Almost all Japanese writers on Ine 6, 3. except Prof. Yoshinobu AOYAMA, consider gafolgelda there to be free land-owning peasant paying tribute only to the king. They have decisively been influenced by Paul Vinogradoff (Growth of the Manor), who, however, was not an Anglo-Saxon scholar and whose interpretation of this Old English term ha: been shown untenable. Now, Prof. AOYAMA, who, I believe, is an Anglo-Saxon scholar, rejects Vinogradoff's view and rightly takes it to mean dependent peasant paying rent to the lord, his authority being none other than Frank Merry Stenton.However, all our writers on Ine 6, 3., to my knowledge, including Prof. AOYAMA, think that the gafolgelda and gebur in the text is an exhaustive classification of the ceorl peasantry of Ine's time, the majority thinking that the early Anglo-Saxon peasant society was that of (mainly) independent peasants, one (Prof. Masayoshi TANAKA), apparently influenced by F. Liebermann's German translation, even going so far as to assert that the gebur, as well as gafolgelda, is independent peasant landowner, while Prof. AOYAMA going to the other extreme in concluding that it was a society of dependent peasants 'under lordship' only.Now, I suggest that both these conclusions are unwarranted: -(1) classification in Ine 6, 2., 3. could easily be shown not to be an exhaustive one by examining other articles (Ine 45, 51.). (2) Liebermann's translation (Bauer for the gebur, Gesetze I. S. 93.) is a loose one and cannot reasonably represent his final opinion, which, a far better one, I presume, is to be found in his Gesetze II. S. 297., where he states that 'gafolgilda, Leister von Bodenzins an den Grundherrn, steht an Rang gleich mit dem gebur Ine 6, 3.', also that 'Ine spricht von gafolgelda oððe gebur, moglicherweise mit jenem den (bloss zinsenden, nicht fronenden) hohren Stand......' (S. 298.). (3) On the other hand, a definite evidence of the existence of a fairly large independent peasant landowner even in the tenth century was pointed out by Prof. M. Chad-wick in as early as 1905 (Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions. p. 87.). Also, I think that the wording of AElfred-Gyðrum (A Gu) 2. strongly suggests that there were ceorls who did not sit on gafollands (i. e. those ceorls who sat on lands of their full ownership) and some of those were entitled to 1, 200 shillings wergild, which view, shared by all the leading European scholars on the subject, Chadwick, Vinogradoff, Lieberman, Stenton, D. Whitelock etc., however, Prof. AOYAMA rejects on the ground that 'if ceorls at that time consisted of two such groups having different wergilds [i. e. 1, 200 and 200 shillings], the laws of Alfred could not have failed to refer to them.' I suggest that he is misled on two points. First, it is one thing to say that a ceorl could thrive into thegnship (as in A Gu 2.) and quite another that a ceorl was entitled to 1, 200 shillings as a ceorl (as Prof. AOYAMA thinks we do), an unknown phenomenon. I confess, however, that I do not quite understand why the professor was led into such confused thinking, the more so since one of the references in his book is given to Stenton's article The Thriving of the Anglo-Saxon Ceorl. Second, I call attention to the fact that the early Germanic laws, of which Alfred's (as well as Ine's) is one, though often called 'codes', are really not like modern systematic, comprehensive codes (e. g. German BGB), but almost invariably isolated rules written down to supplement, modify, or strengthen the unwritten customary rules of law, only which could, in any way, be systematic. Therefore, the fact that a rule of law is not found in such a 'code' does not, by any means, imply that such a rule did not in fact exist.
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Jul 1, 1997
Edward Bridle 
Open Access