Free Battle of Hastings, The by Harriet Harvey Harriet; Wood Harvey Wood Page B

to the
king from the local shire or hundred court. xxiv It is true that in the days of Alfred’s descendants, particularly during the reign of
Æthelred when the need to pay Danegeld led to the frequent levying of extrataxes, this independence of the peasant-farmer was to some extent eroded, probably in the
main because of the increasing difficulty smallholders experienced in maintaining themselves. A bad harvest could bring them to the verge of starvation; a Danish raid could reduce them overnight to
beggary. It made sense in such cases for a smallholder to trade in his nominal independence for the security of binding himself and the land that he had inherited in some form of servitude to a
lord who was able to protect or maintain him. There is little doubt, however, that the process was accelerated and, to some extent, brutalized by the conquest; Stenton has noted that ‘many
peasants who in 1066 had been holding land immediately of the king, or as the voluntary dependents of other magnates, are represented in Domesday Book by villani [serfs] on the estates of
Norman lords.’ xxv
    Moreover, the sophisticated system of land tenure in England meant that the kings always knew exactly what they could count on in terms of revenue and fighting men, and their subjects knew what
their liabilities were as precisely. It has been calculated that in the whole of England, there was not a scrap of land unaccounted for in the assessment system. Each hundred was broken down into
so many hides of land (carucates in the Danelaw, sulungs in Kent). Theoretically, the hide was originally the amount of land sufficient for a peasant family to live on, but very soon the hide
ceased to have any relationship to a specific area of land (just as the modern pound has ceased to have any relationship to a specific weight of gold) and became simply a unit of assessment, so
that hides in different parts of the country might be assessed differently, often according to the wealth or productivity of the area. A man’s ownership of, say, five hides of land might
typically mean that he was liable for so much in taxes, for the provision of a fighting man with all his equipment for aspecified number of days a year when the king needed
him for the defence of the realm, and for various other services. Such services might include, depending on the owner’s rank, duties of hospitality and escort to the king or his family, food
rent (the laws of Ine tell us that the food rent from a ten-hide estate should be ten vats of honey, three hundred loaves, twelve ambers of Welsh ale, thirty of clear ale, two full-grown cows or
ten wethers, ten geese, twenty hams, ten cheeses, an amber of butter, five salmon, twenty pounds of fodder and a hundred eels) and other miscellaneous services such as maintenance of hedges. Some
of these might be remitted in special circumstances; the three services that were almost never remitted, whether the land were owned by a layman or the Church, were military service, the
construction and maintenance of the country’s fortifications and bridge-building. It was this efficient system of assessment that made it possible for Æthelred to raise quickly as extra
taxes the vast sums of money that were needed to pay off the Danes between 991 and 1016. It is hardly surprising that they kept coming back for more.
    However efficient the tax-collecting system, it would hardly have worked if the money had not been there to be collected. Despite the frequent plundering raids, England was known to be wealthy
– indeed, its notorious wealth had much to do with the frequency of the raids. Through the six centuries of its existence, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom had been a trading nation, but it had also
achieved renown in various kinds of manufacture. Much of the detail of what the country once produced and contained is still obscure, despite recent archaeological research, and will no doubt
remain so because by its nature it was perishable;