The Vill

Within the hundred were the tuns, or vills, both of which names refer to the same thing, one being the English, the other the Latin form. Some of the English, tuns were doubtless single farmsteads; but others, and these were the more common, were clusters of houses occupied by the tunsmen or villagers. The tun or vill was composed of homesteads, surrounded by open fields in which the villagers labored, and by meadows, pasture, waste, and forest. The open fields were broad expanses of arable land, divided into narrow strips, which were so distributed as to give each villager an equal share in the field. Each villager had a homestead, a certain number of the strips, and definite rights in the meadows and pastures. The villagers owned the land in severalty, but all ploughed, sowed, and reaped together. The vill, however, had no political importance, and is rarely mentioned in the laws. Only once do the records tell us that the king and the witan made any use of it. This was in Eadgar's time, when the people of the vill were required to report strange cattle brought into their pasture; but even in this case the hundred was held responsible if it were found that the cattle had been stolen, and not bought in the presence of witnesses, as the law required.

The inhabitants of the vills were originally the freemen of the tribes. During the long struggle with the Danes, many of these free villagers, losing all that they possessed, had been compelled to seek the protection of more powerful landowners; while others, reduced to poverty by the heavy cost of the war carried on in Wessex and Mercia, had pledged their lands, and on receiving them back had bound themselves to new obligations of payment and labor. This change in the condition of the old freemen came about more easily because the West Saxon kings, since Alfred, had required every freeman to find a lord who should be responsible for his keeping of the peace, and for his appearing at the hundred court when wanted. Probably the change had not gone very far by the time of Eadgar, nor had it yet altered seriously the general condition of the people. Each villager, whether he had pledged himself and his land or not, had his wergeld, or price at which he was valued, in case he were murdered;' each was entitled to bear arms and serve in the army; and each could get justice in the hundredmot.

The Burgh

Besides the tuns and vills there were also burghs, settlements more compact than the vills, with larger numbers of inhabitants, and with special privileges which the vills did not possess. Most of the burghs at this early time were half agricultural communities and half trading centres, located in places, on the coast or inland, favorable for trade and fortification. The origin of the burghs is obscure. Some of them, such as Lincoln and Winchester, go back to the days of the Roman occupation, though continued occupation cannot be proved; others, such as Cambridge, were vills in origin, with open fields, pastures, and waste, but they were not ordinary vills, for many of them were the chief towns of shires, possessing a market and a court; while others, such as Worcester, Hertford, and Warwick, may trace their origin to some, of the fortresses erected by the West Saxon kings, notably, by Eadward the Elder, during the wars with the Danes. Trade gave to these centres their exceptional advantages; so that the name "burg", "got restricted either to those places specially fortified and capable of defence, which were in convenient trading localities, or to those places which, as seats of the royal administration, had become trading centres because they were under the special protection of the king's peace.

In these burghs were placed the markets, and in them money was coined and business transacted. To fortify and defend the burghs was one of the duties imposed upon every Anglo-Saxon landowner : this obligation fell sometimes on the inhabitants or on those in the immediate neighborhood, sometimes on all the people of the shire. Most interesting of all the special privileges of a burgh were its judicial rights. Eadgar decreed that three times a year a burghgemot should meet, over which the burgh-reeve should preside. This court had to do with the affairs of the burghers just as the hundred-mot had to do with affairs of the people of the hundred; for a burgh in which a court was held was not under the jurisdiction of the hundred court, although it was in the shire and under the sheriff.

The Land System: Folkland

Today we think of land as worth owning whether we actually use it or not; but the Anglo-Saxons did not think so, and consequently valued land only because it could furnish support or revenue, or because it could be given away. At first, there was only one name for all occupied land, namely, folkland. In fact, all lands were folklands to those who occupied and cultivated them. It did not matter whether they had been part of the original distribution among families and individuals or had been brought into use at a later time. The right to use such lands was based upon custom, and the family or individuals possessing or disposing of such lands were governed by the unwritten law of the folk, the folk law. That is why these lands were called folk-lands. All the Anglo-Saxons, from king to non-noble freeman, who possessed land at all, had folklands, and each family or individual was supported by the food which these lands furnished.