Originally Posted by
Blair, John. Building Anglo- Saxon England. 2018. pp. 302-5.
WHO WERE THE PEOPLE?
So much has been written about the social structure of the Anglo- Saxon ‘peasantry’ that one
might think that we know quite a lot about them. But when the documentary evidence is
distinguished by region, its severe limitations become obvious. Detailed sources for rural
cultivators in estate- management contexts are almost entirely post- 900, and from the West
Saxon zone. Surviving law- codes of the seventh to early eighth centuries are from Kent and
Wessex; in the post- Viking period, they are from Wessex alone; and the rich narrative
sources for early eighth- century Northumbria emphasise Bernicia rather than Deira, and
give only fleeting glimpses of the ordinary laity. Kent, Wessex, and Bernicia are among the
regions where archaeological evidence for mainstream settlements is hard to find. Maybe
some of the categories of people itemised in the ‘Laws of Ine’ lived in places like Collingbourne
Ducis or Wantage, or the rustici occasionally mentioned by the Northumbrian histories
and hagiographies occupied upland farms like those around Ingleborough, but such
possibilities are too broad and indirect to help us very much.
The two archetypal Anglo- Saxon groups below the nobility were free farmers (ceorlas)
and slaves (þeōwas).71 In some and perhaps most regions, they dominated rural society
through the whole period. There must have been gradations among the ceorlas—some richer
than others, many no doubt owning slaves—but they look like a culturally coherent class of
independent householders, to whom ties of kindred and community were more important
than vertical stratification. From the seventh century, however, the rise of great (and initially
monastic) estates generated the dynamic that would ultimately result in the high medieval
demesne economy, with its servile workforces. There were many stages in that process, and
for present purposes the word ‘demesne’ is anachronistic. It is better—with Paul Vinogradoff
and Rosamond Faith—to follow Old English terminology, and describe the intensively exploited
cores of great estates as ‘inlands’.72 With their formation and expansion, a new social
category emerged, intermediate between free farmers and slaves. These were the people
known as gebūras, a word that in origin just means ‘farmers’; legally they were free, and
therefore members of society in a way that slaves were not.73 When we first meet them, however,
they had relatively small holdings, they were burdened with services to the lords of big
estates, and they were—at least to some extent—constrained from leaving those estates without
permission. While we should never forget how little we really know about their lives, it
is tempting to borrow a later expression and call them ‘serfs’.74
When and how did this category come into existence? In parts of Wessex, the southeast
Midlands, and western Mercia, it is demonstrable that gebūr workforces existed by the
880s.75 The only earlier piece of evidence is a single, less- than- lucid clause in the laws of Ine
of Wessex: ‘If anyone comes to terms about a yard of land or more at an agreed payment and
ploughs, if the lord wishes to increase that land for him as regards either labour or payment,
he need not accept it from him if he does not give him a house, and let him suffer loss of the
crops’.76 Like several clauses in Ine’s chaotically organised code, to which additional enactments
may have been added well into the eighth century, this one reads like the overcondensed
summary of discussions on a specific, complex case. The crux is whether the man to
whom a lord ‘gives a house’ is initially free, and thus sinks into a relationship of subjection,
or initially a slave, and thus rises into the ranks of small cultivators.77 The latter is perhaps
more likely (and is supported by Bede’s story that Saint Wilfrid baptised and freed 250 slaves
at Selsey, since he presumably expected them to remain as an estate workforce78), but in
either case the clause implies a category of tenants who not only owed labour, but who were
also constrained from leaving their land.
In southern and western England, then, it is likely that gebūras became more common
through the eighth and ninth centuries, though even there they may still have been confined
to the major estates: islands in an essentially ceorlisc society. Nothing useful can be said here
about their domestic building culture, or how it may have differed from that of ceorlas, since
the houses of all social groups are equally invisible. More important for present purposes is
to emphasise the lack of any trace of gebūras—either then or long afterwards—in the eastern
zone of England,79 with its high coin circulation, abundant jewellery, and tradition of substantial
timber construction. The laity of that area are essentially undocumented before 900,
but in later centuries they were notably free, and there are strong grounds for thinking that
this freedom was long- standing.80 The quantities of finds now being recovered by metaldetecting
imply that some of them were rich enough to lose or discard copper- alloy and even
silver dress fittings.81 Some evidently prospered by producing—and presumably selling or
exporting—commodities that must have included wool, cloth, and grain, but it is imponderable
whether they did this independently, or as tenants or agents. They must have included
merchants, or at least have interacted with them regularly.82
It is unhelpful to call these people ‘peasants’: not because the term is derogatory (which
it is not), but because we have no idea whether they matched any useful definition of it. It is
likewise against common sense to define them all as ‘lords’—and, strong though the monastic
influence was, they can hardly all have been monks and nuns. Many inhabitants of the
eastern province, and of the houses that we can excavate and study there, are likely to have
been prosperous weapon- bearing farmers supported by an underclass of slaves. The combination
of grid- planning with relatively poor material culture on some monastically associated
sites might point to the origins there of a gebūr- type class, but might also suggest that
the inhabitants were identified specifically as monastic workforces, bound by ties that were
religious as well as economic. There must have been a spectrum in status and wealth, ranging
from farmers through monastic personnel to the top aristocrats. In any case this was
clearly a society with a broad spread of disposable resources; it must have contained its
disadvantaged groups, but a ‘lords- versus- peasants’ dichotomy does not help us to understand
it.
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