THEIR CONDITION IN 1086 153 



of the slave received only 40^. ; and there is no evidence in 

 Domesday Book to show that even after the Conquest the 

 cottager had ceased to be a freeman. 



The same document draws a further distinction between 

 the cottager and the gebur. The latter was provided with 

 oxen, and was liable to perform ploughing service for his 

 lord ; the former had no oxen provided for him, and escaped 

 all liability to plough. Domesday Book seems to point to a 

 similar distinction between the villan and the bordar, for, 

 except in a very small number of cases, the holdings of the 

 bordars in Middlesex are expressed in terms of acres and not 

 of virgates ; and when we read of two or more bordars hold- 

 ing a virgate, it is possible that the holding of a villan furnish- 

 ing a couple of oxen to the manorial plough had passed to his 

 sons, and remained undivided at his death. 



Another point has still to be noticed in connection with 

 the cottagers. Their 5-acre plots were obviously too small to 

 provide them with all the food they required, even although 

 they were allowed to turn their swine on the waste land of 

 the village. And it has been suggested by Professor 

 Vinogradoff that they were already a wage-earning class, 

 and employed their spare time in working for the lord 

 or the richer villagers, or in the village industries. He 

 sees in them the most advanced class from the economic 

 standpoint. 1 



Some 38 per cent, of the recorded population in 1086 were 

 villans. We have already equated the villan with the gebur, 

 and have seen that he was a freeman occupying land who 

 performed week-work on his lord's demesne farm ; like the 

 freeholders and the sokemen, the villans, too, had their 

 burdens increased by the Conquest. At Leominster there 

 were, in 1066, 238 villans who ploughed and sowed with their 

 own seed 140 acres of wheat, and paid 11 4s. \d. as custom. 

 In 1086 their number was reduced to 223, who ploughed and 



1 G. M., 353. 



