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relations as manifest in the relationship of retainers to the king were significant in the emergence of the bureaucratic exploitative state and destruction of kin-based society in England. Following the migration of the Germanic Tribes to England from about the fourth to mid-sixth centuries, tribesmen became peasants on the king's lands and serfs on the lords' lands. The enslavement of kinspeople, surplus extraction on the part of the king, and increased centralisation served to separate production and reproduction within the kin groups and to weaken ties of kinship.26
Corporate landholdings of the indigenous tribal peoples were alienated. According to Muller, between the fifth and seventh centuries, when kingdoms were small, internal self government of the various tribal groups was left undisturbed as long as they paid a food tribute to the king. The tribute was assessed according to the number of hides controlled by each tribe.27 However, the evidence suggests that certainly by the seventh century in England, the hide was a unit of exploitation by lords. According to the laws of the West Saxon king Ine, the hide was a unit of land associated with the normal freeman. It was supplied to him as of right by the corporate kin group. This freeman might be a lord in his own right, using labour from outside the nuclear family to work the land. Indeed due to the loosening of ties between wealth and status, many peasants, while legally free, were the tenants of manorial lords.28 In this vein, Whitelock notes '...by about 700, and perhaps long before, there were men who took their land at a rent from a lord, and, if they also accepted a homestead from him, he had a right to agricultural services as well as rent.'29 Moreover, one's lord may very well be the head of one's kin group. In Ireland from the seventh century the lowliest of lords had one lineage (consisting of five hides) of freemen in vassalage. The Anglo-Saxon lord's qualifications was also five hides, 'if a ceorl prospered, so that he possessed fully five hides of land of his own, a bell and a castle-gate, a seat and a special office in the king's hall, then was he henceforth entitled to the right of a thegn.'30 Indeed T. M. Charles Edwards suggests that The hide was the unit of land which bound together in one coherent system the lineage, the hierarchy of status and also, perhaps, the relationship of lord and vassal.'31
Ultimately, through the effects of warfare, smaller kingdoms were amalgamated into larger ones. The tribal hidage was abolished and replaced with the shire, i.e. the new administrative unit of the bureaucratic and exploitative state. Patron client relations became a basic organising principle of the society. 'Folkland' became the property of the king. Thegns were given control over territories, bypassed the heads of lineages and reached directly into the household as tax unit.32
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Bookland though was free from secular dues and burdens. It was initially an ecclesiastical instrument. Early records demonstrate that gifts of bookland were made to religious persons in an attempt to provide the Christian Church with a permanent landed endowment.33 However, Mark Meyer argues that concomitant with the king's increasing need for military strength and administration of the expanding law, during the 10th and 11th centuries thegns were increasingly rewarded with bookland.34 Patrick Wormald though notes the appearance of bookland for secular aristocrats from the later eighth century, and, as we shall see, suggests that this may be related to shifts in inheritance patterns. As property which was acquired rather than inherited, bookland was not bound by rules of kinship. It was land which could be alienated. Through choice though rather than through the custom of the kin, bookland could become an hereditary tenure.35
Effectively bookland could become a grant of lordship and revenues, and sometimes jurisdiction and profits. Meyer points out that lords of bookland sometimes created smaller holdings of the same type, and it is apparent that many of the inhabitants on the land owed dues and services to these lords.36 Though not expressed legally, the relationship between a grantee of bookland and those who held land under him began to resemble those of a feudal lord and tenant.37 However, it should be clear from the discussion above that bookland did not mark the beginning of lordship. Rather, it marked a consolidation of the power of the Anglo-Saxon nobility.
