Earle,
Handbook
to the Landcharters, p.
Cambridge Medieval History - v3 - Germany and the Western Empire
In this extremity Gruffydd was
deserted not only by the Mercians but also by his own men, and was
shortly afterwards assassinated. His fall, accompanied as it was by the
restoration of considerable tracts along the marches to English rule,
brought Harold undoubted prestige; but it must not be supposed that
the Welsh were in any sense conquered. Their unity was once more
a
CH. XV.
## p. 398 (#444) ############################################
398
Captivity of Harold. Northumbrian Revolt
broken up. Within their own borders, however, various Welsh chieftains
remained as independent as ever.
During the course of the next year an untoward mishap befell
Harold. For some reason or other he had occasion to take a sea trip
in the Channel, and, as he was sailing from his paternal seat at Bosham
in Sussex towards Dover, a storm caught him and drove his ship ashore
on the coast of Ponthieu in France. Guy, the count of the district,
when he heard of the wreck, gave orders for Harold's arrest, and being
a vassal of William, the Duke of Normandy, handed him over to his
overlord at Rouen as a captive.
Harold thus became an unwilling
guest at the Norman court. As such he accompanied the duke on a
campaign into Brittany, but though he was outwardly treated with
honour, he was informed that he would not be allowed to return to
England unless he would become the duke's man and take an oath to
assist William in the future, should he make a claim to the English
throne on Edward's death. Seeing no other way of regaining his liberty,
Harold had perforce to take the oath demanded of him, whereupon he
was permitted to sail for England. On his return he made as little as
possible of the misadventure, and no doubt regarded the oath extracted
from him by force as of no validity; but he had none the less placed
himself in a very false position, considering his own aspirations to be
Edward's successor.
Harold came back to find a very disturbed state of affairs in the
north of England. For nine years his brother Tostig had been Earl of
Northumbria, but he had ruled harshly and had especially provoked
discontent by treacherously causing the deaths of Gamel, son of Orm,
and Ulf, son of Dolfin, two members of the old Bamborough house,
and appropriating their estates. The result was that the kinsmen of the
murdered men started an intrigue with the young Edwin of Mercia, and
in 1065 broke into open insurrection. A little later they seized York and
declared Tostig outlawed. They then elected Morkere, Edwin's younger
brother, to be earl in Tostig's place, and putting him at the head of the
Northumbrian forces, advanced into Mercia, where they were joined by
Earl Edwin and his thegns and also by a body of Welshmen. Marching
further south, the combined armies overran in succession Northampton-
shire and Oxfordshire, until at last they were met by Harold in the
Thames valley. All this time Tostig had remained well out of the way,
hunting in Clarendon forest in Edward's company. Harold intervened,
it appears, with insufficient forces to risk a battle, and being reduced to
negotiate had to accept the conditions demanded by Edwin and his
Yorkshire allies.
As a result Morkere was officially recognised by King Edward as
earl north of the Humber, whereupon Tostig retired in high dudgeon to
Flanders to seek assistance from his father-in-law, Count Baldwin V
(1036–1067). As part of the resettlement the youthful Waltheof, the
a
## p. 399 (#445) ############################################
Fall of Tostig. Death of Edward
399
son of Earl Siward, was made Earl of Northamptonshire and Hunting-
donshire, as some compensation for the fact that his hereditary claims
to Northumberland were a second time ignored. Harold's share in these
transactions has sometimes been represented as an act of justice to the
Northerners, done at the expense of his family's interests without any real
necessity. Be that as it may, Tostig never forgave him for not rendering
more effective support, and from this time forward became his bitterest
enemy. It certainly looks as if Harold was thinking more of his own
interests than Tostig's, and saw in Tostig's fall an opportunity of making
the house of Mercia more friendly to himself in the future and less in-
clined to oppose him, should he make a bid for the crown. For now it
was hardly concealed that Harold and his friends, in the event of the
king's death, would seek to set aside the direct line of the house of
Alfred and would propose that the house of Godwin should be put in
its place. If, however, this was to be effected by general consent, with-
out an appeal to force, it could only be by the action of the national
assembly, in which Edwin and Morkere and their supporters would have
a very influential vote. Harold, therefore, had very good reasons for
making terms with them, as it clearly would be more advantageous to
him to win the crown by consent than by force.
Questions as to Harold's motives are, however, a problem so complex
as to defy our best efforts to unravel them, and all that can be said with
certainty is that events were soon to shew that, in abandoning Tostig's
cause and favouring the Mercian aspirations, he had taken the most
prudent course. For in the winter following Tostig's fall Edward became
seriously ill while superintending the building of the new abbey at West-
minster, which he had recently founded. And here, in his manor house
on the banks of the Thames, he died on 6 January 1066, leaving the
succession an open question. To his own contemporaries he was never
the saintly person that later historians have depicted, but just a pious
and often misguided ruler, who had attempted to bring the English into
closer connexion with their continental neighbours than was desirable,
and had rather wilfully undermined the insularity of his dominions
without knowing how to bring them peace and security. It was only by
later generations, who venerated him as the last of the line of Cerdic and
Alfred, that he came to be honoured as a saint, and it was only in 1161
that the bull was issued by Pope Alexander III which conferred on him
the title of “ Confessor " which has become so familiar.
In tracing the political developments under Aethelred, Knut and
Edward, little has been said about the economic or social side of English
life; but it must not be thought that the period of ninety years from 975 to
1065 was a period devoid of social developments, or that materials are
lacking for forming an estimate of the amount and character of the
changes which were going on. On the contrary, did space permit, much
might be said on such topics as the distribution of wealth and territorial
CH. XV.
## p. 400 (#446) ############################################
400
Economic conditions under Edward
power, the density of the population in different districts, the ranks and
grades of society, the methods of tillage and industry, and the condition
of the urban centres. . Information as to some of these, if not very clear,
is comparatively ample; for in addition to the laws and charters and a
fair amount of literary evidence, we can use as the groundwork for our
picture the very detailed description of England in 1065, which is
preserved in the Domesday Survey. Primarily of course this Norman
survey is concerned with the condition of the country twenty years later;
but the local jurors, who furnished the returns, were also required to
state how matters had stood “on the day when King Edward was alive
and dead," and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of their
answers, even though some allowance has to be made for their recollection
of the earlier period being somewhat blurred.
The most important feature which stands out in all the sources alike
is that there was just as little uniformity in England at the end of the
Anglo-Saxon period in social and economic matters as in political con-
ditions. In spite of the fact that the country had been nominally a single
kingdom for over a century, each province in 1065 still retained its own
traditions and customs in social matters, and there were not only
fundamental differences between the English and Danish districts, but
also between the valley of the Thames and the valley of the Severn,
between Kent and Wessex, between Wessex and Mercia and between the
northern and the southern Danelaw. Any attempt, therefore, to give a
picture of a typical village or a typical estate would be misleading, for
everywhere there were startling variations (even within the limits of a
single shire there were frequently several types of organisation) not to
speak of differences in nomenclature and differences in land measures and
monetary units. There are however some generalisations which can be
accepted confidently, and to these we must chiefly confine ourselves.
The first most obvious economic feature is that the density of the popu-
lation decreased as one passed from east to west. In 1065 Lincolnshire,
Norfolk and Suffolk were by far the most thickly populated shires. Were
the population of these three counties left out of account, we should be
leaving out of account not much less than one-sixth of the whole English
nation. The least thickly populated districts south of the Humber and the
Ribble were apparently Shropshire, Staffordshire and Cornwall, but men
were also sparse in Devon and in all parts of the Severn valley. Another clear
feature is that the land was much more valuable in the east than in the west,
partly of course because of geological differences and the variation of soils,
but largely because the denser population of the east facilitated a more in-
tensive working of the land and the maintenance of a far greater head of
cattle and sheep. Yet another great contrast between the east and the
1 There is no evidence as to the districts north of the Humber. The Vale of York
may have been well populated, but there cannot have been any large number of
inhabitants in the great moorland areas.
## p. 401 (#447) ############################################
Contrast between East and West
401
>
west, of critical economic importance, arose from the fact that the east
was the home of liberty. In the Danish districts the peasantry, whether
English or Danish by descent, were far less exploited in the interests of
the upper classes than in the English districts. To begin with, there were
far fewer actual slaves or “theows” in these parts than elsewhere. In East
Anglia the slaves formed only 4 per cent. of the population, whereas in
the Midlands they formed 14 to 15 per cent. , on the Welsh border 17 per
cent. and in Cornwall 21 per cent. But this is not the whole story. In
the Danish districts considerable sections of the inferior cultivating classes
rendered far lighter dues for their holdings, and performed far fewer
services for their lords than in the Midlands or in Wessex. One reason
for this was that the overlordship of the soil was far more divided and
broken up in the Danelaw than in the south and west. In the Chiltern
districts, in Kent and in Wessex generally, it was fairly common for a
village to have only one lord; but in the Danelaw, as often as not, four
or five lords were concurrently interested in even quite small villages, and
it is not impossible to point to instances in which a village was shared
between as many as nine or ten. At the same time, in the Danelaw the
tie between a lord and his men was far looser as regards a large section
of the peasantry than in Mercia or Wessex, for considerable numbers of
the classes described in the Domesday Survey as “liberi homines" and
“sochemanni” still had the right of choosing their lords and, from time
to time, of transferring their allegiance from one lord to another. As
the phrase runs in the Domesday Survey, “they could recede from their
lord without his license and go with their land where they would. ” The
natural consequence followed that it was difficult for the lord, whose
patronage they did acknowledge, to get any burdensome rents or services
out of them.
Let us now turn to consider what is known about the ranks of
English society outside the Danelaw in the earlier years of the eleventh
century. One has to admit that this is an obscure subject, but some
direct light is thrown on it by the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum.
This Anglo-Saxon tract is unfortunately undated, and nothing is known
of its origin; but it seems to be a memorandum drawn up by the land-
agent of a monastic or episcopal estate, comprising in all probability
several villages, in order to keep a record of the services due from the
various grades of tenants who were under his management. It is thought
to have been put together about 1025, and along with it is found a
second tract, which sets forth the duties of the land-agent, calling him
at time a gerefa or reeve and at another a scyrman. The
occurrence of this second term has led some commentators to think that
the writer of the tracts might have been a shire-reeve, but scyrman
carries no such implication, being used indifferently of any official person.
The author of the Rectitudines begins his treatise by describing the
services of the thegn. By that term he clearly did not mean a king's
one
c. MED. H. VOL. III. CH. XV.
26
## p. 402 (#448) ############################################
402
The Rectitudines Singularum Personarum
thegn or man of much importance, nor did he mean the lord of the
estate, who was probably some bishop or abbot, but only a lesser thegn,
the mediocris tainus of Knut's laws. In the Domesday returns relating
to 1065 such lesser thegns are frequently mentioned. They occur most
commonly on large ecclesiastical manors, their holdings being termed
tainlands, and on them lay the burden of providing the military and
other services due from the churches to the king. In the Rectitudines the
thegn's duties are similar, the main ones specified being fyrdfæreld,
burhbote and brycgeweorc, that is to say the well-known “trinoda neces-
sitas” together with all other burdens arising at the king's ban, such as the
provision of ship-service and coastguard service and the building of deer-
hays for the king's use when he came into the district. Here then, we seem
for the first time in our sources to meet with a definite military tenure,
but it differed from the later knight's service in that the thegn fought on
foot and not on horse-back, and performed his service on behalf of his
lord's estate and not in respect of his own holding. As to the size of the
thegn's holding, the Rectitudines are silent, but tell us that the thegn was
worthy of his book-right. No doubt he was also, as his name implies, a
“dear-born” man with a wergeld of 1200 shillings. We cannot, however,
picture him as more than a petty squire, for in Domesday the assessment
of the “tainland,” though sometimes five hides or more, is often no more
than one hide. It was not, however, always a compact tenement but might
be made up of parcels lying in several villages.
