4 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



earlier time, but they had been graduallj emaacipated, and were, 

 of cour.-e, one element of the class of cottagers. Another element 

 was the poorer or more shiftless members of the village com- 

 munity ; however low they might sink, so long as they retained, 

 by prescriptive right, a shard in the mark, they were villant, or 

 customary tenants ; if they lost this, and were dependent upon 

 the lord for grants of land, they were cottagers, tenants at will. 



Personal status and tenure of land are two points of view from 

 which every class of persons in the middle ages must be regarded. 

 In treating of the changes in landed property, I have partly antici- 

 pated the companion topic of personal status. While the hide 

 was subdivided, and while many members of the community were 

 losing their share altogether, a parallel process was going on, by 

 which the entire body of free villagers, villani, were transformed 

 into serfs. And side by side with this was a process familiar to 

 all students of social history — the converse process, by which 

 the slaves were elevated in position and became personally free, 

 while still held to obligatory labor. The common freemen, by 

 a process of degradation, and the slaves, by a process of eleva- 

 tion, met on the common ground of serfdom, and were distin- 

 guished from one another, not by any difference in personal status, 

 but by their relation to the land. The common freemen, the 

 villani, were now villeins regardant ; the landless freemen and the 

 slaves were villeins in gross, or serfs proper. For it should be noted 

 that the distinction made by modern law writers between villeins 

 regardant and villeins in gross is not recognized by the law writers of 

 the time, and must be considered as not at all a difference in per- 

 sonal rights, but in right to the land. Quicumque servus est, says 

 rieta,* ita est servus sicut alius, nee plus nee minus. The higher 

 class were attached to the soil simply because they had a prescrip- 

 tive and inalienable right to the soil ; the lower class could be 

 transferred from hand to hand or estate to estate like slaves, 

 simply because their obligation to labor was not joined with a 

 permanent right to a definite estate of land. 



Therefore, we have a clue to start with — the two fold origin of 



1 Book I. 3. 3. 



