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parcelling of tenements may have been due to the custom of partitioning
the inheritance among brothers in gavelkind, which is not mentioned
directly in the Survey, but which gave its name to the general
peculiarities of Kentish tenure and was the most marked, although not the
essential, later feature of it. If these small Saxon tenements are watched
as they pass over into Norman hands an interesting and very significant
process of coalescing and co-ordinating may be observed. In some twelve
instances land once held for two or more small manors is "now"
held for one. The best examples are the Bayeux lands held by Anschitil de
Ros in Darenth and Horton Kirkby, where four manors became one (haec iiii
maneria sunt modo pro uno manerio),71 the manor in Gravesend
held by Herbert son of Ivo once three manors ‘now’ one,72
and the three manors in Teston once held by three brothers, ‘now’ one
manor.73 Other examples are found elsewhere as in Cray,
Greenwich, Little Wrotham, a number of them occurring on the lands of
Anschitil de Ros. Fairly numerous references, perhaps a dozen in all, made
to land sine halla, land where there is in dominio nichil, land
without a domanial centre, seem to indicate that in parts of Kent
manorialization had not proceeded far. Kent, at the time of the Survey,
was being forced into a manorial mould as far probably as its peculiar
gavelkind arrangements would allow. There should be noticed also in this
connection the cases common in Saxon times, although lost later, of those
that ‘could go where they would with their land,’ cases which have so
often been commented on as marking a stage in the process of
manorialization in various parts of England. Another point is the great
number of Saxon sokemen who appear in parts of the county, and, in a
measure, were merged in the class called by the commissioners the villani,
of whom further remarks must be made. Yet while the process of
manorialization was evidently at work in Kent, we know that it never
reached its fullest fruition there. The week work, a feature so
characteristic of manorialization in some parts of England, although
perhaps less widespread than the tendency to consider the manorial customs
of some manors typical of all would lead us to suppose, never appeared in
Kent. Labour services were here rather of the type known as ad tascham
;
and the most perfect form of domanial exploitation was found,
therefore, nowhere in the county. The crystallization of Kentish custom
into a body of sufficient entity and self-consciousness to be recognized
by the courts, and hence strong enough to maintain itself against common
law practices as ‘the custom of Kent,’ had at the Conquest gone
sufficiently far to check the unifying and standardizing progress of the
common law, the law and custom, that is to say, of the ordinary military
tenement, with its integral factor of domanial exploitation. This progress
reduced irregularities and antiquities of custom to uniformity with no
gentle touch.
A little difficult to interpret amongst the tenants of Saxon times are the
alodiarii. They should probably be considered as affording
additional evidence of the freer, less uniform conditions of tenure and
status existing in Kent before the Conquest. They were men who held in
alodio or in alodium, and were more common in Sussex and
Hampshire than in Kent, occurring occasionally in Berkshire also. They are
even described as holding ‘pro manerio in alodium,’74
a phrase which
seems to imply a contradiction of terms,
71 See p. 222a and
b. 72 See pp.
225a, 226a. 73 See p. 230b.
74 Dom. Bk. 1, 56b ,62, 280b, 298b.
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