to recoup himself as best he could.(109*) Now it is a liability of this sort that we are venturing to carry back into the Confessor's day. The lord is responsible to the state as principal, and indeed as sole, debtor for so much of the geld as is due from his demesne land and from the land of his villani, while as regards any lands of 'free men' or sokemen which are attached to his manor, his liability is not primary nor absolute; he is bound to take measures to make these men pay their taxes; if he fails in this duty, then their taxes will become due from his demesne.(110*) When we read that in Nottinghamshire the relief of the thegn who had six manors or less was three marks, while his who had more than six manors was eight pounds,(111*) this may seem to hint that some inferior limit was set to the size of the manor. If so, it was drawn at a very low point in the scale of tenements. Possibly some general rule had compelled all men who held less than a bovate or half-virgate to 'add' themselves to the manor of some lord. But the Nottinghamshire rule is rude and arbitrary. He who has seven houses against which geld is charged is a big man. On the other hand, it is probable that the Norman lords brought with them some notion, and not a very modest notion, of what a reasonably sufficient manerium should be. The king has in some cases rewarded them by a promise of ten or twenty manors without specifying very carefully what those manors are to be like. He has promised Count Eustace a hundred manors.(112*) Thus we would explain a not uncommon class of entries: -- 'fourteen free men commended to Wulfsige were delivered to Rainald to make up (ad perficiendum) this manor of Carlington.'(113*) -- in Berningham a free man held 20 acres of land and this was delivered to Walter Giffard to make up Letheringsett.'(114*) -- 'Peter claims the land which belonged to seventeen free men as having been delivered to him to make up this manor.'(115*) -- 'This land was delivered to Peter to make up some, but his men do not know what, manor.'(116*) The small 'free men' of the east have been 'added to' manors to which they did not belong in King Edward's day. A few of the free men of Suffolk still 'remain in the king's hand' ready to be delivered out to complete the manors of their conquerors.(117*) Here too we may perhaps find the explanation of the entry which says that Hugh de Port held Wallop 'for half a manor.'(118*) The king has promised him a dozen or score of manors; and this estate at Wallop worth but fifteen shillings a year, really no gentleman would take it for a manor. Such then is the best explanation that we can offer of the manerium of Domesday Book. About details we may be wrong, but that this term has a technical meaning which is connected with the levy of the danegeld we can not doubt. It loses that meaning in course of time because the danegeld gives way before newer forms of taxation. It never again acquires a technical meaning until the late days when retrospective lawyers find the essence of a manor in its court.(119*)