CHAPTER VIII

THE PERSONAL STAGE OF SOCIALIZATION

I. THE FEUDAL TYPE

By a society organized on a basis of personal relations I mean a social and economic order which rests upon intimate association rather than upon kin ties or upon impersonal relations. Typical forms of a social organization characterized by personal ties are the old agricultural village and the mediaeval town: the first organized around landholding; the latter around division of labor and specialization of skill. For example, after the Norman Conquest, the English social constitution was an aggregation of nearly 10,000 practically self-sustaining agricultural village communities, each under the personal authority of the lord of the manor, the tenant-in-mesne of the baron, who was the tenant-in-chief of the king. In the whole series of gradations from the king at the apex, to the slave, cotter, and villein at the base of the social order, the personal relation of man to man was the social cement which gave organic stability to the structure of society. At a later period, the towns became significant for national economy. Their merchant and craft guilds were economic and political organisms whose individual cells functioned as a whole because of the definite personal relations of the market and the shop. This social mutation from the simple social form of tribal relation in which the chief is "first among equals" to the more complex and differentiated social form of the manor and the town where the lord of the manor or the guild-master exerts personal control over dependent workers involved an enormous psychic reconstruction. Our first task is, therefore, to analyze the psychic changes which accompanied the transformation of the tribal bands of Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes, superimposed upon the slightly Romanized Celtic tribes, into the feudalized England of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. We shall then proceed to a résumé of the origin of the towns and the psychological aspect of their organization.

The feudal type of personal relations.-The evolution of the English economic and social unit—the agricultural hamlet community-from the family to the personal type of organization was determined by the accommodation within it of the English settlers and the subdued British villagers under the external pressure of the

Danish invasion and the Norman Conquest. The British agricultural communities at the time of the English settlement varied in form from the tribal hamlet but little modified by Roman supremacy, to the groupings, on a personal basis, of the half-servile workers who tilled the country estates of the Roman or Romanized master. At all events, the family cast of the British social organization had been somewhat fractured even in the remotest districts.

The psychic organization, not only of the Celtic tribes, but also of the Teutonic immigrants, was of the "kin set" analyzed above. Lamprecht thus describes the social and psychic organization of the German hundred: "The tribal communities turn out to be not simple, but complicated formations. They consist in a number of hundreds, and in these the German actually lived. And the hundreds bear distinctly a genealogical character, are at bottom great families or clans. In the family, therefore, is the German quite at home; it encircles him with its uninterrupted life, and within this he is accounted only a specimen, not an individual; he is subject to the system of blood-vengeance with the psychic point of view, which puts every individual on exactly the same level; in his personal preferences, in friendship and enmity, he is bound by the bonds of family life; he appears to the outsider, and according to our views also in purely personal matters, as if he were interchangeable with any of his equals, as if he were but a function." What, then, were the influences which changed the hundred from a family to a community association?

1. Even if the landholding system of the Germanic tribes had once conformed precisely to the communal organization and the democratic government of a group of families as stated by the advocates of the mark theory 2 at the time of the emigration of the Anglo-Saxons this primitive village community had developed tendencies toward the personal relations of dependence characteristic of the later manorial system. Undoubtedly, household servants accompanied their masters in the settlement of Britain."

What Is History? 1905, p. 46.

2Vide Seebohm, English Historical Review, VII (1892), 465.

3The Saxon, Frisian, and Thuringian system on the Continent provided for the threefold division of classes above slaves (Vinogradoff, op. cit., p. 123).

Stubbs, Constitutional History, 6th ed., 1897, I, 78.

2. Not only a social tendency already present, but also the previous British agricultural arrangements may have tended to accelerate the organization upon the basis of personal ties. Seebohm believes that the Roman villa with its relations of personal dependence did not disintegrate before the devastating Saxon, but was the mold in which was cast the rough outlines of the later manor. Certainly, it is not beyond reason to agree that where the villa was a predominant form of agricultural and social arrangement, the Saxon chief may have displaced the Roman or Romanized landlord. But the evidence does not show that the absolute individual system of landholding was general. At any rate, the contact of Saxon and Briton in the community required an adjustment, and the weight of evidence indicates that in the enforced adaptation of the weaker to the stronger' is to be found the beginnings of the dependent feudal relationships.