Having described the “thegn," the author of the Rectitudines passes
next to the ceorl class and sets before us three distinct grades, called re-
spectively geneatas, geburas and cotsetlas. The differences between them
were clearly in the main economic and not due to differences of legal
status. In the eyes of the law all alike were twihyndemen, and had
wergelds of 200 shillings. Even the cotsetlas, who were the poorest, paid
their “hearthpennies” on Holy Thursday, “as every freeman should. ”
What marked these grades off from one another was the nature of the
dues which could be claimed from them by their lords. The cotsetlas or
cottage tenants, having as a rule no plough-oxen, may probably be re-
garded as the lowest of the three in the social scale. They worked every
Monday throughout the year for the lord on his inland, or demesne
portion of the estate, and three days a week at harvest-time. They paid
church-scot at Martinmas, but did not normally pay landgafol or rent in
money. Their holdings in the arable fields were usually five acres more
or less. Next in order in the village hierarchy came the geburas or boors,
whose name itself, used as it is in most Germanic tongues for a peasant
of any kind, and still familiar to us in a disguised form in the term
“neighbour," seems to imply that they were the commonest and most
widespread class? . To these tenants our author devotes about a quarter
1 Maitland has contended that the geburas were only an insignificant class: cf.
Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 329. But this opinion ignores the use of the derivative
## p. 403 (#449) ############################################
Geburs and Geneats
403
of his treatise, admitting however that he cannot be very precise about
their services, as they varied in details from place to place. Their
holdings, described as gesettesland, that is, land “set to gafol” as con-
trasted with the inland retained by the lord for his own use, were known
as “yardlands” or gyrde. Each of these comprised a farm-stedding or toft
with some thirty acres of arable, scattered in acre and half-acre strips in
different parts of the village fields, together with a share in the hay
meadows and pastures. In return for their yardlands the services of the
geburas to the lord were far heavier than those of the cotsetlas, being three
days' work a week on the inland from Candlemas (2 February) to Easter,
three days' work a week in harvest-time and two days' work a week at
other seasons.
Moreover, as a part of this week-work (wicweorc) they had
specially to assist the lord with their own oxen and labour in ploughing
his inland. They had also to pay divers gafols or rents, some in money
and some in kind. For example, they might have to feed the lord's
hounds, or find bread for his swineherds, while some provided hens and
lambs and some paid “honeygafol" and some “ale-gafol. ” Their beasts
also had to lie at the lord's fold from Martinmas to Easter. When first
admitted, or set to their holdings, they received an outfit of live-stock and
seed from the lord, which had to be returned at their death, a custom
which has survived together with the yardland in a modified form even
to modern times? under the name of the heriot. Highest in the scale
above the geburas came the geneatas. They were altogether freer men
who, though they had to pay landgafol and other dues and had to reap and
mow for the lord at harvest time, had no fixed week-work to do. The
essential feature in fact about their tenure was that their services were
occasional and not fixed to definite days. Their main duties were to ride
on the lord's errands far and near, to carry loads and do carting when
called upon, to reap and mow at harvest time, to act as the lord's body-
guard, to escort travellers coming to the lord, and to maintain the walls
and fences round the lord's “burg” or dwelling-house. Exceptional types
of rent-paying ceorls are next described, such as the beo-ceorl in charge
of the lord's hives, and the gafol-swan in charge of his pigs; and then to
complete the picture we have the various sorts of praedial slaves, the
theowan or servi and theowan-wifmen or ancillae. Of these unfree hinds
words formed from gebur in the laws and land-books. In Edward the Elder's dooms,
for example, geburscipe is the term used to express the village community generally
in which a man has his home: cf. Liebermann, Gesetze, p. 138, “on dum geburscipe
be he on hamfæst wære. ” Similarly an Abingdon charter, dating from 956 or 957,
speaks of the three villages adjoining Oxford, called Hinksey, Seacourt and Wytham,
as geburlandes ; cf. Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 1002. We know too that in Hertfordshire
there were many geburs in the district round Hatfield. Cf. Thorpe, Diplomaturium,
pp. 649-651.
1 In 1920 considerable heriots were paid to King's College, Cambridge, as lords
of the Manor of Ogbourne in Wiltshire, in respect of the transfer of some customary
freeholds reckoned to contain 7} yardlands.
CH, XV.
26-2
## p. 404 (#450) ############################################
404
The Tidenham evidence
nearly a dozen types are mentioned, such as ox-herds, shepherds, goat-herds,
cheese-makers, barn-keepers, woodmen, hedgers and so on; but not much
is told about them individually, except details as to the cost of their
maintenance.
The remarkable fullness of the details, furnished by the author of the
Rectitudines, and the great interest of his account as the earliest known
picture of a large English landed estate, naturally lead us to speculate
how far it is to be considered a valid picture for England generally. The
answer seems to be, that it had little application outside Wessex and
Mercia, and even in those provinces it is difficult to make it altogether
tally with the conditions found in the majority of the counties a gene-
ration or two later on, as depicted in the Domesday Survey. It fits best
in fact, when compared with Domesday, with the counties along the
Welsh border from Gloucestershire to Cheshire; for there is an obvious
parallel between these geneatas of the Rectitudines with their riding services
and those radmanni or radchenistres who were prominent in those counties
in 1065, and who were clearly riding men after the style of the "equites”
set up by Oswald on the estates of the church of Worcester in Edgar's
day. It agrees also remarkably well with an account we have of the
labour customs in use at Tidenham in the Fores of Dean, drawn up
about 1060! This village lies in the triangle formed by the junction of
the Wye with the Severn, and in Edward's reign belonged to the monks
of Bath, who had sublet it to Archbishop Stigand for his life. It was an
extensive estate divided into several hamlets and was assessed for taxation
at 30 hides; nine of these hides were inland and twenty-one gesettesland,
divided into yardlands occupied some by geneatas and some by geburas.
The account speaks of these yardlands as gyrda gafollandes; and then
sets out the services of the two classes of tenantry, remarking that “to
Tidenham belong many labour services,” “to Dyddanhamme gebyred
micil weorc ræden. ” As in the Rectitudines, the geneat's chief duty was
to act as an escort, take messages and do carting, while the gebur had
not only many gafols to render but owed heavy week-work and ploughing
services. It looks then as if the Rectitudines must apply primarily to this
part of Mercia, and as if the tract probably had its origin on one or
other of the great church fiefs which dominated the valley of the Lower
Severn. On the other hand it is impossible to suppose that the main con-
ditions on the larger ecclesiastical or lay estates in Wessex were not to
some extent the same; for geneat and gebur, yardlund and gesettesland,
are all mentioned as West Saxon institutions in the laws of Ine, together
with the gafol geldu, the lord's gerefa and the taking up of land to weorc
and to gafole. We know too that King Alfred had his geneatas, and the
abbeys of Glastonbury and Abingdon had their tainlands and geburlands
in the ninth and tenth centuries; while yardlands, half-yardlands and
>
i Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 928. Seebohm, English Village Community, pp. 148–157.
## p. 405 (#451) ############################################
The growth of seignorial courts
405
cotlands formed the basis of village organisation in all the southern shires
except Kent and Cornwall from the Norman Conquest onwards until
rendered obsolete by the enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. We must suppose then that, though radchenistres are hardly
alluded to at all in Wessex in the Domesday returns (they appear once
in Berkshire and twice in Hampshire), they must none the less have ex-
isted there in the days of Knut and Edward, and we must account for
the silence of Domesday about them by the hypothesis that the jurors
for the West Saxon hundreds in 1055 were not asked to distinguish
between the two classes of ceorlas and therefore merged them together
under the vaguer title of tunesmen, a term which occasionally appears in
Anglo-Saxon documents and which Latin scribes rendered by the word
villanus. We cannot, however, postulate more than a general similarity
of system on the various estates, whether of Wessex or Mercia; for the
leading characteristic of rural organisation in England has ever been
that each village has been free to regulate its own farming and develop
its own special customs as to tenure and tillage. Provided this funda-
mental limitation is kept steadily in view, we may fairly take the sketch
furnished by the Rectitudines as an approximately valid picture of all the
greater estate-units south and west of Watling Street in the days of Knut
and Edward; but at the same time we must remember that the writer of
the Rectitudines was not attempting a description of the smaller estates
of the ordinary thegns. His treatise is clearly restricted to lordly
territories, where elaborate differentiation of classes and minute sub-
division of services were both natural and feasible. It may well be then
that the comparatively heavy rents and services, recorded in the Rectitu-
dines, were by no means characteristics of the ordinary thegn's estate, and
that it was only on the larger ecclesiastical estates, where the lords had
power to bind men's souls as well as their bodies, that the exploitation of
the tenantry had been carried to any extreme lengths.
Enough evidence has now been presented to give a general idea of the
economic and seignorial relations existing between the landowning classes
and the mass of the cultivators in the first half of the eleventh century.
One question however of considerable importance still remains to be
considered, and that is, had the landlords as a class judicial authority over
their tenants merely as landowners? In other words, could they set up
petty courts on their estates, similar to the manorial courts of a later day,
and compel their men to try their disputes in them, at any rate in matters
of civil justice, provided the cases did not involve persons who were
tenants under other lords? The evidence at our disposal is perhaps too
fragmentary and too lacking in precision to enable us to say how matters
stood in all parts of England; but two things at any rate seem clear.
First, there certainly was a very considerable number of lords in Edward's
day who were holding their own private courts or hallmoots (halimotes)
in competition with the national hundred moots; and secondly, there was
CH. XV.
## p. 406 (#452) ############################################
406
Sake and Soke in Edward's day
no general law or custom as yet recognised, which entitled landlords to
hold such courts, but in all cases, where hallmoots had sprung up, the
right to hold them rested on some special grant from the Crown and was
in the nature of a franchise or special privilege. The conclusion, that
hallmoots had become fairly common institutions by 1050, is not really
open to question, being based on the collective evidence of hundreds of
passages scattered up and down the Domesday Survey, which tell us that
some church magnate or some fairly important layman had enjoyed the
privilege of “sake and soke” (saca et soca) over this or that estate, or over
this or that group of men, in the days of King Edward. But this
technical term, which stands for the Anglo-Saxon saca and socne, is only
a pleonastic phrase for sócn; and as we have already seen sócn is the
Anglo-Saxon term for jurisdiction and implies the right to do justice and,
if need be, to hold a court for the purpose.
As it is only possible here to give a few examples of these passages, we
must contentourselves with observing that there are very few sections of the
survey from which they are entirely lacking, though in different counties
they assume different forms. It is clear too that they imply several
different types of hallmoots, according as the jurisdiction granted had
been extensive or restricted. The simplest but least instructive references
to sake and soke are found in certain schedules, which merely record the
names of persons who had been entitled to sake and soke under King
Edward. For example, we have a list of fifteen persons who had enjoyed
the franchise in Kent, a list of nineteen who had enjoyed it in Derbyshire
and Nottinghamshire, and a list of thirty-five who had enjoyed it in
Lincolnshire. But we cannot from such lists infer with any certainty that
these privileged persons had exercised the right over all their lands lying
in these counties and still less over their lands in other districts. Else-
where the information as to sake and soke is more often given in respect
of particular places. We read for example under Essex, that Robert, son
of Wimarc, the king's staller, had sake and soke over the half-hundred of
Clavering; under Suffolk, that Ulwyn of Hedingham had sake and soke
over his estates at Lavenham, Burgate and Waldingfield, and under
Warwickshire, that Ealdred, the Bishop of Worcester, had sake and soke
over seven and a half hides of land at Alveston near Stratford-on-Avon.
