io6 LAND REFORM 



assumption. The great body of serfs who cultivated 

 their manors were their property, whom they could 

 sell, and over whom they had even the power of life 

 and death. These serfs had no rights against their 

 lords, not even the right to marry or give their 

 children in marriage without their lord's consent. 

 They were often allowed a little land to cultivate, but 

 anything they could save, and all their belongings, 

 as well as themselves, were the property of their 

 lords. 



The villeins — a mild name for slaves — appear to 

 have had some rights, but were bound fast to the 

 manor and could be sold with the land like cattle or 

 any other stock. ^ Besides these, there were the free- 

 men, who held land direct from the king, or from great 

 landlords under special charters or agreements, and 

 subject to personal service, or annual money payments, 

 or both. It was the great object of the nobles to re- 

 duce these freemen to vassalage on the principle which 

 they sought to enforce that " every man must have 

 a lord." Altogether the system was a merciless one, 

 under which the peasantry had neither rest nor hope. 



The " Black Death," ^ a few years before, had swept 



^ It is shown also that they could be sold without the land. Hallam 

 (" Middle Ages," Vol. Ill, p. 263) quotes several instances of villeins sold 

 with their families and chattels, but without land. He also quotes a case 

 where a man defended at law his right to the freehold of land that he 

 held, but he failed because the prosecutor was able to prove that he held 

 the land in villeinage, and the proof consisted in the fact that he — the 

 prosecutor — had himself sold one of the defendant's sisters for four 

 shillings. In a previous reign an ordinance was made " that there should 

 be no more buying and selling of men in England, which was hitherto 

 accustomed as if they had been kine or oxen." But this ordinance was 

 issued through the influence of some of the superior clergy, and was quite 

 disregarded by the manorial magnates. 



- The pestilence recurred in 1361 and again in 1369, but that of 1348 

 is known as the " Black Death." 



