A common peoples history of the UK part 1: Free born Englishmen

Once land belonged to ‘free-born Englishmen’, but after 1066 the Norman invaders took the best of it for themselves. Even then, the peasants retained access to the unfenced commons, and remained in some respects a self governing community. In the wake of the Black Death, in which a third of the entire population of England perished, came the social upheavals that culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, bringing with it new and radical ideas.

Before 1066 land in England was owned not by wealthy landlords, nor by the state, nor even by the monarchy, but rather by free peasant proprietors, or ‘coerls’. Each family cultivated its own smallholding and undertook communal activities within their own village. The ceorl was an independent ‘free born Englishman’, subject only to the king, to whom he had to provide military service when required, and the only tax was an annual food rent, a quantity of provision sufficient to maintain the king and his retinue for a day.

This system was beginning to break down even before the Norman conquest. The Saxon kings rewarded supporters by making them ‘thegns’ or territorial lords, and bestowed charters transferring to the thegns the rights of claiming military service and food rent from the peasants. In some places, when harvests failed, thegns would take over land in return for providing relief from hardship, and were paid in labour instead of food rent. But extensive common lands remained, and all the people of a district or village shared the right to these lands

The Norman yoke

The Norman occupation changed all this. After his victory William the Conqueror handed out the land of England as spoils of war to his mercenaries, and as a result, ownership of land was no longer absolute, but rested on permission of the king, the ultimate owner. Parts of the kingdom were kept by William for himself ‘in demesne’, and the rest was divided among about 180 barons, on the understanding they would provide knights for battle when the need arose. In turn the barons retained a portion of the land allotted to them as their own demesne and divided the rest among knights, each of whom was under a military obligation to the barons (and thus to the king). The churches and monasteries also retained demesne lands and sub-let the rest of their holdings.

Serfdom

As for the conquered Saxons, they became serfs: survival in exchange for servitude. Where the population resisted they were annihilated, and their villages burnt, and for decades after 1066 great swathes of England especially in the North remained depopulated. The nobility, naturally, kept the best land themselves. Villagers were required to give up a set number of days to work the lord’s demesne land, and to serve as foot soldiers if there was war. There were many other rights and obligations, varying from place to place, more often preserved by custom than written into formal statute. The village peasants were obliged to grind their corn at the lord’s mill, and if they wanted to marry, they would first have to beg the lord’s permission, and pay a tribute.

Mainly self governing

But though in relation to the lord of the manor they were serfs, in relation to each other the peasants were in many respects a self-governing community. In most places, the landscape they worked was very unlike that of modern rural England. There were no hedges or fences; the cultivated land was a single large open field, and every year a communal gathering of villagers at the manor-court or court-leet would allot to each man several narrow strips, taking care to share out the good and bad land equally, and on these narrow strips each villager tried to grow enough food to feed himself and his family. The nobility were expected to provide basic assistance in cases where the poor became ill, or a man died and left a widow and children. Anyone who did not work or who committed a transgression was punished, or outlawed and left to starve to death in the woods or wastelands. A rudimentary legal system did provide some limited safeguards for the common people, and above all ‘habeas corpus’ ensured that no man could be held in prison without being charged and put on trial by a jury of his peers. But the lord held power in his manor, and was, in practice, judge, jury and executioner. Moreover, there was also the church, which claimed its tithes from the poor, made its own laws and held its own courts, made certain that the common people remained illiterate, controlled public and private morality, and built splendid cathedrals.

The commons

Beyond the open field was unenclosed common land where the villagers had rights, granted not by statute but by immemorial custom, to cut the long grass to make hay, to gather fuel from the woodland, or to graze their cattle if they had anbeas corpusy. There were also vast forests, but these belonged to the king and only the king and his nobility were allowed to hunt the deer, wild boar, rabbits, and other game. Poaching was a national sport, but punishable by death.

