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as a status.

to be the basis of the manorial system, the legal aspect of Survival of serfdom lost in a large measure its practical importance. villeinage Technically the serf obtained emancipation only by formal manumission, but the fundamental cause of the disappearance of bondage was not legal but economic. Emancipation from labour service brought in its wake legal security and an improved status, and commutation by destroying the economic foundations of villeinage became a powerful lever in the enfranchisement of the English peasantry. It transformed the relations between the lord and his tenants, substituted contract for custom, and merged the villein into the freeman. The distinctive marks of bondage were obliterated as the result of a gradual economic revolution which turned labour dues into money rents. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the break-up of manorial husbandry and the commutation of personal service straightway conferred rights of freedom upon the serf; legally his status remained unchanged. Personal serfdom survived the decay of economic serfdom, and was not destroyed either by the Black Death or the Peasants' Revolt. Nevertheless bondage gradually disappeared and ceased to be numbered, both in name and in fact, among the social institutions of England. In the first place the disorder produced by the great plague favoured the assertion of freedom, and the flight of the villeins at this period, and subsequently, dispersed large numbers of the manorial population1. In this way there was to all appearance a substantial decrease in the number of bondmen during the fourteenth century. In the second place the dissolution of the manorial system relaxed the lord's grasp on his subjects, afforded them immunity from control, and so enlarged the avenues of escape. Henceforth, even in the absence of legal forms, it was rendered comparatively easy to shake off the shackles of bondage and obtain freedom by prescription. The memory of their original servitude died out when labour services, the outward sign and primary purpose of their subjection, were no longer exacted from them. It would be difficult to prove their servile status, since the mortality of the Black Death had 1 Supra, p. 93.

Personal serfdom

in the sixteenth century.

caused a breach of continuity in the life of the manor, in the evidence of its rolls and the testimony of its officials.

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None the less serfdom lasted through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and while the mass of customary tenants obtained emancipation, there were still large numbers of bondmen in existence under the Tudors scattered over many counties. Some Elizabethan writers have denied this: "so few there be", wrote Sir Thomas Smith1, that it is not almost worth the speaking". But sixty years earlier Fitzherbert had written in a different strain 2: "In some places the bondmen continue as yet, the which me seemeth is the greatest inconvenience that now is suffered by the law". The House of Lords in 1537 rejected a bill for the manumission of villeins 3, an indication that the plea advanced by the insurgents in 1549 was no idle utterance: "We pray that all bondmen may be made free" 4. There is documentary evidence, surveys and court rolls and manumissions, in proof of sixteenth-century villeinage. It has been reckoned that they formed about I per cent. of the whole population, and this estimate would imply that many thousands still remained in a condition of personal subjection. Henry VII. manumitted a number of villeins on his estates (1485), "because in the beginning nature made all men free, and afterwards the law of nations reduced some under the yoke of servitude". In 1500 there were still eight bond families on the manor of Forncett; in 1550 the number had dwindled to three, and by 1575 serfdom was here extinct?. Nor was the survival of villeinage a mere legal fiction, as is sometimes thought, devoid of all practical signi1 De Republica Anglorum (written in 1583), ed. L. Alston (1906), 131. Surveyinge (ed. 1539), c. xiii. p. 31.

5

3 A. Savine, "Bondmen under the Tudors ", in Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. N.S. xvii. 239.

4 F. W. Russell, Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk (1859), 51.

"

5 Savine, op. cit. 284. See also H. E. Malden, Bondmen in Surrey under the Tudors", in Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. N.S. xix. 305.

• The Reign of Henry VII. from Contemporary Sources (ed. A. F. Pollard, 1914), ii. 234. The bishop of Chichester manumitted bondmen in 1522: Hist. MSS. Comm. Various Collections, i. 194.

Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. N.S. xiv. 131, 132, 140.

8 It is far from being the case that manumission "meant only the relief of the bondmen from an opprobrious appellation": Hone, The Manor and Manorial Records, 60.

ficance. The peculiarity of the villein's condition consisted no longer in the obligation to enforced labour, but in the liability to be tallaged arbitrarily at the lord's will, and to pay certain fines and dues from which freemen were exempted. A bondman of Castle Combe1, William Heyne, who had accumulated considerable wealth as a clothier, was forced to pay fines for marrying his daughters, and after his death heavy exactions were repeatedly extorted from his widow before she was allowed to retain undisturbed possession of his goods. Altogether his family was mulcted of over two hundred and forty pounds within a generation; and from another the earl of Bath 2 seized goods worth four hundred pounds. The bondmen were often in fact men of substantial position who were too wealthy to be allowed manumission. A mayor of Bristol was claimed as a serf, and in 1586 the privy council intervened on his behalf. A letter was sent to Lord Strafford "that his lordship forbear to offer any violence or other molestation unto R. Cole, mayor of the city of Bristol, and T. Cole his brother, by seeking to disturb them in their trade and to seize their bodies upon pretence of challenging them to be his lordship's bondmen, seeing they offer to answer his lordship in law, and that their lordships think it requisite that a principal officer of such a place and his brother, having been both themselves and their ancestors heretofore reputed freemen, should not be so hardly dealt with upon any suspicion "3. Manumission especially was a source of profit, and the heavy price sometimes paid for emancipation would seem to show that serfdom was still attended by serious disabilities, immunity from which was worth considerable sacrifice. One of the bondmen on Forncett manor appears to have paid no less than a hundred and twenty pounds for manumission, and Elizabeth granted patents to her courtiers empowering them to enfranchise a number of villeins on the Crown lands as a means of raising

1 G. Poulett Scrope, History of Castle Combe (1852), 223 (temp. Hen. VI.). 2 Select Cases in the Court of Requests, 49; cf. ibid. 42.

3 Savine, op. cit. 261.

4 Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. N.S. xiv. 134.

money 1. Personal serfdom had thus survived only as an instrument of extortion. It had lost all economic significance the moment it ceased to be the basis of compulsory labour and the keystone of mediaeval husbandry.

1 I. S. Leadam, “ The Last Days of Bondage in England ", in Law Quarterly Review, ix. 357.

CHAPTER IV

THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION

DURING the two hundred years that lie between the end of The growth the thirteenth and the opening of the sixteenth century farms. of large English rural society, even apart from the disintegration of the manor, had not stood still. One great change was slowly breaking down the rigid uniformity of the old agrarian arrangements and transforming the characteristic features of the open field system of husbandry. This was the con- ✔ centration of landed property in the hands of fewer persons. In the thirteenth century the typical peasant holding had been the yardland of thirty acres, and the pressure of manorial obligations had combined with economic forces to maintain outwardly intact the general regularity of the virgate system. But after the Black Death the conservatism of manorial life was gradually relaxed by a growing economic individualism which undermined the very basis of the village community, destroying the primitive equality of the original shareholders in the common fields. One or two examples will serve to illustrate the new economic tendencies, which were already bringing about a different order of society long before they were enormously accelerated by the social upheaval of the sixteenth century. In 1452 the manor of Malden in Surrey 1 included one tenant with twenty-four acres, three with sixteen, two with fifteen, and others with ten, eight, six, five, and two acres respectively. These holdings show traces of the original tenement of sixteen acres, which was now fast disappearing under the disintegrating influences of an incipient capitalism. Again in 1275 Aspley Guise 2 contained forty customary tenants each 1 Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 68. 2 Ibid. 73.

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