Between 900 and 1066 the peasants of Kibworth – English and Viking neighbours – became part of a kingdom of all England. Though described as the gens Anglorum (after Bede), this was in fact a mixed-race state with different laws for West Saxons, Mercians and Danes, and more specifically local legislation in bilingual frontier zones. It was a state embracing people speaking British, Welsh, Cumbrian and Scandinavian languages as well as the various English dialects. In the regions there were even different systems of measuring land and counting money. But the idea was that all owed allegiance to the king of the English: the creation of the allegiance was the key. It was, one could say, a typically English form of improvisation, allowing different and even contradictory systems to work in parallel. How this came about at the grass roots is only now being discovered from a very wide range of sources, and in this story what happened along the cultural and linguistic frontier with Viking England was of crucial importance.
But first, a glimpse of the times. The tenth century has had a bad name, and not without cause. Across Western Europe it began with the ever-present threat of civil war and Viking invasion. Warfare was the tenth-century condition; but so too, as Western Europeans perceived it, was the failure of kingship and the breakdown of allegiance. In 906 Regino of Prum expressed his horror at the post-Carolingian malaise, failed states and ignoble dynasties ‘creating kings out of their own guts’. A church council in northern France in 909 pronounced gloomily, ‘We now live in an Age of Iron.’ But ages of iron, times in which people are forced to go back to first principles and build from the bottom, can be no less creative than ages of gold. Out of the tenth-century disorder, English communities, urban and rural, emerge; an English kingship with national law and the beginnings of a sense of an English culture to which all belonged.
Across the British Isles the century began with hugely disruptive weather patterns, torrential rains and failed harvests. The year 900 was remembered as a year of rains followed by ‘great scarcity’ and cattle murrain. Plague struck in 907 and cattle pest in 909. From 912, the year of Halley’s comet, a time of ‘rain and darkness’ was prolonged for two years with more miserable harvests. Then in 917 came the first signs of a little ice age which would last into the 940s. As an Ulster annalist wrote:
such snow and extreme cold and unnatural ice this year that the chief lakes and rivers of Ireland were passable on foot, and death was brought to cattle, birds and fish. There were horrible portents too: the heavens seemed to glow with comets; and once a mass of fire appeared with thunder in the west beyond Ireland, and it went eastwards over the sea.
Such lurid omens were widely trusted. The Viking threat was no less imminent than it had been in the late ninth century. The collapse of several English kingdoms in the 860s and 870s showed it was not possible for a single regional kingdom to fight the Vikings and win. The alliance of Mercians and West Saxons, however, was able to turn the tide and eventually create the kingdom of all England. Beyond the Watling Street frontier established by Alfred the Great and the Vikings, the centres of Anglo-Scandinavian power were the old cities of York in Northumbria and the Five Boroughs of the East Midlands, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and the old Roman cities of Lincoln and Leicester. Each was ruled by its own military oligarchy. The old Middle Anglian provincial capital of Leicester was the centre of the ‘army of Leicester’, ruled by an ‘Army Council’ which controlled numerous former Mercian royal estates and wide resources, including Leicester Forest, which as late as the twelfth century was known as the Hereswode, the ‘Army Forest’. To the Leicester assembly under its paramount Danish chief, or jarl, our Kibworth villagers of both English and Viking descent – men like Sven of Westerby for example – owed allegiance, tax and military service.
But times were changing fast. The first three decades of the century are among the most dramatic and action-packed in British history, out of which would appear a new social and political landscape (in Scotland and Wales too). To the south of the Thames a powerful West Saxon kingdom had emerged out of the Viking wars under Alfred the Great. Alfred’s military victories between the late 870s and the early 890s enabled him to push through draconian forms of lordship. Galvanized by earlier military failures Alfred was determined that English society should become geared to war. As a contemporary close to Alfred admitted, ‘after first trying gentle instruction, he then cajoled, urged, commanded and in the end forced his people to do his will’, that is, to accept much heavier levels of military obligation. Reaction was widely hostile: ‘Everyone then was more bothered with his own particular well-being,’ says Bishop Asser, ‘rather than the common good.’ But the reforms were pushed through. The result was the widespread loss of freedoms among the dependent peasantry in southern England, where as Asser admits ‘the poor had few supporters – if any.’ In the Danelaw, however, the free peasantry survived as a large and distinctive landed class especially in the East Midlands and East Anglia. In some places in the twelfth century this was 30 or 40 per cent of the population, and in some small pockets it was over 60 per cent, as opposed to something like 15 per cent of the English population as a whole.
