Domesday Book provides a wealth of information about English society in 1086.

It lists about 13,000 towns,

villages and  tiny hamlets. The basic unit in Domesday Book was the manor - since this showed who owned the
land and controlled its inhabitants.

At the time of Domesday Book, more than 90 per cent of the English population (of about two million) lived
in the countryside. Even with the vast mass of the population engaged in agriculture, almost all the cultivable
land had to be farmed because output was so low - about four times the amount of seed sown. 
Social classes 
The Free

At the top of the English social scale stood the king and nobility. Senior churchmen (abbots and bishops) were
also barons with noble status. About 200 of these men formed England's ruling elite. Crown, nobility and church
owned about 75% of English land.

Immediately below the nobility were knights. Knighthood was not hereditary; instead, men were made
knights as a reward for outstanding service or because they had become wealthy enough. (By the 14th century,
there were about 1,000 knights, owning land worth on average ₤40 per annum.)
[Until the later 14th century, noblemen and knights spoke a different language from the common people - an
increasingly corrupt form of French, quite unlike the basically Germanic speech illustrated in The Cuckoo Song.]

The other class of freemen were "sokemen" (or socmen.) Roughly one in six of the population were sokemen,
and they owned about twenty per cent of the land. They were especially  numerous in East Anglia. Sokemen held
in socage; they had security of tenure provided they carried out certain defined services often including light
labor services and paying a fixed rent. Their land was heritable.
 
The Unfree

The largest class of the population were villani. (Those born to servile status were also called nativi.) About
four in ten people were villani tied to the land. They did not own the land but farmed their own holdings (about
45 per cent of all English land,) which they were allowed to occupy in exchange for labor services on the
landowner's demesne.

The exact services required from villani varied in accordance with local customs and agreements. A common
arrangement was three days work each week (more in harvest time). During the 12th Century the villani were
keen to have their labor services commuted to money rents, but labor services remained widespread.

A lower class of villeins were known as bordars or cottars. These occupied very small plots of land for
personal use, which like the villani they did not own, but for which they had to pay rent and/or labor services.
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Although they constituted about one third of the population, bordars only occupied about five per cent of the
land.

At the very bottom of the social scale were slaves who owned no land at all. These constituted slightly less
than one in ten of the population at the time of Domesday Book. During the 12th Century many of these slaves
were given holdings and became bordars.

Social and economic change meant that these classes were far from fixed - villeins could buy free land, and
freemen could slip into villeinage.

In the course of the Middle Ages the tendency was for the peasants to become freer but poorer - as
population expansion outstripped the growth of agricultural productivity, reducing the size of average
landholdings; this also had the effect of reducing the price of hired labor; lords could find it more efficient to hire
cheap labor (paid per task) than to enforce labor services on reluctant serfs/ villeins (paid per day).
The social structure of the Middle Ages was organized round the system of Feudalism. Feudalism in practice
meant that the country was not governed by the king but by individual lords, or barons, who administered their
own estates, dispensed their own justice, minted their own money, levied taxes and tolls, and demanded military
service from vassals.

Usually, the lords could field greater armies than the king. In theory, the king was the chief feudal lord, but in
reality, the individual lords were supreme in their own territory. Many kings were little more than figurehead
rulers.

Feudal Ties
Feudalism was built upon a relationship of obligation and mutual service between vassals and lords. A vassal held
his land, or fief, as a grant from a lord. When a vassal died, his heir was required to publicly renew his oath of
faithfulness (fealty) to his lord (suzerain). This public oath was called "homage".

A Vassal's Obligations
The vassal was required to attend the lord at his court, help administer justice, and contribute money if needed.
He must answer a summons to battle, bringing an agreed-upon number of fighting men. As well, he must feed
and house the lord and his company when they travelled across his land.

This last obligation could be an onerous one. William the Conqueror travelled with a very large household, and if
they extended their stay it could nearly bankrupt the lord hosting them. In a few days of Christmas feasting one
year, William and his retinue consumed 6,000 chickens, 1,000 rabbits, 90 boars, 50 peacocks, 200 geese, 10,000
eels, thousands of eggs and loaves of bread, and hundreds of casks of wine and cider.

A Lord's Obligations
On the lord's side, he was obliged to protect the vassal, give military aid, and guard his children. If a daughter
inherited, the lord arranged her marriage. If there were no heirs the lord disposed of the fief as he chose.

Manors
Manors, not villages, were the economic and social units of life in the early Middle Ages. A manor consisted of a
manor house, one or more villages, and up to several thousand acres of land divided into meadow, pasture,
forest, and cultivated fields.

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The fields were further divided into strips; 1/3 for the lord of the manor, less for the church, and the remainder
for the peasants and serfs. This land was shared out so that each person had an equal share of good and poor.

At least half the work week was spent on the land belonging to the lord and the church. Time might also be spent
doing maintenance and on special projects such as clearing land, cutting firewood, and building roads and
bridges. The rest of the time the villagers were free to work their own land.