Cornbote: A Feudal Custom and Faulkner's "Barn Burning"

CORNBOTE: A FEUDAL CUSTOM AND FAULKNER'S "RARN RURNING" Brenda Eve Sartoris Mississippi State University In William Faulkner's often anthologized short story "Barn Burning," the conflict between Abner Snopes and the social order of the Old South is delineated in two courtroom scenes, one opening the story and the other precipitating the final crisis. Snopes' offense in each case and the fine imposed in the second suggest the feudal custom of combóte. The Middle English Dictionary offers two definitions of combóte, both of which are useful in establishing the similarities between the feudal system of villenage and the sharecropping arrangements typical of the Southern agrarian economy in the late nineteenth century. The first definition is "a manorial rent paid in sheaves of grain, in the service of carting grain, or in money commutation."1 In describing English village life in the thirteenth century, George C. Homans points out that the manner in which such rents were paid on some estates distinguished freeholders from villeins, the former holding the right to pay the rent in money and escape some of the services to the lord, while the villein was bound to perform certain services.2 The social significance of this distinction is made clear by manorial court rolls that record fines being assessed those who libeled freeholders by publicly referring to them as villeins or serfs. Regardless of the form payment took, however, it continued to be termed, combóte, even after the move to a moneyed economy. The OED records the use of the term as late as the seventeenth century, particularly in Scotland. Although the details of the sharecropping arrangement between Snopes and Major de Spain are not spelled out by Faulkner in the story, two points are clear. First, Snopes' justification of his ill-fated visit to the plantation house on the grounds that he wants to have a "word with the man that aims to begin to-morrow owning me body and soul for the next eight months"3 indicates his recognition that his contract with de Spain places him in a condition akin to villenage. Moreover, when Major de Spain demands satisfaction for the rug Snopes has ruined, it is obvious that the contract specifies rent in terms of sheaves of grain: "I'm going to charge you," says de Spain, "twenty bushels of corn against your crop. I'll add it in your contract and when you come to the commissary you can sign it" (p. 16). The significance of such a custom lies in the effect on the relationship between landlord and tenant. Homans argues that the reciprocity involved in the feudal system of bestowing lands in return for certain 92Notes goods and services contributed in principle as well as in fact to a sense of community that in turn stemmed from the recognition of the common interests of landlord and peasant. The commutation of such rents to money payments ultimately served to undermine that sense of community . But Homans goes on to point out that non-economic factors were as important as economic considerations in cementing this bond. There was much "mutual loyalty and understanding" between the two parties: "The landlord was not simply a landlord. He was in charge of local government and in some measure responsible for the general wellbeing of the people in his neighborhood."4 That this same sense of mutual responsibility inhered in the Southern agrarian system has been suggested by a number of American social historians; for example, in The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash discusses the effects of the Southern aristocracy's sense of honor: As part and parcel of their spirit they developed a real and often tremendous sense of obligation ... to the common whites about them—a feeling that they were bound to go beyond the kindness of the old backcountry, to set them an impeccable example of conduct and sentiment, to advise them correctly, to get them out of trouble when they got in, to hold them up to the highest possible moral and intellectual level in this world, and somehow to get them through the gates of jasper at last.5 This sense of responsibility is reflected...