Or again we are told that the soke was restricted and only applied to some
particular class of tenant. For example, at Reedham in Norfolk the Abbot
of Holme had sake and soke but only over those who were bound to use
his sheepfold (super hos qui sequebantur faldam). At Buxhall in Suffolk
Leswin Croc had sake and soke but only over his hall and his cottage
tenants (super hallam et bordarios). In some cases again the soke is
attributed not to the immediate landlord but to his overlord. For
example, Uggeshall near Dunwich is entered as owned by Osketel
Presbyter, but the survey goes on to say “Ralf the Staller had sake
and soke over this estate, and over all other estates owned by Osketel. ”
a
## p. 407 (#453) ############################################
Sake and Soke in Knut's day
407
From these various examples it is easy to see that sake and soke, though
not a rare privilege, had not under Edward become a right common to
all landowners, for it would be pointless to give lists of those who were
exercising it, if all landowners were free to do so. It is clear on the
contrary from hundreds of other passages that the wielding of soke was
regarded as primarily a royal right, and the general rule of the land still
enjoined that all men should attend the hundred moots, and that these
should be held under the presidency of officials appointed by the king and
the earl, who shared the profits of jurisdiction between them, the king
taking two-thirds of the fines and the earl one-third. Further, even where
landowners had acquired some measure of soke over their estates, the
resulting franchises were regarded primarily as subdivisions carved out of
the hundreds by leave of the Crown, and consequently men could still
conceive of seignorial justice as being merely a variant of the general
scheme of national justice, and not as a distinct and rival type of jurisdic-
tion to be feared by the Crown and suppressed whenever there was an
opportunity. There was in fact no idea at all as yet that these franchises
constituted encroachments on the powers of the Crown.
If we inquire into their origin we do not find that their existence
can be put down chiefly to Edward's being a complaisant ruler, inclined to
placate his more ambitious subjects by offering them bribes in the form
of judicial concessions. Doubtless, Edward was rather lavish with his
grants of sake and soke, and many English writs have survived which
testify to his activities in this direction; but there is plenty of evidence
to shew that he was no innovator and only followed the practice of his
predecessors. For in this connexion we have only to turn to Knut's laws
to be convinced that private sokes were plentiful in his day; for, if not,
certain famous sections in them which declare that the king ought to have
certain important pleas over all his subjects, unless he has expressly
granted them away, would be meaningless. Nor does this conclusion
depend solely on inferences; for a writ of Knut? still survives which was
issued about 1020 in favour of the Archbishop of Canterbury, proclaiming
to all the king's lieges that the archbishop was to be worthy throughout
his lands of sake and soke, grithbrice, hamsocn, foresteal, infangennethef
and flymena-fyrmth, and these specially mentioned rights turn out to be
just the very pleas that the laws say ought to be reserved to the king
except in very exceptional circumstances. There is nothing about this
writ to lead us to question its genuineness. On the contrary it is quite
on all fours with Knut's general policy of favouring the Church, and fits in
well with some other evidence which shews that this was not the only
case in which he was willing to give away the reserved pleas. The evidence
which can be quoted to prove this is not indeed contemporary, but seems
perfectly trustworthy, and consists in certain later writs issued by Norman
1 Cf.
Earle, Handbook to the Landcharters, p. 232.
CH. XV.
## p. 408 (#454) ############################################
408
St Edmunds Liberty
a
kings which imply that Knut granted his wife Emma sake and soke over
eight and a half hundreds in West Suffolk and that the grant carried with
it grithbrice, hamsocn, foresteal, aeberethef flitwite and fihtwite'. From some
points of view this grant to his wife is more novel and important than the
grant to the archbishop; for it is the earliest clear instance on record of
a wide stretch of territory passing into the hands of a lay subject, and
shews that sokes had already ceased to be regarded as specially ecclesias-
tical privileges at least twenty years before Edward came to the throne.
None the less this great franchise did ultimately come into the hands of
the Church; for Emma's estates were all confiscated in 1043, soon after
her son's accession, and this gave Edward the opportunity to transfer
the jurisdiction over the eight and a half hundreds to the monks of
St Edmund's Bury, who continued to enjoy the franchise right down to the
Reformation. How much further back it would be possible to trace these
franchises, were documents of Aethelred's reign available, it is impossible
to say; but there seems no reason for supposing that Knut was an
innovator. Like all rulers he more often than not followed precedents,
and after all he had excellent precedents for such sokes as he created in
the sokes which Edgar had set up in the tenth century. The really obscure
problem is not so much the origin of the larger franchises granted to the
magnatęs, as the origin of the practice of allowing quite small men to
exercise sake and soke over petty estates. As to these we can never hope
to attain any certainty; but it is interesting to note that the phrase saca
and socne is even older than the reign of Edgar, being found in a
charter issued by Eadwig in 958 which is apparently genuine and which
relates to Southwell in Nottinghamshire'.
1 Cf. H. W. C. Davis, “ The Liberties of Bury St Edmunds,” Eng. Hist. Rev.
1908, vol. xxiv. pp. 417-423.
2 Cf. Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 1029.
## p. 409 (#455) ############################################
409
CHAPTER XVI.
THE WESTERN CALIPHATE.
After the successes of Mūsā and ‘Abd-al-´Aziz and the occupation
of the Iberian peninsula by Hurr the slight resistance of the Christians
may be neglected, while we follow the victorious Muslims through Gaul
up to the defeat of the Emir Abd-ar-Raḥmān at Poitiers by Charles
Martel (732). From that date till the accession of 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān ibn
Mu‘āwiya the whole history of Muslim Spain may be said to consist of
internal dissensions between Yemenites and ķaisites, Syrians and Medin-
ese. 'Abd-al-Malik, an old Medinese chief, was appointed governor of
Spain in October 732. He refused to provide some Syrians, who were
starving in Ceuta, with the means of crossing over into Spain, but an
insurrection among the Berbers in the peninsula compelled him to summon
them to his aid. The ragged and starving Syrians fought so fiercely that
they routed the Berbers, and then having no desire to return to Africa
where they had fared so ill, they revolted and proclaimed Balj as their
Emir (741). They sought to inspire terror. They crucified Abd-al-
'
Malik, and defeated his sons at Aqua Portora (August 742). The civil
war ended with the appointment by the Emir of Africa of Abū-l-
Khațțār the Kalbite as governor. He pacified Spain and settled the
Syrians along the southern fringe from Murcia to Ocsonoba (Algarve);
but the conflict was promptly renewed between Ķaisites or Ma'addites
and Yemenites or Kalbites. The rebels defeated the Kalbites under
Abū-l-Khatřār at the battle of Guadalete (745), their leader Thuwāba
becoming Emir. On his death war between rival tribes lasted some six
years longer.
According to the oldest Arab and Christian chroniclers Asturias
was the only part where the Visigoths prolonged their resistance. Some
nobles of the south and centre of Spain had taken refuge there with the
remnants of their defeated armies. The death of Roderick at Segoyuela?
led them to elect Pelayo as their king, who took up Roderick's task of
heroic resistance. Pelayo retired to the Picos de Europa ; there in the
valley of Covadonga the Visigoths defeated (718) an expedition led
1 See Vol. 11. p. 186, and cf. Vol. 11. p. 372.
CH. XVI.
## p. 410 (#456) ############################################
410
Asturias and Navarre
against them by ‘Alķama, who lost his life in the battle. This victory,
all the more remarkable after signal defeats, has been taken as the
turning point from which the reconquest of Spain has been dated.
National legend has told that Pelayo was chosen king not before this
success but as the result of his victory, great if magnified in the telling.
In the north of Aragon and on the frontier of the Basque country
(which was for the most part independent) a new centre of resistance
arose in 724 under the leadership of Garcia Ximenez, who defeated the
Arabs and occupied the town of Ainsa in the district called Sobrarbe.
Another independent centre of resistance connected with Sobrarbe must
have been formed in Navarre, and its leader according to the oldest
records seems to have been Iñigo Arista. But of all this we have only
confused and contradictory accounts.
For a century few victories were won over the invaders in the king-
dom of Asturias. Its history may be said, according to Visigothic
tradition, to have resolved itself into a struggle between king and nobles.
The former aimed at an hereditary and absolute monarchy while the
latter strove to keep their voice in the king's election and their long-
cherished independence. Alfonso I the Catholic, Duke of Cantabria
and son-in-law of Pelayo, was the only one to take advantage of the
internal conflicts among the Muslims. He made raids through Galicia,
Cantabria and Leon, and occupied or laid waste important territories like
Lugo. At his death in 756 the Muslim frontier ran by Coimbra, Coria,
Toledo, Guadalajara, Tudela and Pampeluna, and the Christian frontier
included Asturias, Santander, parts of Burgos, Leon and Galicia. Be-
tween these two lines was an area continually in dispute.
Such was the state of Spain on the arrival of ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān ibn
Muřāwiya. He had escaped from the general massacre of the Umayyads,
which had been ordered by the Abbasids, by swimming across the
Euphrates, and had seen from the opposite bank the slaughter of his
thirteen-year-old brother. His faithful freedmen Badr and sālim, who
had been in his sister's service, joined him in Palestine with money
and precious stones, and thence he passed to Africa, where he might
have lived in peaceful obscurity. But (according to Dozy)“ ambitious
dreams haunted without ceasing the mind of this youth of twenty.
Tall, vigorous and brave, he had been carefully educated and possessed
talents out of the common.
His instinct told him of his summons
to a glorious destiny," and the prophecies of his uncle Maslama con-
firmed his belief that he would be the saviour of the Umayyads. He
believed that he was destined to sit upon a throne. But where would
he find one? The East was lost ; there remained Spain and Africa.
In Africa the government was in the hands of Ibn Habīb, who had
refused to recognise the Abbasids and aimed at an independent king-
dom. Because of the prophecies favourable to ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān he
persecuted him : indeed he persecuted every member of the Umayyad
## p. 411 (#457) ############################################
‘Abd-ar-Rahmān I
411
a
dynasty, and had executed two sons of Caliph Walīd II for some in-
discreet remarks which he had overheard. “Wandering from tribe to
tribe and from town to town,” says Dozy, “Abd-ar-Raḥmān passed from
one end of Africa to the other. ” For some five years it is clear he had
never thought of Spain.
At length he turned his eyes towards Andalusia, of which his former
servant Sālim, who had been there, gave him some account. Badr went
over to Spain, to the clients of the Umayyads, of whom some few hundreds
were scattered among the Syrians of Damascus and Ķinnasrīn in Elvira
and Jaen; he bore a letter to them, in which `Abd-ar-Rahmān told his
plight and set forth his claim to the Emirate as grandson of the Caliph
Hishām. At the same time he asked their help and offered them im-
portant posts in the event of a victory. As soon as they had received
this letter, the chiefs of the Syrians of Damascus, 'Ubaid-Allāh and Ibn
Khālid, joined with Yusuf ibn Bukht, chief of the Syrians of Ķinnasrīn.
It was as much from a sense of their duty as vassals as from hope of office
and self-interest that they decided to forward the undertaking. But what
means had they at their disposal ? They resolved to consult Şumail the
ķaisite, a hero of the civil wars. He put off giving an answer in a matter
of such importance, but entertained Badr and the other Umayyads.
Afterwards he left for Cordova, where the Emir Yusuf was collecting
forces to punish the Yemenites and Berbers who had revolted at Sara-
gossa. Yusuf bought the help of the Umayyads for the campaign.
