120 THE AGRICULTURAL CLUB. 



them, to some monastery, or one of his thegns, perhaps even to the 

 reeve of the vill himself, for a money payment. In some cases 

 the King has acquired the whole village as his own property. 

 Communal ownership has practically disappeared and feudalism 

 has begun. Every man is " commended " to some lord who, in 

 return for certain services, undertakes to defend him and guar- 

 antee him in his possessions. But within the village the land is 

 not yet the absolute property of the landlord. Apart from the 

 men who, in the words of Domesday, may go with their land 

 to whatever lord they will, the villanus or occupier of land in the 

 village is still a privileged person and cannot be dispossessed. 

 He is bound to the land, but the land is also bound to him. 

 But when we come to ask what rent he pays we find a desperately 

 complicated system. Sometimes he still pays " the food of one 

 night " as formerly ; sometimes he has commuted his payments 

 in kind for labour services on the lord's demesne, sometimes 

 there is a strange mixture of both, with all sorts of other strange 

 duties added. There are, moreover, a certain number of men 

 who hold land in the manor, but outside the limits of the old 

 village, who render " suit and service " in the lord's court, but 

 do not work for him. These men are called freeholders. If 

 we try to find whether the villagers are free or not, we shall 

 have the same difficulty as before, for freedom connoted a very 

 different thing to them from what it means to us. We shall be 

 told, I think, that the men who work are in a servile condition, 

 while those who render other dues are free. Times change and 

 we change with them, and the last thing that we think of labour 

 in return for the right to hold property is that it is servile. 



Let us once more make a jump of three or four hundred years 

 and revisit the villages we have already described. Again the 

 country has changed a good deal and the forests and waste lands 

 have shrunk in extent. The wild oxen have now all gone, except 

 in a few private herds, but the wolves are almost as abundant as 

 ever and do a great deal of damage. The roads are now good for 

 travelling, for there is a vast population always on the move, and 

 commerce is now well established. The result of this is seen in 

 the village. The larger houses are substantially built of timber, 

 and the new stone church that has just been erected is a proof of 

 the increased prosperity of the district. Even the houses of the 

 villagers are larger and more comfortable, though unfortunately 

 many are empty and deserted, for the pestilence which visited the 

 place some years ago swept away many of the inhabitants. Those 

 that were left fell victims to another disease known as " labour 

 unrest," an invariable sign of improving economic conditions, and 

 they exhibited the usual symptoms with which we are all familiar. 

 Unluckily the medical practice of those days was barbarous, and 

 the chief official remedies were blood letting and tight bandaging, 