By Alfred’s death in 899 southern English society had been reorganized on to a permanent war footing. Wessex was now studded with a network of fortified places – burhs – supplied, fed and supported from the heavy labour dues imposed on the peasantry. The king could put into the field a mobile royal army whose core was perhaps 2,000 ‘armour-bearing thegns’ bristling with weaponry, each with servants and retinue and equipped with horses and expensive war gear. These were backed up by 27,000 men who garrisoned the towns and were financially supported and fed by their rural communities. And these figures do not take into account the peasant levies which could be called up by the shire to defend against local Viking attacks. This all amounts to an almost unbelievable proportion of a population of perhaps half a million people south of the Thames. So along the Watling Street frontier from Tamworth down to the River Welland, two militarized societies faced each other, with the pagan Scandinavian kings and their warbands in the cities of the Danelaw and north of the Humber. The situation was set for war, and war duly came.
Alfred the Great died in October 899, at the age of only fifty. His son Edward immediately had to defend his throne from rivals within his own kin. In the south a brutal civil war ended in a bloodbath on the Fen edge at Holme in Huntingdonshire in 904. The next few years were marked by the marching and counter-marching of hostile armies, in the payment of Danegeld, punctuated by devastating Viking raids into southern England. The very future of the nascent kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons created by Alfred was for a time in doubt. A Midland cleric was hardly exaggerating when he wrote that this was ‘a time when it is by no means evident that the written word will survive the terrible dangers that imperil us …’ What this meant for everyday life is revealed in a lease issued to the Bishop of Winchester in 909 for an estate just outside Winchester. The rent was payable in kind (ale, loaves, meat, cheese and other produce) and makes allowance for the situation arising when rent couldn’t be paid ‘because of the stress caused by [Viking] raids’. And this was only six miles from the ‘capital’.
More graphic still is a lease of an estate near Croydon in Surrey in around 908 which conveys a vivid sense of how endemic warfare and freezing winters combined to make life desperate for the peasantry. This letter to King Edward begs remittance of their tax burdens given the desolate situation on the estate: ‘When the king our lord rented it to me it was completely without stock, and had been stripped bare by the heathen men [the Vikings].’ The bishop had restocked the estate, but at a cost increased by bad weather which had further depleted the estate:
Now of the cattle which survived the severities of the winter we have 9 full grown oxen with 114 full grown pigs and 50 wethers … and there are 110 full grown sheep and seven bondsmen [serfs] and twenty flitches [note how the human stock of the estate are lumped in with the animals and the flesh] and there was no more corn there than could be prepared for the bishop’s farm: we have ninety sown acres. [The estate was seventy hides, several thousand acres, so they had been able to plough only a tiny portion.]
Then the bishop and the community at Winchester beg in charity for the love of God and for the sake of the holy church that you [the king] desire no more land of them, for it seems to them a very unfair demand.
If the principal bishopric in Wessex found it so difficult to make ends meet, what was it like for small freeholders up and down the country? Many freemen and freewomen no doubt lost their freedoms in this period, forced to put themselves under the protection of powerful lords. And indeed this was a period when lordship inexorably spread in southern England, paving the way for the Norman feudal order that followed in the eleventh century.
The conquest of the Danelaw
Where the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides a detailed narrative for events in Wessex between the 870s and 920s, the situation in most of the rest of England is largely obscure. Viewed from the other side of Watling Street this is especially so. Situated inside the Danelaw only a few miles over Watling Street, Kibworth was almost on the front line of the war between the English and the Vikings. All this time though the village may well have remained under its English local lord. Four fifths of the field names in Kibworth parish are English, and the village didn’t change its name to become ‘Sven’s worth’ or ‘Haesten’s worth’, although as we saw in the last chapter it had Viking neighbours, and enough Viking field names survive in the parish to show that the Viking language was widely spoken. This was very likely a genuinely bilingual society under an English lord. But as with their Viking neighbours, the sons and grandsons of Slagr, Iolfr and Hrolfr, the English landowners here were expected to turn out with their horses, armour and weapons to join the followings of their local Danish earls to fight against the ‘kings of the South Angles’, as in the disastrous campaign down the Severn valley in 910, and the mounted campaigns of 913 and 917 when the Leicester army was in the combinedDanelaw forces which rode southwards to attack the West Saxon King Edward.