When Yusuf crossed the Guadalquivir, ‘Ubaid-Allāh and Ibn Khalid
appeared before him and begged they might first be allowed to get in their
crops and then they would join him at Toledo-a request which was
granted. Thereupon they urged 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān's cause on Şumail,
who had just risen from one of his frequent orgies; he was out of temper
with Yusuf and gave way to their demands, and so the Umayyads started
on their homeward journey well satisfied. However, as soon as Sumail
reflected that it would end in the extinction of the independence of the
tribal chiefs and of his own authority, he sent messengers to overtake the
Umayyads, and informing them that he could not support their master,
advised them not to attempt any change of government.
Seeing that all hope was lost of forming an alliance with ķaisites,
the Umayyads threw themselves into the arms of the Yemenites, who
were burning to shake off the yoke of the Kaisites. The answer to their
call surpassed their expectations. As soon as the subject Umayyads felt
sure of the support of the Yemenites and could count on Yusuf and
Şumail being engaged in the north, they sent to Tammām in Africa
money for the Berbers, who had refused to allow 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān to
leave them till a ransom was paid. Then `Abd-ar-Raḥmān left for Spain
and reached Almuñecar in September 755. There ‘Ubaid-Allāh and
Ibn Khālid awaited him, and put him in possession of the castle of Torrox
between Iznajar and Loja.
-a
-
CH, XVI.
## p. 412 (#458) ############################################
412
The Umayyad Emirate
a
The receipt of this news made a deep impression on Yusuf. He
had caused distrust by executing three rebel Ķuraishite chiefs at the
instance of Şumail, and his resolution to attack the pretender imme-
diately caused the desertion of almost the whole of his army, which was
reluctant to undertake a fresh campaign in the depth of winter and in
the mountainous district of Regio (Málaga). Yusuf therefore opened
negotiations with 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān. His envoys had an interview with
‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān, whom they found surrounded by his little court, in
which ‘Ubaid-Allāh held the first place; and they offered him on Yusuf's
behalf a safe refuge in Cordova, the hand of Yūsuf's daughter as well as
a large dowry and the lands of Caliph Hishām. They shewed him as
evidence of good faith a letter from Yûsuf and promised him magnificent
presents, left cautiously behind. These terms seemed satisfactory to the
Umayyads; ‘Ubaid-Allāh was on the point of answering Yusuf's letter,
when the envoy Khālid, a renegade Spaniard, insolently told him that he
was incapable of writing a letter like his; “Ubaid-Allāh's Arab pride was
wounded by the Spaniard's reproach, and he gave orders for his arrest.
The negotiations were broken off.
As soon as winter was over ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān advanced to Archidona,
where the ķaisite governor, Jidār, proclaimed him Emir, and entered
Seville about the middle of March 756. He then marched out towards
Cordova along the left bank of the Guadalquivir, while Yusuf advanced
to Seville along the right bank? On sighting one another the two armies
continued their march towards Cordova, still separated by the river. As
soon as they reached Mosara, 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān resolved to give battle.
By a cunning move he managed to cross the river without any opposi-
tion from Yusuf, a manoeuvre which gave him provisions for his troops.
On Friday, 14 May, a sacrificial feast, being the day of the battle of
Marj Rāhit, which had given the crown to the Umayyads of the East,
the combat opened. The cavalry of ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān routed the right wing
and centre of the army commanded by Yusuf and Sumail, who each saw
the death of his own son. The left wing alone sustained the attack all
day until all the notable ķaisites had fallen, including their chief
‘Ubaid. The victors began to pillage ; but ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān forbade
it and shewed magnanimity in his treatment of Yūsuf's wife and sons.
The Yemenites were offended by his generous behaviour, and formed
a plot to kill him. However, he discovered the conspiracy, and no
opposition was made to his offering as Imām the Friday prayers in
the principal mosque of Cordova. Negotiations were begun, and finally
Yūsuf recognised ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān as Emir of Spain in July 756. It was
&
1 It was at Colombera or Villanueva de Brenes that the leaders noticed 'Abd-
ar-Raḥmān had no banner. Accordingly Abū-ş-Şabbāḥ, a Sevillan chief, placed
his turban on the point of his lance and thus unfurled what became later the
standard of the Umayyads in Spain.
2 See Vol. 11. p. 360.
## p. 413 (#459) ############################################
Consolidation of the Emirate
413
.
not long before Yusuf was slain in battle, and one morning Şumail him-
self was found dead, strangled by order of 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān.
In spite of his growing power ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān had to suppress
other revolts, of which the most formidable was that of the Yemenites.
In 764 Toledo made its submission. Its chiefs had to pass through
Cordova clad in sackcloth, with their heads shaved and mounted on
donkeys. But the Yemenites continued restless.
Shortly after 764 the Berbers, who had hitherto kept quiet, rose in
arms, headed by a schoolmaster named Shakyā, half fanatic and half
impostor, who gave himself out to be a descendant of Ali and Fātima.
After six years of warfare 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān succeeded in sowing discord
among them. He advanced against the rebels, who retreated northwards.
Meanwhile the Yemenites and the Berbers of the East advanced towards
Cordova. On the banks of the river Bembezar the Yemenites were
treacherously left to their fate by the Berbers, and 30,000 perished at
the hands of 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān's soldiers. The Berbers of the centre
were only subdued after ten years' fighting, when Shakyā was murdered
by one of his adherents.
In 777 Afrābī the Kalbite, governor of Barcelona, formed a league
against 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān and sent to Charlemagne for help. Charles,
who reckoned on the complete pacification of the Saxons, crossed the
Pyrenees with an army. Afrābi was to support him north of the Ebro,
where his sovereignty was to be recognised, while the African Berbers
were to help in Murcia by raising the standard of the Abbasid Caliph,
Charles's ally. But this coalition failed. Just as Charlemagne had begun
the siege of Saragossa he was called home by the news that Widukind
had re-entered Saxony and pushed on to Cologne. On his return to
Francia through Roncesvalles the rear-guard of his army was attacked
and annihilated by the Basques. There the famous Roland, who was
afterwards immortalised in the medieval epic, met his death. ‘Abd-ar-
Raḥmān reaped the benefit of these successes, which were due to his rebel
subjects at Saragossa, to the Basques and to a Saxon prince who did not
even know of his existence. He advanced and took possession of Sara-
gossa ; he attacked the Basques, and forced the Count of Cerdagne to
become his tributary.
These feats were the admiration of the world and evoked from
the Abbasid Caliph Manşūr the following speech concerning ‘Abd-ar-
Raḥmān : “ Although he had no other support to rely on but his
. statesmanship and perseverance, he succeeded in humbling his haughty
opponents, in killing off all insurgents, and in securing his frontier
against the attacks of the Christians. He founded a mighty empire,
and united under his sceptre extensive dominions which had hitherto
been divided among a number of different chiefs. ” This judgment is an
exact description of 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān's life-work.
Detested by the Arab and Berber chiefs, deserted by his followers
# CH. XVI.
## p. 414 (#460) ############################################
414
Muslim factions
and betrayed by his own family, he summoned mercenary troops to his
aid. Though his policy, which was both daring and treacherous, might
alienate his people's affection, yet it was invariably clever and adapted
to his circumstances. The very means which he used, violence and
tyranny, were the same as those by which the kings of the fifteenth
century were victorious in their struggle against feudalism. He had
already traced the outlines of the military despotism, which his suc-
cessors were to fill in.
His successor Hishām I (788–796) was a model of virtue. In his reign
the sect of Mālik ibn Anas was started in the East, and the Emir, who
had been commended by Mālik, did his utmost to spread its doctrines,
choosing from its members both judges and ecclesiastics. When Hishām
died the sect, to which most of the faķīhs (professional theologians)
belonged, was already powerful. It was headed in Spain by a clever
young Berber, Yahyā ibn Yaḥyā, who had ambition, enterprise and
experience, along with the impetuosity of a demagogue.
Although the next Emir, Hakam, was by no means irreligious, his easy
disposition, his love of the chase and of wine, brought on him the hatred
of the faķīhs, which was intensified by his refusing them the influence they
desired. They were not sparing in their attacks upon him and used as
their tools the renegados, who were called muladies (muwallad or the
adopted). The position of these renegades was uneasy ; in religion they
were subject to Muslim law, which punished apostasy with death and
counted any one born a Muslim to be a Muslim. Socially they were
reckoned as slaves and excluded from any share in the government. Never-
theless they were able to help the faķāhs in bringing about a revo-
lution.
The first rising took place in 805, but was put down by the Emir's
bodyguard. Then other conspirators offered the throne to Ibn Shammās,
the Emir's cousin, but he revealed the plot, and sixty-two of the conspira-
tors were put to death, while two of them fled to Toledo. When Hakam
was reducing Mérida (806), the inhabitants of Cordova rose a second
time, but he successfully crushed the revolt, beheading or crucifying the
leaders. Hakam now shewed himself even more cruel and treacherous
than before. His cruelty at Cordova was followed by a massacre at
Toledo.
The Toledans were a people difficult to govern, and under the
headship of the poet Gharbīb, a renegade by birth, they had already
caused alarm to the Emir. On the death of Gharbib he appointed as.
governor an ambitious renegade from Huesca, 'Amrūs, a man subtle and
dishonest, but a mere puppet in the hands of his master. He cleverly
won over the Toledans, and was able to build a castle in the middle
of the city, where the Emir's troops were quartered. An army under
the prince 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān arrived, and the leading Toledans were
invited to a banquet at the castle. Bidding them enter one by one,
## p. 415 (#461) ############################################
'Abd-ar-Raḥmān II
415
he had their heads cut off in the courtyard of the castle and Aung
into a ditch. It is impossible to fix the number of those slain on this
“day of the ditch,” and estimates vary between 700 and 5000.
The impression made by this slaughter kept the people of Cordova
quiet for seven years. Moreover, the Emir strengthened his bodyguard
with slaves known as “mutes," because they spoke no Arabic. Never-
theless discontent steadily grew among the students and theologians in
the quarter of Arrabal del Sur. At length a formidable revolution
broke out. In the month of Ramadan (May 814) a soldier killed a
polisher who refused to clean his sword, and this act was made the
pretext for the revolt. A huge mob marched in spite of cavalry
charges to the Emir's palace. But Hakam with the utmost calm-
ness ordered the execution of some imprisoned fakīhs ; then after this
sacrilege a body of his troops set fire to Arrabal del Sur. The rebels,
as he expected, rushed to the help of their families and, attacked on
every side, suffered fearful slaughter at the hands of the terrible mutes.
Thereupon Hakam ordered the expulsion within three days under pain
of crucifixion of all the inhabitants of Arrabal del Sur. On reach-
ing the Mediterranean, one body consisting of 15,000 families went to
the East, and there after a struggle with the Bedouins seized Alexandria
and soon founded an independent kingdom under Abū Hafs Omar
al-Balluţi. Another body of 8000 families settled at Fez in Morocco.
Hakam now issued an amnesty to the faķihs and allowed them to
settle anywhere in Spain, except Cordova and its neighbourhood. Yahyā
even managed to secure his sovereign's favour.
Hakam, relentless towards the Toledans and the artisans of Arrabal
del Sur, shewed towards the Arabs and Berbers who were of his own
race a clemency attributed by Arab historians to remorseful conscience.
Some of his verses suggest that he followed the example of 'Abd-ar-
Raḥmān: “ Just as a tailor uses his needle to join different pieces of
cloth, so I use my sword to unite my separate provinces. ” He maintained
the throne of the Umayyads by a military despotism.
