accelerating social mobility: the case of anglo-saxon england

The Past and Present Society

Accelerating Social Mobility: The Case of Anglo-Saxon EnglandAuthor(s): W. G. RuncimanSource: Past & Present, No. 104 (Aug., 1984), pp. 3-30Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/650696 .

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ACCELERATING SOCIAL MOBILITY: THE CASE OF ANGLO-SAXON

ENGLAND* DURING THE SIX HUNDRED YEARS BETWEEN THE ARRIVAL OF THE

Anglo-Saxons in Britain and Harold's defeat by William of Norm- andy in io66, English society was in a state of continuous change and frequent upheaval. Although it remained throughout that period an overwhelmingly agrarian society in which social position was principally determined by possession of, or control over, land, it never conformed to the ideal type of a traditional social order within which the families of landlords, petty proprietors, and dependent tenants or labourers succeed one another in unvarying accordance with inherited custom and in the absence of either technological or ideological innovation. On the contrary, the standard modern accounts of the period1 all bring out, with differing shades of emphasis, the instability and disruption resulting from internal warfare and external invasion, land reclamation and settlement, urbanization, the expansion of manufacture and trade, the introduction of coinage, the increasing sophistication of government, the spread of Christian- ity and monasticism, the revival of learning, and the progressive evolution of new forms of social differentiation. But what has not, so far as I am aware, been explicitly emphasized anywhere in the specialist literature is the degree to which these influences served to promote what must have been, in consequence, relatively high rates of social mobility for a society in which the majority of the population continued to be occupied in tilling the soil.

It has of course to be recognized from the outset that there is not and never will be the quantitative evidence for rates of inflow and

* I am grateful to Dr. Simon Keynes for valuable comment and advice. 1F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1971); D. Whitelock,

The Beginnings of English Society, 2nd edn. (Harmondsworth, 1954); H. R. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest (London, 1962); D. P. Kirby, The Making of Early England (London, 1967); P. Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo- Saxon England, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1971); D. J. V. Fisher, The Anglo-Saxon Age (London, 1973); H. P. R. Finberg, The Formation of England (London, 1974); P. H. Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England (London, 1978). I have also relied extensively on English Historical Documents, i, ed. D. Whitelock, 2nd edn. (London, 1979; hereafter E.H.D., i); English Historical Documents, ii, ed. D. C. Douglas and G. W. Greenaway, 2nd edn. (London, 1981; hereafter E.H.D., ii); Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. D. Whitelock (Cambridge, 1930); Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A. J. Robert- son, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1956); Anglo-Saxon Writs, ed. F. E. Harmer (Manchester, 1952). References to laws are to Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903-16), i. References to Domesday Book are to the two volumes edited by Abraham Farley (Record Commissioners, London, I783).



outflow or for probabilities of either inter- or intra-generational short- or long-range rise or fall which would enable this claim to be conclusively tested. Further, it is always possible that even if the rates were relatively high, this was not a fact of any great significance for the workings of Anglo-Saxon society or for the attitudes and experiences of its members. It is, however, striking that all the evidence, sketchy as it may be,2 points towards, and none away from, the conclusion that rates of mobility accelerated steadily between the early eighth and mid-eleventh centuries, and that this mobility was over a sufficient social distance to merit serious attention from sociologists and historians alike. In what follows I shall, in addition to reviewing the evidence, offer an explanation in terms of the unusual combination of rising prosperity, endemic violence and the continuous expansion of the church peculiar to Anglo-Saxon England; and I shall conclude with the suggestion that social mobility would have started to decline in the course of the eleventh century even if the Norman Conquest had not taken place.

I Before reviewing the evidence, however, it is necessary to elucidate the notion of social mobility more precisely. By definition, there are as many dimensions of mobility as there are of social structure, and I propose without further argument to assume that in Anglo-Saxon England, as in any and every other society, there are three and only three such dimensions - the economic, the cultural-cum-ideological and the political-cum-military - which although always mutually interdependent are never wholly reducible to one another.3 More difficult, however, is the question into how many distinguishable, hierarchically ordered groups or categories Anglo-Saxon society is to be divided for the purpose of counting movement from one to another as an instance of "social mobility"; and this is bound up in turn with the distinction between the movement of persons from one existing role or position to another and their movement into changed or even newly created roles or positions located significantly higher

2 There is always a risk that the literary sources will tend to overstate the extent of social mobility, whether because the author approves or disapproves of it, and to fix attention on the most remarkable because least typical instances: see, for example, W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), p. 9, n. 4, on the career of the famous slave-girl Balthild; but this does not undermine their value as evidence for relative increases or decreases in the rate of it.

3 The same assumption is made in two preceding articles to which this one should be read as a sequel: W. G. Runciman, "Origins of States: The Case of Archaic Greece", Comp. Studies in Society and Hist., xxiv (1982), pp. 35 -77; W. G. Runciman, "Capitalism without Classes: The Case of Classical Rome", Brit. Jl. Sociology, xxxiv (1983), pp. I57-8i.

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SOCIAL MOBILITY IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

or lower than their starting-point.4 For the early generations of the Anglo-Saxon period it is plausible to view English society as consisting broadly of three main strata - nobility (eorls), peasantry (ceorls) and slaves (theows) - within which the position of free women was tied to that of their husbands.5 But by the end of the period there was a far more highly differentiated complex of roles and positions between which both inter- and intra-generational mobility might occur, and there were women other than members of royal families whose rank was demonstrably independent of that of their husbands.6 Even if, therefore, we had the evidence which periodic occupational censuses could in principle provide, we should still be left with the task of assessing independently the relative economic, social and political position of the merchants, attorneys, parish priests, craftsmen, cottagers, clerks, millers, bailiffs, mercenaries, entertainers, burgesses and so forth whose existence had in some cases not even been conceivable ten or fifteen generations before.

At the same time, moreover, while new roles and positions emerge and have therefore to be filled, there may also be a collective change in the relative standing of existing ones. Bloch, commenting on the distinctiveness of social relations in England on the eve of the Conquest, remarked that the fluidity of the verbal distinctions drawn in the sources "demonstrates the continued absence of any clear differentiation among the classes";7 and this fluidity not only implies ease of movement between one class and another, but also suggests that the verbal distinctions themselves may be changing in meaning between one generation and the next. One significant such example is the role of geneat, which, as Bloch among others points out, at the beginning of the seventh century designated "a real warrior and a person of fairly high rank",8 but by the time of the eleventh- century document on estate management known as the Rectitudines singularum personarum designates a person paying rent to, and per-

4 Formally, this corresponds to the distinction between what is usually labelled "exchange" or "circulation" mobility and what is usually labelled "structural" mobility, the former being in theory the net residue when structural has been subtracted from total mobility. But even where quantitative evidence is available, the two are impossible to sift out in practice: see, for example, A. Heath, Social Mobility (London, 1981), appendix 2.

5 At the same time there seems throughout the period to have been "a recognized instability in Anglo-Saxon marriages, although we have no quantitative measures": L. Lancaster, "Kinship in Anglo-Saxon Society", Brit. Jl. Sociology, ix (1958), p. 246; see also Whitelock, Beginnings of English Society, pp. I50-1.

6 See Whitelock, Beginnings of English Society, pp. 94-5 (the lady Asa who held her land separately from her husband when married to him and withdrew it when she parted from him is recorded in Domesday Book, i, fo. 373). For the bequest to a daughter of "the estate which was bought with her mother's gold", see Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. Whitelock, p. 54, 11. 25-6.

7 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (London, 1961), p. 183. 8 Ibid.

5



forming services for, the lord of a large estate.9 A change of this kind thus creates the possibility that individual upward mobility and collective downward mobility may so combine that a person who appears to be rising into a traditionally higher-ranking category or group is in fact stationary relative to his fellows in all three dimensions of social structure. And similarly, although the church can plausibly be assumed to provide an avenue to advancement for a person entering the priesthood from modest social origins,10 an cetheling compelled to take holy orders (like Eadberht Pran, who became king of Mercia in 796)1 can hardly be counted as a case of upward mobility.

