they remained in their monasteries, and had the feorm brought them regularly; they had an overseer in the village to see to this, and so they tightened their hold on the village.  Then the smaller people, the peasants, make gifts to the Church.  They give their land, but they also want to keep it, for it is their livelihood; so they surrender the land and take it back as a lifelong loan.  Probably on the death of the donor his heirs are suffered to hold the land.  Then labour services are substituted for the old provender rents, and thus the Church acquires a demesne, and thus the foundations of the manorial system, still to be traced all over the country, were laid.  Thegns, the predecessors of the Norman barons, become the recipients of grants from the churches and from kings, and householders ‘commend’ themselves and their land to them also, so that they acquired demesnes.  This ‘commendation’ was furthered by the fact that during the long-drawn out conquest of Britain the old kindred groups of the English lost their corporate sense, and the central power being too weak to protect the ordinary householder, who could not stand alone, he had to seek the protection of an ecclesiastical corporation or of some thegn, first for himself and then for his land.  The jurisdictional rights of the king also passed to the lord, whether church or thegn; then came the danegeld, the tax for buying off the Danes that subsequently became a fixed land tax, which was collected from the lord, as the peasants were too poor for the State to deal with them; the lord paid the geld for their land, consequently their land was his.  In this way the free ceorl of Anglo-Saxon times gradually becomes the ‘villanus’ of Domesday.  Landlordship was well established in the two centuries before the Conquest, and the land of England more or less ’carved into territorial lordships’.[16] Therefore when the Normans brought their wonderful genius for organization to this country they found the material conditions of manorial life in full growth; it was their task to develop its legal and economic side.[17]

As the manorial system thus superimposed upon the village community was the basis of English rural economy for centuries, there need be no apology for describing it at some length.

The term ‘manor’, which came in with the Conquest,[18] has a technical meaning in Domesday, referring to the system of taxation, and did not always coincide with the vill or village, though it commonly did so, except in the eastern portion of England.  The village was the agrarian unit, the manor the fiscal unit; so that where the manor comprised more than one village, as was frequently the case, there would be more than one village organization for working the common fields.[19]