IT THE GREAT PLAGUE AND ITS RESULTS 21 



have to do to-morrow.' He must grind his corn at the 

 lord's mill and pay dues; he must pen his sheep on the 

 lord's fold to manure it; he must keep his buildings in 

 repair and his ditches clean ; he pays numerous little dues 

 in kind or money. Lastly villein tenure, unless it was on 

 ancient demesne (a manor which had been in the king's 

 hand ' when Edward the Confessor was alive and dead ', that 

 is in the first year of Will. I), is not protected by the king's 

 court, while on his death his lord can admit whom he likes, 

 and if his son is admitted he must pay a heriot. 



Such was the legal position of the villein whether by 

 status (blood) or by tenure. Yet we must remember that 

 the manor was a juridical unit and had its court. 1 Here 

 no doubt the lord or his steward presided. We might 

 therefore expect that in and by this court the chains of 

 villeinage would be all the more strongly riveted. The fact 

 was otherwise. Just as the existence of a good system of 

 justice acts as a control on the arbitrariness of a despot, so 

 it was in the case of the manor. In this court all tenants, 

 free and villein, were suitors, and though villeins alone 

 could be forced to serve on the juries, freemen also did. It 

 was under the protection of the court that those customs 

 grew, which served as an effective check on the will of the 

 lord. Custom is the very life of the manor, the court is the 

 protector of that custom, and the suitors were the inter- 

 preters of that custom. ' To fix/ says Professor Maitland, 

 ' in precise terms the degree of binding force that the lords 

 in their thoughts and deeds ascribed to manorial custom 

 would be impossible. Generalizations about the moral senti- 

 ments of a great and heterogeneous class of men are apt to 

 be fallacious, and when a lord pays respect to a custom that 

 cannot be enforced against him by any compulsory legal 



1 N.B. Only one court. The distinction between Court Baron and 

 Court Customary came later. 



