THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 51 



not what the tenant could possibly afford, but what was' customary. 

 And, finally, there was as yet no capital in the modern sense. Of 

 course there was capital in the sense in which the word is defined 

 by the orthodox economists "wealth appropriated to reproductive 

 employment"; for the villeins had ploughs, harrows, oxen, horses. 

 But this is one of the most unreal of economic definitions. As has 

 been well said, "by capital we habitually mean more than this; we 

 mean a store of wealth which can be directed into new and more 

 profitable channels as occasion arises. In this sense the villeins cer- 

 tainly had no capital, and it was only gradually, as commutation 

 began, that the landlord was getting to have something that he could 

 "capitalize," i.e., that he could save with the intention of getting a 

 profit from it by and by. 



Little as the mere substitution of money payments for labour- 

 dues may seem to have affected the relations of classes, it marked the 

 beginning of a change of supreme importance. The German econo- 

 mist Hildebrand was the first to point out that whatever difference 

 there may have been between the economic development of the differ- 

 ent European nations, there is one characteristic common to all, the 

 transition, namely, from payment in kind to payment in money. Such 

 a way of phrasing it, indeed, but very inadequately represents what 

 Hildebrand meant by the transition from N aturalwirthschaft to Geld- 

 wirthschaft the development of a society in which exchange, and 

 the distribution of wealth generally, are effected by means of, or 

 expressed in terms of, a metallic currency, from one in which land was 

 given for service, service given for land, goods exchanged for goods, 

 without the intervention of a currency at all. This change is what 

 we see in all directions during these three centuries. 



In examining the character of the village group, we saw that in 

 the eleventh century, and in most cases long afterward, the lord and 

 his family lived upon the produce of his demesne, cultivated by the 

 customary labour services of his tenants, and the tenants upon the 

 produce of the lands which they held in return for such services; and 

 we have noticed how very gradually these services were exchanged 

 for money, so that the lord should receive a rent with which he might 

 hire wage-labourers. What is true of the several manorial groups 

 was true also of the relations between the tenants and the seigneurial 

 household in those cases where a lord held a great number of manors. 

 The lords received from their bailiffs, not sums of money, but cer* 

 tain amounts of agricultural produce, for the maintenance of their 



