hard straits, as to serve some ale to the labourers to keep them in good humour. In this way the demesne farm throve as a kind of huge parasitical growth by drawing on the strength of the tenantry.
Let us now turn to the second constitutive element of the manor, to what we have called its social aspect in distinction to the economic and to the political aspects. From the social point of view the manor is a combination of classes, and the three main classes are to be found on its soil: the villeins, or as they are sometimes called the customary tenants, the freeholders or free tenants, and the officials and servants of the lord.
The villeins are in the majority. They come from people whose position was by no means uniform. Some of them are the offspring of slaves, some of free men who have lapsed into serfdom through crime or inability to provide the means of existence. Some claim to descend from the ceorls of Saxon times, a class of free peasants who were gradually crushed down to rural servitude. Be that as it may, the distinctive features of villeinage are derived from all its original sources and are blended to form a condition which is neither slavery nor self-incurred serfdom nor the subjection of free peasants to their rulers. Three main traits seem especially characteristic of manorial villeinage: the performance of rural services, the inability to claim and defend civil rights against the lord, and the recognition of villeins as free men in all matters concerning the political and criminal law of the realm. Each of these traits deserves some special notice.
The villein is primarily a man obliged to perform rural work for his lord. Every person in the medieval social scheme is bound to perform some kind of work, every one holds by some kind of service or appears as a follower of one who holds by some service. The Church holds some of her lands in return for her obligation to pray and to minister to spiritual needs. The knights and serjeants hold theirs by military service of different kinds. The burgesses and socagers hold in the main by paying rents, by rent service. The villein has to perform agricultural services to his lord. Some such agricultural services may be linked to the tenure of other classes, to the tenure of socagers, burgesses, and even military tenants, but the characteristic week work was primarily imposed on the villeins, and though they sometimes succeeded in getting rid of it by commuting it for money payments, these modifications of their status were considered as secondary and exceptional, and generally some traces of the original obligations of agricultural service were left: even privileged villeins had to serve their lord as reeves or rural stewards, had to send their sheep to the lord's fold, had to appear at the bidding of manorial officers to perform one or the other kind of work in the field. The villein was emphatically a man who held by the fork and the flail.
In the early days of feudalism agricultural service must have decided
