Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1099 page)

Not so the great barons. Each of them could most easily increase his riches at the expense of some other great baron or of the king; and the people who lived near him would be the firstto suffer if lie were allowed to do so. William had been obliged to allow his barons and earls to judge and govern their tenants in accordance with those
“feudal” customs which had come to be universal in Western Europe since Roman law had been lost and strong government with it. The great kings who succeeded him slowly, painfully, out of scanty material, had to recreate a strong government, and, so, to give peace and order.

Now of the first four, whom alone we call
“Norman” kings, three were wise and strong —
William I, William II, and Henry I — and the fourth, Stephen, was foolish and weak. So,
while the first sixty-nine years after the conquest were a time of increasing peace and prosperity, the next nineteen were the most dreadful period in our history.

Remember that the Norman barons were only five or six generations removed from the fierce
Danish pirates who followed Rollo to France.
There, as there were no strong kings to restrain them, they had been accustomed to build castles and to make their tenants fight for them in their private quarrels. When they got to
England, and grew richer in lands and tenants than they had been in Normandy, they expected to play their familiar game with even greater success. Their kings, however, from the first,
determined they should not do so.

William found, in the slow, undisciplined old
Saxon life, several things which served him to keep his barons in order. For instance, there was an officer in every county called a
sheriff-,
he collected the King’s rents and taxes; he presided over the rude court of justice which was held in every county; he was supposed to lead to battle the free landowners of that county.
William made his sheriffs much more powerful,
and made them responsible for the peace of their counties. In England, too, there had been few castles, and these only stockades of wood on the top of earthen mounds; whereas in
France every baron had a castle. On the
Welsh and Scottish borders William was obliged to allow, and even to encourage, his followers to build castles, but elsewhere he forbade it.
But he built a great many
royal
castles and filled them with faithful paid soldiers. Again,
in Normandy there had been barons as rich in lands and money as the Duke himself; but
William kept enormous tracts of English land in his own hands, and so made the Crown ten times richer than any baron. In Normandy the Duke had no real system of taxes; in England the King could and did levy a regular tax of so many shillings on each estate. Ethelred had begun this in order to get money to bribe the Danes; the later kings had continued it.

Many estates were, however, free from this tax, and no doubt it was always difficult to collect. So, in 1085, William sent officers to every village and county in England to find out who must pay the tax and how much each must pay. These officers called together a sort of
“jury” of the villagers, who declared the value of the estate. The results were collected and written down in “Domesday Book,” which you may see in the British JMuseum. An extract from it will run somewhat like this: “County of Cambridge: In Blackacre are ten hides
(the hide is an old measure of land, say 120
acres). Thurstan holds it. In King Edward’s time Wulfstan held it. It was worth £2 6s. 8
d.
Now it is worth £4 13s. 4
d.
It never paid tax.
There is land for eight ploughs. There are two freeholders and ten serfs. The priest holds half a hide. There is a mill, value 10s. There is wood for 100 pigs, and pasture for 20
cows.”

Are you astonished at the small value of land? You must remember that you could then buy with £l what might now cost you
£40. For there was little silver and less gold in Europe before the discovery of America.
Few gold coins were made in England before the reign of Edward III.

From “ Domesday Book “we can make a roughguess at the population of England in the eleventh century, say about 2,000,000, whereas now it is over 40,000,000. The book does not mention the number of people in the towns,
but in many towns it does mention the number of houses. Probably no town, except London,
had then as many as ten thousand people. Of many places the book says that they were
“waste,” that is, had been burned, either by accidental fires (which must constantly have been occurring when all buildings were of wood)
or by Danes or Normans in the process of conquest. It also tells something of the “customs”
which prevailed in different counties and towns.
We are getting near an age when we shall be able to call such customs “Laws.” The Norman kings tried to use old English customs and to improve them. But theft and murder were still reckoned more as offences against the family of the person wronged than as crimes against the state. You could still atone for such offences by a fine. It was not till late in the twelfth century that you would infallibly be hanged if you were caught; and the certainty of punishment is what really prevents crime.

Now, you can see that the result of an inquiry like Domesday was that the kings knew a great deal about their country and about their

people. They would know, for instance, what great baron or earl was really dangerous; on what part of England what taxes could be levied,
and so on. No doubt the new Norman landowners were often hard to their Saxon tenants.
But it would not pay them to be too hard.
They wanted rents and labour, and a starving man cannot pay rent or work in the fields. :
The land was the only source of riches, and therefore every gentleman had to be first and foremost a farmer, and his tenants under him had to be farmers or farm labourers too.
Domesday mentions, under strange names? a great number of different classes of farming tenants; but, within the next century, we find that all these are melted away into two, the free and the unfree, the freeholders and the
“villeins “ or “serfs.” The former are men whose land averages perhaps forty acres. They pay some small rent in money or in produce to the squire or “lord of the manor,” they follow the sheriff to battle when he bids them. The villein perhaps farms nearly as much land as the freeholder. But he is not
free;
he is bound to pay a rent in labour, say two or even three days a week on the squire’s land, many extra days at harvest time, and perhaps to pay so many eggs, or pigs, or hens every year; nor may he sell his land or go away without his squire’s

lelle. In fall he is very much at the mercy of the squire until the latter half of the twelfth century, when the King’s Law begins to protect him against the squire, to hang him if he commits crimes, and to enroll him as a soldier.
But it will not pay the squire to oppress him too much if he is to get good work out of him.
These clever Normans, all but a few of the greatest barons, soon made common cause with their tenants, soon became English at heart. Over them, too, the good land threw its dear familiar spell, and made them love it beyond all things.