At Cordova his son and successor, 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān II (822-852), set
a high standard of magnificence.
deserted not only by the Mercians but also by his own men, and was
shortly afterwards assassinated. His fall, accompanied as it was by the
restoration of considerable tracts along the marches to English rule,
brought Harold undoubted prestige; but it must not be supposed that
the Welsh were in any sense conquered. Their unity was once more
a
CH. XV.
## p. 398 (#444) ############################################
398
Captivity of Harold. Northumbrian Revolt
broken up. Within their own borders, however, various Welsh chieftains
remained as independent as ever.
During the course of the next year an untoward mishap befell
Harold. For some reason or other he had occasion to take a sea trip
in the Channel, and, as he was sailing from his paternal seat at Bosham
in Sussex towards Dover, a storm caught him and drove his ship ashore
on the coast of Ponthieu in France. Guy, the count of the district,
when he heard of the wreck, gave orders for Harold's arrest, and being
a vassal of William, the Duke of Normandy, handed him over to his
overlord at Rouen as a captive.
Harold thus became an unwilling
guest at the Norman court. As such he accompanied the duke on a
campaign into Brittany, but though he was outwardly treated with
honour, he was informed that he would not be allowed to return to
England unless he would become the duke's man and take an oath to
assist William in the future, should he make a claim to the English
throne on Edward's death. Seeing no other way of regaining his liberty,
Harold had perforce to take the oath demanded of him, whereupon he
was permitted to sail for England. On his return he made as little as
possible of the misadventure, and no doubt regarded the oath extracted
from him by force as of no validity; but he had none the less placed
himself in a very false position, considering his own aspirations to be
Edward's successor.
Harold came back to find a very disturbed state of affairs in the
north of England. For nine years his brother Tostig had been Earl of
Northumbria, but he had ruled harshly and had especially provoked
discontent by treacherously causing the deaths of Gamel, son of Orm,
and Ulf, son of Dolfin, two members of the old Bamborough house,
and appropriating their estates. The result was that the kinsmen of the
murdered men started an intrigue with the young Edwin of Mercia, and
in 1065 broke into open insurrection. A little later they seized York and
declared Tostig outlawed. They then elected Morkere, Edwin's younger
brother, to be earl in Tostig's place, and putting him at the head of the
Northumbrian forces, advanced into Mercia, where they were joined by
Earl Edwin and his thegns and also by a body of Welshmen. Marching
further south, the combined armies overran in succession Northampton-
shire and Oxfordshire, until at last they were met by Harold in the
Thames valley. All this time Tostig had remained well out of the way,
hunting in Clarendon forest in Edward's company. Harold intervened,
it appears, with insufficient forces to risk a battle, and being reduced to
negotiate had to accept the conditions demanded by Edwin and his
Yorkshire allies.
As a result Morkere was officially recognised by King Edward as
earl north of the Humber, whereupon Tostig retired in high dudgeon to
Flanders to seek assistance from his father-in-law, Count Baldwin V
(1036–1067). As part of the resettlement the youthful Waltheof, the
a
## p. 399 (#445) ############################################
Fall of Tostig. Death of Edward
399
son of Earl Siward, was made Earl of Northamptonshire and Hunting-
donshire, as some compensation for the fact that his hereditary claims
to Northumberland were a second time ignored. Harold's share in these
transactions has sometimes been represented as an act of justice to the
Northerners, done at the expense of his family's interests without any real
necessity. Be that as it may, Tostig never forgave him for not rendering
more effective support, and from this time forward became his bitterest
enemy. It certainly looks as if Harold was thinking more of his own
interests than Tostig's, and saw in Tostig's fall an opportunity of making
the house of Mercia more friendly to himself in the future and less in-
clined to oppose him, should he make a bid for the crown. For now it
was hardly concealed that Harold and his friends, in the event of the
king's death, would seek to set aside the direct line of the house of
Alfred and would propose that the house of Godwin should be put in
its place. If, however, this was to be effected by general consent, with-
out an appeal to force, it could only be by the action of the national
assembly, in which Edwin and Morkere and their supporters would have
a very influential vote. Harold, therefore, had very good reasons for
making terms with them, as it clearly would be more advantageous to
him to win the crown by consent than by force.
Questions as to Harold's motives are, however, a problem so complex
as to defy our best efforts to unravel them, and all that can be said with
certainty is that events were soon to shew that, in abandoning Tostig's
cause and favouring the Mercian aspirations, he had taken the most
prudent course. For in the winter following Tostig's fall Edward became
seriously ill while superintending the building of the new abbey at West-
minster, which he had recently founded. And here, in his manor house
on the banks of the Thames, he died on 6 January 1066, leaving the
succession an open question. To his own contemporaries he was never
the saintly person that later historians have depicted, but just a pious
and often misguided ruler, who had attempted to bring the English into
closer connexion with their continental neighbours than was desirable,
and had rather wilfully undermined the insularity of his dominions
without knowing how to bring them peace and security. It was only by
later generations, who venerated him as the last of the line of Cerdic and
Alfred, that he came to be honoured as a saint, and it was only in 1161
that the bull was issued by Pope Alexander III which conferred on him
the title of “ Confessor " which has become so familiar.
In tracing the political developments under Aethelred, Knut and
Edward, little has been said about the economic or social side of English
life; but it must not be thought that the period of ninety years from 975 to
1065 was a period devoid of social developments, or that materials are
lacking for forming an estimate of the amount and character of the
changes which were going on. On the contrary, did space permit, much
might be said on such topics as the distribution of wealth and territorial
CH. XV.
## p. 400 (#446) ############################################
400
Economic conditions under Edward
power, the density of the population in different districts, the ranks and
grades of society, the methods of tillage and industry, and the condition
of the urban centres. . Information as to some of these, if not very clear,
is comparatively ample; for in addition to the laws and charters and a
fair amount of literary evidence, we can use as the groundwork for our
picture the very detailed description of England in 1065, which is
preserved in the Domesday Survey. Primarily of course this Norman
survey is concerned with the condition of the country twenty years later;
but the local jurors, who furnished the returns, were also required to
state how matters had stood “on the day when King Edward was alive
and dead," and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of their
answers, even though some allowance has to be made for their recollection
of the earlier period being somewhat blurred.
The most important feature which stands out in all the sources alike
is that there was just as little uniformity in England at the end of the
Anglo-Saxon period in social and economic matters as in political con-
ditions. In spite of the fact that the country had been nominally a single
kingdom for over a century, each province in 1065 still retained its own
traditions and customs in social matters, and there were not only
fundamental differences between the English and Danish districts, but
also between the valley of the Thames and the valley of the Severn,
between Kent and Wessex, between Wessex and Mercia and between the
northern and the southern Danelaw. Any attempt, therefore, to give a
picture of a typical village or a typical estate would be misleading, for
everywhere there were startling variations (even within the limits of a
single shire there were frequently several types of organisation) not to
speak of differences in nomenclature and differences in land measures and
monetary units. There are however some generalisations which can be
accepted confidently, and to these we must chiefly confine ourselves.
The first most obvious economic feature is that the density of the popu-
lation decreased as one passed from east to west. In 1065 Lincolnshire,
Norfolk and Suffolk were by far the most thickly populated shires. Were
the population of these three counties left out of account, we should be
leaving out of account not much less than one-sixth of the whole English
nation. The least thickly populated districts south of the Humber and the
Ribble were apparently Shropshire, Staffordshire and Cornwall, but men
were also sparse in Devon and in all parts of the Severn valley. Another clear
feature is that the land was much more valuable in the east than in the west,
partly of course because of geological differences and the variation of soils,
but largely because the denser population of the east facilitated a more in-
tensive working of the land and the maintenance of a far greater head of
cattle and sheep. Yet another great contrast between the east and the
1 There is no evidence as to the districts north of the Humber. The Vale of York
may have been well populated, but there cannot have been any large number of
inhabitants in the great moorland areas.
## p. 401 (#447) ############################################
Contrast between East and West
401
>
west, of critical economic importance, arose from the fact that the east
was the home of liberty. In the Danish districts the peasantry, whether
English or Danish by descent, were far less exploited in the interests of
the upper classes than in the English districts. To begin with, there were
far fewer actual slaves or “theows” in these parts than elsewhere. In East
Anglia the slaves formed only 4 per cent. of the population, whereas in
the Midlands they formed 14 to 15 per cent. , on the Welsh border 17 per
cent. and in Cornwall 21 per cent. But this is not the whole story. In
the Danish districts considerable sections of the inferior cultivating classes
rendered far lighter dues for their holdings, and performed far fewer
services for their lords than in the Midlands or in Wessex. One reason
for this was that the overlordship of the soil was far more divided and
broken up in the Danelaw than in the south and west. In the Chiltern
districts, in Kent and in Wessex generally, it was fairly common for a
village to have only one lord; but in the Danelaw, as often as not, four
or five lords were concurrently interested in even quite small villages, and
it is not impossible to point to instances in which a village was shared
between as many as nine or ten. At the same time, in the Danelaw the
tie between a lord and his men was far looser as regards a large section
of the peasantry than in Mercia or Wessex, for considerable numbers of
the classes described in the Domesday Survey as “liberi homines" and
“sochemanni” still had the right of choosing their lords and, from time
to time, of transferring their allegiance from one lord to another. As
the phrase runs in the Domesday Survey, “they could recede from their
lord without his license and go with their land where they would. ” The
natural consequence followed that it was difficult for the lord, whose
patronage they did acknowledge, to get any burdensome rents or services
out of them.
Let us now turn to consider what is known about the ranks of
English society outside the Danelaw in the earlier years of the eleventh
century. One has to admit that this is an obscure subject, but some
direct light is thrown on it by the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum.
This Anglo-Saxon tract is unfortunately undated, and nothing is known
of its origin; but it seems to be a memorandum drawn up by the land-
agent of a monastic or episcopal estate, comprising in all probability
several villages, in order to keep a record of the services due from the
various grades of tenants who were under his management. It is thought
to have been put together about 1025, and along with it is found a
second tract, which sets forth the duties of the land-agent, calling him
at time a gerefa or reeve and at another a scyrman. The
occurrence of this second term has led some commentators to think that
the writer of the tracts might have been a shire-reeve, but scyrman
carries no such implication, being used indifferently of any official person.
The author of the Rectitudines begins his treatise by describing the
services of the thegn. By that term he clearly did not mean a king's
one
c. MED. H. VOL. III. CH. XV.
26
## p. 402 (#448) ############################################
402
The Rectitudines Singularum Personarum
thegn or man of much importance, nor did he mean the lord of the
estate, who was probably some bishop or abbot, but only a lesser thegn,
the mediocris tainus of Knut's laws. In the Domesday returns relating
to 1065 such lesser thegns are frequently mentioned. They occur most
commonly on large ecclesiastical manors, their holdings being termed
tainlands, and on them lay the burden of providing the military and
other services due from the churches to the king. In the Rectitudines the
thegn's duties are similar, the main ones specified being fyrdfæreld,
burhbote and brycgeweorc, that is to say the well-known “trinoda neces-
sitas” together with all other burdens arising at the king's ban, such as the
provision of ship-service and coastguard service and the building of deer-
hays for the king's use when he came into the district. Here then, we seem
for the first time in our sources to meet with a definite military tenure,
but it differed from the later knight's service in that the thegn fought on
foot and not on horse-back, and performed his service on behalf of his
lord's estate and not in respect of his own holding. As to the size of the
thegn's holding, the Rectitudines are silent, but tell us that the thegn was
worthy of his book-right. No doubt he was also, as his name implies, a
“dear-born” man with a wergeld of 1200 shillings. We cannot, however,
picture him as more than a petty squire, for in Domesday the assessment
of the “tainland,” though sometimes five hides or more, is often no more
than one hide. It was not, however, always a compact tenement but might
be made up of parcels lying in several villages.
