It was a
matter of rather slow development. After the conquest villeins could
neither in fact nor theory acquire or hold property as against their lord,
and the class of landlords stretched upwards from the owner of a knight's
fee to the king on his throne, who was the chief landlord of all, but by
so narrow a margin that he often had enough to do to maintain some vestige
of sovereignty. So, to help himself, it came to pass that the king
intrigued with the serfs against their restive masters, and the abler the
king, the more he intrigued, like Henry I, until the villeins gained very
substantial advantages. Thus it was that toward 1215, or pretty nearly
contemporaneously with the epoch when men like Grosseteste began to show
restlessness under the extortionate corruption of the Church, the villein
was discovered to be able to defend his claim to some portion of the
increment in the value of the land which he tilled and which was due to
his labor: and this title the manorial courts recognized, because they
could not help it, as a sort of tenant right, calling it a customary
tenancy by base service. A century later these services in kind had been
pretty frequently commuted into a fixed rent paid in money, and the serf
had become a freeman, and a rather formidable freeman, too. For it was
largely from among these technical serfs that Edward III recruited the
infantry who formed his line at Crecy in 1346, and the archers of Crecy
were not exactly the sort of men who take kindly to eviction, to say
nothing of slavery.
Pages:
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144