The confiscation of much land by the king and thegns did though involve the alienation of the means of production, i.e. land, from the kin group, thus further separating the productive-reproductive unity of kin groups. Along with increased taxation, the imposition of heavy fines for various state defined crimes, and the use of slavery, the outcome ultimately was the dissolution of corporate land holdings as kin solidarity weakened. Land had become privatised, i.e. heritable and alienable by members of the nuclear family.38
Implications for the Position of Women
The impact of these developments upon gender relations appear to confirm Engels' basic hypothesis in The Origins Of The Family, Private Property AndThe State. With the development of private property and the increasing separation of the nuclear family from its larger kin group there was a concomitant development of women's oppression.39
Historians have celebrated the proprietal capacity of women in Anglo-Saxon England. Christine Fell for example discusses the extensive landholdings of Eadgifu the Fair,40 and Queens as owners
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and givers of estates.41 Meanwhile according to McNamara and Wemple, 'As the smaller family groups began to replace the tribe as the basic social unit, the incapacity of women to inherit property began to disappear...'42 However, as Muller points out, 'It would be just as logical for these historians to praise the development of the state for liberating men who could, as a result own private property and become wealthy, whereas in tribal society they couldn't really own anything as an individual'.43
With the entrenchment of class society in England, the vast majority of women were excluded from control of personal wealth. In terms of bookland for example, Marc Meyer points out that although the low survival rate of Anglo-Saxon charters makes an estimate of the amount of bookland held by women difficult, the evidence that does exist suggests that only a small percentage of secular or ecclesiastical women were grantees of bookland.44 Grants of bookland were made to ecclesiastical and secular women for the purposes of endowing a religious community and the extension of royal policy. However, Meyer argues that both social and marital status limited not only the extent to which women were granted bookland in their own right, but also their ability to exploit the potential power that bookland gave to them through a joint donation. Where women were granted bookland, it was either because of their association with the royal household or because they were members of the powerful provincial aristocracy.45 He argues that women received bookland jointly with their husbands because of their relationship to a loyal thegn of the king and because of their maternal role within the family. In this context he points out that a husband was very much the senior partner. A woman was recognized as being capable of managing an estate in her husband's absence. However, a wife was usually mentioned in a passive connection in the charters. Where estates were donated to religious communities for example, wives usually appear as consenting parties, complying with the wishes of their husbands.46
As far as inherited property is concerned, during the earlier Anglo-Saxon period, Bede assumes that an inheritance was divided between sons, with the eldest probably receiving the paternal home.47 According to the laws of Ine
If a husband and wife have a child together, and the husband dies, the mother is to have her child and rear it; she is to be given six shillings for its maintenance, a cow in summer, an ox in winter; the kinsmen are to take charge of the paternal home, until the child is grown up.48
By the eighth century Patrick Wormald suggests that there may have been an increasing recognition that an eldest son should have major rights in inheritance. He points out that recognition of the Kentish
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custom of Gavelkind, in which the rule was partibility between sons, with the youngest receiving the family home, indicates that rules for the rest of England were actually different. Significantly, recognition of the custom of Gavelkind coincides with the appearance of bookland for secular aristocrats in the eighth century. Wormald suggests that an increasing recognition that an eldest son should have major rights in inheritance would likely prompt noblemen to acquire bookland as a way of catering for younger sons and daughters.49
It is thus unsurprising that Domesday Book reveals that very few women existed as tenant landholders in their own right.50 With the dissolution of corporate kin groups the vast majority of women were also deprived of both personal autonomy and security. Muller points out that a woman's status became basically that of ward - of her father or husband.51 Similarly Sacks suggests that class societies, '...to the extent that they developed from patri-corporations, transformed women from sister and wife to daughter and wife, making them perennial subordinates'.52 As class relations became more and more entrenched, increasingly delineating the household/ nuclear family, and throwing up more individualistic forms of property, and pre-existing tendency towards gender inequality would arguably be exacerbated.
The historical evidence demonstrates that kinship remained an important consideration within the transmission of property. Thus during the Anglo-Saxon period, whilst bookland might be used to cater for the needs of daughters, women would inherit in the absence of male heirs to the same degree of kinship.53 However, although women continued to have access to the descent group's property, they did so more clearly as dependents of the head of a nuclear family. But it has been argued that this was due to the effect of shifts in forms of property relations rather than the result of 'patriarchy'.
Thus far then, a process which seems to indicate the delineation of different historical forms of gender relations has been sketched. In so doing it has been argued that the development of the patron-client relation and the entrenchment of class relations in England transformed property relations. By fostering their dependency on men, the development of private property and the increasing economic separation of the nuclear family from the larger kin group had detrimental implications for women. However, it was also demonstrated that women were by no means excluded from access to property. On the contrary, whilst upper class women could control considerable amounts of personal wealth, kinship continued to be an important consideration in the transmission of property, and one which meant that females would inherit before more distant male relatives.
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It is often asserted by feminists, particularly radical feminists, and dual systems theorists, who argue that the position of women is determined by two systems - those of class and patriarchy - that men benefit from women's oppression. Heidi Hartmann, for example, one of the most influential exponents of the dual systems approach, notes the institution of'patriarchy' in class and state societies. She argues that a 'partnership' developed between men and the emergent ruling classes, such that men derive considerable personal and material benefits from the oppression of women.54
However, even the most cursory glance at English history demonstrates that men were quite clearly not bought off by any kind of 'partnership' with the emergent ruling classes. Medieval England was riddled and racked with class conflict. Indeed, far from benefiting from class society in England, the vast majority of men were also deprived of economic security. The imposition of class society ultimately rendered the vast majority of the English population -women and men - propertyless. Certainly, I would suggest, we are beginning to witness a possible basis for the development of class divisions structured along the lines of gender - a theme which will be developed later in this article. But the ultimate beneficiaries of this were not men, but the English ruling classes.