USA > New York > Bronx County > The Bronx and its people; a history, 1609-1927, Volume I > Part 15
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Doubtless the tribute to the Bronx River made in a later day by Joseph Rodman Drake might not unaptly have been applied to it in that early time :
I sat me down upon the green bank side, Skirting the smooth edge of a gentle river, Whose waters seemed unwillingly to glide, Like parting friends, who linger while they sever; Enforced to go, yet seeming still unready,
Backward they wind their way in many a wistful eddy.
And I did leave thy loveliness to stand
Again in the dull world of earthly blindness,
Pain'd with the pressure of unfriendly hands, Sick of smooth looks, agued with icy kindness;
Left I for this thy shades, where none intrude,
To prison wandering thought and mar sweet solitude.
Yet I will look upon thy face again,
My own romantic Bronx, and it will be A face more pleasant than the face of men. Thy waves are old companions; I shall see A well-remembered form in each old tree, And hear a voice loved in thy wild minstrelsy.
The houses of the settlements were at this time chiefly of wood, with thatched roofs, some of them covered with sods. The chimneys were mostly of wood. Some of the houses, however, particularly those of the plantations, were somewhat superior, and partially constructed of
INTERCOURSE AND CONFLICT WITH THE INDIANS 125
brick or stone. On Manhattan, the church, the company's five ware- houses, and the city tavern were substantially built of stone; and we read of a fine mansion, contracted to be built for the director, which was to be partially of stone, and upward of one hundred feet long. His house in the fort was built of brick. Director Kieft did much to im- prove the settlements, and during his early administration there was considerable activity in building and in the laying out of plantations. Most of the houses, for the sake of the shelter afforded, were clustered about the fort or where the two rivers gave protection and easy ap- proach. They were placed at first in a straggling manner, some on the thoroughfares, and some at random, about the quaint little town. The bouweries were nearly all located on the two rivers, on both sides' of the Harlem Kill, and on the shores of the bays and lagoons of the East River. The outlying plantations, such as those in Westchester and the valley of The Bronx, and the other stream that ran through The Bronx territory, were generally protected by wooden palings against Indians and wild beasts. In the beginning settlers had located themselves on any spot of ground that seemed good to them, land be- ing then of little value, and the trader population being mainly migra- tory. In 1642, however, Andreas Hudde was appointed surveyor to draw lines and make boundaries; and land, thereafter, when conveyed, was defined by rods and feet, and farm-land outside was conveyed by morgens. When the Kieft administration began there was no regula- tion of streets or paving, and no names except those suggested by the nature of the ground or by natural boundaries. Such roads or lanes as there were resulted from the convenience afforded in reaching certain localities or in avoiding hills or swamps. Some of them were the paths of cattle. On Manhattan the main road, called the Public Road, the Hoogh Weg, or Highway, and after that Heeren Straat, extended from the fort north, on the line of the present Broadway, extending upward through the island, though in those days branching to the Old Post, or Boston Road, which ran through The Bronx. A dense forest in which deer herded plentifully covered the middle and upper parts of the island of Manhattan and thence through The Bronx, and here the tribes of the Manhattans and the Mohegans lived in their primitive way. Wolves roamed at large through the Manhattan and Westchester re- gion and bears were not infrequent in their visits to the Harlem, and afforded considerable sport to the settlers as the annals show. A bear hunt which took place in 1680 is chronicled by the Rev. Charles Wooley, who found in the hunt "great diversion and sport." When the bear got to his resting place, he writes, "perched upon a high branch, we prudently despatched a youth after him with a club to an opposite
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bough, who knocked his paws. He comes grumbling down with a thump upon the ground-and so, after him again!"