The critical measure, accordingly, is the social distance between one role or position and another which is to count as marking a step from one distinguishable group or category in a definable rank-order to the next. In some contexts, the answer may seem to be sufficiently provided by the almost pedantically precise and comprehensive- looking rules which govern the payment of wergild: thus the laws of Ine not only distinguish in Kentish shillings between the ceorl worth 200, the king's geneat worth 1,200 and the slave worth either 60 or 50, but also put the king's horswealh level with a ceorl at 200, rank wealhs at 60, 80 or 120 according to whether they own no land, a half-hide or a hide, and put a wealh paying rent level with one owning a hide (his son being set at Ioo). But the social structure of the West Saxons at the turn of the eighth century cannot be mapped by reference to wergild alone. In addition to these distinctions and categories, Ine's laws refer also to servants (esnes) and bondsmen (geburs) at the lower end of the social scale, to reeves (gerefas) in the middle, and to sheriffs (scirmen) and - if the term is not too anachronistic - "lord-lieutenants" (ealdormen) at the upper; they imply significant differences in wealth between one ceorl and another; they mention in passing priests, abbots and abbesses who are evi- dently ranked within a separate hierarchy of their own; and they include a number of separate regulations concerning the gesithcund man who may or may not be a landowner. Even at this early stage, therefore, where the institutions of government are still rudimentary,12 the number of distinguishable roles limited and wergild the

9 E.H.D., ii, pp. 875-9. 10 For the rank accorded to a priest, see VIII Ethelred 28. For the possibility of mobility from sangere to sacerde and bocere to biscpe, see Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Liebermann, i, p. 472 (Grio, 21.2), and Wulfstan's "Corpus" fragment (CCCC 201) as published by K. Jost, Die "Institutes of Policy, Civil and Ecclesiastical" (Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten, xlvii, Bern, 1959), p. 257.

1 See Whitelock in E.H.D., i, p. 25, and the letter of Pope Leo to Cenwulf where he is described as "that apostate cleric who mounted the throne" (ibid., p. 862).

12 See Whitelock's comment (E.H.D., i, p. 60) on the "simple state of things" that seems to lie behind the laws of Ethelbert of Kent, and Stenton's comment (Anglo- Saxon England, p. 30I) on the "primitive simplicity" of the organization depicted in the eighth-century document known as the "Tribal Hidage". For a slightly different, but still cautious, view of the Tribal Hidage, see J. Campbell, "The First Christian

(cont. on p. 7)

6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 104




most important indicator of rank, the existence of vernacular terms denoting distinguishable ranks cannot be assumed to mean that the social distance between them was either large or consistent.

Finally there is also the problem, long familiar in sociological theory, of the relation between local and national rankings. Anglo- Saxon society was characterized throughout its history by marked regional differences. Already in the early law-codes it seems that the span of social distance was greater in Wessex than in Kent (since Kentish nobles appear to have had only three times the wergild of Kentish ceorls) and the differences between Kent and East Anglia and the rest of southern England - to say nothing of the northern Danelaw and the areas of Norwegian settlement - continued right up to the Conquest whether the country was unified under a single king or not. There is no possible way of devising a comprehensive scale on which there can be precisely measured the relative standing of the incumbent of an ostensibly similar role or position in one part of the country and another: although wergild, or size of landholding, or wealth in mancuses of gold may be arithmetically comparable, the status of a viceregal Northumbrian ealdorman is not necessarily equivalent to that of a west country thegn, or that of a semi-free sokeman of the Danelaw with that of a semi-dependent rent-payer (gafolgelda) in the south.

None of these difficulties, however, is such as to make it impossible to talk at all of an acceleration (if such it was) in rates of social mobility over the period. In practice, the evidence in favour of acceleration is of three kinds: first, evidence that the total span of social distance was steadily and significantly increasing, not only in the gap between rich and poor in land or other forms of wealth, but in distinctions of rank and social prestige and in the powers attaching to the higher political and military roles and positions relative to those below them; second, evidence that more and more men (and in some contexts women) were moving into vacant roles or positions either above or below those occupied by their fathers at the time of their birth or by themselves at the time of their emergence into adulthood; and third, evidence that new roles were being created which were not being filled exclusively by persons moving into them from a similar economic, social and/or political position. The impossibility of computing rates of social mobility as such does not make it impossible to decide whether the rate is likely to have gone

(n. 12 cont.)

Kings", in J. Campbell et al. (eds.), The Anglo-Saxons (Oxford, I982), p. 61: "Quite likely it is early, or is derived from early lists. If so, whatever it is, and whatever it means, it indicates a degree of orderliness or coherence in the exercise of power, which, if it can be glimpsed in the early laws and charters, is less easy to detect in the narrative sources".

7



up or down from what it could in principle have been computed to be for a given initial generation. We do not have to know the numbers in the cells of the putative matrix taken as a starting-point before asking whether it became more or less likely for those born into subsequent generations to move into positions significantly higher or lower than those occupied by their fathers than it had been for those born into the initial one.

II The first period of immigration and settlement and the destruction, expulsion or absorption of the Romano-British communities whom the newcomers encountered on their arrival are too sparsely documented, and the controversies surrounding them too far from resolu- tion, for any discussion of social mobility to be precise or even meaningful. But it is not in dispute that, in Loyn's words, "By the seventh century the Anglo-Saxon had so tamed the land that it could support expanding and thriving communities capable of sustaining powerful kings, a prosperous aristocracy and a new Church that made heavy demands upon the faithful".13 This is the society documented by the laws of Ine, the first authentic surviving charter (by Hlothere of Kent in 679) and Bede's account in the Ecclesiastical History of the period of his own lifetime, and it is from this starting- point that it becomes possible to consider the question of social mobility over the next four hundred years. The political and social, as well as the economic, achievements of the period were (to quote Loyn again) "made possible by the skill and care of generations of unnamed peasant farmers working under a social system which slowly evolved more effective techniques for the maintenance of general peace";14 and there can be little doubt that if there were somehow to be made available the data from which to construct mobility tables for those successive generations of unnamed peasantry, the largest single cell would be that containing freeborn cultivators whose fathers had been freeborn cultivators before them. This being so, it might seem reasonable to expect a priori that rates of mobility would be very low. Why should England between 700 and o066 not have continued to be divided into the same three broad classes of nobles, peasantry and slaves which by and large reproduced themselves between one generation and the next? Yet this is not what happened.

The persistent combination of prosperity and violence, both inter-

13 Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, p. 42. 14 Ibid., p. 66.

8 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER I 04




nal and external,15 together with the steady expansion of the church, served to generate not only "structural" mobility through the creation of new roles but also "exchange" mobility as new men rose and previous holders of land or office were driven out or killed or depressed into dependent or even servile status. Moreover, it also created the need for a whole new class of administrators and officials, as kings and their lieutenants sought to organize the means of raising troops and taxes, safeguarding the minting of coins, securing the performance of the trinoda necessitas (the maintenance of bridges and fortifications as well as the supplying of men for military service), and imposing at least the rudiments of public order in the areas where they could. It is true that all of this could in theory take place without rates of social mobility having to accelerate in the course of it. If all officials and administrators, whether clerical or lay, were recruited into positions which corresponded to their social origins; if the nobility were all succeeded by their own or other nobles' sons; if increases in agricultural output were all siphoned off into the rising costs of warfare; if peasant sons who did not inherit their fathers' holdings all settled on equivalent holdings, whether newly vacated or reclaimed; and if servile status was strictly hereditary and slaves systematically replaced by breeding - then it would indeed be possible for increasing prosperity, persistent violence and the expansion of the church to be compatible with a near-absolute minimum of social mobility. But as we shall see, there is ample evidence to show that none of these was the case.

However far the evidence we have may leave us from estimates of differential birth- and death-rates, something can still be said about the likelihood of vacancies at the top of Anglo-Saxon society which could not all be filled from families of equivalent social position. High rates of mortality are always favourable to social mobility, and there is no lack of evidence both for low population growth16 and for the regular incidence of plague and famine in a society in which undernourishment was widespread, medicine rudimentary and stand- ards of hygiene virtually non-existent.17 It is likely that, as in all societies, plague and famine affected the rich less than the poor, and

15 That these two had become directly connected with one another by the end of the period is forcibly pointed out by P. H. Sawyer, "The Wealth of England in the Eleventh Century", Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xv (1965), p. I45: "England was a rich country in the eleventh century, far richer than most neighbouring parts of the continent, and this explains the many raids and attempts at conquest which the English suffered in that century. It was the wealth of England, not the inadequacy of the English defences, that tempted so many continental adventurers to come here in search of loot and tribute".

16 See the estimate of Douglas and Greenaway (E.H.D., ii, p. 74) that infant mortality in any Anglo-Norman village was normally such that "it apparently took two years on an average to add one individual to the community".

