14.8 Wisconsin Academij of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 



there remained very few self-governing townships, composed of free peas- 

 ants.^ I do not consider the king's, eorl's and man's tun of Aethelbirht's 

 Laws, to have been feudalized townships, at least not always or neces- 

 sarily; they appear rather to have been farmsteads. But fifty years later 

 the charters of the Codex Diplontaticus afford ample evidence of towns 

 which were the private property of the King or powerful noblemen, 

 the peasants or ceorls being their tenants and fast becoming their serfs, as 

 I showed in my paper of last year. 



The two-fold process here described, of converting the free townships 

 into manorial estates, and the free peasants into servile tenants upon those 

 estates, was consummated in the complete f eudalization of England which 

 followed the Norman conquest. Nevertheless the town organization was not 

 obhterated, but only obscured. We have seen that it continued to serve as 

 a basis for representation, and we have frequent mention of the town, villa, 

 as the equivalent of the manor. The word villa is used about a dozen times 

 Domesday Book, at least three of these times as equivalent to manor. E. g. 

 (i. f. 199 b.) " Wluuinthe thane held this manor. In the same town Regi- 

 nald holds half a hide of Alberic." [So ii., 31 and 31b.] The Exeter 

 Domesday and the Ely Inquest, documents which appear to be the rough 

 draft from which the great record was made up, often use the word villa 

 where the Exchequer Domesday sajsmaiieriuni, " manor." ' But the two 

 words are not used as equivalent, but rather as describing the same terri- 

 torial area from different points of view. There might have been two 

 manors in the same vill, or lands in the vill while were independent of the 

 manor. Indeed it would naturally be the case that the manor would often 

 vary from the town in respect to metes and bounds, while the parish or 

 ecclesiastical organization would, like the town itself, be an unchangeable 

 district. The manor, being a piece of private property, would be subject to 

 the laws of private property, and would be divided, added to or diminished, 

 through the processes of purchase, sale, inheritance and inter-marriage. So 

 greatly have these processes changed the boundaries of manors, that it is 

 stated that in East Kent there is only one manor co-extensive with the par- 

 ish. (Academy, No. 167). We find, however, instances of this identifica- 

 tion of manor and town as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

 In the " Certificates of Church Goods in Suffolk," in the reign of Edward 

 VI., is mentioned: "Mr. Sakford, lorde and patron of the Towne," evi- 

 dently lord of the manor. In the time of the Civil Wars (1648), the Me- 

 moirs of Col. Hutchinson speak of CromweU having " a design, by insinu- 

 ating himself into Colonel Sau.nders, to flatter him into the sale of a town of 

 his called Ireton." (ii., 137.) 



When the town was feudalized and became a manor, its gemot, or 

 meeting, seems to have become that branch of the manorial court known 



1 For examples, see paper upon "Village communities and serfdom in England." 



2 The Ely Inquest rests upon the evidence, among others, of sex villani uniuscujusque 

 villae. 