Having described the “thegn," the author of the Rectitudines passes
next to the ceorl class and sets before us three distinct grades, called re-
spectively geneatas, geburas and cotsetlas. The differences between them
were clearly in the main economic and not due to differences of legal
status. In the eyes of the law all alike were twihyndemen, and had
wergelds of 200 shillings. Even the cotsetlas, who were the poorest, paid
their “hearthpennies” on Holy Thursday, “as every freeman should. ”
What marked these grades off from one another was the nature of the
dues which could be claimed from them by their lords. The cotsetlas or
cottage tenants, having as a rule no plough-oxen, may probably be re-
garded as the lowest of the three in the social scale. They worked every
Monday throughout the year for the lord on his inland, or demesne
portion of the estate, and three days a week at harvest-time. They paid
church-scot at Martinmas, but did not normally pay landgafol or rent in
money. Their holdings in the arable fields were usually five acres more
or less. Next in order in the village hierarchy came the geburas or boors,
whose name itself, used as it is in most Germanic tongues for a peasant
of any kind, and still familiar to us in a disguised form in the term
“neighbour," seems to imply that they were the commonest and most
widespread class? . To these tenants our author devotes about a quarter
1 Maitland has contended that the geburas were only an insignificant class: cf.
Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 329. But this opinion ignores the use of the derivative
## p. 403 (#449) ############################################
Geburs and Geneats
403
of his treatise, admitting however that he cannot be very precise about
their services, as they varied in details from place to place. Their
holdings, described as gesettesland, that is, land “set to gafol” as con-
trasted with the inland retained by the lord for his own use, were known
as “yardlands” or gyrde. Each of these comprised a farm-stedding or toft
with some thirty acres of arable, scattered in acre and half-acre strips in
different parts of the village fields, together with a share in the hay
meadows and pastures. In return for their yardlands the services of the
geburas to the lord were far heavier than those of the cotsetlas, being three
days' work a week on the inland from Candlemas (2 February) to Easter,
three days' work a week in harvest-time and two days' work a week at
other seasons.
Moreover, as a part of this week-work (wicweorc) they had
specially to assist the lord with their own oxen and labour in ploughing
his inland. They had also to pay divers gafols or rents, some in money
and some in kind. For example, they might have to feed the lord's
hounds, or find bread for his swineherds, while some provided hens and
lambs and some paid “honeygafol" and some “ale-gafol. ” Their beasts
also had to lie at the lord's fold from Martinmas to Easter. When first
admitted, or set to their holdings, they received an outfit of live-stock and
seed from the lord, which had to be returned at their death, a custom
which has survived together with the yardland in a modified form even
to modern times? under the name of the heriot. Highest in the scale
above the geburas came the geneatas. They were altogether freer men
who, though they had to pay landgafol and other dues and had to reap and
mow for the lord at harvest time, had no fixed week-work to do. The
essential feature in fact about their tenure was that their services were
occasional and not fixed to definite days. Their main duties were to ride
on the lord's errands far and near, to carry loads and do carting when
called upon, to reap and mow at harvest time, to act as the lord's body-
guard, to escort travellers coming to the lord, and to maintain the walls
and fences round the lord's “burg” or dwelling-house. Exceptional types
of rent-paying ceorls are next described, such as the beo-ceorl in charge
of the lord's hives, and the gafol-swan in charge of his pigs; and then to
complete the picture we have the various sorts of praedial slaves, the
theowan or servi and theowan-wifmen or ancillae. Of these unfree hinds
words formed from gebur in the laws and land-books. In Edward the Elder's dooms,
for example, geburscipe is the term used to express the village community generally
in which a man has his home: cf. Liebermann, Gesetze, p. 138, “on dum geburscipe
be he on hamfæst wære. ” Similarly an Abingdon charter, dating from 956 or 957,
speaks of the three villages adjoining Oxford, called Hinksey, Seacourt and Wytham,
as geburlandes ; cf. Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 1002. We know too that in Hertfordshire
there were many geburs in the district round Hatfield. Cf. Thorpe, Diplomaturium,
pp. 649-651.
1 In 1920 considerable heriots were paid to King's College, Cambridge, as lords
of the Manor of Ogbourne in Wiltshire, in respect of the transfer of some customary
freeholds reckoned to contain 7} yardlands.
CH, XV.
26-2
## p. 404 (#450) ############################################
404
The Tidenham evidence
nearly a dozen types are mentioned, such as ox-herds, shepherds, goat-herds,
cheese-makers, barn-keepers, woodmen, hedgers and so on; but not much
is told about them individually, except details as to the cost of their
maintenance.
The remarkable fullness of the details, furnished by the author of the
Rectitudines, and the great interest of his account as the earliest known
picture of a large English landed estate, naturally lead us to speculate
how far it is to be considered a valid picture for England generally. The
answer seems to be, that it had little application outside Wessex and
Mercia, and even in those provinces it is difficult to make it altogether
tally with the conditions found in the majority of the counties a gene-
ration or two later on, as depicted in the Domesday Survey. It fits best
in fact, when compared with Domesday, with the counties along the
Welsh border from Gloucestershire to Cheshire; for there is an obvious
parallel between these geneatas of the Rectitudines with their riding services
and those radmanni or radchenistres who were prominent in those counties
in 1065, and who were clearly riding men after the style of the "equites”
set up by Oswald on the estates of the church of Worcester in Edgar's
day. It agrees also remarkably well with an account we have of the
labour customs in use at Tidenham in the Fores of Dean, drawn up
about 1060! This village lies in the triangle formed by the junction of
the Wye with the Severn, and in Edward's reign belonged to the monks
of Bath, who had sublet it to Archbishop Stigand for his life. It was an
extensive estate divided into several hamlets and was assessed for taxation
at 30 hides; nine of these hides were inland and twenty-one gesettesland,
divided into yardlands occupied some by geneatas and some by geburas.
The account speaks of these yardlands as gyrda gafollandes; and then
sets out the services of the two classes of tenantry, remarking that “to
Tidenham belong many labour services,” “to Dyddanhamme gebyred
micil weorc ræden. ” As in the Rectitudines, the geneat's chief duty was
to act as an escort, take messages and do carting, while the gebur had
not only many gafols to render but owed heavy week-work and ploughing
services. It looks then as if the Rectitudines must apply primarily to this
part of Mercia, and as if the tract probably had its origin on one or
other of the great church fiefs which dominated the valley of the Lower
Severn. On the other hand it is impossible to suppose that the main con-
ditions on the larger ecclesiastical or lay estates in Wessex were not to
some extent the same; for geneat and gebur, yardlund and gesettesland,
are all mentioned as West Saxon institutions in the laws of Ine, together
with the gafol geldu, the lord's gerefa and the taking up of land to weorc
and to gafole. We know too that King Alfred had his geneatas, and the
abbeys of Glastonbury and Abingdon had their tainlands and geburlands
in the ninth and tenth centuries; while yardlands, half-yardlands and
>
i Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 928. Seebohm, English Village Community, pp. 148–157.
## p. 405 (#451) ############################################
The growth of seignorial courts
405
cotlands formed the basis of village organisation in all the southern shires
except Kent and Cornwall from the Norman Conquest onwards until
rendered obsolete by the enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. We must suppose then that, though radchenistres are hardly
alluded to at all in Wessex in the Domesday returns (they appear once
in Berkshire and twice in Hampshire), they must none the less have ex-
isted there in the days of Knut and Edward, and we must account for
the silence of Domesday about them by the hypothesis that the jurors
for the West Saxon hundreds in 1055 were not asked to distinguish
between the two classes of ceorlas and therefore merged them together
under the vaguer title of tunesmen, a term which occasionally appears in
Anglo-Saxon documents and which Latin scribes rendered by the word
villanus. We cannot, however, postulate more than a general similarity
of system on the various estates, whether of Wessex or Mercia; for the
leading characteristic of rural organisation in England has ever been
that each village has been free to regulate its own farming and develop
its own special customs as to tenure and tillage. Provided this funda-
mental limitation is kept steadily in view, we may fairly take the sketch
furnished by the Rectitudines as an approximately valid picture of all the
greater estate-units south and west of Watling Street in the days of Knut
and Edward; but at the same time we must remember that the writer of
the Rectitudines was not attempting a description of the smaller estates
of the ordinary thegns. His treatise is clearly restricted to lordly
territories, where elaborate differentiation of classes and minute sub-
division of services were both natural and feasible. It may well be then
that the comparatively heavy rents and services, recorded in the Rectitu-
dines, were by no means characteristics of the ordinary thegn's estate, and
that it was only on the larger ecclesiastical estates, where the lords had
power to bind men's souls as well as their bodies, that the exploitation of
the tenantry had been carried to any extreme lengths.
Enough evidence has now been presented to give a general idea of the
economic and seignorial relations existing between the landowning classes
and the mass of the cultivators in the first half of the eleventh century.
One question however of considerable importance still remains to be
considered, and that is, had the landlords as a class judicial authority over
their tenants merely as landowners? In other words, could they set up
petty courts on their estates, similar to the manorial courts of a later day,
and compel their men to try their disputes in them, at any rate in matters
of civil justice, provided the cases did not involve persons who were
tenants under other lords? The evidence at our disposal is perhaps too
fragmentary and too lacking in precision to enable us to say how matters
stood in all parts of England; but two things at any rate seem clear.
First, there certainly was a very considerable number of lords in Edward's
day who were holding their own private courts or hallmoots (halimotes)
in competition with the national hundred moots; and secondly, there was
CH. XV.
## p. 406 (#452) ############################################
406
Sake and Soke in Edward's day
no general law or custom as yet recognised, which entitled landlords to
hold such courts, but in all cases, where hallmoots had sprung up, the
right to hold them rested on some special grant from the Crown and was
in the nature of a franchise or special privilege. The conclusion, that
hallmoots had become fairly common institutions by 1050, is not really
open to question, being based on the collective evidence of hundreds of
passages scattered up and down the Domesday Survey, which tell us that
some church magnate or some fairly important layman had enjoyed the
privilege of “sake and soke” (saca et soca) over this or that estate, or over
this or that group of men, in the days of King Edward. But this
technical term, which stands for the Anglo-Saxon saca and socne, is only
a pleonastic phrase for sócn; and as we have already seen sócn is the
Anglo-Saxon term for jurisdiction and implies the right to do justice and,
if need be, to hold a court for the purpose.
As it is only possible here to give a few examples of these passages, we
must contentourselves with observing that there are very few sections of the
survey from which they are entirely lacking, though in different counties
they assume different forms. It is clear too that they imply several
different types of hallmoots, according as the jurisdiction granted had
been extensive or restricted. The simplest but least instructive references
to sake and soke are found in certain schedules, which merely record the
names of persons who had been entitled to sake and soke under King
Edward. For example, we have a list of fifteen persons who had enjoyed
the franchise in Kent, a list of nineteen who had enjoyed it in Derbyshire
and Nottinghamshire, and a list of thirty-five who had enjoyed it in
Lincolnshire. But we cannot from such lists infer with any certainty that
these privileged persons had exercised the right over all their lands lying
in these counties and still less over their lands in other districts. Else-
where the information as to sake and soke is more often given in respect
of particular places. We read for example under Essex, that Robert, son
of Wimarc, the king's staller, had sake and soke over the half-hundred of
Clavering; under Suffolk, that Ulwyn of Hedingham had sake and soke
over his estates at Lavenham, Burgate and Waldingfield, and under
Warwickshire, that Ealdred, the Bishop of Worcester, had sake and soke
over seven and a half hides of land at Alveston near Stratford-on-Avon.
