223] ^^^ FERTILITY OF THE COMMON FIELDS 67 



But it is not true that the most comprehensive of these 

 tendencies was the accumulation of capital in the hands of 

 the villains, and their desire to improve their social condi- 

 tion. The immediate affect of the commutation of services 

 and similar changes at this time was to leave their social 

 condition untouched, whatever the final result may have 

 been. These villians did not buy themselves free of the 

 marks of servitude. Their gradual emancipation came for 

 other reasons. At Witney, for example, where the works 

 of all the native tenants had been commuted by 1376, they 

 were still required to perform duties of a servile character : 



they were all to join in haymaking and in washing and shearing 

 the lord's sheep, to pay pannage for their pigs, to take their 

 turn of service as reeve and tithingman, and to carry the lord's 

 victuals and baggage on his departure from Witney as the 

 natives were formerly wont to do.^ 



This example, taken at random, is typical of the continuance 

 of conditions which should make the historian hesitate be- 

 fore adopting the view that the social condition of the peas- 

 ants was improved by the new arrangements made as to the 

 bulk of their services and rents. But more than that, the 

 terms of the new arrangements are not those which would be 

 offered by well-to-do cultivators in whose hands the profits 

 from the soil had accumulated. In all of these cases the 

 new terms were advantageous to the tenants, not to the lord, 

 and advantageous in a strictly pecuniary way. The lord had 

 to grant these terms because the tenants were in the most 

 miserable poverty, and could no longer pay their accustomed 

 rent. 



Neither the Black Death, whose effects were evanescent, 

 nor the desire of prosperous villains to free themselves of the 



1 Levett and Ballard, op. cit., p. 199. 



