140 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters. 



and that all live by agriculture and hand labor." Melebroc (Millbrook) in 

 the same county the Domesday record (i. 41, b.) gives as being held by 

 villani. Of Ibthorpe we are told: " The people of Ibthorpe are lords of 

 their own manor and to this day exercise their manorial rights."^ It is 

 hard to explain these cases except as original village communities of free 

 peasants, who, in losing the ownership of their land and becoming ten- 

 ants, did not lose their freedom or their rights as a community. 



I have shown that the Anglo-Saxon ceorls, or peasants, were in the sixth 

 and seventh centuries, that is the period directly following theu' migration 

 to England, not serfs but freemen, possessing houses, lands, serfs and slaves 

 of their own; that at the end of the seventh century, the period of the laws of 

 Ine, they are still distinctly recognized as fi'eemen, but as subject to certain 

 exactions and encroachments on the part of the more powerful classes, 

 which were reducing them to a semi-servile condition, in particular encour- 

 aging the practice of commendation, or placing themselves under the pro- 

 tection of a lord, and becoming his " men;" and that in the time of AKred 

 tliis practice of commendation had become universal and obligatory, and 

 their servile condition distinctly recognized. 



In short, the history of the English peasantry in the Anglo-Saxon period, 

 corresponds very closely to that of the same class upon the continent in the 

 same period. In both England and Germany the free peasants appear to 

 have been forced, by the disorders and distresses of society to commend 

 themselves, or seek the protection of men higher in station than themselves, 

 The protection was not granted without some equivalent — service, follow- 

 ing, surrender of land to be given back again as tenure, requirements 

 of labor, becoming more and more onerous as the relation became more 

 and more fixed, until at last they were stripped not only of their pos- 

 sessions, but even of personal freedom, and reduced .to the state of 

 complete serfdom: — not so complete, however, in the case of the Eng- 

 lish peasants, but that the memory of their original freedom was preserved 

 in the principle that it was only in relation to their lords that they were 

 serfs, and that towards all others they were freemen, having weU defined 

 rights before the law, and a recognized place in the constitution. 



1 Antiquary, February, 1888. 