17 See W. Bonser, The Medical Background of Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1963), esp. ch. 4.

9



the transfer of landholdings within the class of ceorls resulting from premature death or the lack of direct heirs need not have generated any significant upward or downward mobility. But there is compel- ling evidence for the creation of vacancies at the top of Anglo-Saxon society in the frequency of deaths by violence. Here there seems little doubt that the risks were higher among the nobility than among those below them. It is true that murders and assassinations by themselves are unlikely to amount to enough deaths in total significantly to influence mobility rates. It is also true that contemporaries are likely to have exaggerated the casualty rate in both vendettas and battles. But there is no reason to be sceptical cf the numerous references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and elsewhere to the deaths in battle after battle of kings, thegns and ealdormen. 18 Although the famous poem on the battle of Maldon of 991 describes one unorne ceorl as playing a notable part in the fighting,19 this is no evidence (even if the poem is taken as factual)20 that ceorls were normally other than auxiliaries who accompanied the warriors of thegnly rank who arrived at the battlefield on horseback. No doubt kings and noblemen often had fighting men in their retinues who were not gesithcund; but the story of Imma told by Bede in book iv of the Ecclesiastical History clearly shows that the normal role of the peasant auxiliary, even at that early date, was in the provisioning of the fighting men.21 It was thus among men of thegnly rank that the risk of death in battle was highest, whether in wars against other English kingdoms, resistance to marauding Vikings or invading Danes, or feuds and vendettas between or even within a thegnly family.22 Nor

18 See, for example, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 937 and I004, or Roger of Wendover, Flores historiarum, s.a. 867 (E.H.D., i, pp. 219, 239, 282). For what the English armies were up against, see N. P. Brooks, "England in the Ninth Century: The Crucible of Defeat", Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xxix (1979), p. ii. Fisher, Anglo-Saxon Age, p. 264, comments that "The prominence of the king's thegns in the warfare of both Alfred and Edward the Elder leaves no doubt that they bore the brunt of the fighting". 19 E.H.D., i, p. 323.

20 See R. Woolf, "The Ideal of Men Dying with their Lord", Anglo-Saxon England, v (1976), p. 8i, on the "legendary" character of Brihtnoth's last stand, and the conclusion of N. F. Blake, "The Genesis of The Battle of Maldon", Anglo-Saxon England, vii (1978), p. 129, that the poem is "a literary creation based entirely on the Vita Oswaldi and imagination". (There is no mention in the Vita Oswaldi of the unorne ceorl.)

21 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, iv.xx (E.H.D., i, p. 718); see also the discussion by E. John, "English Feudalism and the Structure of Anglo-Saxon Society", Bull. John Rylands Lib., xlvi (1963), pp. 14-41, esp. pp. 20-4, and appendix i. It is of course possible that auxiliarii sometimes fought, and certain that they were sometimes killed: T. M. Charles-Edwards, "The Distinction between Land and Moveable Wealth in Anglo-Saxon England", in P. H. Sawyer (ed.), Medieval Settlement: Continuity and Change (London, 1976), p. 182, n. i. But milites are almost invariably of thegnly rank, albeit not necessarily by birth.

22 For the death of a king's thegn and fifteen companions in such an episode as reported by Ethelred in 996 in a grant of estates to his mother, see E.H.D., i, p. 577; cf. Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 63.

IO PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER I04




can the attempts of successive kings to impose settlement of feuds, as evidenced by their law-codes, be argued to have been very obviously successful: the regulations of the Cambridge thegns' guild make it abundantly clear that men of this rank needed to form such an association precisely because of the likelihood that a guild-brother would kill or be killed.23 Only if the normal inverse correlation between fertility and social position was drastically reversed for Anglo-Saxon society - and there is no evidence that I know of to suggest it - will deaths by violence not have created empty places to be filled from below.

At the other end of the social scale there was from the beginning of the period at least some mobility in both directions across the indisputably significant boundary between slavery and freedom: the early law-codes and Bede's Ecclesiastical History testify not merely to the existence of slaves but to the processes of both enslavement and manumission.24 That slavery persisted as an accepted institution up to the end of the period, although declining rapidly thereafter, is sufficiently demonstrated by the Domesday returns which classify over 10 per cent of the recorded population as servi; and although it is impossible to prove that rates of either enslavement or manumission were higher in the tenth and eleventh centuries than the eighth and ninth, there are several good reasons for thinking so.

First, the increasing influence of the church in promoting manumission is attested by the frequency with which the wills which survive from the later part of the period provide for the freeing of the testators' slaves (even if not always in total or unconditionally),25 and by the tenth- and eleventh-century practice of recording manu- missions in the books of a neighbouring church.26 Second, the traffic in English slaves which is already implied by the well-known anecdote in which Pope Gregory I is supposed to have made the remark "non Angli sed angeli" and by the penalty imposed by Ine (c.II) on the sale "across the sea" of a fellow-countryman may be presumed to have increased along with the general expansion of trade in all commodities: the prohibition of it documented in V Ethelred 2, VI Ethelred 9 and II Cnut 3 is evidence in itself that it was

23 E.H.D., i, p. 604. 24 Ibid., pp. 397 (Wihtred c.8), 399 (Ine C.3), 714 (Bede, Ecclesiastical History,

iv.xiii). D. Pelteret, "Slave Raiding and Slave Trading in Early England", Anglo- Saxon England, ix (1981), p. 103, points out also that whatever the actual date of its composition the Poenitentiale Theodori, which records a variety of grounds for enslavement, drew on sources dating back to the late seventh century.

25 See Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. Whitelock, nos. I, 3, 4, 9, 14, i8, 20, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38. H. P. R. Finberg, "Anglo-Saxon England to 1042", in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, i, pt. 2, A.D. 43-1042, ed. H. P. R. Finberg (Cambridge, 1972), p. 508, remarks that although the church never con- demned slavery as such it had an interest in manumission if only because the freedmen would then become liable for ecclesiastical dues.

26 See E.H.D., i, pp. 383-4.

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flourishing, and it is not implausible to suggest that "the new influx of Danes had given new vitality to old bad habits".27 Certainly in the time of Wulfstan II, bishop of Worcester, as we know from William of Malmesbury,28 traders were shipping to Ireland slaves "bought up all over England" and Wulfstan, archbishop of York, in his Sermo Lupi ad Anglos bewails the sale of innocent men "far and wide out of this country into the power of foreigners".29 Third, the unceasing fighting consequent on the Scandinavian raids and invasions in a society in which slavery was the normal fate of prisoners captured in battle can hardly have failed to increase the numbers of men enslaved on both sides: Wulfstan testifies to the enslavement of thegns at the hands of their own former slaves who had themselves achieved their freedom by running away to the Vikings.30 Fourth, there were also families compelled to sell themselves into slavery to save themselves from starvation, even if they might hope to be subsequently manumitted, like the one whose manumission by the lady who had "taken their heads for food in the evil days" is recorded in a late tenth-century hand in a Liber vitae from Durham.31 Numerical estimates may be out of the question, but these several inferences when taken together make it highly implausible to suppose that the frequency of either manumission or enslavement declined during the last two centuries of the Anglo-Saxon period. What is more, it is evident from the sources that individual mobility across the boundary between slave and free could not only cover a very large social distance but could and did occur in both directions within the same person's lifetime.

Against this background it may seem eccentric to talk of prosperity, particularly for the mass of cultivators whose struggle to feed themselves and their families, difficult enough in times of peace, must all too often have been beyond them in times of war, pestilence and famine. But it remains true, all the same, that the country as a whole was prosperous and that the greater part of its wealth came from the land. What is more, the conditions under which its wealth was created and used served to promote both upward and downward mobility. Upward mobility increased as increasing amounts of land changed hands through resettlement, purchase, usurpation or be-

27 Fisher, Anglo-Saxon Age, p. 333. On the fate of the companions of Alfred son of Ethelred, see also Florence of Worcester, s.a. I036 (E.H.D., i, p. 316). Pelteret, "Slave Raiding and Slave Trading in Early England", p. I07, draws the parallel between the shift in the meaning of wealh in West Saxon texts from the tenth century from "Celt" to "slave" and the later derivation of "slave" from "Slav".

28 Vita Wulfstani, ed. R. R. Darlington (London, 1928), ch. 20. 29 E.H.D., i, p. 930. 30 Ibid. Nor were Vikings the only ones: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. Io65

(E.H.D., ii, p. 142) records the capture and removal of "many hundreds" of people from the area round Northampton by Northumbrians.