Norman and Saxon

“ My son,” said the Norman Baron,” I am dying,

and you will be heir
To all the broad acres in England that William

gave me for my share
When we conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and

a nice little handful it is.
But before you go over to rule it I want you to understand this:

“The Saxon is not like us Normans; his

manners are not so polite;
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right;

When he stands like an ox in the furrow with

his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son,
leave the Saxon alone.

“You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or

torture your Picardy spears,
But don’t try that game on the Saxon; you’ll

have the whole brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the

poorest chained serf in the fields,
They’ll be at you and on you like hornets, and,
if you are wise, you will yield!

“But first you must master their language, their

dialect, proverbs, and songs,
Don’t trust any clerk to interpret when they

come with the tale of their wrongs.
Let them know that you know what they’re saying; let them feel that you know what to say;

Yes, even when you want to go hunting, hear them out if it takes you all day.

“They’ll drink every hour of the daylight and

poach every hour of the dark,
It’s the sport, not the rabbits, they’re after
(we’ve plenty of game in the park).

Don’t hang them or cut off their fingers.

That’s wasteful as well as unkind,
For a hard-bitten, South-country poacher makes the best man-at-arms you can find.

e< Appear with your wife and the children at

their weddings and funerals and feasts;
Be polite but not friendly to bishops; be good

to all poor parish priests;
Say “we,” “us,” and “ours” when you’re talking, instead of “you fellows” and “I.”
Don’t ride over seeds; keep your temper; and
never you tell ‘em a lie/”

The towns were no doubt horrid places. The fortification of one or more “boroughs” in each county had been begun by the son and grandsons of King Alfred in their wars against the
Danes. Besides a wooden castle on a mound of earth, there would probably be some sort of wooden paling round the towns; and in the twelfth century palings would be replaced by stonewalls. London, York, and Chester probably kept their old Roman walls of stone and occasionally repaired them. As for cleanliness and what we now call “sanitation,” there was none.
All refuse was thrown into the streets, which only rainstorms washed, and where pigs, dogs,
and kites scavenged freely. Each trade orcraft had its own street, and a walk down
“Butcher’s Row” would probably be unpleasing to modern noses. But there was strong patriotism in the towns, and great rivalry between them. A townsman from Abingdon was a-suspected “foreigner” to the citizens of
Oxford. In Sussex to-day the old folk in some villages speak of a hop-picker from another village as a “foreigner.”

Both in town and country the food, even of the poorest, was fairly plentiful. Salt meat,
mainly pork, and in Lent salt fish, was the rule,
and was washed down by huge floods of strong beer. There were no workhouses and no provision for the poor except charity, but charity
(called “almsgiving”) was universal, and beggars swarmed everywhere. If no one else would feed them, the monks always would, and I
fear they made little difference between those who were really in need and those who preferred begging to working. Washing was almost unknown. Even in the King’s household, while there were hundreds of servants in the cooking departments, there were only four persons in the laundry. Horrible diseases like leprosy were common, and occasionally pestilence swept away whole villages and streets of people.

Life then was undoubtedly shorter, and its conditions harder, than to-day; but I think itwas often merrier. Holidays were much more frequent; for the all-powerful Church forbade work on the very numerous saints’ days. Religion influenced every act of life from the cradle to the grave. All the village feasts and fairs centred round the village church and were blessed by some saint. The Norman bishops at once woke up the sleepy Saxon priests and abbots, taught them to use better music, more splendid and more frequent services, cleaner ways of life. Stone churches replaced the w ooden ones, and those mighty Norman cathedrals,
so much of which remains to-day, began to grow up. The zeal for monkery continued right into the thirteenth century, although a pious Norman gentleman seldom went into a monastery himself till his fighting days were over. In the
Church a career was open to the poorest village lad who was clever and industrious; he might rise to be abbot, bishop, councillor of kings, or even Pope. All schools were in the hands of churchmen, and Latin was the universal language of the Church throughout Western
Europe.

In King William’s Great Council, which took the place of the Saxon “Wise Men,” and which became the direct father of the House of Lords, there would sit perhaps 150 great lay barons, nineteen bishops, and some thirtyabbots; but the churchmen would be the most learned, the most cunning and the most regular attendants. Though this Great Council met only for a few days in each year, the King would need secretaries, and lawyers, and officials of one kind or another to be continually about his person; and most of these would be churchmen whom he would reward with bishoprics and abbeys and livings. So far as there was what we now call a “ Ministry “ or a “Privy Council,”
it consisted mainly of churchmen.

So powerful indeed was the Church that quarrels between it and the strong kings were of frequent occurrence during the next century or two. The churchmen were too apt to look to the Pope as their real head instead of the
King. The Popes always tried to keep the
Church independent of the King. They wanted the clergy to pay no taxes for their lands, to have separate courts of justice, to be governed by other laws than those of the laymen, and yet to be wholly defended by the kings and laymen.
Now no good king approved of these demands,
which were indeed monstrous if you consider that the clergy owned between one quarter and one third of the land of England, and were getting more and more, from gifts by pious laymen,
every day. William I had to grant separate courts of justice, and he had no actual quarrelwith the Pope, mainly because his archbishop,
Lanfranc, was a very wise man. But William II
and Henry I each had sharp quarrels with Archbishop Anselm, while as for poor Stephen, he was at the mercy of the great bishops.