The Normans and Their World by Lindsay Jack

Author:Lindsay, Jack [Lindsay, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2014-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven – Tenures, Fiefs, and Military Organization

We now turn to a more detailed examination of what happened in England. Here we can see how a Norman takeover and transformation of a native system worked out. First we must note the almost total dispossession of the native ruling class in favour of an alien group. At Edward’s death there seem to have been between four and five thousand Englishmen holding estates of the king that the Normans were to call manors. When the Domesday Book (1086) was compiled, there were some 1400 to 1500 tenants-in-chief holding direct from the king, with some 170 or 180 of them getting a yearly income of £100; and there were about 8,000 sub-tenants. Only two of the tenants-in-chief were English; a mere eight per cent of the land was left in English hands. The total population was somewhere between one and two million, having been much reduced by warfare, deaths, ravages and disease since 1066. The thegns were still to be found in most parts of the country, but with diminishing status. Many sank down to peasant level; the more adventurous wandered off to Scotland, Ireland, Denmark or Byzantion. Goscelin, a monk of St Bertin, tells of a vir honorificus, who, though a layman, seems to have been brought up in St Augustine’s Abbey at Canterbury; after Hastings he went with other optimates to Byzantion, where he became a duke. He must have entered the Varangian guard. Marrying a rich noblewoman, Eudoxia, he built a basilica by his house, and dedicated it to St Nicholas and his old patron St Augustine; the English exiles used to gather there.[362] A few Normans got estates by marrying English heiresses; and a few Englishmen bought back their lands at high rents. Others survived at a low level as sub-tenants of the new lords. At the end of the county surveys in Domesday we meet groups of thegns reduced to holding tiny pieces of land. Thus, the lands of Merleswein, a great thegn under Edward and William (in his first years), were taken over by Ralph Paynel, ancestor of the Luttrells of Dunster, lords in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Devonshire, Somersetshire and Gloucestershire.

The two Englishmen who were big landowners in 1086 are worth a glance. They were not great men surviving from Edward’s day, but unscrupulous characters who had risen on the backs of their fallen fellows. Thorkill of Arden had a big fief in Warwickshire, mostly made up of the lands of dispossessed Englishmen, valued at over £120; it was assessed at over 135 hides for geld and as able to support nearly 220 ploughs. The value had increased by almost a third since 1066. Thorkill held seventy-one manors, of which only four are known to have been his father’s. He seems to have risen through his zeal as sheriff. But even so his heirs failed to carry on at his level: most of his estates went to Roger of Beaumont, to swell the earldom of Warwick, while his heirs became modest military tenants of the Warwick fief.

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