presumption. The clear distinction, drawn by the Courts between tenants in a relation of contract with their lord and tenants in a relation of customary subjection, divided sharply the classes of freeholders and villeins and moulded all the details of their personal position. It was not always easy to make out in particular cases to which of the two great subdivisions a person and a holding belonged, and, as a matter of history, the process of pressing the people into the hard and fast lines of this classification was achieved by disregarding previous and more organic arrangements, but undoubtedly this distinction created a mould, which not only worked powerfully to bring some order into feudal society, but set a definite aim before the very class which was depressed by it; to obtain freedom the villeins must aspire to contractual relations with their lords.
We are now concerned with the period when these aspirations were only more or less indefinite ferments of social progress, and the legal distinction still acted as a firm rule. The freeholders sought and obtained protection for their rights in the royal courts and thereby not only acquired a privileged position in regard to holdings, dues and services, but in a sense, obtained an entirely different footing from the villein and were able to step out of the manorial arrangement, to seek their law outside it. This was undoubtedly the case, and the countless records of law suits between lords and tenants tell us of all the possibilities which such a position opened to the freeholders. But it is necessary to realise the other side of the matter, which we may be apt to disregard if we lay too much stress on the legal standing of freeholders in the King's Courts. In all that touched the life and arrangements of the village community underlying the manor, the freeholders were in scot and in lot with the township and therefore on an equal footing with the villeins. In speaking of the management of open field and waste, of the distribution of arable and meadows, of the practices of enclosure and pasture, etc., we did not make any difference between villeins and freeholders, indeed we have not even mentioned the terms. We have spoken of tenants, of members of the community, of shareholders, and now that we have learnt to fathom the deep legal chasm between the two sections of the tenantry, we still must insist on the fact that both sections were at one in regard to all the rights and duties derived from their agrarian association, appertaining to them as tillers of the soil and as husbands of their homes. Both sections joined to frame the by-laws and to declare the customs which ruled the life of the village and its intricate economic practices. And the freeholders had not only to take part in the management of the community but, of course, to conform to its decisions. They were not free in the sense of being able to use their plots as they liked, to manage their arable and pasture in severalty, to keep up a separate and independent husbandry. If they transgressed against the rules laid down by the community, they
