176 JAMES NEIL, M.A., 
answered somewhat to our small farmers, only that they were 
in abject serfdom, subject to all manner of services, fixed by 
custom in each manor, fines, penalties, and, above all, com- 
pulsory week-work on the lord’s demesne sometimes for as 
much as four days a week. Their normal holding was a 
vergate of 30 acres, or 10 acres in each of the three fields. 
These villein tenants, or virgarii, as they were sometimes 
called, were in each case hereditary tenants for life, their 
holdings passing by the lord’s re-grant from father to son 
by the rule of primogeniture, on payment of the customary 
heriot, or relief, The holding of-a hide or carucate, 120 acres, 
was ordinarily the mark of a free family, But in the survey 
of Thorpe, a manor in Essex, we read of a class of hydarit, 
who “ were probably, as their name implies, groups of villan, 
ville tenants, holding a hide,’ and their services were 
reckoned in a lump, which they appear to have “clubbed as 
it were together to perform.” (Domesday of St. Paul. Camden 
Society, 1858.) 
In most instances in the old rolls we are simply told in the 
case of each of the villein tenants that A.B., or C.D., is the 
holder of a virgate or a half-virgate. A manor is described 
as consisting of so many villani holding so many virgates or 
half-virgates, or else we read that the monks of such and such 
an abbey hold so many virgates, or husband-lands, in the villa, 
or manor, of a given place. The parcels are not described 
nor the boundaries mentioned. An exception to this occurs 
in the Winslow manor rolls in the case of one John Moldeson, 
whose individual holding of a messuage in the village of 
Shipton and of 68 half-acre strips of land scattered all over 
the open fields of the manor of Winslow is given, with the 
furlong, or shot, where each half-acre was situated. Each of 
these strips is further defined as to its boundaries by being 
said to be between the land of A.B. and ©.D., or the land of 
A.B, and E.F., &c. But this, be it remembered, is in the 
middle of the fourteenth century. To putit in Mr. Seebohm’s 
own words, “This villenage of the Winslow tenants was, no 
doubt, in the fourteenth century mild in its character; the 
silent working of economic laws was breaking it up; but it 
was villenage still. It was serfdom, but it was serfdom in 
the last stage of its relaxation and decay.” Exactly so: and 
there seems every reason to believe that for centuries before 
this the villein tenants, holding a virgate or half-virgate in 
the three open fields, were assigned no individual possession 
of any particular strips of ground, but had simply the right 
to till 80 or 15 acres, or thereabouts, as the case might be, in 
