The Blackberry Walk

Law codes of earlier times all have oddities. There's the biblical law code granted by God to Moses, which debates the subtleties and circumstances of ox goring, to almost comic effect for later readers. In London, it is, in theory, illegal to walk down the road carrying a plank of wood. And in mediaeval times, a villein would be granted freedom should he escape from his lord for a year and a day. The rule has always perplexed me. Why would any legal system allow for such an easy path to liberty? The lord's manor wasn't huge, and nor was its perimeter patrolled by guards. A few hours walk, and you'd be set on your path to freedom. And it was simpler still, since after four days refuge in a borough, the lord couldn't march into town with his henchman and capture the escapee by force; after those four days, it became a legal matter. Four days has a significance in mediaeval law. Four days of peaceful ownership was the length of time it took for 'seisin', that is legal ownership, to be passed along from one party to the next. That is why after four days, you ceased to be under the ownership of the lord, but instead of the borough into which you had fled. Boroughs were essentially towns, populated by burgesses, as opposed to villages, where villeins lived. The burgesses weren't all too keen on these runaways; he looked down his nose at his new neighbour and saw him as a foreigner. A foreigner! People from but a few miles away they considered foreigners! How small Little Britain was back then, in an age when the accent of the neighbouring village was incomprehensible. But they were foreign to the towns, and if you close your eyes you can imagine mediaeval townsmen complaining about immigration into their towns from the country, just as we complain today. The parallels are striking. Just as immigrants today do menial labour like Uber and Deliveroo, so too was there a mediaeval 'gig economy' for runaway villeins. Guilds had a great deal of influence in the towns, housing and bringing together the skilled workers of the town; and these guilds saw the more menial work as beneath them. Petty work, like carrying heavy loads, digging foundations and trenches, or building basic infrastructure, was lapped up by the villeins, much like the Irish navvy of later British history. Running away and hiding for a year and a day wasn't always straight forward. To begin with, after your first four days not every borough was willing to 'claim' you as their own. One such place was Plympton, where the Earl of Devon decreed in 1242 that no villein escaping to Plympton should be regarded as free without the consent of the burgesses, the free citizens of the borough. The emphasis is squarely placed on ownership. Like the aforementioned seisin, the villein, in escaping, was loosing himself as the property of the lord by binding himself as the property of the borough; and in doing so ceased to be property at all. As a runaway villein, you had to integrate in the local community, despite being a foreigner to the borough. The guildsmen weren't particularly keen on inviting this new population of villein stock into their guilds either, and for good reason. There is one such case of a man named Simon of Paris, a free man of eighteen years living in the City of London, who had by 1306 become the Sheriff of London. Quite the promotion. (The City of London was unique in electing sheriffs.) Then one day he went on a journey, off to his home village of Necton in Norfolk, whereupon he was imprisoned by the lord's bailiff on the grounds he was an escapee villein. The custody didn't last long however, since he was a free man, and the lord was forced to pay damages to this public figure. But what if he weren't so public a figure? You can see why there was scepticism about employing these freed villeins. The laws upholding the year-and-a-day limit were somewhat flimsy, based solely on case law and not decree. In the case a villein was taken to court after the four days of seisin but before the year-and-a-day, the best legal defence the villein could offer was an appeal to the Willelmi Articuli Retracti, a set of laws written by the Conqueror himself - though the text is mostly lost now, preserved only in citations. These precedents were not as universal as they may have ought to have been, however. England was a large place to govern in a pre-technological age, and many boroughs and manors were ruled by bylaws (literally, town-laws - think Grimsby). For a villein to be able to employ an advocate in court to plead for him, and know the ins and outs of the law was an unlikely thing. And once taken to court by his former lord, his chances of victory were slim, around one in four were successfully prosecuted. Thankfully, judges generally looked well upon these villeins, and as per precedent it was incumbent on the lord to find eye witnesses to prove the defendant was in fact one of his villeins. Not any witness would do, in proving former villein-hood. Women were off the cards, since being brought to court over such a case was seen as too great a stress. And friends of defendant were also not counted as valid witnesses. Only a kinsman of escaped villein were valid witnesses. And then, once this charade