42 ENGLISH RURAL LIFE 



holds, it will be observed, ten acres in each field. This 

 thirty-acre farm was the normal villein's holding. 



The peasants, whether freemen, villeins or cotters, 



must have felt that the strips of land in the open 



arable fields and the lot meadows were their 



Land tenure O wn, and that the commons, woods and 



and 



the law. wastes belonged to the community, basing 



their claim on ancient custom. The Nor- 

 man lord on the other hand, since his ancestors and 

 their king had conquered the land, claimed that the 

 soil of the whole estate was his, and that, whatever 

 the title of the freemen, the bondsmen, at any rate, had 

 no definite rights, but held their fields, as the phrase 

 ran, 'at the will of the lord.' The difference between 

 the peasantry on the one hand claiming as the de- 

 scendants of the original settlers, and the lords claiming 

 by right of conquest a quarrel inherited in part from 

 Anglo-Saxon times continued through the manorial 

 period and led to much friction. The law, as before 

 explained, recognized the freemen as having a legal 

 title to their land and common rights, but gave the 

 lord a right to enclose woods and wastes not required 

 by the peasantry, a right explained and defined by 

 the Statutes of Merton and Westminster. 1 Further than 

 that the law supported the lord of the manor as against 

 the bondsmen, since until the end of the XlVth century 

 the national courts of justice would not, as before 

 mentioned, interfere to give protection to a bondsman 

 who was being evicted or otherwise evilly treated in 

 matters relating to his land holding by his lord. The 

 bondsman was in the eye of the law the subject of the 

 lord, and so interference was not logical. 2 But, what- 

 1 See Appendix, p. 168. = But see Appendix, p. 163 (B). 