31 E.H.D., i, p. 6Io.





quest outside the immediate kin. Downward mobility increased as commendation and incipient manorialism depressed the social position of formally free but dependent labourers and tenants. There was, inevitably, some fragmentation of landholdings among both noble and peasant families. But there was not an increasing pressure of population on a limited supply of cultivable land so much as a continuing competition for the yield of the most productive of it. It is true that Bede, in a letter of 734 to the archbishop of York, laments the lack of places where nobles' sons or veteran thegns can receive an estate.32 But this is in the context of a complaint about the acquisition of land "in the name of monasteries" by "those who are totally ignorant of the monastic life": estates were frequently usurped by fraud or violence, and gesithcund young men without land of their own were particularly likely to be among those who did so. As royal authority strengthened, there was in the territories under the kings' effective control more transfer of land by purchase or bequest and less by violence. But in the process the holders of book-right increased their powers over their dependent tenants, and the powers of the kindred correspondingly declined.33 There developed an increasingly active land-market,34 in which there was nothing to prevent ceorlisc men from acquiring the five hides which carried the status of thegnhood;35 and in the same process less fortunate ceorls were forced downwards. As Whitelock comments in connection with a lease of an estate in Surrey to Edward the Elder by the bishop of Winchester,36 a bishop was able to restock seventy hides "stripped bare by heathen men" but what ceorl could afford to restock his own few acres? There must have been many who had no choice but to accept the terms which a landrica offered them and to pay the rent and/or services asked.

Whether the sanctions at the landrica's disposal were quite as drastic as is implied by IV Edgar 1.2, according to which a persist- ently defaulting tenant (geneatmann) will be deprived not merely of his property but his life by his lord (hlaford), is perhaps not proven by a clause in a law-code to that effect. But there can be no doubt of the weight of fines and taxes imposed and of dues and contributions

32 Ibid., p. 805. 33 See Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, p. 155, who speaks of a "fundamental change in the concepts of land ownership in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries".

34 For an injunction that an estate is to be sold for as much as it will fetch (swa man derast mage), see Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. Whitelock, p. 12, 1. 12.

35 As witnessed by the text Gethynctho (Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Liebermann, i, pp. 456-8), now attributed to Wulfstan (see E.H.D., i, p. 468).

36 E.H.D., i, p. 57, commenting on the Old English lease translated on pp. 543- 4. See also F. M. Stenton, "The Thriving of the Anglo-Saxon Ceorl", in D. M. Stenton (ed.), Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England: Being the Collected Papers of Frank Merry Stenton (Oxford, 1970), pp. 387-8.

I3



extracted. The kings' food-rents of the earlier part of the period were already substantial,37 and the danegeld and heregeld of the later part, coupled with the payments due (as set out in V Ethelred II. I) from all free men to the church, were clearly very onerous indeed. The murder of two royal tax-collectors at Worcester in the reign of Hardacnut38 may have been exceptional, but it is symptomatic of the onerousness of the exactions that brought it about. Such relentless extraction of any agricultural surplus could not but promote vertical differentiation between those who benefited from the exaction of the geld and those from whom it was exacted, and among the latter between those best and least able to pay it. Hazardous as it may be to read too much back from the evidence of Domesday, it can nevertheless be said that "The one generalization about the Anglo- Saxon agrarian community upon which all seem to be agreed is that the condition of the peasantry was markedly worse in the latter part of the period than it had been in the earlier";39 and it seems agreed also that the Domesday evidence shows that many formally free men had been reduced to very small landholdings (even after allowance is made for the Domesday commissioners' lack of interest in pasture as opposed to arable). In Lennard's words, "'Freedom' may mean freedom for the enterprising or the fortunate to prosper and obtain more land and stock; but it also means freedom to become indebted, freedom to sell one's land, freedom to sink into poverty".40 Thus there is every reason to believe that within the category of those living on the land who could still be assigned to the recognized intermediate category between nobility and slaves, both individual and collective mobility across a significant social distance had been on the increase in the several generations prior to the Norman Conquest.

When it comes to consideration of the non-agricultural sectors of the economy, their relative insignificance rules out the possibility that more than a very small proportion of men born as ceorls rose in social position as a result of moving from agriculture into trade or industry. But small though the numbers may have been, the proportion must have risen steadily as towns and markets41 grew, increasing amounts of coinage were minted and issued,42 pottery production

37 See Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 288, commenting on Ine, c.70.I. 38 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. I04I (E.H.D., i, p. 260). 9 Hunter Blair, Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, p. 261.

40 Reginald Lennard, Rural England, zo86-1135 (Oxford, 1959), p. 355. See also R. S. Hoyt, "Farm of the Manor and Community of the Vill in Domesday Book", Speculum, xxx (1955), p. 60o (on Blakenham, in Suffolk): "it is most reasonable to suppose that a group of the free men undertook a three year farm of the manor as a speculative venture which failed".

41 For their evident value, see for example the terms of King Edward's grant to Ramsey Abbey of the market at Durham: Anglo-Saxon Writs, ed. Harmer, p. 259.

42 On the exceptional competence of the late Anglo-Saxon coinage (and the contrast with Normandy), see C. E. Blunt, "Anglo-Saxon Coinage and the Historian", Medieval Archaeol., iv (I960), p. 15; J. Campbell, "Observations on English Govern-

(cont. on p. i5)

I4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER I04




was expanded,43 wool was exported,44 and churches were built in even greater numbers than recorded in the Domesday Book.45 The "burgesses" who begin to appear in the sources in the later part of the period may not be quite of thegnly rank, but they are never equated with ceorls;46 and the same text of Wulfstan's which attests the possiblity of a ceorl achieving thegnly rank by possession of five hides also attests the possibility of a merchant doing so by making three successful voyages.47 That merchants could be much more than mere local peddlers is evident already from the reference to their retinues in a law of Alfred (c.34). It may be that by the time of the Conquest no more than some io per cent of the adult male population could have been classified as in urban employments. But this still meant that many tens of thousands of new positions had had to be filled, and few if any can have been filled by persons for whom no significant change of status was involved. Whatever the numbers involved, it can hardly be doubted that structural opportunities for both inter- and intra-generational mobility accelerated rather than declined between the early tenth and mid-eleventh century.

The same holds equally in the political dimension. All authorities seem to be agreed that the royal power strengthened significantly from the time of Alfred onwards, and that the rituals of kingship on which, with the aid of the church, increasing emphasis came to be placed both symbolized and enhanced it. But the further effect of this process was to increase both the number and the power of the king's auxiliaries. The numbers in his immediate household were, admittedly, far too small for their recruitment to make any significant difference; and in any case, the chamberlains, butlers and lesser (n. 42 cont.) ment from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century", Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xxv (I975), pp. 39-40. S. Loyn, "Some Problems in Interpreting Anglo-Saxon Coinage", Anglo-Saxon England, v (I976), p. 208, emphasizes the flexibility, as well as the sophistication, of late Anglo-Saxon monetary policy, which enabled it to tolerate both local and national variations in metrology.

43 See L. and J. Laing, Anglo-Saxon England (London, I979), p. 155: "It is in the English pottery industry that substantial [archaeological] evidence can be found for the intensification of trade and industry in late Saxon England".

44 See Sawyer, "Wealth of England in the Eleventh Century", pp. I6I-3. 45 See Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, pp. 136-7, drawing on

H. C. Darby and E. M. J. Campbell (eds.), The Domesday Geography of South-East England (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 496-7. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, p. 254, concludes that "the overall impression is that England was well served with ecclesiastical buildings, and that no Englishman lived an impossible distance from a church".

46 Finberg, Formation of England, p. 227: "their hallmark is the payment of a money rent for their houses. They are not serfs of the manor and nobody will be so misguided as to call them ceorls. Their status is nearer to that of the geneat; it even approximates to that of the thegn".

47 Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Liebermann, i, p. 458 (Textus Roffensis only). The "merchant" in £lfric's Colloquy (M. Swanton (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Prose (London, I975), pp. 1I-I2) who imports "precious things which aren't produced in this country" sounds, to that extent, like a person of altogether greater wealth and higher status than a ceorl.

I5



attendants on the royal person were likely to be recruited from their rank of origin. But the deputies on whom the kings depended to uphold their authority in their outlying shires were raised in the social scale as the power of the monarchy increased. The process is reflected in the emergence of what Loyn is prepared to call "a new class called thegns" on whom much of the responsibility for local government devolved in the last century and a half of Anglo-Saxon and Danish rule,48 and who were at the same time responsible for the performance of the trinoda necessitas and the defence of the realm.49 Moreover this increasing differentiation also extended down to the village level where the institution of the hundred, wapentake and tithing50 created new quasi-political roles whose new incumbents ranked significantly higher than the rest of their fellow-tunesmen. The ties of kinship may not, even by the end of the period, have been entirely displaced by the ties of lordship. But when the stipulation in the laws of Alfred (c.42.6) that no man may fight on behalf of his kinsman against his lord is read together with that of III Ethelred i that the king himself reserves soke over his own thegns and Athelstan's presumption that every man is to have a lord, it is very difficult not to conclude that with all due allowance for regional variation there was a progressive widening of social distance from the king downwards. Loyn holds that "The aristocracy in the eleventh century was almost certainly more numerous, absolutely and relatively, than it had been in the seventh century".51 If this is so, then in the absence of evidence for exceptionally high birth-rates and low death-rates among successive generations of the same initial landholding nobility, there can be no escape from the conclusion that individual upward mobility both within52 and into the enlarged aristocracy accelerated over the period.