As King Edward and his councillors saw it from the south, their aim was to reunite the gens Anglorum. This ‘reunification’ came about through one of the most brilliant and sustained campaigns in the Dark Ages. Even on the continent the news was of ‘the bravery of the English who with Christ’s grace defend themselves with strong arms and men and when pirate armies invade from the northern parts, drive them out in violent battles’. While Edward drove West Saxon armies into East Anglia and the East Midlands, reducing Viking army bases one by one, his sister Aethelflaed, ‘Lady of the Mercians’, with a Mercian army consolidated the West Midlands and Welsh Marches. In 917 Edward took the surrender of the Danish armies of Cambridge and Northampton, bringing the English forces to the banks of the Welland only five miles south of Kibworth. Then from across Watling Street Aethelflaed stormed the Danish fortress at Derby, where ‘four of the thegns most dear to her were killed right inside the gate.’ Faced by this pincer movement the Viking rulers of Leicester resorted to diplomacy. In early 918 their assembly approved the peaceful surrender of the ‘Army of Leicester’ and ‘most’ of the territory they controlled, including the Kibworth area. They now swore allegiance to Aethelflaed as ruler of the Mercians. After her death later that year this allegiance passed on to Edward, then to his son Athelstan, a man who was known to the Viking leadership and who may have spoken some Danish. Athelstan came to the throne in 925 ruling over the lands south of the Humber. The King had been brought up in Mercia and, if a later account can be trusted, had spent time in Danish territory and ‘adopted some of their customs’. Within months came a real sign of the changing times: in a great meeting at the old Mercian ‘capital’ of Tamworth came what had been previously unthinkable, the marriage of the king’s sister Eadgyth to Sihtric, the Viking king of York: the granddaughter of Alfred and the grandson of the bloodthirsty Ivar the Boneless who had been buried at Repton. On Sihtric’s death in 927 Athelstan annexed Northumbria, and a poet in his entourage was able to salute ‘this completed England’.
Shires and hundreds
Claiming to be not only ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’ but ‘king of the Danes’, Athelstan could now put in place his vision of an Anglo-Scandinavian kingdom of ‘all the English nation’. Inevitably huge administrative changes followed, especially in the villages of the English Midlands. In Kibworth changes took place that were as far-reaching as anything experienced by the village till the Act of Enclosure in 1779. In southern England and English Mercia in order to support the war effort the countryside had been reorganized into new administrative districts, shires and hundreds, with uniform sliding assessments to calculate the size of the garrisons to be provided for the boroughs and the soldiers for the mobile defence forces. At this time the English kings were still waging war against the Scandinavian rulers north of the Humber in York with whom there were almost constant campaigns and battles up till the 950s. To impose administrative control and to fight this war they needed to reorganize the newly captured lands of the Midlands, and the hundred system was imposed there in a much more regular form. Positioned in the centre of the country, Leicester was the key to regional defence. So the West Saxons created a new scir, like those south of Watling Street, divided on the continental model into smaller units called ‘hundreds’. Dependent on the burh, where the shire courts were held, these would be the key units of local administration, justice and taxation for many centuries, only finally disappearing in the 1880s.
Once every month the chosen ‘tithing men’ of Kibworth and Smeeton walked or rode a couple of miles or so north-east to a point where an ancient track crosses the Roman Via Devana. There, on a gentle rise with wide views across to Kibworth and the Langtons and over the Welland valley southwards, stood the Gartree. From the tenth century till the early eighteenth this was the meeting place of the local hundred for the elected jurors of Kibworth and the surrounding villages. Located on a prehistoric burial mound, it was very likely the site of an earlier Anglo-Saxon moot place (law codes as early as the seventh century speak of doing justice at an ‘assembly or meeting place’ and already assume the existence of local legal experts called judges or ‘arbitrators’ before whom ‘right’ is done). Like many moot sites, as its name indicates, the meeting place was at a prominent tree. The name Gartree is still found in Westland in Norway, where it signifies a distinctive mark or scar on a tree’s bark, but here it seems more likely to come from the Scandinavian word geir meaning ‘spear’. An appropriate name for the meeting place of a hundred – in Viking speech a wapentake, referring to the brandishing of weapons with which the armed freemen of the region showed their assent to the decisions of the court.
As far back as the seventh century we find references to meetings of formally convened bodies where serious social conflicts and disagreements were ironed out in public before witnesses. But the hundreds mark the real beginning of English local government. They were probably extended over the country between the 920s and 950s. An important aspect was fiscal: the profits of law for example went to the lords of the individual hundreds, whether king, Church or private owners. But a memorandum from the mid-century shows that their main function was to handle local law and order, and to contain feuds and violence, fundamental problems for all early-medieval governments: ‘This is the ordinance on how the hundred meetings shall be held. First they are to assemble every four weeks, and each man is to do justice to another.’
Among other business handled at the Gartree, local custom was declared, new passages in the king’s laws were read out, titles to property were established and violence condemned if not punished, with sureties being fixed to keep the peace, especially for persistent troublemakers. As for lower-class representation, lesser freemen could be present as tithing men, and after 1066 even men of villein status appeared in the juries. Members were usually men though there are occasionally jurywomen. The courts were customarily held outdoors and since the shire court met only twice a year, at Easter and Michaelmas, these monthly hundred courts must have been the main contact most people had with the ‘trickle-down effect’ of royal government.
