Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval HistoryVinogradoff, Paul
History
Villainage in England: Essays in English Mediaeval History
Vinogradoff, Paul
Villeinage -- England -- History -- To 1500
common 'pur cause de vicinage' may be a relic of a time when adjoining
villages formed a part of a higher unit of some kind, of the Mark, of a
hundred, for example. It may be explained also by the difficulty of
setting definite boundaries in wide tracts of moor and forest. However
this may be, its constant occurrence forms another germ of a necessary
contrast between the two classes which afterwards developed into common
appendant and common appurtenant. It could not be brought under the same
rules as those which flowed from the internal arrangement of the manor.
A special difficulty attended it as to admeasurement: the customary
treatment of other holdings could not in this case serve as a standard.
The very laxity of the principle naturally gave occasion to very
different interpretations and deductions. And so we are justified in
saying, that the chief distinctions of later law are to be found in
their substance in the thirteenth century, and that although a good deal
of confusion occurs in details, the earlier documents give even better
clues than the later to the reasons which led to the well-known
classification.
[Restrictions on the lord as to common pasture.]
Common appendant, if we may use the modern term for the sake of brevity,
is indissolubly connected with the system of husbandry followed by the
village community. A very noticeable feature of it is, that, in one
sense, it towers over the lord of the manor as well as over the tenants.
Of course, legally the lord is considered as the owner of the
waste[556], but even from the point of view of pure law his ownership is
restricted by his own grants. In so much as he has conceded freehold
tenements to certain persons, he is bound by his own deed not to
withhold from these persons the necessary adjuncts of such tenements,
and especially the rights of pasture bound up with them. The free
tenants share with the lord, if he wants to turn his common pasture to
some special and lucrative use; if, for instance, strangers are admitted
to it for money, one part of the proceeds goes to the tenantry[557].
Again, the lord may not overburden the common, and sometimes freeholders
try their hand at litigation against the lord on the ground that he
sends his cattle to some place where they ought not to go[558]. The
point cannot be overlooked, that the lord of the manor appears subjected
to certain rules set up by custom and common decision in the meetings of
his tenantry. The number and kind of beasts which may come to the common
from his land is fixed, as well as the number that may come from the
land of a cottager[559]. The freeholders alone can enforce the rule
against him, but it is set up not by the freeholders, but by the entire
community of the manor, and practically by the serfs more than by the
freeholders, because they are so much more numerous.
[Approvement.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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