276 Broughton Gifford. 
is less probable) from the tenure under which they held their land, 
viz. on condition of supplying the board or table of the lord with 
meat, corn, fowls, fish, and whatever might be required, and they 
were able to procure. The distinction which one would like on 
etymological reasons to make between the villani and the bordarii 
would be, that the former were so attached to the vil/a or farm as 
to lodge and board with the farmer, according to a practise com- 
mon with unmarried men till a recent period in England and now 
existing in Cumberland, while the latter had a bord or cottage of 
their own, where they and their families resided. Domesday book 
says nothing of houses, and therefore does not prove or disprove 
this conjecture. I should offer it with the more confidence, if land 
were generally restricted to the bordarii (as in the account of this 
Parish), because the occupation of land seems to imply a dwelling; 
but there are many instances of villani holding land. 
I venture to give to both these classes the name of cottyer, a 
word similarly derived, and whose condition is in Ireland, in some 
of the more happy incidents, not unlike. 
The lot of the servi was more hard, yet neither must they be 
confounded with personal bondsmen or slaves in our sense of the 
word. They could not be removed from the soil; but probably 
they could from their small tenements, in respect of which and of 
labour, they might have been at the arbitrary disposal of the lord, 
who had also over them in some manors a power of life and death, 
which he did not possess over the villains and bordsmen. They 
were as the native Russian serfs, and not as the African slaves of 
the American continent. Their case may seem to us lamentable, 
but happiness is so much a relative term, that the poet might sing 
of them, as of our independent ploughmen, 
‘‘ Jocund they drove the team afield.” 
Indeed some good natured lords are recorded as providing not only 
food, but even music to solace the toils of their labourers.1 Of 
1 Blackstone, B. 2. Chap. 6., says the usage is the same in the Highlands 
of Scotland. The new Statistical account of Scotland, 1835, vol. xix. p. 
384, shows that the practise is recent, and that the motive may have been to 
rouse emulation as well as give pleasure. ‘‘A family on the Cupar Grange 
estate, which has been there more than a century, used to keep a piper, to play 
