Alterations in the Tenure of Land. 217 



by tlie villeinage. They had to reconcile the new manorial 

 economy to the old polity of a communal sj^stem of land 

 tenure. Glanville, Bracton, Fleta, and others, as VinogradofT 

 has shown, simplified the matter by ignoring popular rights 

 altogether. They refused to see any distinction in the terms 

 servus, villanus, and nativus.^ In their eyes the socman as 

 well as the serf was the chattel of the lord. Accordingly in 

 the Dialogiis de Scaccario the latter is represented as owning 

 not only the chattels - of the ascriptici, but their bodies ; and 

 as late as the reign of James I. we see traces of the same ficti- 

 tious assumption. But though an appeal to the King's Courts 

 against seignorial high-handedness was futile, and the villein 

 could be ousted from his holding at the lord's will, he, as a 

 class, still retained rights wholly irreconcilable with the legal 

 theories of the age. What instance can be cited of a successful 

 seignorial attempt to interfere with, much less to alter, the 

 agricultural system on the servile lands? Even more re- 

 stricted was, as we have shown, seignorial interference with 

 the waste. Nothing could better illustrate the collision of 

 legal theory with popular rights than the story told by Mr. 

 Ashley, in his Economic History^ of the quarrel between the 

 Abbot of Burton and his tenants, which occurred in 1280.^ 

 But still more accentuated is the legal error when we come to 

 examine that peculiar position of the villeins on ancient de- 

 mesne lands, whom Bracton has termed men of free blood 

 holding in villeinage, and whose peculiar privileges Vinogradoff 

 has described in detail. 



Meanwhile an important economic change was taking place 

 over the servile lands which rendered still more untenable the 

 Norman lawyer's position with regard to the villeinage. It has 

 been pointed out that it was the general practice in primitive 

 times for the poorer husbandmen to co-operate in the purchase 

 or manufacture of all but the most trivial of agricultural 

 implements, but that this practice was replaced in the ma- 



' Vinogradoff, Villeinage in Engl., Essay i., p. 44. 



2 An idea possibly originating in tlie custom of the lord to supply tlie 

 villein's farming stock. 



3 Vide bk. i., p. 38. 



