[2] Manor (man’or):  see plan of a manor (Old French manoir, “a mansion”) on page 75, the estate of a feudal lord.  Every manor had two courts.  The most important of these was the “court baron.”  It was composed of all the free tenants of the manor, with the lord (or his representative) presiding.  It dealt with civil cases only.  The second court was the “court customary,” which dealt with cases connected with villeinage.  The manors held by the greater barons had a third court, the “court leet,” which dealt with criminal cases, and could inflict the death penalty.  In all cases the decisions of the manorial courts would be pretty sure to be in the lord’s favor.  In England, however, these courts never acquired the degree of power which they did on the Continent. [3] See note above, on the manor.

On every manor there were usually three classes of these tenants:  (1) those who discharged their rent by doing military duty; (2) those who paid by a certain fixed amount of labor—­or, if they preferred, in produce or in money; (3) the villeins, or common laborers, who were bound to remain on the estate and work for the lord, and whose condition, although they were not wholly destitute of legal rights, was practically not very much above that of slaves (S113).

But there was another way by which men might enter the Feudal System; for while it was growing up there were many small free landholders, who owned their farms and owed no man any service whatever.  In those times of constant civil war such men would be almost in daily peril of losing, not only their property, but their lives.  To escape this danger, they would hasten to “commend” themselves to some powerful neighboring lord.  To do this, they pledged themselves to become “his men,” surrendering their farms to him, and received them again as feudal vassals.  That is, the lord bound himself to protect them against their enemies , and they bound themselves to do “suit and service"[1] like the other tenants of the manor; for “suit and service” on the one side, and “protection” on the other, made up the threefold foundation of the Feudal system.

[1] That is, they pledged themselves to do suit in the lord’s private court, and to do service in his army.

Thus in time all classes of society became bound together.  At the top stood the King, who was no man’s tenant, but, in name at least, every man’s master; at the bottom crouched the villein, who was no man’s master, but was, in fact, the most servile and helpless of tenants.

Such was the condition of things in France.  In England, however, this system of land tenure was not completely established until after the Norman Conquest, 1066; for in England the tie which bound men to the King and to each other was originally one of pure choice, and had nothing directly to do with land.  Gradually, however, this changed; and by the time of Edward the Confessor land in England had come to be held on conditions so closely resembling those of France that one step more—­and that a very short one—­would have made England a kingdom exhibiting all the most dangerous features of French feudalism.