Finally there is the well-documented growth in the size and

48 H. R. Loyn, "Gesiths and Thegns in Anglo-Saxon England from the Seventh to the Tenth Century", Eng. Hist. Rev., cclxxvii (1955), p. 542. See also Stenton, "Thriving of the Anglo-Saxon Ceorl", p. 39I: "It is unlikely that an adequate number of potential officials whose loyalty was unquestioned was obtained from the thegns by birth who held land in the West Saxon Kingdom".

49 See for example the organization documented in Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. Robertson, no. 52, to provide for "bridge-work" at Rochester in about the mid-tenth century.

50 See II Cnut 20, where it is first laid down that any free adult man (that is, over twelve years old) who wishes to claim compurgation or wergild is to be brought to a hundred or tithing.

51 Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, p. 223. 52 The prospects of a thegn rising to an earl's rights are also attested in Wulfstan's

Gethynctho (Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Liebermann, i, p. 456), with the clear implication that it was attainable by merit once given the property qualification for thegnhood. See also his claim in the Corpus fragment (Jost, Die "Institutes of Policy", p. 256) that "it often happens that a slave earns his freedom from a ceorl, and a ceorl by the earl's gift becomes entitled to a thegn's rank, and a thegn by the king's gift becomes worthy of an earldom .. .".

PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER I 04




influence of the church over the period; and this too cannot but have further promoted social mobility. I have already remarked on the opportunities for individual advancement which the priesthood offered for those who, like Caedmon the cowherd,53 were not already born to a similar status and wergild. But with the Benedictine revival, the spread of education and learning, and the benefits of royal encouragement and patronage, the clergy like the nobility steadily rose in relative status as well as numbers.

Despite occasional complaints like Alcuin's in 80I about the life- style of the then archbishop of York,54 the prelates of the period continued to behave very much like their secular counterparts, and the steady acquisition of land from kings and nobles made the abbots and bishops with their attendant retinues, dependent tenantry and substantial money incomes from tithes and "scot" into large landlords who, moreover, enjoyed greater privileges and less obligations than others. The same general conclusion about vertical differentiation can thus be applied to bishops and priests as to ealdormen and thegns. But in addition to this, the revival of learning initiated by Alfred in the late ninth century and continued by his successors both raised the educational and thereby the social standing of the clergy and offered further openings for the able and industrious to rise within the social hierarchy of the church independently of status by birth. A distinguished scholar like Byrhtferth might complain about the ignorance of "rustic priests",55 but Wulfstan's Institutes of Polity make it clear that educational qualifications for ordination were taken seriously.56 That there was a marked diversity among them in their landholdings is clear from Domesday Book. But equally there is no doubt that despite the rich livings held by some priests of thegnly rank, village priests were normally men of ceorlisc status who in some villages at least "occupied a position markedly superior to the ordinary villager".57 Once again, therefore, the conclusion must be that there was an increasing number of vacancies for a role higher than that of the typical villanus, not all of which can have been filled by men already of equivalent social position.

III I have argued thus far that all the evidence, sketchy as it is, points

53 See Bede, Ecclesiastical History, iv.xxiv (E.H.D., i, p. 722). 54 E.H.D., i, pp. 865-6. 55 Whitelock, Beginnings of English Society, p. 202, having presumably in mind

Byrhtferth's Manual, ed. S. J. Crawford (Early Eng. Text Soc., original ser., clxxvii, 1929), pp. 132-3, on "rustic priests" (uplendiscum preostum, and cf. the "ignorant clerks", clerici imperiti, on pp. 40-I) in contrast to young monks who have occupied their childhood on "scientific books" (craeftigum bocum), or the "educated priests" (gelaeredum preostum) on pp. 182-3.

56 Cf. Jost, Die "Institutes of Policy", p. 220. 57 Lennard, Rural England, p. 328.

I7



towards, and none away from, the conclusion that social mobility increased over the period under discussion. But I have not directly confronted the longstanding and still unsettled controversy between the two main theories of which one, as Maitland summarized it, "would think of the soil of England as being tilled from the first mainly by men who, when they were not mere slaves, were coloni adscript to the land", whereas the other "would postulate the existence of a large number of free men who with their own labour tilled their own soil, of men who might fairly be called free 'peasant proprietors' since they were far from rich and had few slaves or servants, and yet who were no mere peasants since they habitually bore arms in the national host".58 It is a controversy into which a non-specialist ventures at his peril. But I shall assume from now on that the "peasant proprietor" school has had the worst of it. This is not merely because I have already accepted that thegns rather than ceorls did the fighting but also for two further reasons. First, the critics (such as Aston and Finberg) do seem, so far as I feel competent to judge, to have a very strong case; and second, to side with the "peasant proprietor" school would be to take my own argument for granted by default. If the story of the period is the story of a transition from a society of self-governing, internally egalitarian villages whose male household heads all farmed their own arable and shared the same common rights and owed allegiance to no lord but the king to a hierarchical, inegalitarian, largely manorialized society in which an expanded class of thegnly lords held private jurisdiction and the once independent peasantry were reduced to serfs or cottagers owing rent and services to them, then it is a story of accelerating social mobility almost by definition.

Even if, however, Anglo-Saxon society in the eighth and ninth centuries was already more inegalitarian than the partisans of the "peasant proprietor" school believe it to have been, there was still a further widening of social distance in the tenth and eleventh centuries and therewith an increase in mobility across the dividing- lines preserved or additionally created in the process. Even from an already "proto-manorial" starting-point, there were significant further increases in freedom for those ceorls who rose in the social scale and significant further diminutions of it for those who fell. Of course freedom, as Maitland well knew, could mean many things which need to be carefully distinguished from one another.59 Within the large social space between servus and tainus there are at one end men answerable only to the king, who have their own "sake and soke" and can go with their land "whither they please", and at the other men tied to their holdings, justiciable by their lords and bound

58 F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge, I897), p. 221. 59 Ibid., pp. 42 ff.

PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER I 04




to render labour services to their lords of a kind regarded as servile. For each male household head who is formally free several questions have to be separately asked. What is his wergild? Who is his lord, and what are his obligations to him? On what terms does he hold his land? Can he sell or bequeath the land which he cultivates as he pleases? What are the services which he owes his lord? Does he owe them by birth or by contract? Was he born legally free? Does he serve with the army when summoned to do so, and in what capacity? Has he personally commended himself to a lord, and if so to a lord of what standing? If he leaves, can he be recaptured? To whom are his taxes paid? If he owes rent, in what form is it paid? Does he have access to the king's courts? If he does not have his own "sake and soke", does the lord who has it have a court of his own? Does his soke go with his land, or not? Does he have other free men subordinate to him, and if so in what sense and on what terms? But the fact that all these questions do need to be asked by the late ninth and early tenth centuries is evidence in itself for a social structure in which differentiation and therewith mobility had significantly increased.

There remains, to be sure, the difficulty that the terms by which men who rank somewhere between thegn and slave are designated in the sources are sometimes irritatingly imprecise. We may be reasonably certain that a radcniht is the equal of a geneat, that a censarius owing rent is above a gebur owing both rent and services, that a libertinus or a colibertus is lower than a man born free, and that a sochemannus is above an "ordinary" villanus or tunesman. But we have also to acknowledge that, for example, both geneats and geburs can be categorized as villani, that sochemanni and liberi homines as recorded in Domesday cannot be consistently differentiated by their relations either to their lords or to their lands, and that social categories in general may be applied quite differently in one part of the country from another. Fortunately, however, my argument here does not require me to reconcile all the terminological differences by which even Maitland was sometimes defeated and about which specialists continue to disagree. I need only to be able to relate the evidence back to the broad distinction between the three dimensions of social structure on which the definition of social mobility rests and to show that the increasingly complex forms of social differentiation which the sources record do indicate not merely a refinement of categories within an already rigid hierarchy of subordination of men to their lords but a continuing fluidity of economic, social and/ or political dividing-lines across which movement continued with mounting frequency up to io66.