In the general history of New York City the name of Jonas Bronck is often referred to as an evidence that men of means and men of wealth were at that early time to be numbered among the inhabitants of the province and the city. His purchase of the large tract of land north of the Harlem is mentioned as one of the landmarks in the history of New Amsterdam and New York. Much is made of his hostility to Kieft, and it is inferred that he held the director-general responsible for the Indian troubles in which his own house, Emmaus, was burnt, as well as the house of his neighbor, Kuyter, a Danish Lutheran like him- self. The inventory of the goods and effects of Feuntje, the widow of Jonas Bronck, is pointed to in the history of New Netherland as testi- inony to the degree of comfort with which the Dutch colonists of the' . period were familiar. The forty books, the eleven pictures, the five guns, the gun with the silver mounting, and the other arms; the silver cups, the spoons, the tankards, and the bowls; the thirty pewter plates ; the agricultural and brewing implements; and the bedding and cloth- ing; the satins, the grosgrain suits and gloves, have been taken as show- ing the superior manner in which the prominent citizens of the time lived. It is pointed out that the house was of stone, covered with tiles ; that there were a tobacco-house and out-houses, and a large number of horses, cattle, and pigs. The books showed the serious reading of the day. There were two Bibles, Calvin's "Institutes," Luther's "Psal- ter," Luther's "Complete Catechism," the "Praise of Christ," the "Four Ends of Death," "Fifty Pictures of Death," and a number of biblical stories. Through the smoke of battle and the consternation of the In- dian wars it is interesting to glimpse this little oasis of peace and in- tellectual striving over the Harlem and on the banks of the Aquahung, which before that time had known only the wigwam of the Red Man as the habitation of the brooding human spirit.
CHAPTER V "MANORS AND PATENTS
The word "manor" has a Latin root and the genealogy of the idea for which it stands may be presumed therefore to have had a Latin origin, using the term in the comparative sense, and a Norman-French channel of descent. In American law it stands for a tract of land oc- cupied by tenants who pay a fee-farm rent to the proprietor. Specific- ally in New York it stood for a tract of land granted in colonial days either by patent or in confirmation of grants from the States-General of Holland to proprietors or patroons, who held by perpetual rent in money or in kind. The patroons were tenants in capite and had such manorial privileges as the right to hold a manorial court, to award fines, and to have waifs, estrays, and deodands. They had the right of subinfeudation, but their tenants did not. After the Revolution the State superseded the English king as lord, and the rents from the proprietors were from time to time commuted or released. In a few cases the rents, in money, in services, or in kind, from the subtenants continued to exist as rent charges upon the land. The old French word was "manoir," derived apparently from the Latin verb, "manere," having the sense of "to remain" or "to dwell."
Under the old law of Europe the manor consisted of a district of land held by some baron or man of worth by freehold tenure of the king or of some mesne lord, within which the lord of the manor exercises a certain jurisdiction in addition to his rights as landlord. The term "manor" to describe such a lordship did not come into use in England until some time after the Norman Conquest, but the in- stitution is found in a less-developed form among the Anglo-Saxons. The typical manor in its later development consisted of two parts: (1) the inland (demesne) or home estate, which the lord held in his own hands, upon which his house was built, and which was farmed by non-free, peasant occupiers, and (2) the outland or geneatland, which was held, in part at least, by freemen as freehold tenants, holding of the lord at a rent, which might be money, or produce of the land, or military or other service. The tenants proper were freemen, but most of the occupiers who constituted the lord's dependents belonged to one or more of the classes of the unfree, such as the villeins, who constituted the bulk of the peasant population. These for the most part dwelt together in villages and lived ordinarily by agriculture. In
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the view of certain authoritative historians there were in the beginning few manors, but that they gradually increased in number, until in the twelfth century the prevailing system of society, outside the boroughs or incorporated towns, was that of manors with dependent peasants. The Roman origin of the manor is obscure, but some authorities hold it to be due to the imposition of the system of the Roman villa on the servile population by the French invaders of England and other countries. Other authorities see in it a normal development of the village community. The lord of the manor might hold directly by grant of the king, who was, under the feudal system, the supreme land- owner, the lord paramount, of all lands in the kingdom, in which case his customary jurisdiction, based upon and derived from the ancient customs of the manor, might be restricted or enlarged by royal grant ; or he might hold under some mesne lord, who in his turn held the manor, together with other lands, directly of the crown. With the growth of the process of subinfeudation, that is, of the granting of lands by a tenant to be held of himself as overlord, the latter method of holding manors became common in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. When one lord held two or more manors, whether of the king or of a mesne lord, the entire estate was known as a lordship or honor.