3. The kinship grouping of the Anglo-Saxon folk gradually gave way to organization around personal relations. Settlement by groups of kindred is at first a predominant, but later a decreasing factor in village life. Place-names indicate that the first settlements were largely effected by groups of families or by kindreds on land allotted to them after a victory. In the first centuries after the settlement, the "solidarity of the kindred" was the prevailing medium of social control, and determined, not only the mode of settlement, but also the system of land tenure and the political activities of its members. The hide, the unit of landholding, originally signified "family land," 10 and seems to have been the customary share of the head of the household of the warrior-farmer upon whose industrial welfare and military efficiency Anglo-Saxon political and military organization depended. While we cannot ignore the wide-reaching and persistent influences of the agnatic union of relatives in the formation of Old English society, we must remember that

Tribal Custom, pp. 518-19.

Powell, in Social England, I, 122.

"On the contrary, Maitland inclines decidedly to the Germanic position of extermination or expulsion. (Domesday Book and Beyond, 1897, p. 222). Vinogradoff, op. cit., p. 140.

"Seebohm, Tribal Custom, p. 499.

10 Vinogradoff, op. cit., p. 141.

from the first the personal following of the king and the chieftains was a significant factor which introduced a counter-tendency in social organization which was soon to counterbalance, and finally to outweigh the political and social influence of the kin relationship. 4. The circumstances of the Anglo-Saxon settlement naturally tended to loosen the old tribal arrangements. Old habits were broken up; the hold of a successful leader over the imagination and obedience of his followers became stronger than kindred ties. A band of war-liking men, distinct from the nation in arms, gathered about the king and the powerful chieftains and "remained as a separate organization partaking of the characteristics of a court, a guard and a standing division of the army." Even in times of peace, when the military followers were living away from the court upon royal grants of land, the personal tie12 that bound them to their lord would, at a moment's notice, bring them to his side to quell an uprising or to repel an incursion. Then, too, the manner of migration wrought serious injury to tribal custom. The Celts had come to Britain in solid tribal blocks, but the Teutons crossed the sea in small detached bands, which, in the checkered course of settlement, intermixed in such a way as to loosen the cohesiveness of the blood-bond. The Celts had settled in tribal hamlets, which coalesced, where Roman influence was strong, into villages dependent upon the large estates. The Anglo-Saxons, desirous of keeping together both for mutual aid and for superior control of the subjugated Britons, promoted 13 this movement toward augmented groupings of the rural population. The effect of the larger social group was to weaken the ramification of kin ties by promoting the growth of neighborhood relations. The village came to be more than an enlarged hamlet; it made possible a social organization united by personal, as distinct from blood-ties, and facilitated a more efficient utilization of the land by a more definite allotment of the rights and obligations of individuals.

5. But the strongest internal force making for the growth of personal relations as an organizing principle in community life was

11 Vinogradoff, op. cit., p. 217.

12Ibid., p. 127.

18 Vinogradoff, op. cit., p. 145. Also cf.: "The outlines of our nucleated villages may have been drawn for us by Germanic settlers, whereas in the land of hamlets and scattered steads old Celtic arrangements may never have been thoroughly effaced."-Maitland, op. cit., p. 15.

the requirements of the open-field system of cultivation. The effect of the technique of cultivation upon community life is to be understood in connection both with the mental attitude of the settlers and with the mode of settlement. "In some cases they fitted themselves into the agrarian framework that they found; in other cases they formed villages closely resembling those that they left behind them in their older home. But to all appearance, even in that older home, so soon as the village was formed and had ploughed lands around it, the strips into which these fields were divided were owned in severalty by the householders of the village. Great pains had been taken to make the division equitable; each householder was to have strips equal in number and value, and to secure equivalence each was to have a strip in every part of the arable territory." 14 These arrangements for equality of shares in the holding point to the natural mental attitude of a group of kin or of a band of comrades bent on assigning to one another absolutely equal shares in the land allotted to them in common. All the requirements of the occupational activities of the villagers growing out of this system of landholding made for the development of personal and neighborly, as opposed to hamlet and family, ties. Since the possessor of a hide, or family holding of approximately 120 of these acre strips, owned and utilized a full plow-team of eight oxen, the smaller landowners, the men with perhaps only one ox and a bovate of land, or with two oxen and a virgate, must club together to provide the full number of oxen for the plow. The control of the agricultural arrangements was in the hands not of the individual, but of the group. "The seasons for the commencement and the interruption of work, the choice of the crops to be raised, the sequence in which the different shots and furlongs had to be used, the regulations as to fencing and drainage, etc., were not a matter of private concern and decision, but were to be devised and put in force by the community." 15 The problems of pasture, meadow, and forest, even such questions as the distribution1 of the manure, required community regulation and control and indicate that in industrial life personal relations are becoming more important than family ties. As Vinogradoff puts it, the open-field system necessitated "con14Maitland, op. cit., p. 346.

15 Vinogradoff, op. cit., p. 182.

16 Ibid., pp. 181-82.