For the economic dimension, I have already cited some of the evidence for the increasing differentiation which accompanied the agricultural prosperity and stable currency of the later part of the

I9



period. By then the post-Alfredian law-codes leave no doubt about the powers exercised by lords over dependent ceorls.60 But even if the laws of Ine are construed as already reflecting a not wholly dissimilar social structure,61 there is still a long way to go to the type of structure reflected in the Rectitudines or the similar Tidenham survey or memorandum from Hurstbourne,62 or Domesday Book itself. Even if the gafolgelda or gebur of Ine (c.6.3) works at his lord's command (c.3.2), cannot leave his land without his lord's permission (c.39), is dependent on his lord to intercede for him (c.5o) and gets a house from his lord conditionally on performance of services (c.67), there can still be no doubt that vertical differentiation had progressed significantly further by the early eleventh century. The estate whose customs are set out in the Rectitudines is altogether more remote from the royal authority, more complex in the allocation of services and payments, more differentiated in specialist functions, and more specifically under managerial direction than would have been conceivable in eighth-century Wessex. In particular, the kotsetla of the Rectitudines, who then becomes the cottarius or bordarius of Domesday Book, occupies an entirely new and distinctive economic position. There are about 89,000 bordars and cottars recorded in Domesday,63 and for all the inconsistency with which these terms are applied and the differences in holdings of land and possession of plough-teams ascribed to them, there is by now a substantial class of smallholders with less than enough land to support their families and owing some form or other of more or less onerous service.64 They can only have been recruited either from downwardly mobile villani or upwardly mobile servi (or their sons); and it is highly plausible to construe, as Lennard does, the "hesitations and inconsistencies" of Domesday as "readily intelligible if the class to which they belonged was, so to say, a class in motion - a class tending to split into branches distinguished by economic divergence".65

There might, conceivably, have been more uniformity of economic conditions, and therefore less mobility across a significant social distance, than the diversity of terminology suggests. But the diversity of conditions documented in Domesday Book, even when allowance

60 See IV Edgar 1.2 (cited above, p. 15); Hundred Ordinance, .7. I (a hlaford's ban excuses non-attendance); II Edgar 3.1 and VI Athelstan I.I (the landhlaford takes a share of fines on the men of his estate); II Athelstan Io (the landhlaford keeps livestock exchanged in the absence of a qualified witness); Northumbrian Priests' Law, c.54 (the landrica is to impose a fine for heathen practices and keep half).

61 As argued by T. H. Aston, "The Origins of the Manor in England", Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., viii (1958), pp. 59-83, esp. pp. 65 ff.

62 Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. Robertson, nos. Io9, IIo (E.H.D., ii, pp. 879-80). 63 R. Welldon Finn, An Introduction to Domesday Book (London, 1963), p. 126. 64 Douglas and Greenaway draw attention to the fact that the cottars of the later

Burton survey (circa 1126) who owe one day a week also practise a trade: E.H.D., ii, p. 888, n. I.

65 Lennard, Rural England, p. 356.

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has been made for the lack of information on the relation of landholdings to services due, is so wide that a process of increasing vertical differentiation within the formally free peasantry is unmistakable. Even if the starting-point never was a society in which there predomin- ated a uniform class of ceorls each with his hide of land, his rights in woodland and waste, his share in the open meadow and his household slaves, there is still a long way to go to the spread from the sochemannus on the brink of thegnhood, with his 44 hides,66 to the bordarii "who hold no land",67 or the 243 out of 464 Middlesex cottars not credited with any land and the further 49 credited only with gardens.68 Nor is there any less diversity among the "especially free" peasantry of East Anglia.69 It may be that there was a "normal" holding of a virgate for a Domesday villanus, and of 5 acres for a cottar or bordar (as suggested by the author of the Rectitudines). But this is still indicative of a general depression of the peasantry and therewith an accentuation of the difference between the prosperous villanus or rent-paying censarius with his hide or more of arable, his four or more oxen and/or his profits from sheep-farming and the landless cottar or the gebur dependent on a manorial lord for his house, tools and seed and burdened by both labour services and tribute. Loyn's comment on the gebur of the Rectitudines is that "The need for protection must have been great before such demands could be made of a class that was certainly numerous".70 But protection apart, if there was by now an increasing number of ceorlisc sons seeking landholdings this will in itself have weakened their bargain- ing power compared with what it was in the still colonizing days of King Ine. Conversely, we know that at least some industrious and/ or fortunate geburs were able to purchase for themselves a greater measure of freedom, like two persons at Bedwyn in Wiltshire who bought release "out of the geburland" for 300 pence each some time in the tenth century, or the son of a colibertus who bought his release some time in the eighth century by giving a fishery to the abbey of Gloucester.71 The conclusion is inescapable that extensive downward collective and some upward individual mobility was taking place.

66 Domesday Book, i, fo. I46a. 67 Ibid., ii, fo. 75b. 68 Lennard, Rural England, p. 342. 69Ibid., p. 359. 70 Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, p. 191. 71 See Finberg, Formation of England, pp. 66, 219, and Aston "Origins of the

Manor in England", pp. 72, 73 (who in giving references acknowledges his debt to Finberg for the second). As regards the Danish freedmen (leysingar), F. M. Stenton, "The Danes in England", in D. M. Stenton (ed.), Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England, p. 147, argues that "many of them, no doubt, rose in the social scale, achieved full independence, and transmitted it to descendants who appear in Domes- day as sokemen", and he points for evidence of their numbers not only to personal names and place-names but to the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum which equates them with English ceorls occupying gafolland (E.H.D., i, p. 416). This tantalizing clause has, however, been much disputed; see R. H. C. Davis, "East Anglia and the Danelaw", Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., v (1955), pp. 33-5. Before drawing any

(cont. on p. 22)

2I



There is an equally strong impression of fluidity at the upper end of the scale, among the "lower middle classes"72 of sochemanni and liberi homines and south Lancashire drengs, geneats or radcnihts performing non-servile duties for their manorial lords, thriving ceorls on the way to "the top of the agricultural ladder",73 the petty thegn with his single hide,74 or the holder of a petty manor like the deacon with a mere 12 acres pro manerio in Tudenham.75 By the end of the period, fluidity of landholding had been promoted not merely by purchase or bequest (or violence) but by the increasing amount of bookland which passed into the hands of leaseholders. It is true that the practice of leasing goes back as far as the early eighth century.76 But the "great series" of Worcester leases, of which that just cited is the first, increases to more than seventy granted by St. Oswald between 96I and 992 and extends to a further dozen granted by his successors down to the Oswald who officiated at the Conqueror's coronation.77 Nor is the evidence restricted to only one or two sees or shires: Lennard regards it as certain that "it was very common in the generation before the Conquest for people to hold a tenancy on one or more lives" and believes that there can be little doubt that the surviving evidence is "merely the traces, almost fortuitously preserved, of arrangements that must have been far more numerous than the cases mentioned".78 The lessees were required to perform services as well as to pay rent. But these services are not servile; they are those of the radmanni and drengs.79 What is more, the limit of three generations which appears to have been normal was in practice likely to be nullified either by the negligence of the lessor or by the obstinacy (reinforced "by the power of evil men") of the lessee.80 Once again, therefore, we have evidence of a significant increase in opportunities for the ascendant ceorl.81 (n. 71 cont.)

sociological inference it is perhaps prudent to recall Maitland's observation in his Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 44, n. I, that "This international instrument is setting an exceptionally high tariff for the maintenance of the peace".

72 Welldon Finn, Introduction to Domesday Book, ch. 8. 73 Finberg, Formation of England, p. 227, citing a rusticus who had held eight hides

in a charter of 994, and having presumably in mind Codex diplomaticus aevi Saxonici, no. 1282, cited also by Stenton, "Thriving of the Anglo-Saxon Ceorl", p. 392.

74 Domesday Book, i, fo. I52b. 75 Ibid., ii, fo. 423. 76 Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, p. 176, citing Cartularium

Saxonicum, no. i66. 77 Lennard, Rural England, p. 159. 78 Ibid., pp. I64-5. 9 See Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 308.

80 Ibid., p. 310, quoting from Heming's Cartulary, i, 259, as does Robertson in Anglo-Saxon Charters, p. 320. For a case where a brother of a third life obtained a legitimate extension, see Anglo-Saxon Writs, ed. Harmer, p. 131; but this too led to trouble, since the brother claimed to have been granted ius hereditarium and the abbey of Abingdon did not finally win its case until some years later: ibid., p. 121.

81 See Stenton's comment in his Anglo-Saxon England, p. 485, that "In course of time [that is, in Edgar's reign] churches began to grant leases to men of a lower social rank".

