the fate of many people who had good claims to rank as free. In a rough way the really important distinction was this: on one side stood people who were bound to feed the rest and were therefore bound to the glebe, on the other those who were free to go wherever they pleased, provided they performed their military or ecclesiastical duties, and paid their rents. But when once the main social cleavage had taken place, the lawyers had to face a vast number of personal claims and disputes, and they gradually worked out a principle which itself became a basis for social distinctions, namely that the villein, the peasant holding by rural work, had no civil claims against his lord. It was convenient to assume that everything a villein possessed was derived from a grant of his lord and liable to be resumed by him, and though this may by no means be true in point of historical fact, it became as good as true because the king's courts declined to examine and decide civil suits of villeins against their lord. Villeins were left unprotected, and this lack of protection gave birth to a series of customary exactions quite apart from the many instances when a lord simply ill-treated the peasants. A villein had to pay a fine on the marriage of his daughter because she was considered the property of the lord, and this fine was materially increased when she married out of the lordship, as the lord lost his bond-woman and her offspring by such a marriage. On the death of a villein his heir could not enter his inheritance without surrendering a valuable horse or ox in recognition of the claims of the lord to the agricultural outfit of the holding.
As a matter of fact the civil disability of villeins did not amount to a general insecurity of their rights of possession. On the contrary, the custom of the manor was elaborately constant and provided for most contingencies of rural life with as much accuracy and nicety of distinction as the law administered in the royal courts. But all these provisions were merely customary rules drawn from facts; they were not binding on the lord, and in one very important respect, the amount and kind of work to be exacted from the peasant, changes and increases occasionally occurred. There was one class of the English peasantry which enjoyed a much better condition, namely the villeins on the so-called ancient demesne of the Crown. In manors which had belonged to the kings before the Conquest and had been granted to subjects after the Conquest, the lords had no right to oust the villagers from their holdings and to increase their services at pleasure, but were bound to follow the customs which held good at the time of the transfer of the estates from the Crown. In such manors a recourse to the rural courts was admitted and the peasants were treated as free people in regard to their tenements and services; their tenure became a species of lease or contract, though burdened with base services. This valuable privilege only emphasised with greater sharpness the rightless condition of the rest of the peasantry.
This rightlessness was, however, restricted to the relations of the
