Peasant Life

Much debate surrounds the degree to which the Norman Conquest impacted upon peasant life, and a lot of this writing has been influenced by more recent political debates. The old story, for example, that the Normans introduced the concept of the ‘lord’s first night’, the right to deflower all peasant virgins at the time of their marriage, is little more than an eighteenth-century libel, broadcast by the enemies of lordly privilege on the eve of the French Revolution to blacken the reputation of the old regime. It would in fact be possible to argue that the conditions of large numbers of peasants improved as a result of the Norman Conquest. Henceforth, outright enslavement of prisoners or captives like brute animals was forbidden by the Church. These rulings were first enacted, ironically enough, at the same Council of Westminster in 1102 which saw the introduction to England of draconian legislation against sodomy. As this suggests, one set of freedoms is generally gained only at the expense of another. The romanticized, Tolkienesque idea of the Anglo-Saxon peasant living in close proximity and joshing sympathy with his social betters, the sort of peasants of whom Trollope or Tolstoy would have approved, is very largely a myth. There were massive social divisions before 1066, however much the Church might attempt to gloss over the gulf by describing those who toiled, those who prayed and those who fought, the three orders of society, as parts of an indivisible and symbiotic whole. Even so, after the Conquest there was an increase in lordly privilege, an increasingly legalistic definition of social standing, and a rush towards the identification of lordly privileges and perquisites that undoubtedly depressed the standing and prospects of as much as ninety-five per cent of the population.

Villeinage, serfdom, the peasant economy, became a legal as well as a human reality, hedged about with new restrictions and obligations that bonded the peasant to his land and made escape from the manor or from the condition of serfdom increasingly difficult. Sir Walter Scott, whose Ivanhoe supplies perhaps the most powerful nineteenth-century vision of post-Conquest England, was indulging in gross exaggeration when he portrayed his English peasants after 1066 choked with massive metal collars as the symbol of their slavery. The good old English lords of Ivanhoe are portrayed oafishly drinking themselves to death whilst a new generation of brutal and domineering Normans, the Reginald Front-de-Boeufs of the Conquest, lord it over a cowering and conquered land. Scott was influenced here by events of his own day, by a romanticized vision of the symbiosis of Scotland’s lords and peasants, by the experience of Napoleonic conquest that gave the French a less than perfect name as imperialists, and by his loathing for a cosmopolitan and urban conformity that he saw corroding the old verities of locality, place and position. Medieval history has sometimes been written by radical reformers, seeking to parody the iniquities of the present in the brutalities of the past, sometimes by political conservatives, such as Scott, keen to contrast the good old days with present day inequality and ruin. Neither party is likely to do full justice to the reality of the past.

As in more recent times, after 1066 the withering away of liberties and the sharpening of social divisions between haves and have-nots went hand in hand with a general upsurge in prosperity. The most prosperous times are often those that witness the greatest erosion of the liberties of the many faced with the privilege of the few. It is another general rule of agrarian economies, not least of the Ukraine after the great famine of the 1920s, or most of western Europe after the terrible trans-continental wars of the 1640s, 1750s, 1800s or 1940s, that agriculture recovers relatively rapidly even after the most severe looting or conquest. Livestock or seed grain may be stolen or driven away, barns may be burned and the harvest ruined, but the land itself abides. All that is required for its recultivation is sufficient new investment, and this is generally forthcoming from the profits of conquest, no matter who wins the war. The Conquest, for all the obligations it placed upon peasants to remain bonded to their land, did little or nothing to stifle social mobility or to deter economic migration.