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When we turn to the dimension of social status, there is again evidence for increasing opportunities for upward mobility. But it is in one respect paradoxical. Kingship, as I have already remarked, became endowed with significantly greater prestige, and kingship was hereditary (albeit in theory elective from within the royal family, and without any tradition of a single designated successor). But lower down in the social hierarchy, it was rather the replacement of kinship by service as a criterion of status which created the opportunities for mobility. There is, however, no real contradiction. Status by birth was always operative throughout the society: a king was normally the son of a king, a gesithcund man the son of a man of thegnly rank, a ceorlisc man the son of a ceorl, and a slave's son was born a slave. The difference which took place was that while the importance of the kin-group and the wergild diminished, greater importance came to be attached to the nature of the functions which a man performed and the reputation and life-style which went with them. As differentiation increased, a ceorl by birth might equally well end his career as a geneat whose duties to his lord were almost thegnly or as a gebur whose duties were barely distinguishable from those of a freedman. The interesting rendering in the Alfredian translation of Orosius whereby ceorl is equated with libertinus82 cannot be taken by itself as evidence that ceorls as a class were equated by Alfred or anyone else with freedmen. But it does strongly suggest a clerical prejudice symptomatic of a decline in the social prestige of the "ordinary" ceorl.

It is also noticeable that after Alfred's time, wergild becomes less a guarantee of social status than a residual symptom of it. The 600- shilling man disappears from the sources altogether; new social categories appear within that of the formally free but increasingly diverse ceorl; and the puzzling distinction between liberi homines and sokemen may well, as Maitland suggested, be a residual symptom of just the kind of differentation by wergild which by the time of Domesday had been overtaken by new economic and social forms of differentiation alike.83 In particular, military functions became at the same time more professional and more prestigious. Even if ceorls who performed military service had only ever done so as auxiliaries, this does not mean that there were not increasing opportunities for

82 Finberg, Formation of England, p. I 3, having presumably in mind King Alfred's Orosius, ed. H. Sweet (Early Eng. Text Soc., original ser., lxxix, 1883), pp. 162, I63. J. Bately in a new edition of the same text notes that the translator is interpreting libertinus not as Orosius meant but according to the definition given by Isidore (Etymologies, ix.iv.47), for whom they are sons of freedmen (quasi de libertis nati): The Old English Orosius, ed. J. Bately (Early Eng. Text Soc., supplementary ser., vi, London, I980), p. 274.

83 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. io6, n. I, citing the post-Conquest Leges Edwardi, I2.4 (though Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 517, regards any such explanation as "mere surmise").

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men of ceorlisc birth to become professional warriors and thereby acquire both the status and the landholding which would accrue to the most successful among them. The professionalization of military functions culminated in Cnut's housecarls who were distinguished alike by their code of discipline and their proximity to the king.84 The fact that they were recruited entirely from fellow-Danes meant that initially, at least, the indigenous English milites had nothing to gain. But the separation of functions did both create additional opportunities and further increase the social distance between the new military 6lite and the ordinary villager or petty thegn called out for service in thefyrd. The Danes did not, like the Normans, displace the indigenous nobility, but supplemented them. By the time of the Conquest, the Anglo-Danish nobility was an affluent, prestigious, still expanding, still open elite of thegns, bishops and housecarls far removed from the simple warrior lords drinking with their companions in the benched mead-halls of the epic poems. Even if, in the earlier period, differences in social prestige within the ranks of the formally free was greater than is conceded by the "peasant proprietor" school, there is again no doubt that by the eleventh century the social distance between the top and bottom was significantly greater still.

In the political dimension, finally, the striking change at the end of the period is in the evidence of subordination of formally free men to the holders of "sake and soke" on whom they depended for protection and by whom jurisdiction was effectively exercised over them. The relation of commendation to soke remains controversial, although Maitland's view seems to have been broadly vindicated against the criticisms subsequently levelled against it.85 But it is not in dispute that the disorders consequent on the Danish invasions created not merely a fragmentation of lordship in the east and north but also a determined effort subsequently to reassert and strengthen it. Again it may well be that seigneurial justice, or something very like it, can be traced back into the pre-Alfredian period. A charter of 816 to the bishop of Worcester is hard to construe as other than implying that the bishop had a court of his own from which only habitual malefactors were passed on to be dealt with by the king's justice,86 and it is perfectly possible that private courts existed at or soon after the time of Ine's laws. But even if so, there can be no

84 See Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 415-16, who also draws attention (as does Whitelock, E.H.D., i, p. 50) to the Scandinavian names of many of the witnesses to Cnut's charters. Kirby, Making of Early England, p. 125, doubts that Cnut can really have maintained as many as 3,000 housecarls; but they were clearly a very substantial body of men.

85 See particularly B. Dodwell, "East Anglian Commendation", Eng. Hist. Rev., ccxlviii (1948), pp. 289-306.

86 Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 493, citing Cartularium Saxonicum, no. 357.





doubt that by the time of Domesday the juridical subordination of the ordinary free man had progressed a great deal further. The phrase "sake and soke" is not found before an incidental use of it in a charter of 956,87 and the first writ explicitly granting royal jurisdiction to another person is one of Cnut's in I020.88 But fragmentary though the direct documentary evidence may be, it is evident that after the reconquest of the Danelaw the monarchy did succeed over most of the country in imposing a uniform system of administration and that in the process the ordinary ceorl was both deprived of much of his old right of recourse to the kin-group and more strictly subordinated to whatever lord was his immediate judicial superior. Indeed, the contrast is highlighted by the difference from those parts of the country where the system of hundred, borough and shire courts (III Edgar 5, 5.I) could not be imposed. In the Northumbrian Priests' Law the cyrlisc man is explicitly allowed his compurgators (c.53), and although there are wapentakes there are no wapentake-courts. North of York, there were no royal burhs. But it is striking that even so, the landrica was, as we have already seen, directly involved in the collection of church dues and the suppression of heathen practices, and the king's thegns and the mass-priests are taken for granted as the agents of central authority.

Whatever the right answer to the question whether or to what degree the Normans inherited a system of what could properly be called "manorial" justice in the hands of "feudal" magnates,89 the general trend away from reliance on compurgation and wergild is unmistakable.90 There might still be villani sufficiently powerful "that they cannot be punished",91 but they are mentioned precisely because this ought by now to be a thing of the past. On any view of the evidence, the same conclusion seems again inescapable. In the post-Alfredian period social distance widened significantly in the political dimension, as in the economic and social, and thereby both accelerated the collective downward mobility of the formally free ceorls and furnished more opportunity for individual upward mobility into the ranks of the humbler agents of royal, ecclesiastical and/ or manorial92 jurisdiction.

87 E.H.D., i, p. 557. 88 Anglo-Saxon Writs, ed. Harmer, p. 183. 89 Cnut's complaint (II Cnut 20.I) at the abuse whereby "many an overbearing

man" will defend a man of his own "whether as a free man or as a slave" as he pleases is perhaps suggestive of a "feudal" relationship, whether or not such an "overbearing man" is presumed to have a private court as well.

90 Wulfstan in the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos complains that a kinsman no longer protects a kinsman "any more than a stranger" (E.H.D., i, p. 93I). This is no doubt an exaggeration, but it is still a symptomatic one. Royal attempts to curb the vendetta are attested already in the laws of Alfred (c. 42 ff.). 91 III Athelstan 6: "if any man be so rich or of so much kindred that he cannot be punished". See also VI Athelstan 8.2.

92 See Finberg's comment in his "Anglo-Saxon England to I042", p. 519, that Wulfric Spott, the founder of Burton Abbey, "must have employed a small army of reeves and other officials" to run his seventy different villages.

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The distinction between economic, social and political mobility is of course an analytical one. Not only would the upwardly or downwardly mobile ceorls of Anglo-Saxon society not have thought in these terms themselves, but there will have been in any case a fairly high degree of congruence between the three. But when the increasingly complex, diverse and cross-cutting forms of social differentiation in the later part of the period are categorized in terms of it, it becomes all the clearer that the evidence points without excep- tion in the direction of an acceleration rather than a deceleration of mobility. No doubt the marginal totals were such that in the last generation before the Conquest the son of a ceorl was still more likely to remain a ceorl than either to rise to the status of thegn, reeve, burgess, housecarl, or mass-priest or to fall into servitude. But whatever the actual figures would be if it were possible to compute them, it seems overwhelmingly plausible to suppose that in each generation in the three centuries preceding the Conquest the chance of a male child chosen at random either rising or falling significantly in the course of his adult life in economic and/or social and/or political position was higher than his father's chance had been, however modest it might still be.