Or again we are told that the soke was restricted and only applied to some
particular class of tenant. For example, at Reedham in Norfolk the Abbot
of Holme had sake and soke but only over those who were bound to use
his sheepfold (super hos qui sequebantur faldam). At Buxhall in Suffolk
Leswin Croc had sake and soke but only over his hall and his cottage
tenants (super hallam et bordarios). In some cases again the soke is
attributed not to the immediate landlord but to his overlord. For
example, Uggeshall near Dunwich is entered as owned by Osketel
Presbyter, but the survey goes on to say “Ralf the Staller had sake
and soke over this estate, and over all other estates owned by Osketel. ”
a
## p. 407 (#453) ############################################
Sake and Soke in Knut's day
407
From these various examples it is easy to see that sake and soke, though
not a rare privilege, had not under Edward become a right common to
all landowners, for it would be pointless to give lists of those who were
exercising it, if all landowners were free to do so. It is clear on the
contrary from hundreds of other passages that the wielding of soke was
regarded as primarily a royal right, and the general rule of the land still
enjoined that all men should attend the hundred moots, and that these
should be held under the presidency of officials appointed by the king and
the earl, who shared the profits of jurisdiction between them, the king
taking two-thirds of the fines and the earl one-third. Further, even where
landowners had acquired some measure of soke over their estates, the
resulting franchises were regarded primarily as subdivisions carved out of
the hundreds by leave of the Crown, and consequently men could still
conceive of seignorial justice as being merely a variant of the general
scheme of national justice, and not as a distinct and rival type of jurisdic-
tion to be feared by the Crown and suppressed whenever there was an
opportunity. There was in fact no idea at all as yet that these franchises
constituted encroachments on the powers of the Crown.
If we inquire into their origin we do not find that their existence
can be put down chiefly to Edward's being a complaisant ruler, inclined to
placate his more ambitious subjects by offering them bribes in the form
of judicial concessions. Doubtless, Edward was rather lavish with his
grants of sake and soke, and many English writs have survived which
testify to his activities in this direction; but there is plenty of evidence
to shew that he was no innovator and only followed the practice of his
predecessors. For in this connexion we have only to turn to Knut's laws
to be convinced that private sokes were plentiful in his day; for, if not,
certain famous sections in them which declare that the king ought to have
certain important pleas over all his subjects, unless he has expressly
granted them away, would be meaningless. Nor does this conclusion
depend solely on inferences; for a writ of Knut? still survives which was
issued about 1020 in favour of the Archbishop of Canterbury, proclaiming
to all the king's lieges that the archbishop was to be worthy throughout
his lands of sake and soke, grithbrice, hamsocn, foresteal, infangennethef
and flymena-fyrmth, and these specially mentioned rights turn out to be
just the very pleas that the laws say ought to be reserved to the king
except in very exceptional circumstances. There is nothing about this
writ to lead us to question its genuineness. On the contrary it is quite
on all fours with Knut's general policy of favouring the Church, and fits in
well with some other evidence which shews that this was not the only
case in which he was willing to give away the reserved pleas. The evidence
which can be quoted to prove this is not indeed contemporary, but seems
perfectly trustworthy, and consists in certain later writs issued by Norman
1 Cf.
Earle, Handbook to the Landcharters, p. 232.
CH. XV.
## p. 408 (#454) ############################################
408
St Edmunds Liberty
a
kings which imply that Knut granted his wife Emma sake and soke over
eight and a half hundreds in West Suffolk and that the grant carried with
it grithbrice, hamsocn, foresteal, aeberethef flitwite and fihtwite'. From some
points of view this grant to his wife is more novel and important than the
grant to the archbishop; for it is the earliest clear instance on record of
a wide stretch of territory passing into the hands of a lay subject, and
shews that sokes had already ceased to be regarded as specially ecclesias-
tical privileges at least twenty years before Edward came to the throne.
None the less this great franchise did ultimately come into the hands of
the Church; for Emma's estates were all confiscated in 1043, soon after
her son's accession, and this gave Edward the opportunity to transfer
the jurisdiction over the eight and a half hundreds to the monks of
St Edmund's Bury, who continued to enjoy the franchise right down to the
Reformation. How much further back it would be possible to trace these
franchises, were documents of Aethelred's reign available, it is impossible
to say; but there seems no reason for supposing that Knut was an
innovator. Like all rulers he more often than not followed precedents,
and after all he had excellent precedents for such sokes as he created in
the sokes which Edgar had set up in the tenth century. The really obscure
problem is not so much the origin of the larger franchises granted to the
magnatęs, as the origin of the practice of allowing quite small men to
exercise sake and soke over petty estates. As to these we can never hope
to attain any certainty; but it is interesting to note that the phrase saca
and socne is even older than the reign of Edgar, being found in a
charter issued by Eadwig in 958 which is apparently genuine and which
relates to Southwell in Nottinghamshire'.
1 Cf. H. W. C. Davis, “ The Liberties of Bury St Edmunds,” Eng. Hist. Rev.
1908, vol. xxiv. pp. 417-423.
2 Cf. Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 1029.
## p. 409 (#455) ############################################
409
CHAPTER XVI.
THE WESTERN CALIPHATE.
After the successes of Mūsā and ‘Abd-al-´Aziz and the occupation
of the Iberian peninsula by Hurr the slight resistance of the Christians
may be neglected, while we follow the victorious Muslims through Gaul
up to the defeat of the Emir Abd-ar-Raḥmān at Poitiers by Charles
Martel (732). From that date till the accession of 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān ibn
Mu‘āwiya the whole history of Muslim Spain may be said to consist of
internal dissensions between Yemenites and ķaisites, Syrians and Medin-
ese. 'Abd-al-Malik, an old Medinese chief, was appointed governor of
Spain in October 732. He refused to provide some Syrians, who were
starving in Ceuta, with the means of crossing over into Spain, but an
insurrection among the Berbers in the peninsula compelled him to summon
them to his aid. The ragged and starving Syrians fought so fiercely that
they routed the Berbers, and then having no desire to return to Africa
where they had fared so ill, they revolted and proclaimed Balj as their
Emir (741). They sought to inspire terror. They crucified Abd-al-
'
Malik, and defeated his sons at Aqua Portora (August 742). The civil
war ended with the appointment by the Emir of Africa of Abū-l-
Khațțār the Kalbite as governor. He pacified Spain and settled the
Syrians along the southern fringe from Murcia to Ocsonoba (Algarve);
but the conflict was promptly renewed between Ķaisites or Ma'addites
and Yemenites or Kalbites. The rebels defeated the Kalbites under
Abū-l-Khatřār at the battle of Guadalete (745), their leader Thuwāba
becoming Emir. On his death war between rival tribes lasted some six
years longer.
According to the oldest Arab and Christian chroniclers Asturias
was the only part where the Visigoths prolonged their resistance. Some
nobles of the south and centre of Spain had taken refuge there with the
remnants of their defeated armies. The death of Roderick at Segoyuela?
led them to elect Pelayo as their king, who took up Roderick's task of
heroic resistance. Pelayo retired to the Picos de Europa ; there in the
valley of Covadonga the Visigoths defeated (718) an expedition led
1 See Vol. 11. p. 186, and cf. Vol. 11. p. 372.
CH. XVI.
## p. 410 (#456) ############################################
410
Asturias and Navarre
against them by ‘Alķama, who lost his life in the battle. This victory,
all the more remarkable after signal defeats, has been taken as the
turning point from which the reconquest of Spain has been dated.
National legend has told that Pelayo was chosen king not before this
success but as the result of his victory, great if magnified in the telling.
In the north of Aragon and on the frontier of the Basque country
(which was for the most part independent) a new centre of resistance
arose in 724 under the leadership of Garcia Ximenez, who defeated the
Arabs and occupied the town of Ainsa in the district called Sobrarbe.
Another independent centre of resistance connected with Sobrarbe must
have been formed in Navarre, and its leader according to the oldest
records seems to have been Iñigo Arista. But of all this we have only
confused and contradictory accounts.
For a century few victories were won over the invaders in the king-
dom of Asturias. Its history may be said, according to Visigothic
tradition, to have resolved itself into a struggle between king and nobles.
The former aimed at an hereditary and absolute monarchy while the
latter strove to keep their voice in the king's election and their long-
cherished independence. Alfonso I the Catholic, Duke of Cantabria
and son-in-law of Pelayo, was the only one to take advantage of the
internal conflicts among the Muslims. He made raids through Galicia,
Cantabria and Leon, and occupied or laid waste important territories like
Lugo. At his death in 756 the Muslim frontier ran by Coimbra, Coria,
Toledo, Guadalajara, Tudela and Pampeluna, and the Christian frontier
included Asturias, Santander, parts of Burgos, Leon and Galicia. Be-
tween these two lines was an area continually in dispute.
Such was the state of Spain on the arrival of ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān ibn
Muřāwiya. He had escaped from the general massacre of the Umayyads,
which had been ordered by the Abbasids, by swimming across the
Euphrates, and had seen from the opposite bank the slaughter of his
thirteen-year-old brother. His faithful freedmen Badr and sālim, who
had been in his sister's service, joined him in Palestine with money
and precious stones, and thence he passed to Africa, where he might
have lived in peaceful obscurity. But (according to Dozy)“ ambitious
dreams haunted without ceasing the mind of this youth of twenty.
Tall, vigorous and brave, he had been carefully educated and possessed
talents out of the common.
His instinct told him of his summons
to a glorious destiny," and the prophecies of his uncle Maslama con-
firmed his belief that he would be the saviour of the Umayyads. He
believed that he was destined to sit upon a throne. But where would
he find one? The East was lost ; there remained Spain and Africa.
In Africa the government was in the hands of Ibn Habīb, who had
refused to recognise the Abbasids and aimed at an independent king-
dom. Because of the prophecies favourable to ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān he
persecuted him : indeed he persecuted every member of the Umayyad
## p. 411 (#457) ############################################
‘Abd-ar-Rahmān I
411
a
dynasty, and had executed two sons of Caliph Walīd II for some in-
discreet remarks which he had overheard. “Wandering from tribe to
tribe and from town to town,” says Dozy, “Abd-ar-Raḥmān passed from
one end of Africa to the other. ” For some five years it is clear he had
never thought of Spain.
At length he turned his eyes towards Andalusia, of which his former
servant Sālim, who had been there, gave him some account. Badr went
over to Spain, to the clients of the Umayyads, of whom some few hundreds
were scattered among the Syrians of Damascus and Ķinnasrīn in Elvira
and Jaen; he bore a letter to them, in which `Abd-ar-Rahmān told his
plight and set forth his claim to the Emirate as grandson of the Caliph
Hishām. At the same time he asked their help and offered them im-
portant posts in the event of a victory. As soon as they had received
this letter, the chiefs of the Syrians of Damascus, 'Ubaid-Allāh and Ibn
Khālid, joined with Yusuf ibn Bukht, chief of the Syrians of Ķinnasrīn.
It was as much from a sense of their duty as vassals as from hope of office
and self-interest that they decided to forward the undertaking. But what
means had they at their disposal ? They resolved to consult Şumail the
ķaisite, a hero of the civil wars. He put off giving an answer in a matter
of such importance, but entertained Badr and the other Umayyads.
Afterwards he left for Cordova, where the Emir Yusuf was collecting
forces to punish the Yemenites and Berbers who had revolted at Sara-
gossa. Yusuf bought the help of the Umayyads for the campaign.
