Bookland

The king as an individual had his own folk-lands or royal demesnes, from which he derived a large part of his support. But as king he had, as we have seen (pp. 7-8), special rights over the people who were his subjects and over the folklands that they possessed, rights to food and services of various kinds. In time, these rights came to be looked upon as the property of the king and were spoken of as royal rights.

At first, the king alone enjoyed these rights; but when the monks came and the conversion of the English began, and he desired for the good of his soul to make gifts to the church, he began to give these rights away. The monks took good care that these gifts should be written in Roman fashion in a deed and signed, so that from the time of thelbirht we have the charters or books, written mainly in Latin, which tell us of the gifts of the king. These grants were always of lands already occupied or in large part occupied ; so that the value of the gift lay not in the land itself, but in the revenue and services which the monks received from the people who inhabited it. These lands were called booklands, and a single bookland could include many folklands. Afterward the kings made similar grants to their thegns for faithful service done.

Loanland

At first booklands were given without any condition attached, and though the consent of the king wag often asked, the person receiving them could generally give them away or leave them to his successors. He was freed from all payment or service to the king except the trinoda necessitas,l which included ship-service and army-service, repair of bridges, and the maintenance of fortresses.

In the ninth century, however, we meet with grants that were not outright gifts; they were loans. The church made the greater number of these loans, for the idea of the loan," like the idea of the book," was brought to England from the Continent by the church. Such loans came out of the booklands which the church had received from the king, and were made to thegns, chiefly those of high rank. But the thegn could not dispose of the land as he pleased; the church had merely loaned it to him that he might enjoy the revenues from it for a limited time, that is, during his life and usually the lives of two others. In return for this concession the thegn would pay a sum of money, or an annual rent, or would bind himself to do some service for the church or bishop from whom he had received the land. Such lands were called loanlands.

We see then that the same piece of land could be a folkland, a part of a bookland, and a loanland at the same time. It would be folkland to the occupiers, that is, the villagers; book-land to the ecclesiastic who received it from the king ; and loanland to the thegn who received it from the church on loan for life. Later bookland and loanland became confused, because in the case of each the grant was recorded in a deed or book.

General Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Life

Agriculture was the dominant interest among the Anglo-Saxons. Men tilled the fields and raised barley, oats, wheat, beans, and the like; they lived in thatched huts without chimneys, and kept oxen, cows, sheep, goats, swine, poultry, and bees. Upon the church-lands and in the burghs stone was used in building, and the standard of life was higher than in the country places. There was very little communication, men rarely travelled, and the produce of a vill was not taken away to be sold, but was consumed where it was raised. There was almost no money in circulation except in the trading centres. Men paid their dues to the king or to the church in certain amounts of grain or malt, honey and ale, in a certain number of hens and chickens, fish, ewes, or in the performance of certain duties. To a life like this, invasion and war were bound to be injurious, not only because crops would be destroyed, but also because men would be taken away from their ploughing and harvesting.

Keeping the peace was at first simply a local obligation.' Family groups were held responsible for the conduct of their members, individual persons were held responsible for those of their households; and later, freemen were required to find lords who would be surety for their good behavior. A man might be charged with a great crime, a felony; or a lesser crime, a trespass. If the former, he was at the king's mercy if the latter, he might get off with paying a fine.

But how was he proved guilty? First, in the presence of the free landowners, who made up the hundred court and acted as judges, he was charged with the crime by the complainant in formal words. This charge he answered in words equally formal. Then those present decided, not on the merits of the case, but according to the correctness of the forms used, which of the two should be put to the proof. Such a method, which seems to us strange, was necessary in an age when all. business in the courts and almost everywhere else was conducted by word of mouth and no records were kept. Ability to remember, or to find others who remembered, was of prime importance to the Anglo-Saxons. The one adjudged guilty could clear himself by the ordeal of water, that is, if he sank after being thrown in, he was innocent; or by the ordeal of fire, which necessitated his walking over or carrying hot irons, and if after three days he showed the marks of the burns, he was guilty; or by the testimony of a certain number of oath-helpers or compurgators, who bore witness to his character.

The Angles and Saxons, when they came to Britain, must have spoken a language almost entirely free from an admixture of foreign words. After they had settled in the island, a few Latin and Celtic words crept in, but the number was small. In time, dialects arose, chief of which were the West Saxon, the Mercian, and the Northumbrian. Slowly a literature, poetry and prose, came into existence. But learned men wrote in Latin, and most of the charters are in that language. Anglo-Saxon, however, was the tongue of the Chronicle, of the laws, of the poets, and of such preachers as lfric and Wulfstan. It was everywhere the speech of the people.