All this may sound almost democratic, and the Victorians were prepared to believe that it was, seeing in the hundred and shire ‘moots’ and the ‘national’ king’s council, the witan, the origin of the British parliamentary system. In practice of course the courts were far from egalitarian. There was one law for the rich and one for the poor as far as judicial proofs went, and the few surviving accounts of assemblies of the shires show they were often swayed by the voices of men of influence, the big local landowners, ealdormen or thegns. The penalties exacted for fighting at a moot show that tempers regularly flared up. But the point is not that the courts were democratic, but that they were consultative. They mark the beginnings in the English state of the means by which the local and the centre could communicate, and through which the local could have a voice. By the 1260s when the ‘community of the realm’, including the free peasantry, played a real part in the great events of the kingdom, the local community had found a voice it would never lose.
The beginnings of civic life
As for the transaction of local business, few documents have survived the devastation of the archives of the Danelaw by the Vikings. In the century or so between 850 and 970 we have very little detail on the ground of the huge changes which took place in society: then documents from the old Middle Anglian monastery of Peterborough open a window on life in the East Midlands. From the middle of the tenth century lists of sureties – guarantees made on oath ‘before all the wapentake’ – record the sales of property, woodland, arable, field strips, mills and homesteads on the Welland east of Kibworth. These give a precious glimpse into life in our region in the tenth century. Indeed, if we could only eavesdrop on them we would no doubt be surprised at the level of what one might call ‘civic’ life. They show us English and Scandinavian neighbours doing deals, buying and selling property, and even resolving their feuds through the local assembly, with serious cases heard in front of ‘the whole army’ – that is, the shire court. In a relatively small area there are scores of householders and property owners operating in an active land and property market using a plentiful silver coinage and (for big purchases) gold. Here are priests with English and Viking names; women freeholders called Hungifu and Swuste; a widow from Raunds; a painter called Wulfnoth; and even a pilgrim who had made the journey to Rome. Before the age of fixed surnames there is a certain amount of confusion given the limited number of Anglo-Saxon male names – ‘blond Godric’, ‘Godric the beard’ and ‘the other Godric’ appear in one case. Sometimes the lists of sureties reveal what must have been a daunting level of everyday violence and blood feud, but most cases involve land and house purchases. In Kibworth, as here, these would be confirmed by the new owner in Leicester at a meeting of the whole army (‘ealles heres gemotes’) when ‘the whole army stood security on his behalf that the estate was free and unencumbered by any burdens left by previous owner.’ These documents show that by the middle of the tenth century there was already a vigorous land and property market, and well-off peasant families were already wheeling and dealing to expand their inheritance.
Of course, this presupposes at least some contact with literacy for the villagers, though how far literacy had really touched Kibworth and other places like it is a big question. In Anglo-Saxon England literacy was probably more widespread than has been thought. So in the England of the tenth century it is unlikely there was not someone literate in each village: the priest, the leading jurors in the shire court, the tithing men involved in administering law and order, in policing and charity, and members of peace guilds. For all of them the sense was now growing of belonging not only to their village and shire, but also, if distantly, to a national community.
The open fields
Around that time great changes also took place in the village in the organization of the fields and farming practices. These were more significant than any agrarian innovations in Kibworth till the Agricultural Revolution and the Act of Enclosure in 1779; indeed, they are some of the most revolutionary in the history of the English countryside. The circumstances of these changes are hidden from us by the lack of documents – till recently indeed they were largely unsuspected – but they involved the planned introduction of the open-field system of farming. In this system typically three great open fields are communally farmed in rotation leaving one field fallow each year. The adoption of this system cannot be separated from the creation of the network of towns and shires during the Viking wars. To garrison and supply the towns required the reorganization of the countryside. English peasant society was being reshaped by powerful lordship to facilitate social control, to share animals, plough gear and resources and to maximize production and create surplus.
The first signs of the specialized terminology of the open fields start to appear in the tenth century in southern England, with ‘intermixed strips’ in open unhedged fields which were communally farmed and in which meadow, pasture and arable were all ‘common land’. Some of these documents seem to describe open-field strips where there is no boundary between strips, where, as one tenth-century lease puts it, ‘lands are farmed in common and not demarcated on any side by clear bounds because to left and right the acres lie combined with each other.’ Still more explicitly one tenth-century estate in Wiltshire is described as ‘in individual strips [jugeribus] dispersed in a mixture through the common land’. To complement this documentary evidence, in recent years in a systematic survey in the East Midlands archaeologists have found evidence in scores of places of such fields being laid out over eighth- and ninth-century settlements. In this light the Peterborough sureties from the 960s referred to above are also illuminating: one mentions a small estate at Maxey divided into twenty-nine ‘portions’, presumably groups of strips, and another at Oxney describes thirty acres of arable divided into sixty sticca, which sound like half-acre strips in the open field.