The manor could be looked at from two points of view, the economic and the political. The manor has an estate for its basis, although it need not coincide with an estate, but may be wider. It is also a political unit, a district formed for purposes of government although the political functions made over to it may greatly vary. As a lordship based on land tenure, the manor necessarily comprised a ruler and a population dependent on him, and the characteristic trait of such dependance con- sisted not in ownership extending over persons, as in slave-holding communities, nor in contractual arrangements, as in a modern economic organization, but in various forms of subjection, chiefly regulated by custom. In this sense the manor occurred in every country in which feudalism got a hold. Under various names we find it not only in France, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, but also, to a certain extent, in the Byzantine Empire, Russia, Japan, and other countries. It is especially representative of an "aristocratic" stage in the development of European nations. When tribal notions and arrangements ceased to be sufficient for upholding their commonwealths, when social and political life had to be built up on the basis of land-tenure, the type of manorial organization came forward in natural course. It was closely connected with natural economy, and was suited to a narrow horizon of economic wants and political requirements. At the same time it provided links for a kind of national federation of military states.
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Feudalism and the Manor-The full grown continental manor of the medieval period is better seen in France than elsewhere. Feudalism in France attained the greatest extension and the utmost regularity, while in other European countries it was hampered and intermixed with other institutional features. The expression best corresponding to the English "manor," in the sense of an organized district, was seigneurie. In principle the disruption of political life brought about by feudalism ought to have resulted in a complete administrative in- dependence of the manor. "Chaque baron est souverain dans sa baronie" is a proverb meant to express this radical view of manorial separation. As a matter of fact this separation was never completely realized, and even at the time of the greatest prevalence of feudalism the little sovereigns of France were combined into a loose federation of inde- pendent fiefs. Still the problem was not a mere play of words and it took a long time for the kings of France to break in the local potentates. The institutional expression of this aspect of feudalism in the life of the seigneurie was the jurisdiction combined with the latter. The principal origin of the jurisdiction was the dismemberment of royal justice, the acquisition by certain landowners of the right of holding royal pleas. The assumption of authority over public tribunals of any kind was naturally considered as equivalent to such a transmission of royal right. But it was assumed by French feudal law that in all cases where land was granted by a seigneur in subinfeudation the recipients would be bound to appear as members of a court of tenants for the settlement of conflicts in regard to the land. There was also the extension of the patrimonial justice of a person over his serfs and personal dependents to the classes of free and half-free population connected with the seigneurie in one way or another. There arose in consequence of this assumption of jurisdiction a most bewildering confusion of tribunals and judicial rights. It happened sometimes that the question as to who should be judge in some particular contest was decided by matter-of-fact seizure-the holder of pleas who was the first on the spot to proclaim himself judge in a case was deemed entitled to jurisdiction. In other cases one seigneur held the pleas in a certain place for six days in the week, while some competitor of his possessed jurisdiction during the seventh.
