Читать книгу The Industrial History of England - Henry de Beltgens Gibbins - Страница 12

—The chief feature of the social condition of these classes of people was that they were subject to a lord. They each depended upon a superior, and no man could be either lordless or landless; for all persons in villeinage, which included everyone below the lord of the manor, were subject to a master, and bound to the land, except, of course, “free tenants” (p. 15). But even against their lord the villeins had certain rights which had to be recognized. They had, moreover, many comforts and little responsibility, except to pay their dues to their lord. Moreover, it was possible for a villein to purchase a remission of his services, and become a “free tenant.” Or he might become such by residing in a town for a year and a day, and being a member of a town gild, as long as during that period he was unclaimed by his lord. And in course of time the villein’s position came to be this—he owed his lord the customary services (see p. 14) whereby his lord’s land was cultivated; but his lord could not refuse him his customary rights in return—“his house and lands, and rights of wood and hay”—and in relation to everyone but his lord he was a perfectly free citizen. His condition tended to improve, and up to the time of the Great Plague (1348) a large number of villeins had become actually free, having commuted their services {14} for money payments. What these services were we shall now explain. But finally, we wish to point out that the state of villeinage and of serfage was practically the same thing in two aspects; the first implying the fact that the villein was bound to the soil, the second that he was subject to a master. A serf was not a slave; and, as we saw above, slaves became extinct soon after the Norman Conquest.