Yillage Community and Serfdom in England. 135 



centuries, as Mr. Seebohm does by aknost certain inference, is a valuable 

 contribution to oiir knowledge; but that serfdom went back with it is an 

 unwarranted inference. The question of freedom or serfdom is the funda- 

 mental one, that of land tenure or husbandry being really but secondary. 

 To this fundamental question of status, therefore, we will now apply our- 

 selves, leaving that of land occupation aside for the present. 



At this point it must be conceded, as I have said before, that the exist- 

 ence of a large body of free peasants in the Germanic nations of the continent, 

 which I consider to be fully proved, does not necessarily prove the existence 

 of the same class in England. The Angles and Saxons settled forcibly and 

 very slowly in Britain, and it is not in itself impossible that the whole body 

 of the Conquerors became a landed aristocracy in their new home, estab- 

 lishing such a system of manors, with a population of serfs upon them, as 

 we find in later centuries. This is Mr. Seebohm's view. But the probability 

 is the other way. The Angles and Saxons did not enter Britain as the Nor- 

 mans did afterwards, as a handful of conquerors, ruling over a subject 

 people. They came as a people, bringing their wives and children with 

 them, not as an army; and with regard to the Angles we are expressly 

 told ^ that they left vacant the country which they had formerly occupied 

 — the entire people having migrated. Moreover the native inhabitants 

 were as a people exterminated; in the eastern parts of the island their lan- 

 guage, their religion, and so, far as we can judge, their institutions and 

 customs disappeared. If the invaders established a system of serfdom in 

 Britain, they must have brought the serfs with them, otherwise the servile 

 population would liave hadtlie preponderence of numbers, and the resulting 

 community would have been, as in the case of the Normans and the Franks, 

 the native poiDulation with an admixture of the conquerors, instead of — as 

 the language shows to have been the case — the conquering population M-ith 

 an admixture of natives. Now the Germans had in their native land a 

 class of serfs called lidi or lazzi, and the Anglo-Saxon laws mention a similar 

 class called laet, whom we must supjjose to have been the serfs {lidi), brought 

 with them by the invaders. These laet, the serfs of the Anglo-Saxon 

 period, Mr. Seebohm suggests (p. 175), may have been identical with the 

 villani, who were the serfs of the later middle ages. This cannot, however, 

 be the case, as the villani are invariably identified with a quite different 

 class, the ceorls. 



This brings us to the most fundamental question in tlie subject under 

 consideration: Were the ceorls of the early period a free or a servile class? 

 Two things are entirely certain: first, that the Anglo-Saxon ceorls weve the 

 villani of tlie Latin documents; secondly that the villani of the later mid- 

 dle ages were serfs. The point at issue is whether these ceorls were origin- 

 ally serfs, as Mr. Seebohm's theory would require, or became serfs by a 

 gradual process of deterioration, as the common theory holds. I shall en- 



' de ilia patria quae Anguhis dicihtr, et ab eo tempore usque hodie desertus inter pro- 

 vincias Jutorum et Saxonum erhibetur. Beda. Hist. Eccl., i, 15. 



