221] THE FERTILITY OF THE COMMON FIELDS 65 



the chief factor in the commutation movement to have been 

 the desire of prosperous villains to rid themselves of the 

 degrading marks of serfdom. Vinogradoff, for instance, 

 in his preface to the monograph from which most of the 

 foregoing illustrations have been drawn, has nothing at all 

 to say of the reduction of rent and the poverty of the tenants 

 when he is speaking of the various circumstances attending 

 the introduction of money payments. 



In the particular case under discussion the cultural policy of 

 William of Wykeham may have suggested arrangements in 

 commutation of labour services and rents in kind. In other 

 cases similar results were connected with war expenditures 

 and town life. In so far the initiative in selling services came 

 from the class of landowners. But there were powerful ten- 

 dencies at work in the life of the peasants which made for the 

 same result. The most comprehensive of these tendencies was 

 connected, it seems to me, with the accumulation of capital 

 in the hands of the villains under a system of customary dues. 

 When rents and services became settled and lost their elasticity, 

 roughly speaking, in the course of the twelfth, thirteenth, and 

 fourteenth centuries, the surplus of profits from agriculture 

 was bound to collect in the hands of those who received them 

 directly from the soil, and it was natural for these first receivers 

 to turn the proceeds primarily towards an improvement of their 

 social condition ; the redemption of irksome services was a con- 

 spicuous manifestation of this policy.^ 



This paragraph contains several suggestions which are 

 shown to be misleading by a study of the extracts from the 

 original sources embodied in the essay of whose preface it 

 forms a part. It is true that the cultural policy of William 

 of Wykeham was an extravagant one, and that he was in 

 need of money when the system of tenure was being revolu- 



^ Levett and Ballard, op. cit., p. v. 



