But these services and the time of rendering them were strictly limited by custom, not only in the case of the ceorl or villein but in that of the originally meaner “landless man.”  The possession of his little homestead with the ground around it, the privilege of turning out his cattle on the waste of the manor, passed quietly and insensibly from mere indulgences that could be granted or withdrawn at a lord’s caprice into rights that could be pleaded at law.  The number of teams, the fines, the reliefs, the services that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of oral tradition, came to be entered on the court-roll of the manor, a copy of which became the title-deed of the villein.  It was to this that he owed the name of “copy-holder” which at a later time superseded his older title.  Disputes were settled by a reference to this roll or on oral evidence of the custom at issue, but a social arrangement which was eminently characteristic of the English spirit of compromise generally secured a fair adjustment of the claims of villein and lord.  It was the duty of the lord’s bailiff to exact their due services from the villeins, but his coadjutor in this office, the reeve or foreman of the manor, was chosen by the tenants themselves and acted as representative of their interests and rights.  A fresh step towards freedom was made by the growing tendency to commute labour-services for money-payments.  The population was slowly increasing, and as the law of gavel-kind which was applicable to all landed estates not held by military tenure divided the inheritance of the tenantry equally among their sons, the holding of each tenant and the services due from it became divided in a corresponding degree.  A labour-rent thus became more difficult to enforce, while the increase of wealth among the tenantry and the rise of a new spirit of independence made it more burthensome to those who rendered it.  It was probably from this cause that the commutation of the arrears of labour for a money payment, which had long prevailed on every estate, gradually developed into a general commutation of services.  We have already witnessed the silent progress of this remarkable change in the case of St. Edmundsbury, but the practice soon became universal, and “malt-silver,” “wood-silver,” and “larder-silver” gradually took the place of the older personal services on the court-rolls.  The process of commutation was hastened by the necessities of the lords themselves.  The luxury of the castle-hall, the splendour and pomp of chivalry, the cost of campaigns drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom to a serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an easy and tempting mode of refilling them.  In this process even kings took part.  At a later time, under Edward the Third, commissioners were sent to royal estates for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the king’s serfs; and we still possess the names of those who were enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard cash in aid of the exhausted exchequer.