I have divided my analysis of the condition of the feudal peasantry into two parts according to a principle forcibly suggested, as I think, by the material at hand. The records of trials in the King's Court, and the doctrines of lawyers based on them, cannot be treated in the same way as the surveys compiled for the use of manorial administration. There is a marked difference between the two sets of documents as to method and point of view. In the case of legal records a method of dialectic examination could be followed. Legal rules are always more or less connected between themselves, and the investigator has to find out, first, from the application of what principles they flow, and to find out, secondly, whether fundamental contradictions disclose a fusion of heterogeneous elements. The study of manorial documents had to proceed by way of classification, to establish in what broad classes the local variations of terms and notions arrange themselves, and what variations of daily life these groups or classes represent.
It is not strange, of course, that things should assume a somewhat different aspect according to the point of view from which they are described. Legal classification need not go into details which may be very important for purposes of manorial administration; neither the size of the holdings nor the complex variations of services have to be looked to in cases where the law of status is concerned. Still it may be taken for granted that the distinctions and rules followed by the courts had to conform in a general way with matter-of-fact conditions. Lawyers naturally disregarded minute subdivisions, but their broad classes were not invented at fancy; they took them from life as they did the few traits they chose from among many as tests for the purpose of laying down clear and convenient rules. A general conformity is apparent in every point. At the same time there is undoubtedly an opposition between the curial (if I may use that term) and the manorial treatment of status and tenure, which does not resolve itself into a difference between broad principle and details. Just because the lawyer has to keep to distinct rules, he will often be behind his age and sometimes in advance of it.
His doctrine, once established, is slow to follow the fluctuations of husbandry and politics: while in both departments new facts are ever cropping up and gathering strength, which have to fight their way against the rigidity of jurisprudence before they are accepted by it. On the other hand, notions of old standing and tenacious tradition cannot be put away at once, so soon as some new departure has been taken by jurists; and even when they die out at common law such notions persist in local habits and practical life. For these reasons, which hold good more or less everywhere, and are especially conspicuous in mediaeval history, the general relation between legal and manorial documents becomes especially important. It will widen and strengthen conclusions drawn from the analysis of legal theory. We may be sure to find in thirteenth-century documents of practical administration the foundations of a system which prevailed at law in the fifteenth. And what is much more interesting, we may be sure to find in local customaries the traces of a system which had its day long before the thirteenth century, but was still lingering in broken remains.
Bracton defines villainage as a condition of men who do not know in the evening what work and how much they will have to perform next morning. The corresponding tenure is entirely precarious and uncertain at law. But these fundamental positions of legal doctrine we find opposed in daily life to the all-controlling rule of custom. The peasant knows exactly on what days he bas to appear personally or by representative at ploughings and reapings, how many loads he is bound to carry, and how many eggs he is expected to bring at Easter;(1*) in most cases he knows also what will be required from him when he inherits from his father or marries his daughter. This customary arrangement of duties does not find any expression in common law, and vice versa the rule of common law dwindles down in daily life to a definition of power which may be exercised in exceptional cases. The opposition between our two sets of records is evidently connected in this case with their different way of treating facts.
Manorial extents and inquests give in themselves only a one-sided picture of mediaeval village life, because they describe it only from the point of view of the holding; people who do not own land are very seldom noticed, and among the population settled on the land only those persons are named who 'defend' the tenement in regard to the lord. Only the chief of the household appears; this is a matter of course. He may have many or few children, many or few women engaged on his plot: the extent will not make any difference in the description of the tenement and of its services. But although very incomplete in this important respect, manorial records allow us many a glimpse at the process which was preparing a great change in the law Hired labourers are frequently mentioned in stewards' accounts, and the 'undersette' and 'levingmen' and 'anelipemen'(2*) of the extents correspond evidently to this fluctuating population of rural workmen and squatters gathering behind the screen of recognised peasant holders.