IV To pose the question at all whether mobility would have continued to accelerate if the Norman Conquest had not taken place is to invite Maitland's magisterial warning that "To speculate what would have happened had Harold repelled the invader would be vain . . .93 But two assertions at any rate can be made with confidence. First, the Normans did, in the event, restrict mobility in a number of ways: it seems not in dispute among specialists that William imposed on the country a new, closed, hereditary, Norman nobility, that land tenure in general was more tightly regulated, that the market in land virtually disappeared, that the legal status of women declined, and that whatever the immediate impact of the Conquest on the indigenous peasantry, there was thereafter a progressive assimilation of former slaves and depressed ceorls into a more or less uniform serfdom. Second, however mobility is conceptualized and measured it cannot go on accelerating indefinitely: the higher the rate of it by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, the likelier it must be that it would slow down in the absence of some further radical transforma- tion of the social structure. Counterfactual speculation may, in principle, be vain. But on this topic, and in this context, there are grounds on which to argue the hypothesis that even without the

93 Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. I7I.





coming of the Normans, the rate of mobility would have begun within a few generations at the most to decline.

By Io66 the processes which had engendered the acceleration of mobility had nearly run their course. It is true that effective royal authority did not extend throughout the area of the kingdom. But if we assume an end to invasion, or the threat of it, from either Scandinavians or Normans, and stable frontiers with Scotland and Wales, its extension was only a matter of time. Likewise by io66 the Christianization of the country was virtually complete and the church so far established, both geographically and organizationally, that every parish had its priest as well as every see its bishop. Nor was there left any significant amount of land to be reclaimed for settlement and thereby to afford opportunities for ascendant ceorls to build up their five hides for thegn-right: the pattern of cultivation may have altered subsequently, but new settlements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were marginal except along the Lincolnshire coast.94 Manorialism of the kind documented in the Rectitudines was solidly established in the south and west and spreading steadily into the Danelaw, where it appears to have been a matter of royal policy to encourage English landlords to settle.95 The circumstances which led to the decline and disappearance of slavery under the Normans would equally have obtained without them if the country was at peace and there was therefore no supply of captives for domestic use or sale abroad. Urbanization might have continued to progress a little further. But the network of burhs, markets and mints was already established. There were no new trades or crafts beyond those by which the population was already adequately served relative to the existing level of demand, and there would not have been the political fragmentation which might have led to a development analagous to that of the north Italian cities of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The diversity of social positions, however much greater than would have been conceivable in the days of the early kings of Kent, Mercia and Wessex, was not further increasing; nor is there any reason to suppose that there would have been a significant further increase in the number of vacancies. No doubt there would always have been some fluidity: some thriving ceorls would have continued to rise and some petty thegns to fall. But a fairly stable distribution of royal officials, manorial landlords, merchants, professional soldiery, dependent tenants, smallholders, burgesses and clergy would have been increasingly recruited from within their own ranks once the effective establishment of the royal authority, backed by loyal mag-

94 Sawyer, From Roman Britain to Norman England, p. I42; see also Kirby, Making of Early England, pp. 285-6: "It is important to emphasize that by I066-86 the area of land under the plough in the country as a whole may not have been much if at all less than the extent of arable land in the early twentieth century".

95 Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, p. 57.

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nates both ecclesiastical and lay, had brought disruption and instability to an end.

It might be objected that the assumption that no further major structural changes were impending is unwarrantable, if only because all societies do, for whatever reasons, undergo such changes in due course. But what, from within the institutions and practices of Anglo- Saxon England, would have brought a major change about, whether economic, cultural-cum-ideological, or military-cum-political? Econ- omically, there was no prospect of any significant agricultural innovation once the open-field system and the controlled common use of meadowland and forest was established. There was, admittedly, room for improvement in ploughing techniques96 and yield ratios, but the effect on the social structure would have been no more than to mitigate and perhaps to postpone the pressure of a rising population on food supply. Nor is there any prospect of significant innovation in metalworking, pottery, textiles, mining or building. The scattered local centres of manufacture and trade and the semi- autarkic manorial estates seem to have been adequate to meet the existing need for clothes, tools, buildings and utensils, and the encouragement which warfare and particularly the evolution of the armoured cavalryman might have given to new skills and new products is ruled out ex hypothesi. Internal peace in a prosperous, monetarized economy might, presumably, have led to a much greater and more widespread demand for goods other than simple necessar- ies. But luxuries of the kind imported by the merchant of AElfric's Colloquy or bequeathed by the rich testators in the surviving wills would not have generated anything in the nature of a proto-industrial take-off; and in any case, much wealth was firmly thesaurized in churches and monasteries and the homes of the nobility. A stable society consisting economically of rich landlords and their retainers, a larger stratum of dependent and increasingly populous cultivators, a small but well-established mercantile class, and a limited number of skilled and semi-skilled craftsmen could be predicted to be far more likely to evolve in the direction of self-recruitment than in the direction of increased individual or collective mobility, whether "structural" or "exchange".

Ideologically, likewise, there seems little scope for innovation or disturbance such as would have had the effect on the social structure of promoting further mobility. A reversion to paganism and consequent displacement of the Christian clergy is hardly conceivable. No doubt there would still have been scope for new sects with new

96 It seems now generally agreed among specialists that there is no good evidence for Anglo-Saxon use of mould-board ploughs: see Hunter Blair, Introduction to Anglo- Saxon England, pp. 270-2; P. J. Fowler, "Farming in the Anglo-Saxon Landscape: An Archaeologist's View", Anglo-Saxon England, ix (1981), p. 269, n. 30.





doctrines to form within the institutional framework of the church and to enlist the support or opposition of the established authorities. Edgar's reforms had already disrupted the ecclesiastical status quo, and thereby brought about significant promotion for some and de- motion for others.97 But a numerous, well-distributed, doctrinally homogeneous, royally supported and (by now)98 adequately literate clergy was likely to be immune for a long time to serious schism, and had little room either to expand or to contract so far or so fast as either to force a significant number of monks or parish priests back on to the land or to call for a further influx of new recruits to be promoted from the ranks of the ordinary villani. Violent though the changes of the preceding centuries had been, the prospect of heresy and suppression, reformation and counter-reformation, reli- gious warfare between one region and another or forcible disposses- sion of the monasteries was very remote from mid-eleventh-century England.

Finally the prospect of further serious political upheaval would have been hardly less remote once it is assumed that external interven- tion was no longer a danger. A legitimated eleventh-century monarchy resting on an integrated Anglo-Scandinavian nobility, exercising effective authority down through the shires to the hundreds and wapentakes, buttressed by a strong church, controlling a well- established system of taxation, protected by a professional soldiery, and assisted by an administrative staff by now tantamount to a chancery99 would have been in no danger of a rebellion or rising which might result in the displacement of the incumbent thegns and bishops and their replacement by a new class of local magnates and the imprisonment or enslavement of the surviving milites and auxiliarii who were on the losing side. Service to the state, whether performed for the king himself or for his agents in the shires, would no doubt have continued to offer something of a carrmere ouverte aux

97 See E. John, "War and Society in the Tenth Century: The Maldon Campaign", Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser. xxvii (1977), p. I80: "There must have been many shires south of the Trent with disaffected thegns, unhappy ex-clerks, and wrathful families".

98 Just how abysmal was the starting-point in the later ninth century is attested by Alfred's celebrated remark in the preface to his translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care (E.H.D., i, p. 888) that "there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could apprehend their services in English or even translate a letter from Latin into English, and I think that there were not many beyond the Humber. There were so few of them that I cannot even recollect a single one south of the Thames when I succeeded to my kingdom". 99 Hunter Blair, Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, p. 212, cites evidence relating to the priest Regenbald as "coming very near to indicating that he was the first Chancellor of England both in fact and in name". See also S. Keynes, The Diplomas of King ,Ethelred the Unready: A Study in their Use as Historical Evidence (Cambridge, 1980), pp. I49-53. E. John, "The Age of Edgar", in Campbell et al. (eds.), Anglo- Saxons, p. 176, concludes that there was a "crude but powerful bureaucracy" and "something like a chancery: but some charters were drawn up by their beneficiaries".

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talents, particularly where the incumbents of the offices in question were selected from a predominantly celibate clergy which was itself still recruited from all ranks of society through schools such as that for whose pupils ]Elfric composed his Colloquy. But there would have been no major expansion of the structure and personnel of government comparable to that which occurred during the evolution from the "primitive simplicity" (in Stenton's phrase) of the era of the Tribal Hidage100 to the strong and complex system inherited by Edward the Confessor in 1042.

It seems, accordingly, highly plausible to conclude that rates of social mobility during the last few generations before the Conquest were not only higher than they had been in any previous generation since the early eighth century (and, for all we know, before that) but higher also than they would have become within a few generations thereafter even if the Conquest had not taken place.

Trinity College, Cambridge W. G. Runciman

100 See n. 12 above.

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