Partly effected by royal power, partly by local lords, the introduction of open fields brought about a revolution in the pattern of the English countryside and the nature of agrarian society. It seems likely that the great open fields laid out in each of the three villages in Kibworth parish were laid over earlier Iron Age fields. At the same time the settlements were nucleated, bringing freemen and cottagers into the villages with streets and garden plots alongside the lord’s manorial hall and demesne land: the beginning of the classic English village landscape. Finds of late-Saxon pottery by the village streets in Smeeton and Kibworth Harcourt offer confirmation of this picture. So in the last phase of Anglo-Saxon history each community of Kibworth Harcourt, Kibworth Beauchamp and Smeeton had three-field systems and each had growing populations, which made Kibworth one of the most populous villages in Leicestershire.
Haywards, woodwards and reeves
‘I can only tell you what I know,’ says a Midland reeve in a memorandum from the time. ‘You see, estate laws vary from place to place. Nor do all these regulations apply in all districts. I can only speak of the customs I know. But in life if we learn well, work hard, and endeavour to understand it better – the more we take delight in the task at hand.’
We don’t know the name of the Anglo-Saxon reeve in Kibworth, but he was the predecessor of men we will come to know well in the fourteenth century – men such as Nick Polle, husbanding resources in the Great Famine, John Church, listing the dead tenants in the Black Death, or John Chapman, wrapping up the rent strike in 1449. In the later period the reeve was an important figure in the village. Elected by the peasants, he was a man of repute, a trustworthy ‘swearing man’ whose job was to supervise the running of the fields, to check the animals, stores and tools, and to look after the routine, the calendar of the year. In the Anglo-Saxon management texts the job seems no different. The work practices of the open fields, the field cycle of fallow and seeded and the overseeing of village custom required village officials who knew it inside out. In the late Saxon period these village officials now emerge into the light of day, and it is in this class of peasants that for the first time we begin to hear the ordinary voice.
On the variety of custom, the reeve continues, warming to his tale, his is the expertise of an experienced countryman who from childhood has mastered all the agricultural tasks; a wealth of practical knowledge, which explains why the job often ran in families in Kibworth – like the Browns, the Sibils and especially the Polles, who provide many generations of reeves and constables between 1300 and 1600. Presumably dictated to the lord’s scribe, the Anglo-Saxon text is in amiable but forcefully idiomatic Old English, with an eye-opening range of technical vocabulary describing the wherewithal of late-Saxon farming. The text also gives a lengthy checklist of all the specialized tools and farm gear needed on a working estate: recognizably a precursor of the detail we find in the later medieval accounts for Kibworth. A Midland text, this could be the reeve of Kibworth in the 1060s working for the lord of Harcourt, Aelfric, son of Meriet, or, in Beauchamp, Edwin, son of Aelferth:
Now there are many different common customs and rights in different places. In some districts there are due winter rations, Easter supplies, a harvest feast for the reapers, a drinking feast for the ploughmen and their helpers, a tip for the mowers … a meal at the haystack during harvest, a log from the wagon at wood carrying, a rick-cup at corn carrying, and many other things which I can’t go into. This is just a memorandum of the basic provisions I’ve been talking about – of course there is more to it than this …
These Old English management texts also tell us about the jobs and grades of society in a village like Kibworth in the century before the Norman Conquest. Below the landlords – the thegns, Aelfric and Edwin – were the freemen and freewomen in Kibworth known as sokemen, who farmed their own land. Then there were lower men: cottagers, semi-free geburs (later called villeins), serfs and bonded slaves. In one management text the men and women with particular jobs are specified: the beekeeper and the swineherd, the bonded swineherd, the servant and the women slaves. Then come the field workers: ploughman, sower, oxherd, cowherd, shepherd and goatherd, along with the forester, the woodward. These are all found in thirteenth-century Kibworth, when detailed records for the village begin. As in later times there will have been a leather worker in the village who made ‘slippers and shoes, leggings, leather bottles, reins and trappings, flasks and leather containers, spur straps and halters, bags and purses’. In the village there would also be a female cheese maker and a granary keeper, and in a big village like Kibworth a carpenter, a miller, a smith, a baker, perhaps even a cook, all of whom existed in Kibworth in the thirteenth century. Then there might have been a priest or monk who lived the religious life but did other jobs in the village too. Towards the year 1000, life in Kibworth was not yet so diversified as it was in the thirteenth century, but any traveller in the English countryside would have seen that society was visibly developing from the inward-looking subsistence life of earlier centuries to a diversified economy already with a market element.