between lord and villein had played out, the villein could simply deny he was who he was said to be. With a fictitious name, he could avoid any such association and lie his way through court. This was of course contempt of court, though such cases are known to have happened. For the unlucky three in four, however, their names were written upon the server logs of mediaeval England, the court rolls, as 'Joe Bloggs, veritable villein'. Never again could they attempt to escape, since all the lord would have to do in court was to point to the court roll. As the lord lost villeins, he didn't sit idly. These villeins were the lord's property, and he wasn't happy when his property upped sticks and fled. There are cases of lords making their villeins swear oaths to say they wouldn't leave; elsewhere, family members of the escapee could have their property seized, or worse still, in extreme cases, be taken to the stocks. To lose property, for the lord, was to lose income. The villein worked the land for his own crops upon which he subsisted, but also the lord's land in what was known as a 'boon'. During a boon, the lord's land was sowed, weeded, and harvested, often with rewards of food and ale in the gruelling harvest season. It was nevertheless compulsory. The proceeds of the lord's land, which was of course the most fertile land, went towards the manor's upkeep, feeding the lord's family and entourage, and balancing the manor's books. The compelled labour of the boons were despised by peasants, as were the other restrictions placed upon them. Querns, personal hand mills, were seen by lords as one of the most abominable contrabands, since it infringed upon his monopoly on milling. All milling had to be done at the lord's watermill or windmill for a set fee. Millers worked for the lord, and weren't a much liked profession. The ovens too belonged to the lord, and as a villein you couldn't cook your bread without a small fee. The villein's life revolved around small fees. There were so many small bylaws around which his life was governed, each incurring a small fine. Such fines were trifling and at times so small they were treated as an expense. Others were not trifling. The most egregious fine was the heriot, a fine on death. Villeins were property, after all, and to just go and die was for your family to deny the lord labour and thus money. Upon death, the family of the deceased had to give up their best beast of burden to the lord. And then your second best beast might be taken by the church in what was known as the mortuary, as a kind of indulgence to the church, that most evil of mediaeval Catholic institutions. As such, you can see why villeins wished to leave the manor. Between boons, vicious monopolies on milling, and heriots, there was much with which to be displeased. But these irksome aspects of manor life were slowly disappearing. It's hard to say how many villeins found freedom under the year-and-a-day ruling, but enough were bled from the manors that the manors had to stay competitive. As if it were a free market, many of the most burdensome and unjust laws were slowly abolished, to render manor life just bearable enough not to want to leave. There would always be ambitious villeins who want to learn a trade and start a better life, but the majority simply want a better lot than what they've got. Running away must've been frightful. Leaving to a strange land to do odd jobs around hostile strangers, living in fear for a year-and-a-day of being taken to court, to a court where you are grossly out of your depths, not knowing your bearings nor your way around these laws. More than the villeins experience, I find the very fact this law existed to begin with fascinating. Why place such a law in the first place? It was a law of the Conqueror, but the law is supposed to pre-date the conqueror and be an Anglo-Saxon law. There's a mythic quality to the law, I feel. G. K. Chesterton talks about the Ethics of Elfland in his book Orthodoxy, where for instance Cinderella must leave the ball by midnight, lest her secret be revealed. There's some hidden truth in these stories, a single all-defining law which must not be broken. Adam is in the garden and can live in paradise, so long as he doesn't eat from the one tree he has been told by God not to eat from. The mythic potency of the year-and-a-day is much the same. The lord may keep the villein in his captivity and make him work the land, but: if he were to run away and not be re-captured for a year-and-a-day, he will forever be a free man. There's something poetic in it. Looking closely at the villein's life, there was little in the way of flourish. The 'merry old England' of yore was one also of hardship and tragedy, like every era of history. People only remember halcyon ages, and are never living through them. Life on a mediaeval manor was much the same, nasty, brutish, and short; but there was, hanging there, this Romantic possibility of freedom, written in by the law-givers. Every manor must have had a successful escapee who was rumoured about and lionised; or maybe he was vilified. Whatever the case may be, I'm certain the year-and-a-day law presented a glimmer of hope to the villein, and one upon which he fantasised fondly.