A sustainable system

This system was, to a degree, sustainable. The villagers were allowed to gather wood for fuel, but only twigs and branches they could reach with a shepherd’s crook or a haymaker’s hook, and therefore the woodlands were not destroyed and would continue, winter after winter, providing fuel for the poor. It was nevertheless a subsistence economy. The villagers on their narrow strips, with rudimentary implements and limited farming methods, could barely grow enough to feed themselves. There was little travel or trade between communities, let alone nations. What wealth the king and barons gathered to themselves was more often the pillage of war (the main purpose of the later crusades) than the produce of local economies. Only the monasteries grew rich, and were hated for it.

The Black Death

The Black Death changed everything. It arrived in England in 1348, landing at Melcombe in Weymouth bay and spreading rapidly across the country. A third or more of the population perished, causing immense distress and social upheaval However, because of labour shortages, the working people who survived found themselves everywhere in a stronger economic position than before. A class of free yeoman farmers emerged, who paid rent on land and cattle, and in turn offered employment to farm labourers. There was rapid transition towards a wage economy, and bonds which for centuries had tied peasant workers to the villages in which they were born were broken. Itinerant workers and their families moved from village to village selling their labour, with neither the restraints nor protections of the feudal system.

A wage economy

Wages were driven ever higher. Inevitably there were attempts to restore control, and laws were passed to limit wage levels. Suddenly the economy was booming. There was expansion in sheep farming and wool production, initially exported as a raw commodity to the continent. Soon thousands of small village enterprises were producing the finest woollen cloth in Europe, and the wool merchants became the greatest power in the land. Other forms of trade flourished, above all local markets, where travelling entrepreneurs would sell household goods and the latest luxuries. These markets also offered amusements, adding liveliness to a society still living in the shadow of death – the plague was to return to afflict each generation for another three hundred years.

A new world

In this new world there was vastly more opportunity and wealth, but also growing division between the wealthy and the poor. Those left behind had no safety net. With large profits to be made from wool, the old nobility and the rising merchant classes started to replace arable farmland with pasture, and worse, to encroach on common land, starting the long process of fencing and hedging that was to destroy the subsistence economy, depopulate villages, and drive the poor off the land and into the towns. Often they did this without legal sanction, in outright defiance of the laws. And yet it happened all the same, and the poor seemed powerless to prevent it.

The Peasants’ Revolt

In 1381, thirty three years after the first outbreak of the Black Death, the king decided to impose a new tax. He needed cash to finance foreign adventures, and the rudimentary taxation system was no longer providing sufficient income to satisfy the lifestyle of the king and his court. For the first time, the central government decided to impose a tax directly on all citizens, and worse, this poll tax required everyone, rich or poor, to pay the same amount. This injustice added fuel to the fire in an already volatile society. At the villages of Fobbing and Brentwood in Essex, villagers decided not to pay, and forced tax collectors to flee. Resistance spread rapidly, and the Peasants’ Revolt was underway.

Radical clergymen and craftsmen took the side of the common people. Pre-eminent among them was John Ball, a renegade priest, and when the rebels gathered at Blackheath on the outskirts of London, John Ball addressed them:

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

Rebels march on London

In June 1381 the rebels marched into London, occupied the city, and struck off the heads of the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Treasurer, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The rebels expected that the boy king Richard II would listen to their grievances, and treat them with justice. The king, accompanied by the Mayor of London and a group of armed retainers, rode out to meet the peasant army which was camped at Smithfield under the leadership of Wat Tyler. There are different versions of what happened next, but the Anonimalle Chronicle tells us something of the hopes of the peasants. Like John Ball, Wat Tyler called for all people to be treated by the State as equal under the law, demanding that ‘there should be no outlawry in any process of law, and that no lord should have lordship save civilly, and that there should be equality among all people save only the king.’