The rise in the standard of living
By the late tenth century the people of the village could look back on two or three generations of relative peace and security under the protection of the English king and his law. Writing in the 980s a member of the royal family speaks of fifty years of ‘peace and abundance of all things’. He seems to be telling us of a perceived rise in the standard of living in English society as a whole, and modern archaeologists have corroborated this, discerning a slow improvement in the material life after the Dark Ages which will blossom in the early eleventh century across Europe, as Ralph Glaber describes in his famous passage of millennial optimism, when ‘on the threshold of the millennium, it was as though the very world had shaken herself and cast off her old age, and were clothing herself everywhere in a white garment of churches.’
Hints of this increased prosperity in Kibworth have come from finds by metal detectorists. Two coins of Ethelred the Unready from the late 980s and early 990s have been found recently, one minted in Rochester in Kent and one from York. These finds suggest the circulation of national currency in the village for the first time since the Romans. The find of a lovely bronze strap end from the same period points to the kind of people of thegnly rank who could afford beautifully made things. In the tenth century laws limiting the passage of merchants between southern England and the Danelaw were lifted, allowing free access to all across Watling Street. Recent digs in York and Lincoln have revealed evidence of this opening up of trade: well-made timber-framed town houses with posh leather-studded furniture, French wine and bales of imported Byzantine silk. Coin hoards from the Danelaw from this time now frequently contain gold dirhams minted in Central Asia. The growing accessibility of such luxury commodities comes out in a tenth-century ‘interview’ with a merchant recorded by Aelfric of Eynsham with its casual assumption that in well-off houses people expected to see luxuries on the table: ‘goods from overseas brought by ship … I buy precious things that are not produced in this country … purple cloth and silks, precious jewels and goldwork, unusual clothes and spices, wine and oil, ivory and bronze, copper and tin … sulphur and glass and all sorts of things like that.’
These exchanges were far-reaching. They changed aspirations and widened mental horizons; they even changed language, for the dialect spoken here came to be the form of English most of us speak today. Our sentence structure (which is Danish not Anglo-Saxon) developed in this area of the East Midlands on the linguistic divide between Viking and English speech – in response to the interaction of immigrants and the older population in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
The workers
How far did these changes affect the peasants themselves? As we saw in the earlier period only wealthy people could have a house with possessions and luxuries. This was now changing for the people of England. In the eleventh century wills begin to give an idea of the personal possessions of a middling person, a free peasant of local thegnly rank who farmed a hundred acres. The wife, say, of Edwin of Kibworth was perhaps a woman like the Siflaed who when she went on pilgrimage ‘across the sea’ to Rome made a small gift of land to her local church, an annual wagonload of wood from her woods:
and Wulfmaer my priest is to sing Masses for my soul, he and his issue so long as they are in holy orders. To the village church five acres and one homestead, two acres of meadow; two wagonloads of wood; and to my tenants their homesteads as their own possessions; my serfs to be set free; to my brother a wagonload of wood; to the others four head of cattle.
We know how such a well-off farmer, freeman or sokeman (or woman) might have lived in Kibworth. He’d have had a wooden bed for himself and his wife, and another for his children; a wooden chest for the bed linen; and clothes consisting of ‘a badger skin coat, best dun tunic, and the best cloak and clasp, two wooden cups ornamented with dots’. Edwin’s wife might have treasured ‘my old filigree brooch, a hall tapestry and three seat coverings … and a weaving frame, little spinning chest’. By 1066 a well-off free peasant household might have servants, often their own children or those of neighbouring families.
Below the likes of Edwin and his wife the many gradations of class in society were well-established before 1066. Ten per cent were still slaves and 15 per cent free, but the large majority were bonded or semi-free, unable to move places or jobs without permission of their lord; these were thralls, villeins, boors and ceorls – words still with a pejorative meaning today. They were the majority of the people of England, their lot vividly conveyed by an interview written as a teaching aid by the schoolmaster and homilist Aelfric around the year 1000. ‘How would you describe your work?’ he asks the ploughman, an unfree labourer on his lord’s demesne. The response is the first piece of English literature in which the working class speaks:
‘Oh I work very hard, dear lord. I go out at daybreak driving the oxen to the field, and yoke them to the plough. For fear of my lord there is no winter so hard that I dare scive at home. But the oxen having been yoked up, and the share and coulter fastened to the plough, I must plough a full acre or more every day.’
‘Have you any companion?’
‘Yes, I have my lad driving the oxen with a goad, who is hoarse now because of the cold and all the shouting.’
‘What else do you do in a day’s work?’
‘I do more than that, sure. I have to fill the oxen’s bins with hay and water them, and carry their muck outside.’
‘My, my, it sounds like hard work then.’
‘It’s hard work all right, sir, because I am not free.’
