By John Watson- Tni/lor. 75 



called cottiers (cotterelli), while as to the servi, in regard to whose 

 status opinions diller, it may he observed that seventy years after 

 Domesday, when lioger de Mandeville granted the manor mill to 

 Montacute Priory, the gift included the man of the mill with all 

 \\\s, \)voi^Qny (iwogeniej , and although this clause does not necessarily 

 imply the power of the lord to make such a grant at this period, 

 it is at least probable that the class to which the miller belonged 

 was at the time of Domesday living under a system that was at 

 best serfdom and may have been actual slavery. 



It is in the same grant that the earliest reference to the manorial 

 economy occurs, in the mention of the payments due from the 

 tenants for the grinding of tlieir corn at the mill, and entries in 

 the court rolls, occurring five hundred years later, show the con- 

 tinuity of custom in this respect, for the members of the court 

 made formal ''presentment" on more than one occasion "that the 

 grist mill in ye parish of Earle Stoke is an accustomed mill and 

 that all the tenants ought to grind their grist at the said mill." 



During the reign of King John the tenants of Erlestoke evidently 

 shared with their lord in the troubles that resulted from the con- 

 tinuous civil wai', and the more so, probably, on account of his 

 fidelity to the unpopular King. In 1215 their cattle were raided 

 by the sheriff but returned to them later by royal command, and 

 the gift of timber in 1220 for rebuilding houses at Erlestoke 

 suggests the fact that these had suffered destruction in some 

 attack on the manor made by a party of those barons who in the 

 reign of Henry III., and after Magna Charta had been obtained, 

 wei'e still in a state of continuous rebellion. 



The first record of any dealings betvVeen the lord and his tenants 

 and of the power of the latter over their holdings occurs in a final 

 concord made in 1227 in the King's court sitting at Wilton, by which 

 Crestiana and Idonea, the daughters of Geoffrey de Cambo,made over 

 their interests in three-and-a-half virgates of land which their father 

 had held, to Matthew Fitz-Herbert and his wife for the sum of 

 twenty shillings.^ It is evident that Geoffrey de Cambo had been 

 a free-tenant, for the record states that half a virgate of the land 



' Feet of Fines, File 6, No. 56. 



