15'3 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 



was " toivn" —whether free or seignorial — so the cognate word villanus 

 was " townsman " — whether free or serf. It is used regularly as the Latin 

 equivalent of " ceorl," the free peasant of the early period, the semi-servile 

 peasant of the later period, and the villein of the feudal period. When the 

 ceorls lost their ownership of land, and their free status, then- name sinking 

 from the designation of a free yeoman to the opprobrious term " churl; " so 

 the equivalent word villanus sank likewise, until it too, from meaning a 

 free townsman, a member of the body politic, came to mean one who lived 

 upon the land of another man, who was his master, paying for -'t by obliga- 

 tory labor. And as " ceorl " has sank to "churl," so the honorable term 

 villanus has sank to the opprobrious term villain. 



A few words in conclusion, upon a subject more obscure in itself, and of 

 more purely antiquarian interest — the connection of tithing and township. 

 The word tithing is used as equivalent to toiLmship in some of the southern 

 counties of England at the present day, ' and it has been a matter of some 

 controversy what is the origin of this territorial signification of the word, 

 and how far back in time it dates. For the discussion of this question I will 

 refer to Prof. H. B. Adams' excellent paper in the Johns Hopkins Studies, 

 Vol. I, No. 4. It is admitted that there is no positive evidence of any but 

 the numerical use of the word tithing in Anglo-Saxon times, as designating 

 a group of ten men — tenmanne tale (Edv. Conf . xx) — formed for the pur- 

 pose of enforcing mutual responsibility, as the fundamental principle of the 

 system of the time for the preservation of the peace. The groups would 

 seem at this period to have been strictly organized by tens. But after the 

 Norman Conquest,under the more e^cient frithborg system then estabhshed, 

 the numerical value appears to have become a secondary consideration, and 

 we very soon find a tendency towards localizing the term. Of course the 

 original tithings were in a sense local; that is, each voluntary group of ten 

 must have been composed of neighbors, and each towmship would naturally 

 contain a number of such groups, none of them extending their member- 

 ship beyond the bounds of the township. But in the thirteenth century 

 (1284) we find, in the Liber Niger of the Monastery of Peterborough, a list of 

 townships, each of which consists of a fixed number of tithings, varying, 

 no doubt, according to the population. Of the town of Bartona we read 

 (p. 109): tota villata debet presentari per sex cap)itales decennarios — the 

 capitales decennarii hemg the " headboroughs" or " tithingmen." Other 

 towns range from six of these oflicers to one, and we see the local character 

 of the ofiice in the fact that that they are the rpgular representatives of the 

 town in the great court of the Hundred: (p. 113) omnes libere tenentes et om- 

 nes capitales decennarii depredictisvilliset foedis a tempore cujus non extat 

 memoria, sc. ante tempus Willemi Regis Conquistoris . . . solebant ve- 

 nire bis in anno ad duas magnas curias que appellantur Tiirna vicecomi- 

 tis, etc. Now, it is evident that in the small townships which had only one 

 tithing, it would be very natural and easy to identify the two terms, and 



1 Stubbs. Const. Hist, i, 85. 