The village in 1066
Kibworth is one of 13,000 villages and towns the Normans will record in their survey of England after the Conquest of 1066 – when for most English communities detailed records begin. For most of these a similar kind of story can be told, even though there are of course great differences in landscape, custom and language between, say, a Devon hill farm, a Durham mining village or one of the archaic English hamlets on the Welsh side of Offa’s dyke.
Norman data for 1066 show that the basic map of the village was already complete, the product of several centuries of growth and change. In the north was the old Anglo-Saxon lord’s enclosure, which will later become Kibworth Harcourt, a place of freemen and smallholders. A short distance to the south, beyond the church, where a little stream ran across the road, was the lower settlement, which will become Kibworth Beauchamp, a workers’ settlement of villeins and serfs perhaps with a communal oven, its water mill, its big barns and yards for the plough teams; then the hamlet of free farmers, smiths and metalworkers to the south at Smeeton. And finally, at the end of the ridge, the tiny Viking settlement at Westerby, little more than an outlying hamlet consisting of maybe only a couple of farmsteads.
Spread over these four settlements, the combined population of the parish of Kibworth on the eve of Conquest we can estimate at around three or four hundred people: a large place by eleventh-century standards when the county town itself had only a couple of thousand.
As is evident from the way the people are described, class divisions were already strongly marked in the communities – and between the communities. All the sokemen, or freemen, lived in Harcourt and Smeeton; but remarkably there were none at all in Beauchamp. It is hard not to think that the roots of such divisions must lie far back in time. Perhaps Beauchamp had begun in the Dark Ages as a vill of dependent peasants: unfree service labour certainly marks its story for centuries. A survey of 1315 astonishingly shows at that time there were forty-four families of serfs and villeins and only three freemen, so the eleventh-century pattern had not changed.
Originating no doubt at some point in the early Middle Ages in differing circumstances of lordship, the contrasting characters of the three hamlets will continue over the next 900 years, and are still remarked on today, when despite the transformations of industry, enclosure and migration, continuities with the old community and the old village families are still not yet quite broken.
The last days of Anglo-Saxon England
So there is the village story up to 1066. With a little speculation, a little help from archaeological finds, landscape, place names, test pits, and even metal detector finds, a tentative narrative can be essayed of what one might call the prehistory of the village. Inevitably (as with most English villages) the lack of early documentation necessitates guesswork, speculation and a little imagination. By 1066 the people of Kibworth had already known Celtic, Roman, Anglian and Viking lords – their tribal and regional identities and allegiances had transferred from lords of the Corieltauvi to Middle Angles and to Mercians; and then to ‘the king of all the English’. They had seen dramatic changes in the pattern and apparent direction of history. They had lived through famine, plague and climate change. They had endured wars, migrations and conquests. There is no evidence over this first thousand years that Kibworth ever ceased to exist, though in the worst times it may have contracted severely. And from the tenth century the villagers had seen their standard of living improve and the insecurity of life lessen under the protection of the king’s law – the thread of English history that continues from then till today.
In the late Saxon period the country grew wealthy. One important source of this wealth was wool, as it had been from Roman times. There were more sheep than people in Anglo-Saxon England, maybe four or five times as many, and fine English cloth was exported to the continent. But at the end of the tenth century the country’s wealth encouraged yet new waves of invaders, which led in the end after a long period of war to conquest by the Danes. From the 990s to 1016 England was criss-crossed by armies as the faltering government lost its nerve. For all its sophistication in administration the English state was still reliant on the energy and charisma of the king: on his ceaseless itineraries, on his military leadership, his ability to bully, cajole and punish where needed, but most of all, in such a diverse multi-ethnic society, to negotiate effectively.
The hapless king at this time was the butt of a pointed contemporary joke: he was Ethelred (‘noble council’) Unraed (‘no council’ – ‘useless’). Writing in London, a remarkably acute observer of the time expressed profound loyalty to the idea of the kingdom of the English, even though he judged the king in the end a failure. Ethelred’s government raised huge sums of silver coin as ‘Danegeld’ to buy the invaders off: tens of millions of silver pennies. This was a staggering measure of the kingdom’s wealth, but a huge burden on the free peasants of Kibworth and elsewhere, as each hundred was required to gather a levy on each village, which from a place like Kibworth might have amounted to its annual taxable value. The passage of armies devastated large tracts of the country and the government’s increasingly panicky attitude to Scandinavian settlers in southern England, people living widely after seventy years of free movement, led to them playing the race card against ‘the enemy within’. Had the massacres fomented in Oxford, among other places, occurred more widely they might have undone much of the previous generations’ work. But 1016, the year of the battles’ resolution, came as a kind of relief to a war-weary country. On a lavish royal manuscript the new king, the bearded flaxen-haired young Canute, is depicted giving a gold cross to the royal house of the New Minster, Winchester, his hand firmly on the hilt of his sword.
