As the political upheaval that followed the Norman Conquest raged, Maccos the hundredman – a modest, non-noble landowner in the small town of Bodmin in Cornwall – freed Codgiuo on the altar of St Petroc to commemorate the Advent of the Lord. Yet, this act of liberation was not the limit of Maccos's remembered public action. In two entries of rudimentary Latin written in a crabbed hand in the Bodmin Gospels, a scribe recorded that Maccos took the toll and stood witness for the transfer of human property. Maccos was not alone in his participation in a variety of public acts that expressed social status and power. However, despite their ability to engage with and determine the overall shape of late Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman society, individuals like Maccos remain neglected by historians of the period. Though eighty-six years have passed since Lucien Febvre, in praise of Albert Mathiez of the Annales school, coined the term histoire d’en bas, and recent historiography has stressed the importance of reciprocity between kings and their subjects in shaping society, historians of the period remain focused on a ‘top-down’ understanding of early English society. This essay hopes to contribute to this renewal of a medieval social history ‘from below’.

Across the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, agrarian reorganization reshaped the landscape, increasing agricultural output and reclaiming formerly marginal land. Economic reform saw the introduction of a sophisticated monetary system replete with regulated coinage and mints. Together, the agrarian surpluses and the move towards a cash economy fueled the growth of market towns inhabited by a mercantile class. Hand in hand with these transformations was the parceling of the extensively managed landscapes of obligations which followed the breaking of the great estates into thousands of small, intensively cultivated and prosperous manors. In an echo of the continental process of seigneurialization, thegns (noble freemen) allegedly sat at the nexus of these broad-sweeping social transformations in England. Seen as the lowest possible agents of change, thegns have been the subject of numerous studies. Even the proliferation of poorer thegns in the eleventh century has not gone unnoticed. Throughout the literature on these processes, the ceorlish ranks (non-noble freemen) are accorded little agency.