Vill is a term used in English history to describe the basic rural land unit, roughly comparable to that of a

parish A parish is a territorial entity in many Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a priest, often termed a parish priest, who might be assisted by one o ...

, manor,

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred ...

tithing A tithing or tything was a historic English legal, administrative or territorial unit, originally ten hides (and hence, one tenth of a hundred). Tithings later came to be seen as subdivisions of a manor or civil parish. The tithing's leader or ...

Medieval developments

The vill was the smallest territorial and administrative unit—a geographical subdivision of the

hundred 100 or one hundred (Roman numeral: C) is the natural number following 99 and preceding 101. In medieval contexts, it may be described as the short hundred or five score in order to differentiate the English and Germanic use of "hundred" to des ...

and

county A county is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposes Chambers Dictionary, L. Brookes (ed.), 2005, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French ...

—in Anglo-Saxon England. It served both a policing function through the

, and the economic function of organising common projects through the village moot. The term is the Anglicized form of the word , used in Latin documents to translate the Anglo-Saxon . The vill remained the basic rural unit after the

Norman conquest The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Norman, Breton, Flemish, and French troops, all led by the Duke of Normandy, later styled William the Con ...

—land units in the ''

Domesday Book Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manus ...

'' are frequently referred to as vills—and into the late

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

era. Whereas the manor was a unit of landholding, the vill was a territorial one—most vills did ''not'' tally physically with manor boundaries—and a public part of the royal administration. The vill had judicial and policing functions, including

frankpledge Frankpledge was a system of joint suretyship common in England throughout the Early Middle Ages and High Middle Ages. The essential characteristic was the compulsory sharing of responsibility among persons connected in tithings. This unit, under ...

, as well as responsibility for taxation, roads and bridges. It would also organise the communal pastures, the seasonal chronology of rural agriculture, and the

three-field system The three-field system is a regime of crop rotation in which a field is planted with one set of crops one year, a different set in the second year, and left fallow in the third year. A set of crops is ''rotated'' from one field to another. The tec ...

. With the Angevin growth of royal, as opposed to feudal, government, new duties were imposed upon the vill. By the early 12th century, the reeve and four villagers were required to attend the hundred court "on behalf of all"; in the 1166 Assize of Clarendon, "four of the more lawful men of each vill" were required to present malefactors. Four men and the reeve were again called on for tax assessment in 1198; the Ordinance of 1242 on policing provided for "continuous watch ... in every vill by six men or four or less according to the number of the inhabitants". At the same time, the vill emerged as a legal entity in its own right, taking oppressive lords of the manor to court, or suing other vills, or purchasing privileges from the Crown, as well as repairing bridges and churches as required. While retaining and even extending its hierarchical and socially stratified nature to the end, the medieval vill always remained a vibrant part of local rural life.C. Dyer, "The English Village Community and its Decline", ''Journal of British Studies'' 33 (1994) pp. 407–429

Legal and other usage

*Traditionally, among legal historians, a vill referred to the tract of land of a rural community, whereas "

township A township is a kind of human settlement or administrative subdivision, with its meaning varying in different countries. Although the term is occasionally associated with an urban area, that tends to be an exception to the rule. In Australia, C ...

" was referred to when the tax and legal administration of a rural community was meant. *The word would later develop into ''

ville ''Ville'' or "town", but its meaning in the Middle Ages was "farm" (from Gallo-Romance VILLA < Latin ''

villa rustica

'') and ...

'' and ''

'', while an unfree inhabitant of a vill was called a

villein A villein, otherwise known as ''cottar'' or '' crofter'', is a serf tied to the land in the feudal system. Villeins had more rights and social status than those in slavery, but were under a number of legal restrictions which differentiated them ...

Notes

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External links

vill
Former subdivisions of England

Medieval developments

Legal and other usage

See also

Notes

External links