When Yusuf crossed the Guadalquivir, ‘Ubaid-Allāh and Ibn Khalid
appeared before him and begged they might first be allowed to get in their
crops and then they would join him at Toledo-a request which was
granted. Thereupon they urged 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān's cause on Şumail,
who had just risen from one of his frequent orgies; he was out of temper
with Yusuf and gave way to their demands, and so the Umayyads started
on their homeward journey well satisfied. However, as soon as Sumail
reflected that it would end in the extinction of the independence of the
tribal chiefs and of his own authority, he sent messengers to overtake the
Umayyads, and informing them that he could not support their master,
advised them not to attempt any change of government.
Seeing that all hope was lost of forming an alliance with ķaisites,
the Umayyads threw themselves into the arms of the Yemenites, who
were burning to shake off the yoke of the Kaisites. The answer to their
call surpassed their expectations. As soon as the subject Umayyads felt
sure of the support of the Yemenites and could count on Yusuf and
Şumail being engaged in the north, they sent to Tammām in Africa
money for the Berbers, who had refused to allow 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān to
leave them till a ransom was paid. Then `Abd-ar-Raḥmān left for Spain
and reached Almuñecar in September 755. There ‘Ubaid-Allāh and
Ibn Khālid awaited him, and put him in possession of the castle of Torrox
between Iznajar and Loja.
-a
-
CH, XVI.
## p. 412 (#458) ############################################
412
The Umayyad Emirate
a
The receipt of this news made a deep impression on Yusuf. He
had caused distrust by executing three rebel Ķuraishite chiefs at the
instance of Şumail, and his resolution to attack the pretender imme-
diately caused the desertion of almost the whole of his army, which was
reluctant to undertake a fresh campaign in the depth of winter and in
the mountainous district of Regio (Málaga). Yusuf therefore opened
negotiations with 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān. His envoys had an interview with
‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān, whom they found surrounded by his little court, in
which ‘Ubaid-Allāh held the first place; and they offered him on Yusuf's
behalf a safe refuge in Cordova, the hand of Yūsuf's daughter as well as
a large dowry and the lands of Caliph Hishām. They shewed him as
evidence of good faith a letter from Yûsuf and promised him magnificent
presents, left cautiously behind. These terms seemed satisfactory to the
Umayyads; ‘Ubaid-Allāh was on the point of answering Yusuf's letter,
when the envoy Khālid, a renegade Spaniard, insolently told him that he
was incapable of writing a letter like his; “Ubaid-Allāh's Arab pride was
wounded by the Spaniard's reproach, and he gave orders for his arrest.
The negotiations were broken off.
As soon as winter was over ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān advanced to Archidona,
where the ķaisite governor, Jidār, proclaimed him Emir, and entered
Seville about the middle of March 756. He then marched out towards
Cordova along the left bank of the Guadalquivir, while Yusuf advanced
to Seville along the right bank? On sighting one another the two armies
continued their march towards Cordova, still separated by the river. As
soon as they reached Mosara, 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān resolved to give battle.
By a cunning move he managed to cross the river without any opposi-
tion from Yusuf, a manoeuvre which gave him provisions for his troops.
On Friday, 14 May, a sacrificial feast, being the day of the battle of
Marj Rāhit, which had given the crown to the Umayyads of the East,
the combat opened. The cavalry of ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān routed the right wing
and centre of the army commanded by Yusuf and Sumail, who each saw
the death of his own son. The left wing alone sustained the attack all
day until all the notable ķaisites had fallen, including their chief
‘Ubaid. The victors began to pillage ; but ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān forbade
it and shewed magnanimity in his treatment of Yūsuf's wife and sons.
The Yemenites were offended by his generous behaviour, and formed
a plot to kill him. However, he discovered the conspiracy, and no
opposition was made to his offering as Imām the Friday prayers in
the principal mosque of Cordova. Negotiations were begun, and finally
Yūsuf recognised ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān as Emir of Spain in July 756. It was
&
1 It was at Colombera or Villanueva de Brenes that the leaders noticed 'Abd-
ar-Raḥmān had no banner. Accordingly Abū-ş-Şabbāḥ, a Sevillan chief, placed
his turban on the point of his lance and thus unfurled what became later the
standard of the Umayyads in Spain.
2 See Vol. 11. p. 360.
## p. 413 (#459) ############################################
Consolidation of the Emirate
413
.
not long before Yusuf was slain in battle, and one morning Şumail him-
self was found dead, strangled by order of 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān.
In spite of his growing power ‘Abd-ar-Raḥmān had to suppress
other revolts, of which the most formidable was that of the Yemenites.
In 764 Toledo made its submission. Its chiefs had to pass through
Cordova clad in sackcloth, with their heads shaved and mounted on
donkeys. But the Yemenites continued restless.
Shortly after 764 the Berbers, who had hitherto kept quiet, rose in
arms, headed by a schoolmaster named Shakyā, half fanatic and half
impostor, who gave himself out to be a descendant of Ali and Fātima.
After six years of warfare 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān succeeded in sowing discord
among them. He advanced against the rebels, who retreated northwards.
Meanwhile the Yemenites and the Berbers of the East advanced towards
Cordova. On the banks of the river Bembezar the Yemenites were
treacherously left to their fate by the Berbers, and 30,000 perished at
the hands of 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān's soldiers. The Berbers of the centre
were only subdued after ten years' fighting, when Shakyā was murdered
by one of his adherents.
In 777 Afrābī the Kalbite, governor of Barcelona, formed a league
against 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān and sent to Charlemagne for help. Charles,
who reckoned on the complete pacification of the Saxons, crossed the
Pyrenees with an army. Afrābi was to support him north of the Ebro,
where his sovereignty was to be recognised, while the African Berbers
were to help in Murcia by raising the standard of the Abbasid Caliph,
Charles's ally. But this coalition failed. Just as Charlemagne had begun
the siege of Saragossa he was called home by the news that Widukind
had re-entered Saxony and pushed on to Cologne. On his return to
Francia through Roncesvalles the rear-guard of his army was attacked
and annihilated by the Basques. There the famous Roland, who was
afterwards immortalised in the medieval epic, met his death. ‘Abd-ar-
Raḥmān reaped the benefit of these successes, which were due to his rebel
subjects at Saragossa, to the Basques and to a Saxon prince who did not
even know of his existence. He advanced and took possession of Sara-
gossa ; he attacked the Basques, and forced the Count of Cerdagne to
become his tributary.
These feats were the admiration of the world and evoked from
the Abbasid Caliph Manşūr the following speech concerning ‘Abd-ar-
Raḥmān : “ Although he had no other support to rely on but his
. statesmanship and perseverance, he succeeded in humbling his haughty
opponents, in killing off all insurgents, and in securing his frontier
against the attacks of the Christians. He founded a mighty empire,
and united under his sceptre extensive dominions which had hitherto
been divided among a number of different chiefs. ” This judgment is an
exact description of 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān's life-work.
Detested by the Arab and Berber chiefs, deserted by his followers
# CH. XVI.
## p. 414 (#460) ############################################
414
Muslim factions
and betrayed by his own family, he summoned mercenary troops to his
aid. Though his policy, which was both daring and treacherous, might
alienate his people's affection, yet it was invariably clever and adapted
to his circumstances. The very means which he used, violence and
tyranny, were the same as those by which the kings of the fifteenth
century were victorious in their struggle against feudalism. He had
already traced the outlines of the military despotism, which his suc-
cessors were to fill in.
His successor Hishām I (788–796) was a model of virtue. In his reign
the sect of Mālik ibn Anas was started in the East, and the Emir, who
had been commended by Mālik, did his utmost to spread its doctrines,
choosing from its members both judges and ecclesiastics. When Hishām
died the sect, to which most of the faķīhs (professional theologians)
belonged, was already powerful. It was headed in Spain by a clever
young Berber, Yahyā ibn Yaḥyā, who had ambition, enterprise and
experience, along with the impetuosity of a demagogue.
Although the next Emir, Hakam, was by no means irreligious, his easy
disposition, his love of the chase and of wine, brought on him the hatred
of the faķīhs, which was intensified by his refusing them the influence they
desired. They were not sparing in their attacks upon him and used as
their tools the renegados, who were called muladies (muwallad or the
adopted). The position of these renegades was uneasy ; in religion they
were subject to Muslim law, which punished apostasy with death and
counted any one born a Muslim to be a Muslim. Socially they were
reckoned as slaves and excluded from any share in the government. Never-
theless they were able to help the faķāhs in bringing about a revo-
lution.
The first rising took place in 805, but was put down by the Emir's
bodyguard. Then other conspirators offered the throne to Ibn Shammās,
the Emir's cousin, but he revealed the plot, and sixty-two of the conspira-
tors were put to death, while two of them fled to Toledo. When Hakam
was reducing Mérida (806), the inhabitants of Cordova rose a second
time, but he successfully crushed the revolt, beheading or crucifying the
leaders. Hakam now shewed himself even more cruel and treacherous
than before. His cruelty at Cordova was followed by a massacre at
Toledo.
The Toledans were a people difficult to govern, and under the
headship of the poet Gharbīb, a renegade by birth, they had already
caused alarm to the Emir. On the death of Gharbib he appointed as.
governor an ambitious renegade from Huesca, 'Amrūs, a man subtle and
dishonest, but a mere puppet in the hands of his master. He cleverly
won over the Toledans, and was able to build a castle in the middle
of the city, where the Emir's troops were quartered. An army under
the prince 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān arrived, and the leading Toledans were
invited to a banquet at the castle. Bidding them enter one by one,
## p. 415 (#461) ############################################
'Abd-ar-Raḥmān II
415
he had their heads cut off in the courtyard of the castle and Aung
into a ditch. It is impossible to fix the number of those slain on this
“day of the ditch,” and estimates vary between 700 and 5000.
The impression made by this slaughter kept the people of Cordova
quiet for seven years. Moreover, the Emir strengthened his bodyguard
with slaves known as “mutes," because they spoke no Arabic. Never-
theless discontent steadily grew among the students and theologians in
the quarter of Arrabal del Sur. At length a formidable revolution
broke out. In the month of Ramadan (May 814) a soldier killed a
polisher who refused to clean his sword, and this act was made the
pretext for the revolt. A huge mob marched in spite of cavalry
charges to the Emir's palace. But Hakam with the utmost calm-
ness ordered the execution of some imprisoned fakīhs ; then after this
sacrilege a body of his troops set fire to Arrabal del Sur. The rebels,
as he expected, rushed to the help of their families and, attacked on
every side, suffered fearful slaughter at the hands of the terrible mutes.
Thereupon Hakam ordered the expulsion within three days under pain
of crucifixion of all the inhabitants of Arrabal del Sur. On reach-
ing the Mediterranean, one body consisting of 15,000 families went to
the East, and there after a struggle with the Bedouins seized Alexandria
and soon founded an independent kingdom under Abū Hafs Omar
al-Balluţi. Another body of 8000 families settled at Fez in Morocco.
Hakam now issued an amnesty to the faķihs and allowed them to
settle anywhere in Spain, except Cordova and its neighbourhood. Yahyā
even managed to secure his sovereign's favour.
Hakam, relentless towards the Toledans and the artisans of Arrabal
del Sur, shewed towards the Arabs and Berbers who were of his own
race a clemency attributed by Arab historians to remorseful conscience.
Some of his verses suggest that he followed the example of 'Abd-ar-
Raḥmān: “ Just as a tailor uses his needle to join different pieces of
cloth, so I use my sword to unite my separate provinces. ” He maintained
the throne of the Umayyads by a military despotism.
At Cordova his son and successor, 'Abd-ar-Raḥmān II (822-852), set
a high standard of magnificence.