Wat Tyler attacks

Wat Tyler went even further, attacking the abuses of the church and calling for church land and buildings to be returned to the people: ‘all the lands and tenements now led by them [the bishops] should be confiscated, and divided among the commons, only reserving for them a reasonable sustenance.’ And finally he called for an end to the feudal system of peasant bondage, insisting that ‘there should be no more villeins in England, and no serfdom or villeinage, but that all men should be free and of one condition.'(1)

The Kings revenge

Wat Tyler did not have to wait long to receive his answer. He was stabbed to death by the Lord Mayor’s retinue. The furious peasants drew back their bowstrings, but the boy king had the presence of mind to save his life by a promise that he would agree to all the demands. The mayor then rushed for reinforcements, and the leaderless rebellion, mollified by the king’s promises, dispersed. When the immediate threat had passed, the king and the nobility turned to vengeance. Walsingham, in Historia Anglicana, records the king as announcing: ‘Serfs you were and serfs you are; you shall remain in bondage, not such as you have hitherto been subject to, but incomparably viler.’ This time, he kept his word.

Relevance for  a permanent culture now:

Land ownership:

This history shows the beginning of the land enclosures, which then lead to the development of the capitalist system and the change is social relations between the common person and the ruling class. It shows the development of land ownership from the coerls (free peasant proprieters) to the lords, then with the Norman conquest William the Conqueror hands out the land to mercenaries and was given on permission of the King.This was also the time of common land that people had right to by custom.

Whose land

This highlights the fact that land was actually not owned by anyone in the beginning, but had in fact been transferred through a series of conquests and invasions by different groups of people. So land rights occur from a history of conquests and battles, reminds me of the following story:

A small tale:

Hey, get off my land!

Your land?

That’s right. My land!

What makes this “your” land?

My Dad gave me this land.

Where did your Daddy get it?

From his Dad, all the way back to my great grandfather.

So, how did he originally get this land?

My great grandfather fought for this land!

Well then, I’ll fight you for it….

So could we fight people for their land, probably not,  but could a legal challenge be in the making for a reclaiming of the commons.

As Simon Fairlie from the Land is ours Campaign states

“Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain’s land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our “property-owning democracy”, nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population,1 while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.”

So the land you live on costs an arm and a leg, yet great swathes of our country are owned by people who never paid a penny for it, but are profiting off past theft of and they they really have no right to.

Communal living

Anglo Saxon living has been seen to one of the more democratic ways of organising society, although it had problems such as, women had very little input, As Tony Dyer states:

“Contrary to popular belief, the end of Roman rule in Britain did not see ethnic cleansing and the genocide of the native “Celtic” population by invading Anglo- Saxons. Instead it saw the end of a period of imperialistic colonial rule and a return to a native tradition where justice and common land rights were maintained by the community for the community. As a result one of the most creative and prosperous societies in Europe was established.”

Watch Tony Dyer talk about the Anglo Saxons here.

The Saxon society that became the serf society under the Normans, was still quite a democratic accountable system of living. This shows that that  more democratic systems of living are possible, yet often these types of societies are not discussed as we get the elites version of history that focuses on the rulers, the church, the kings, the lords and the ruling class, who rewrite history to justify their domination. There have been many attempts at different forms of organising society as you will see when you read the other parts of this series.

Poll tax

The poll tax that the peasants revolt rose up against, is just an example of how the ruling classes attempt to exploit its populace by taxing each individual. They have no right to do this and often it is for them to fund their mistakes or personal campaigns, or just to fund their lifestyles. More recently we had the Poll Tax of the 1980/90’s which again attempted to do this and was fought off by mass protests in the UK. The interesting thing is that these ideas reappear throughout history as the world may change, but the dynamics and power relations often remain the same with the rich and powerful exploiting the poor. Currently we see common people being punished for the credit crisis which has been blatantly caused by the banks and the ruling class. So they cause a massive financial crisis through their own greed and what happens is we see services being cut, benefits slashed, poor people blamed for the crisis and so on and the story continues.

References:

1. Villeins were the most common type of serf in the Middle Ages, renting a house and land, required to farm the land of the lord as well as their own, and forbidden to move away without the lord’s consent.