villeins with their lord. In regard to all third persons and in regard to the requirements of the State they were considered to be free. This is the third marked feature of their condition. Let us remember that the slave of Roman and Saxon times was a thing, an animal at best, that he was supposed to act merely on behalf of his master, that if he committed a theft or slew somebody his master was held responsible for his crime, and that he was not admitted as a warrior to the host and did not pay any taxes to grasping fiscal authorities, though he was estimated at his worth and more than his worth when his master had to pay. All these traits of slavery gradually disappeared when slaves and ceorls were blended in the mould of villeinage. The villein was recognised as having a soul and a will of his own not only in the eyes of the Christian Church but in those of the feudal State. He could enter into agreements, and acquire property in spite of the fact that some authoritative lawyers maintained that he could acquire nothing for himself and that all he had belonged to his lord. He was set in the stocks or hanged for crimes, and the lord had to be content with the loss of his man, as he had not to pay for his felonies. Villeins were grouped in frithborgs or tithings of frankpledge in order that the peace of the realm and its police might be better enforced. They were not merely taxed by their lords and through their lords, but also had to pay hidage and geld from their own land and fifteenths and twentieths from their own chattels. Altogether the government looked upon them as its direct subjects and did not fail to impose duties on them, though it declined to protect their customary rights against the lord.
The celebrated enactments of Magna Charta as to personal security and rights of property applied primarily to free men and to free tenements, and of such there were a good many in the manor. Indeed a manor was deemed incomplete without them. Besides the knights and squires or serjeants who held of the lord by military service, there were numerous tenants who stood to him in a relation of definite agreement, paying certain fixed rents or performing certain specified services which, however burdensome, did not amount to the general obligation of rural labour incumbent on the villeins. Many were the tenants, who, without appealing to a charter or a specified agreement to prove their contractual relation to the lord, held their tenements from father to son as if there were a specific agreement between them and the lord, performing certain services and paying certain rents; and this class was the most important of all. These were the freeholders properly so termed or, as they were called in many ancient manors, the sokemen. Without going into the question of their origin and history, we must emphatically lay down the principle of their tenure in feudal society: it was tenure by contract and therefore free. Such was its essence, although in many, perhaps in most cases, the formation of the contract was hidden by lapse of time unto which memory does not run, and indeed hardly amounted to more than a legal
