(Our first history spot post – looking at Norman land law from about 1066 …)
Landlord
Land is different from all other property. It is where you live, grow your crops, mine minerals, and (maybe) earn money by renting it out.
There is only a limited amount of land – there is only so much you can create by drainage – and so in that sense also it is unique.
Control of land therefore, in early times, meant power. And conversely if you were powerful, if you were a lord, you had land. So the words lord and land have always gone together.
If we go back to Norman times though, having control of land did not necessarily mean you owned it. In fact unless you were the King, you didn’t, because all land was owned by the King.
Tenure
What everyone had in those long gone days was not ownership, but tenure. You did not own land but ‘held’ it.
Tenure was the relationship under which a tenant would hold land from his lord. A Norman lord would give land, as a ‘fee’, to a supporter in exchange for loyalty and service. Often this was military service, but not always
Entering into this relationship of landlord and tenant was a serious matter. As serious, if not more so, than marriage. It was a life long bond, and was entered into in a special ceremony where the tenant (or vassal) would swear an oath of fealty. Here is a description taken from the Middle Ages website.
The Oath of Fealty was sworn during a solemn ceremony necessitating an act of homage. The vassal would appear before the lord bareheaded and without any weapons.
The vassal would then kneel before the lord, clasping his hands as in prayer which he would stretch outward towards his lord. This position signified total submission. The vassal then swore the Oath of Fealty. The lord would then take the hands of the vassal and announce his acceptance.
Seisin
Being a tenant under this old system was nothing like having ownership of land nowadays, even ownership of tenancies / leases. They could not do what they liked with the land, or sell it, and a tenant’s family were not necessarily entitled to inherit it after the tenant’s death.
All the tenant really had was possession. Being in possession of land as a feudal tenant was called seisin.
Seisin was an important concept which I may come back to later.
The futile system
In that best of all history books, 1066 and All That, the feudal system is described as the futile system. As indeed, in a way, it was, and the concept of buying land with services did not last longer than about 200 years after the conquest.
For example, the service fixed when the land was first granted, might not be appropriate several generations later. So, over time it became more convenient to pay for mercenaries if you wanted an army, than to rely on your tenants.
Gradually the old services were converted to payment of money, which eventually lost much of its economic significance as the value of money changed (inflation is not just a modern phenomenon).
However, the concept of holding land rather than owning it, and of tenure remained. In some ways it is still with us today.
I’ll be looking in a bit more detail at how it all worked in Norman times, in future posts.
Note: you will find a list of all the History Spot posts >> here.
Oath of fealty picture is Wikipedia commons (and is not really an oath of fealty)
‘1066 and all that’. I read that years ago and its brilliant.
I have always been interested in language, I studied Cognitive Linguistics and have alaways wondered if people’s knee-jerk negative attitudes to landlords isnt largely down to the very name, the ‘Lord of the Land’. There are a variety if anti landlord sites out there, most notably ‘Rate or Hate your landlord’, that seem to make much of this.
In our more equal times the notion of having a lord rubs us up the wrong way. Once on a training course I was running we were talking about work and I commented on being talked to by one of your ‘Superiors’, at which a guy blew up and said “aint nobody superior to me”. This caused quite a debate that took half an hour to setttle down. Language can be a very emotive thing.
In America they have a different name for the landlord of a building but I cant for the life of me remember what it is.
Maybe the name needs to change.
I also read somewhere that when the Normans invaded, one way of rebelling against our new masters was to refuse to learn or speak their language, which is why French and latin have become part of the fabric of law and authority ever since and which gives rise to anti authority feelings. Maybe if our ancestors had all learnt French we would be able to understand what the bloody hell lawyers are on about haha. Present compnay excepted Tessa :)
I think the language thing is more complicated than that. In law, complex ideas are often given a word which is used by lawyers to describe them. However people who have not studied law and who do not know what the word means, will refer to it as jargon and want lawyers to stop using it. So they can understand what they’re talking about.
However to continually describe a complex idea in ‘normal’ language gets tedious.
Lets use a silly (and completely fictitious) example. In fishing, say you discover a new kind of mackerel which has mauve spots and is poisonous to red headed people. Fishermen give it the name of zmack. When talking about it is it going to be a lot easier to say “I caught 4 zmack today” rather than “I caught 4 of those fish that look like mackeral but have orange spots and are poisonous to redheads”.
If you know what zmack are, its a whole lot easier just saying zmack. However if you don’t know what zmack means, you will probably feel left out and might say “hey what are you doing talking about a load of stuff I don’t understand. You fishermen are always trying to confuse us ordinary people and using jargon we don’t understand. I think it should stop and all fishing manuals should be written in language that a housewife who has never gone fishing can understand.”
However if they taught more about the different types of fish in school, so everyone knew what zmack was, this would stop being a problem, and fisherman would be able to say zmach without getting a lot of grief from non fishermen.
This mentality also applies to legal language.
Just a bit of a Sunday rant …
Oh I agree with you Tessa, and over the years I have picked up enough of that myself. I was in court on Wednesday defending a mortgage repo case and at one point the judge stopped me and asked me to explain haha.
But the problem I have, and I know most non lawyers working in law have, is in the explanations rather than the jargon itself. I’ll come across a word or phrase that I dont know, look it up and still cant understand the explanation because there is just as much jargon used to explain it.
I remember a few months back an article on Nearly Legal about the difference between ‘Champerty’ and ‘Maintenance’. I read the article and the accompanying discussion and was still none the wiser.
Often over the years I have been mystified by something and come to understand it with the passing of time and the crucial difference resides in a tiny but very important point of understanding.
I think as the years go by, with cuts to legal aid and the forced democratisation of the county court system people are going to be doing their own cases more and more. Makes you wonder if basics in law shouldnt be taught in school, certainly at 6th form level. How many times have you seen people thinking their defence to a case is because the judge ‘Isnt being fair’, or as in one mortgage repo case I had once, where my borrower argued that it wasnt reasonable to grant possession of her house because she had a spent a fortune getting it just right and it looked beautiful. She actually said “Judge, if you could see my home you wouldnt take it away”