Anthony House
History 230-01
Prof. Paxton
9 October 2001

The Development of the Manor
in Anglo-Saxon and Danish England

Anglo-Saxon territories in the early Middle Ages were far from cohesive. Substantial social and political variations were common even between adjacent regions. This is not surprising, perhaps, considering the multiplicity of kingdoms concentrated on the island. As many as ten Anglo-Saxon kings exercised control over the area at times. Though fractured, a hierarchy of sorts existed among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. A trend toward political consolidation had begun by the middle of the eighth century: periods of dominance by Mercia and Wessex marked the decline of several of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Still, it would be anachronistic to speak of Anglo-Saxon England as a cohesive territory when Scandinavians first landed at Lindisfarne in 793. Within a century, intermittent raids had given way to full settlement. While significant debate continues among historians as to the brutality of the Viking campaigns, one thing is certain: by the mid-ninth century, the Scandinavian invasion had destroyed all but one of the remaining Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The Danelaw (as the Viking-occupied regions came to be known) included lands previously ruled by East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia, and it made up the majority of northwestern England. Though Alfred the Great halted the advance of the Danes between 878 and 886, the endurance of a distinct Danelaw produced regional sociopolitical and legal differences more pronounced than those of the early Anglo-Saxon period. The period between the Danish and Norman invasions was marked not only by the development of a distinctly Scandinavian portion of England. Over roughly the same period, gradual changes were occurring at the local level, as lords consolidated their power over the surrounding countryside. The nascent manorial system grew to become the predominant form of rural sociopolitical organization for the remainder of the medieval period. Not surprisingly, the system evolved differently in the Danelaw and in the rest of England. In northern Danish territory, the manor’s rise to power proceeded more slowly than in southern or Midland England, due in large part to different methods of territorial organization.

Distinctions between Anglo-Saxon and Danish forms of territorial organization existed at a variety of levels. At higher levels of organization, the dominance of Wessex was able to extend Anglo-Saxon administrative units into the Danelaw. The tenth century witnessed the separation of the rural landscape into counties or shires in both the Danelaw and the rest of England, for example. The process was by no means uniform, though; Wessex led the way by about a century. The Danelaw adopted the unit more slowly. In Midland England the process of shiring was well underway by the middle of the tenth century. The creation of counties was part of a West Saxon campaign to assert the kingdom’s authority over other regions, and the shire system was "impressed on the face of the land" outside Wessex "without regard to the ancient distribution of the peoples or the divisions of the dioceses." Representative of traditional population boundaries or not, though, counties remained the primary units of local government until the modern period. Among their primary functions was the dispensation of justice. Presided over by a representative of the West Saxon king, shire courts typically convened "twice yearly to try important cases" through a complex system of oaths and sworn testimony. Further divisions, with their inherent organizational separation from the king, helped local lords develop their influence. In Anglo-Saxon territories, English hundreds (so-called here to avoid confusion with Danish or twelve-carucate hundreds) "emerged in the tenth century as judicial units." The hundred was a subdivision of the shire. As such, its purpose was similar to that of the shire, though its focus was narrower, and its court was concerned with lesser offenses. In Wessex hundred courts normally met once a month. Meeting more consistently than did their shire counterparts, hundred courts had more contact with the free residents in their jurisdictions. The hundred as an administrative unit ceased to exist in England by the thirteenth century, but its effects on the development of the manorial system meant its influence lived on long after its political obsolescence.

At the highest levels of territorial organization, the Danelaw followed the lead of Wessex. At the regional level, the expansion of Anglo-Saxon rule during the late ninth and mid-tenth centuries resulted in the extension of counties and English hundreds into the Danelaw. "The process of ‘shiring’ the Danelaw progressed rapidly" during this period, an attempt by West Saxon kings to impose their order on territory recently recaptured from Scandinavian rule. Some areas conformed more readily to the Anglo-Saxon system than others. The Midland shires, for example, "dependent on the Danish boroughs of Nottingham, Derby, and Leicester, and the shires of the south-east Danelaw conformed to the normal English pattern." The north was less easily shired. Where counties did exist (Northumberland, York, and Lincoln) they were significantly larger than their counterparts in southern England. Other areas remained part of no county until after the Norman invasion. Large counties left sufficient space for further administrative subdivisions. The unit similar to the English hundred became prevalent in the Danelaw at about the same time as the shire. In much of the Danelaw, the English hundred was known as the wapentake, a Scandinavian word used "to signify the brandishing of weapons in an assembly to show approval." The wapentake is first seen as a normalized division of land in the law-code of 963. For the next century, "the same district could be described indifferently as a hundred or a wapentake, the choice being determined in the end by the relative strength of the Danish and English strains in the local population." Though similar in size, the practical implications of the wapentake were distinct to the Danelaw. Imposed under "the influence of the West Saxon kings" the wapentake was largely redundant. It added a layer of localized administration whose responsibilities were already addressed by an administrative unit unique to the Danelaw. Through the creation of wapentakes in formerly Danish territories, Wessex attempted to impose its vision of teritorial organization the Danelaw. In doing so, they made the differences between the two regions more acute.