A Danish dynasty till 1042 brought back political stability, and opened England in general, and the Danelaw in particular, to the Scandinavian world. The line of Alfred was restored in 1042 in the person of the saintly Edward the Confessor, but great energies were needed to hold the kingdom together in the face of feuding magnates: a task that had worn out some of the great kings of the Alfredian dynasty before they reached fifty. Edward even abolished the national tax on military forces. A vivid image from a contemporary encomium portrays Edward’s wife Emma embroidering fancy diaphanous clothes for him for ceremonial occasions. This is a far cry from our image of Alfred dealing with a knotty legal case in plain man’s language ‘while washing his hands in the closet’; or the plain cloak, woollen leggings and tunic worn by Athelstan, who was praised for his willingness to ‘throw off the condescension of royalty and rank and mingle with the common man’. Beyond the Humber the Northumbrians still hankered after some kind of home rule; in the Midlands they still perhaps temperamentally preferred one of their own. But in 1055 a near civil war was averted, not by the king or his high-ups, but by the rank and file – men like the Kibworth thegns Aelfric and Edwin – on the grounds that ‘there were good Englishmen on both sides.’
The Norman Conquest
In the New Year of 1066 the old king died and a new man took the throne: Harold Godwinson, a member of a powerful landed family of eleventh-century nouveaux riches. From that point events unfolded with incredible suddenness. Duke William of Normandy announced his claim to the throne and assembled a fleet and army at the mouth of the Somme. The English king summoned a huge levy, ‘the biggest ever seen’, from the free peasants of England, supplied and paid by their communities, and for forty days waited on the south coast ready to repel the invaders. Through August contrary winds across the Channel kept William at bay, but meanwhile in the north Harald, King of Norway, landed his fleet in Yorkshire, exciting old separatist urges among the northerners. When the earls of Mercia and Northumbria were defeated outside York the English king gambled all on a lightning move north, riding his royal army up to Yorkshire, where he won a savage battle against the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge. But the gamble failed. Two days later, as Harold licked his wounds in York, the wind changed and William’s fleet was wafted over to Pevensey. Harold’s response, unwisely perhaps, was instantly to march back down to the south coast, where events came to a tragic denouement at Hastings on 14 October. There, the king, his brothers and ‘the flower of the English nation fell.’ Among them perhaps thegns of the Midlands including Aelfric, Meriet’s son, and Edwin Kibworth, who now disappear from history. Whether freemen from Main Street went with their lord with horse, helmet and spear and did not return, history does not record.
There were, as might be expected, many opinions about the disaster, and no doubt these arguments were aired in the village as all over England. Harold had acted precipitately; his support had dwindled, ‘at the end he only had his paid troops with few from the country.’ It was said that only half the English army ever assembled, and those present claimed only a third were even in battle order when the battle began, such had been the speed of Harold’s advance. More plausibly in some eyes, God had given the Frenchmen victory on account of ‘the nation’s sins’. So the nation chewed over the reasons for defeat, as they still do. At Berkhamstead, William received the surrender of the English nobles, including the overlord of Kibworth, Edwin, Earl of Mercia. On Christmas Eve, William was crowned at Westminster Abbey. As the result of one battle, the English world was about to change for ever.
That winter of 1066 the Viking and English farmers of Kibworth saw themselves as belonging to an English state ruled by a king of the English. For people old enough to look back on the war of 1013–16 when Sweyn of Denmark’s armies devastated their fields, traversing the country in the long disastrous unravelling of Ethelred’s government, it must scarcely have been possible to imagine anything worse. By now the community had been formed with its traditions and customs, its work practices and its class divisions, its rich and poor. The great fields existed with their strips, wongs and siks, ‘sunnyside’ and ‘shady side’, paced out by the field jury. Their assemblies met every month at the ‘spear tree’ to enact the common law. In their pockets one coinage of the realm, still as well-minted and as reliable a currency as it had been in the now golden days of Edgar a hundred years before, when, as old people said, ‘You could leave a gold arm ring on a bush and no one would pinch it.’ But now again, as with Cnut in 1016, the whole kingdom had fallen to an invader. And this time an invader with a different language and very different traditions of government.
In the story of England the next stage is set. What will happen to the community of the village and the community of the realm – this ‘rices anweald’, this ‘londes folc’ as they would have put it – over the next centuries? The England which had emerged out of the ancient slave order of Roman Britain is now about to pass into full European feudalism brutally imposed from above and outside. How will it change, and in what way will it remain the same? How will the feudal medieval order fare with its slaves, villeins, burs and churls? How will our modern world emerge out of theirs?