GENERAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. 8.1 



be sure, was languishing, not it seems from absolute deficiency 

 of resources, but from sheer weariness, possibly from the incapa- 

 city with which it was conducted j but as it languished, public 

 losses and public burdens were lessened. 



The reader will remember that the custom of cultivating the 

 demesne land of the lord by means of a bailiff was gradually 

 abandoned after the great Plague, and by this time (1381) that 

 it was getting more and more infrequent. The narrow margin 

 of profit had been reduced to a minimum, and it was found 

 more advantageous to lease the land, at first, and generally 

 during this time, to a tenant who took the stock at a rent, 

 and under an engagement to replace it according to its esti- 

 mated value at the conclusion of the term of his holding. 

 A very long period had elapsed since the copyholder was a 

 precarious tenant, whose land could be resumed at the lord's 

 will, whose services could be exacted to the fullest limit 

 which his lord's discretion or necessity led him to demand. 

 When customs become extinct they are speedily forgotten, 

 and their revival would be a revolution. In all probability, 

 to judge from the language of such documents as recount 

 the profits of manors in the latter half of the fourteenth 

 century, very few tenants in villenage paid rent by service; 

 almost all paid it by a pecuniary commutation. Was it 

 not an attempt to transmute the pecuniary compensation 

 into the labour-rent, and so revive the tenures and the labour- 

 prices of the earlier part of the century, which led to the 

 insurrection ? 



I am compelled to state what I feel convinced was the 

 fact, in the form of an hypothesis. But I cannot account for 

 the outbreak on any other ground than that of an attempt 

 on the part of the customary tenants to vindicate their right 

 to pecuniary commutation against a threatened invasion of 

 the custom ; and perhaps, when the insurrection seemed likely 

 to be successful, to claim the right of holding land at fixed 

 low rents, quit of the contingency of service, and on the 

 same footing as freeholders in socage. 



G 