It is the twelve-carucate hundred, perhaps, that bears the brunt of the responsibility for altering the development of manorial power in Scandinavian England. Unique to the Danish territories, these units did not exist uniformly throughout the Danelaw. It was most dominant in the north. In Lincolnshire, for example, "virtually all land" was enrolled in these hundreds. The hundred of the northern Danelaw was substantially smaller than the English hundred. Its size allowed it to function as a more localized form of administration than anything in Anglo-Saxon territory did. Among its uses were the collection of geld, the provision of military service, and the maintenance of law. The Danish hundreds were themselves convoluted units; "land might be recorded under the name of the hundred but actually lie in a different village." Moreover, their existence created another layer of administration imposed from above, which coupled with other such methods of organization—the shire, the English hundred, dioceses and parishes—to make the northern Danelaw particularly complex territorially. That complexity included a level of local administration that addressed the power vacuum filled by the manor in the rest of England. Further differences between Anglo-Saxon and Danish territories existed at the level of individual settlement. In much of the Danelaw, as in southern England, the landscape was characterized in the medieval period by nucleated villages. Outlying regions of the Danelaw, however, "displayed a more dispersed settlement pattern." Even the approach to land use differed from that in Anglo-Saxon territory: villages in the Danelaw put "arable cultivation at the forefront of all their husbandry." In much of Danish England, the focus on farming precluded development of non-agricultural forms of land use. Differences between Danish and Anglo-Saxon law also affected the villages of the Danelaw. Relative to southern and Midland England, the purchase and sale of land was substantially easier. This "encouraged the multiplication of freeholds," which, in turn, created "a basic division between land which belonged to [a] lord and land from which he was only entitled to claim rents and services of various kinds." In a very real way, then, Danish law undermined the ability of lords to consolidate their power over the local peasants. Given the complexity of land use patterns in the northern Danelaw and the existence of practical subdivisions of land "that were quite unconnected with township and tenurial organization," distinctions between the function of Danish and Anglo-Saxon manors are not surprising.

While the creation of counties and hundreds was important to the way manors interacted with one another, changes at the local level had a greater impact on individual manors. Local developments also affected the ascendance of the manor as the primary institution of medieval life. "Farming by village communities who held their pasture and meadow in common and their arable [land] in scattered strips" was the centerpiece of agriculture in Anglo-Saxon territory. This reliance on the village was existed in the midst of a trend toward the breakup of large territories and multi-village estates. In the absence of adequately small-scale administrative subdivisions, the onus fell on the lords to exert control at the local level. By the ninth century, small estates were increasingly common in charter grants (and thus in the Midland and south England countryside). This increased the number of relatively less powerful but more localized lords. Their ascension as a class resulted in the more thorough exploitation of the peasantry: "The smaller his inland population, the more a landowner depended on the vital supply of labour which could be summoned up when needed." The increased proximity of lord to village no doubt boded poorly for the autonomy of the villagers. By the tenth century the "tenurial unit which was the manor…equated exactly with the agrarian unit which was the village" in Wessex and Mercia. For Anglo-Saxon England, then, it is not unreasonable to assert that the individual township was the forerunner of the manor. While the village continued to exist, its regular coincidence with the manor equated the two, allowing the lord to rule over his manor and its constituent village as one unit.

Anglo-Saxon and Danish territories both relied on the village as a fundamental unit of settlement. The parish church was the focal point of the typical tenth century village. It stood among clusters of small wooden houses, each with a modest garden plot. Stretching out from this nexus laid the arable lands. Many of the fields lacked fences—once harvested, the land used by one resident of the village reverted to the community as a whole. Nearby were the commons, where peasants grazed their domestic animals. Beyond the commons laid the waste—the woods and forests which the village depended on for everything from timber to clay to wild fruits and berries. Depending on the precise location of the village, there could be much variation: in the fertility of the soil, in the size and utility of the surrounding woods, etc. Such natural distinctions were important to the lives of the villagers. Left to its own devices, such natural constraints would have been the primary limit on the productivity of the village residents. Additional variables existed, though, based on the village’s relationship to its lord. These, too, would have influenced the lives of the peasants significantly. The relationship to local lords distinguished villages of the Danelaw from those in the rest of England. In Anglo-Saxon territory, the manor house, the residence of the lord and his family, was set off somewhat from the village proper. The fields radiating out from the village itself were divided between sections in which peasants grew their own crops and the demesne, land dedicated to the lord’s crops and worked by the serfs, or villeins. Agricultural labor on the demesne was one of many distinctions that existed between free peasants and serfs, who were liable to pay considerable duties to their lord. While a free peasant paid annual rent and was then free to use his time and his land as he would, a serf "could not indulge in many of the most common actions without first obtaining his lord’s leave," gained through the payment of a fee. The presence of a mill or oven in the village represented a further burden on the serfs. Villagers were required to use these amenities for a fee. As in many other aspects of manorial life, serfs were obliged to pay their lord to do something they could not avoid. Such oppressive means of raising the lord’s supplemental income cemented distinctions between free peasants and serfs. The villages of the Danelaw, at an individual level, were similar to those of Anglo-Saxon England. The relationship between local lords and Danelaw villages differed, though, growing from methods of land division unique to Danish territory.

