Alfred the Great: The Truth Teller, Maker of England, 848-899 by Lees Beatrice Adelaide

Author:Lees, Beatrice Adelaide [Lees, Beatrice Adelaide]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Albion Press
Published: 2015-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII — THE VICTORIES OF PEACE

II. Alfredian Society

WITHIN the organised community of the West-Saxon State, king and people lived a simple country life in local village groups. Land, its settlement and tillage, its transference, and the uncertainties of title; the recording of boundaries; the alternations of crops and fallow; the gathering of the harvest; rights of pasturage; hunting and fishing, and the cultivation of waste places;— all these things made up the chief daily interests of the average ninth-century Englishman, in time of peace. His talk was of good and bad husbandry, of weather and of stock, of trespass and cattle-lifting, of sport and woodcraft, when it was not of raids and harrying, and the war-hosts of “heathen men.”

A growing proportion of land was held, in the second half of the ninth century, by “book,” or charter, though by the side of the “bookland,” “folk-land,” held under the custom-law by “folk-right,” without written title, still persisted. The advantage of the “book” was that it gave greater freedom of disposition to the grantee, and careful precautions were taken to prevent the abuse of this freedom. An elaborate clause in Alfred’s laws,[169] an early instance of a kind of entail, or family settlement, provides that bookland shall not be granted away from the kindred of the owner, if such alienation is forbidden in the original charter. Only in the central court, however, with the witness of king and bishop, could the injured kinsmen plead their rights, or the land-owner maintain his claim to alienate without restriction. Alfred himself, in his will, limited the succession to his bookland to his male descendants, his kinsmen on the “weapon side,” or “spear side,” as long as any of them remained alive.[170]

Bookland was held by great ecclesiastics, religious houses, nobles and thegns, lords whose estates were worked by dependents, but there were also small freemen who cultivated their own farms, and a considerable amount of land was sublet on lease or “loan.”

The Danish wars worked havoc among the titles to landed property. “Books” were lost or destroyed, and had to be replaced by fresh grants, while landowners were driven from their homes, or permanently impoverished. In particular, as might be expected, this seems to have been the case in Mercia. King Alfred must have seen many changes of ownership when, towards the close of his life, he drew a spiritual lesson from the land-law of his day, and contrasted the log-hut on loan-land of this transitory life with the eternal home in the heavenly country.

Every man [he wrote in his preface to the translation of St. Augustine’s Soliloquies] desires, when he has built a cottage with his lord’s help on his lord’s loan-land, to rest awhile therein, and hunt, and fowl, and fish, and provide for himself in divers ways on that loan, both by sea and by land, until he can earn bookland and eternal inheritance by his lord’s grace.

It is, unfortunately, easier to collect and catalogue the dry bones of legal theory than to clothe them with flesh and blood.

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