26o History of the English Landed Interest. 



out of the irresponsible unit of a servile class there arose the 

 British farmer, in whose character are exaggerated most of the 

 virtues and some of the weaknesses of this stubborn self-assert- 

 ing Anglo-Saxon race. And yet, despite the assumptions of 

 mediaeval lawyers, the Englishman had never degenerated into 

 actual slaver}'. He might have been called a chattel of his 

 lord, but no one knew better than the latter how little the 

 name suited his real position on the manor. He clung to the 

 ancient privileges of a tribal economy, and sustained the rights 

 of a free community amidst all the arbitrary innovations of the 

 overlord. Beyond the revolutionary changes brought about 

 by the introduction of the manorial system there was a fixed 

 line, to transgress which by either party without a quid jjro 

 quo was impossible. The expenditure of seignorial capital in 

 improving the manorial lands, or supplying the manorial farm- 

 ing stock, purchased the labour services of the peasants, and 

 since those services represented the rents of the land and were 

 afterwards commuted at their fair value in money, it is ques- 

 tionable whether the difference between the villein of the 

 fifteenth century and the tenant farmer of the nineteenth was 

 so very great after all. Besides the ministeriales or manorial 

 officials, there were the village representatives, and the Court 

 Leet protected the people's rights in the same way as the Court 

 Baron protected those of the lord. It is not therefore hard to 

 see in this survival of a communal polity the germ of that 

 pQpiilar_mdependence which eventually shook the English 

 constitution to its very foundations. 



