[Sidenote:  The Villein]

Without the towns progress was far slower and more fitful.  It would seem indeed that the conquest of the Norman bore harder on the rural population than on any other class of Englishmen.  Under the later kings of the house of AElfred the number of absolute slaves and the number of freemen had alike diminished.  The pure slave class had never been numerous, and it had been reduced by the efforts of the Church, perhaps by the general convulsion of the Danish wars.  But these wars had often driven the ceorl or freeman of the township to “commend” himself to a thegn who pledged him his protection in consideration of payment in a rendering of labour.  It is probable that these dependent ceorls are the “villeins” of the Norman epoch, the most numerous class of the Domesday Survey, men sunk indeed from pure freedom and bound both to soil and lord, but as yet preserving much of their older rights, retaining their land, free as against all men but their lord, and still sending representatives to hundred-moot and shire-moot.  They stood therefore far above the “landless man,” the man who had never possessed even under the old constitution political rights, whom the legislation of the English kings had forced to attach himself to a lord on pain of outlawry, and who served as household servant or as hired labourer or at the best as rent-paying tenant of land which was not his own.  The Norman knight or lawyer however saw little distinction between these classes; and the tendency of legislation under the Angevins was to blend all in a single class of serfs.  While the pure “theow” or absolute slave disappeared therefore the ceorl or villein sank lower in the social scale.  But though the rural population was undoubtedly thrown more together and fused into a more homogeneous class, its actual position corresponded very imperfectly with the view of the lawyers.  All indeed were dependents on a lord.  The manor-house became the centre of every English village.  The manor-court was held in its hall; it was here that the lord or his steward received homage, recovered fines, held the view of frank-pledge, or enrolled the villagers in their tithing.  Here too, if the lord possessed criminal jurisdiction, was held his justice court, and without its doors stood his gallows.  Around it lay the lord’s demesne or home-farm, and the cultivation of this rested wholly with the “villeins” of the manor.  It was by them that the great barn was filled with sheaves, the sheep shorn, the grain malted, the wood hewn for the manor-hall fire.  These services were the labour-rent by which they held their lands, and it was the nature and extent of this labour-rent which parted one class of the population from another.  The “villein,” in the strict sense of the word, was bound only to gather in his lord’s harvest and to aid in the ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent.  The cottar, the bordar, and the labourer were bound to help in the work of the home-farm throughout the year.