The distinct ways in which land was organized and used in the Danelaw translated directly into the development of a lord-village relationship unique within England. Manors in the northern Danelaw were substantially larder than elsewhere. "Manor and village rarely coincided" in the Danelaw, "and whole villages were regularly reckoned as sokeland or berewicks"—types of land whose ownership and usage distinguished it from the manor’s other lands. The trend common to Anglo-Saxon territory, in which "the multiple estate broke down into its component fragments," did not extend to the Danelaw. It did not have to, since localized administration already existed in the form of the twelve-carucate hundred. The endurance of the multi-village estate had far-reaching implications. The "manorial centre with its constellation of dependent villages" was uniquely characteristic of the Danelaw. Lincolnshire was particularly devoid of single-village estates: "In the wapentake of Elloe, only Lutton and Gedney were held by one lord as a single manor in 1066." Certainly, manors throughout England had dependencies in multiple villages. Still, "it is the number and the extent of the dependencies of such manors which distinguished the northern Danelaw from many other regions." The preponderance of lords holding large estates generally resulted in a less tangible link between village life and manorial organization.

Midland and southern English estates centered on single villages. That meant that an individual manor typically fell within a single hundred and a single county. In the Danelaw (as well as in Northumbria and East Anglia), the coincidence of manors and villages was "extremely rare." Twelve-carucate hundreds, too, "were often unrelated to either the manorial or the parochial structure." The disjuncture between manors and wapentakes was even more pronounced: "Manors and their dependencies were often located in different wapentakes, and unlike some of the hundreds in other parts of the country, the wapentakes of the northern Danelaw were generally not appurtenances of a major manor." While English hundreds often shared their names with major regional estates, wapentakes in the northern Danelaw were neither "named after, nor did they meet at, major manorial centres." The size of estates in the Danelaw prevented their becoming fundamental units of local organization. Instead, the village "remained the principal administrative unit and taxation unit in much of northern and eastern England." This juxtaposed the region with Wessex and the south. Without the direct oversight of a localized lord, villagers enjoyed greater freedom: throughout the Danelaw "there were more free peasants than elsewhere," according to Domesday Book figures. Other differences existed between the peasantry of the northern Danelaw and that of the rest of the country, as well. Compared to his free English brethren, the Danish free peasant "enjoyed an appreciably higher status…He could pronounce verdicts in the courts and speak his mind on even the weightiest matters of state in the general assembly." These accentuated freedoms, though easily dismissed as trivial, indicate the unique role of the manor in the Danelaw.

The factors which affected the development of the manor system in England were numerous and complex. Soil composition, topography, ecclesiastical and secular modes of territorial organization, and the decisions of individual farmers and landowners are just a few of the many circumstances that influenced the landscape of the English countryside. Some of these factors had shaped settlement patterns since prehistory; others had only influenced land use recently. The advent of the Vikings was by no means the only factor at work in shaping the development the English manor system. It is clear, however, that differences in territorial organization existed between the Danelaw and the rest of England. Those differences had direct consequences on the role of the manor in each area. In Anglo-Saxon territories, the large scale of the primary administrative units—the shires and the hundreds—created a power vacuum at the local level that was filled by lesser lords, whose manors developed to coincide with the peasants’ settlements. Compared to the rest of England, the Danelaw had smaller administrative units and larger manors. In Danish territory, villages conformed more closely to the twelve-carucate hundreds than to the manors, and the manors had little relation to hundreds. The primacy of the village in the Danelaw, then, is hardly surprising. Certainly, regional differences existed before the arrival of the Vikings. Their arrival, however, exaggerated those differences, and the Danelaw’s unique methods of land-division had substantial implications for the later development of the medieval English manor.

Works Consulted

Astill, Grenvillagee and Annie Grant, eds. The Countryside of Medieval England. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Bennett, Henry S. Life on the English Manor. New York: Macmillan, 1937.

Cantor, Leonard, ed. The English Medieval Landscape. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.

Dyer, Christopher. Lands and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540. New York: Cambridge U P, 1980.

Faith, Rosamond. The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship. Washington: Leicester U P, 1997.

Finberg, H.P.R., ed. The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. I.ii. New York: Cambridge U P, 1972.

Hadley, D. M. The Northern Danelaw: Its Social Structure, c. 800–1100. New York: Leicester U P, 2000.

Hollister, C. Warren. The Making of England: 55 B.C. to 1399, 7^th ed. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1996.

Hooke, Della. The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England. Washington: Leicester U P, 1998.

Loyn, Henry. The Vikings in Britain. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994.

Marsden, John. The Fury of the Northmen: Saints, Shrines, and Sea-Raiders in the Viking Age, AD 793–878. New York : St. Martin's P, 1995