The economic fabric of the French seigneurie varied greatly accord- ing to localities. In the north of France it was very much like that of the English manor, which derived from it. The capital messuage or castle, and the home-farm of the lord, were surrounded by dependent holdings, paying rent, and villein tenements burdened with services. Between these tenancies there were various ties of neighborhood and Bronx-9
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economic solidarity, recalling the open field cultivation in England and Germany. When the harvest was removed from the open strips they returned to a stage of undivided pasture in which the householders of the village exercised rights of common with their cattle. Wild pastures and woods were used more or less in the same fashion as in England. The social relations between the manorial lord and his subjects were marked by various forms of the exploitation of the latter by the former. Apart from jurisdictional profits, rents and agricultural services, dues of all kinds were exacted from the rural population. Some of these dues have to be traced to servile origin, although they were evidently gradually extended to groups of people who were not descended from downright serfs but had lapsed into a state of consider- able subjection. The main morte of rustic tenants meant that they had no goods of their own, but held movable property on sufferance without the right of passing it on to their successors. The formariage cor- responded to the English merchetum, and was exacted from rustics on the marriage of their daughters. Although this payment assumed very different shapes, and sometimes only appeared in case consorts belonged to different lords, it was considered a badge of serfdom. As a person wielding political authority, a kind of sovereignty, the lord enjoyed divers rights which are commonly attributed to the state-the right of coining money, of levying direct taxes and toll, and of instituting monopolies. These latter were of common occurrence and might take the shape for instance of forcing the inhabitants to make use of the lord's mill, or of his oven, or of his bull.
Manors in England-In England the manor consisted partly of the houses of the inhabitants more or less closely clustered together and surrounded by arable land divided into large fields, two or three in number. The condition of the inhabitants of such a manor was com- plex. At the head of the community came the lord of the manor, with his hall, court, or manor-house, and the land immediately about it, and his demsene both in the fields and in the meadow land. Part of his demsene would be granted out to free tenants to hold at a rent or by military or other service; part would be in the lord's own hands, or cultivated by him. Below the lord and the free tenants came the villeins, natives, bondmen, or holders of virgates or yard lands, each holding a house, a fixed number of acre strips, a share of the meadow, and of the profits of the waste. In any one manor the holdings of all the villeins were equal. Normally the holder of a virgate was unfree ; he had no rights in the eye of the law against his lord, who was protected from all suits by the exceptio ville nagii. He could not without leave quit the manor, and could be reclaimed by process of law if he
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did. The strict contention of the law deprived him of all right to hold property ; and in many cases he was subject to certain degrading incidents, such as merchet (merchetum), a payment due to the lord upon the marriage of his daughter, which was regarded as a special mark of unfree condition. The hardship of his position lay in the services due from him. As a rule a villein paid for his holding in money, in labor, and in kind. The cotters were the poor of the manor, who held a cottage and garden, or perhaps one acre or a half acre in the fields. They were unfree in condition, and in most manors their services were modelled upon those of the villeins. From their ranks were usually drawn the shepherd, the bee-keeper, and other minor officials of the manor.
The most complicated structure in the system was the manor court. The complication was indeed partly the work of lawyers interpreting institutions they did not understand by formulae not adapted to describe them. But beyond this there remain the facts that the court was the meeting point of the lord and the tenants both free and unfree, that any question touching on the power and constitution of the court was bound to affect the interests of the lord and the tenants, and that there was no external power capable of settling such questions as did arise. In the beginning the manor court exercised its criminal, civil or manorial jurisdiction as one court; its name might differ, the parties before it might be free or unfree, but the court was the same. The court leet, the court baron, and the court customary were differentia- tions of a later date. The president of the court was the lord's steward ; the bailiff was the lord's representative and the public prosecutor; and the tenants of the manor, both free and unfree, attended at the court and gave judgment in the cases brought before it. To modern ears the constitution sounds unfamiliar. The president of the court settled its procedure, carried it out, and gave the final sentence, but over the law of the court he had no power. All that is comprised in the word "judgment" was settled by the body of tenants present at the court. This attendance was indeed compulsory and absence subjected to a fine any tenant owing and refusing the service known as "suit of court." It might be asked who in these courts settled questions of fact. The answer must be that disputed questions of fact could only be settled in one way, by ordeal; and that in most manorial courts the method em- ployed was the wager of law. The business of the court was criminal, manorial, and civil. Its powers under the first head depended on the franchises enjoyed by the lord in the particular manor; for the most part only petty offences were triable, such as small thefts, breaches of the assize of bread and ale, assaults, and the like; except under special
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conditions the justice of great offenses remained in the king. But offenses against the custom of the manor, such as bad ploughing, im- proper taking of wood from the lord's woods, and the like, were of course the staple criminal business of the court. Under the head of manorial business the court dealt with the choice of the manorial officers, and had some power of making regulations for the management of the manor; but its most important function was the recording of the surrenders and admittances of the villein tenants. It is to be noted that the conveyance of a villein's holding was affected by the vendor surrendering his land to the lord, who thereupon admitted the purchaser to the holding. The history of the decay of the manorial jurisdiction in England has not yet been written. On the one hand were the king's courts, with new and improved processes of law; on the other hand the gradual disintegration which marks the history of the manor in the later medieval period. The criminal jurisdiction was the first to dis- appear, and was closely followed by the civil jurisdiction over the free tenants.
