70 



So absolute was their dependence, that it was held, if a lord 

 brought a civil action against his serf, that he acknowledged 

 his liberty by the very act, and that the serf was thenceforward 

 free for ever. Madox has quoted some instances, most of them 

 indeed undated, in which the sale of villains is apparently 

 contained. All antiquaries conclude, that in the early period 

 of English history, certainly up to the time of the riots at 

 Blackheath, the villain had no legal rights and no property. 



I do not doubt that the social state of villenage existed, and 

 that at some time or the other, in the days of the earlier 

 Norman kings, it implied absolute dependence on the will of 

 the lord, and a negation of all rights in land and chattels. 

 The fact, however, that the law books insist on the degraded 

 state of the villain, would not, I think, be quite convincing, 

 because it is a natural tendency of legal pedantry to speak of 

 decaying or even extinct institutions as though they still had 

 a vitality and vigour. For though law may be guided by 

 practice, it is founded on custom or statute, and both these 

 are theoretically binding, though really inoperative, long after 

 a different rule has prevailed in practice. Anything like the 

 extreme theory of villenage was, I am convinced, extinct before 

 the close of the thirteenth century. 



The bailiffs' accounts, from which,, as a rule, my facts have 

 been gathered, are the schedules of most of the receipts, which 

 were carried to the credit of the feudal lords. Among them 

 are found the items gathered from the exercise of manorial 

 rights ; that is, from those privileges or perquisites which, 

 paid or rendered by all the tenants of the manor, would have 

 been especially due from those who held simply at the discre- 

 tion of the lord, and had no legal or perhaps equitable right 

 in themselves, or their families, or their property. In fact, 

 very few of the possible profits of the estate are omitted from 

 these accounts. The most important of the omissions are those 

 of the sales of wool, which, for reasons to be specified hereafter, 

 were frequently transferred to another account. 



But in the many thousand accounts which I have investi- 