The Manor in America-The transition from this European idea of the manor to its American form in historic reality may perhaps best be indicated by citing some clauses out of the petition which the Walloons, who were the first settlers of New Netherland, but who in the beginning proposed making the voyage to Virginia, directed through Sir Dudley Carleton, British ambassador at The Hague, to the English king, and setting forth the terms and conditions under which they desired to undertake the enterprise. The petition contained seven articles specifying the details of the plan under which they desired to enter upon the work of colonization. In this document appears the earliest mention of the land tenure which the first colonists of New York asked for. It was that with which they were familiar and which they understood, and under which they had lived, and it was based on fealty, homage, and manorial rights, once fixed by Roman law but modified by the passage of time, and under which the West India Company was established in the new land as the embodiment of its government, and which governed it till the arrival of the English in 1664. The fifth and sixth articles of the petition which was couched in French, ran something as follows :
VI. Whether he (His Britannic Majesty) would grant them a township or territory, in the radius of eight English miles, or say, sixteen miles in diameter, which they might improve as fields, meadows, vineyards, and for other uses; which territory, whether conjointly or severally, they would hold from his Majesty upon fealty and homage; no others being allowed to dwell within the bounds of the said lands unless they shall have taken letters of citizenship; in which territory they would reserve to themselves inferior manorial rights; and whether it might
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be permitted to those of their number who are entitled to maintain the rank of noblemen, to declare themselves such.
VII. Whether they would be permitted in the said lands to hunt all game whether furred or feathered, to fish in the sea and the rivers, to cut heavy timber, as well for ship building as for commerce, at their own will; in a word, whether they could make use of all things either above or beneath the ground, at their own pleasure and will, the royal rights reserved; and whether they could dispose of all things in trade with such persons as may be permitted them. Which provi- sions would extend only to said families and those belonging to them, without admitting those who might come afterwards to the said territory to avail them- selves of the same, except so far as they might of their own power, grant this to them, and not beyond, unless his said Majesty should make a new grant to them.
Here we have the terms under which the earliest colonists began the actual settlement of the region known as New York, terms which they carried out, a little modified by the Dutch manorial system and rule. The West India Company by its charter was obliged to take measures for the development of the new province and the increase of its population. Militating against this was the great profit of the fur trade, which absorbed the general attention, and in addition there was the general apathy in Holland in respect to emigration, for the Dutch farmers and laborers were of opinion that they could do just as well at home as abroad and in many other respects would be better off also. "The colonizing such wild and uncultivated countries demands more inhabitants than we can well supply" says a report of the Assembly of XIX to the States-General in 1629; "not so much through lack of population, in which our provinces abound, as from the fact, that all who are inclined to do any sort of work here, procure enough to eat without any trouble; and are therefore unwilling to go far from home on an uncertainty." It was the recognition of facts such as these that brought about the plan giving special privileges, powers, and exemp- tions, to such members of the West India Company as would, at their own expense and risk, send out expeditions and establish separate and distinct plantations in any part of New Netherland, outside of Man- hattan Island. It was thus that the Dutch manorial system was in- troduced into what is now The Bronx and other places, a system that received its final elaboration and modification in June, 1629, when it was approved and adopted by the Assembly of the XIX, and ratified and confirmed by their High Mightinesses, the States-General. The plan or charter was entitled :
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