The Legal Aspect of Villainage. General Conceptions It has become a commonplace to oppose medieval serfdom to ancient slavery, one implying dependence on the lord of the soil and attachment to the glebe, the other being based on complete subjection to an owner. There is no doubt that great landmarks in the course of social development are set by the three modes hitherto employed of organising human labour: using the working man (1) as a chattel at will, (2) as a subordinate whose duties are fixed by custom, (3) as a free agent bound by contract. These landmarks probably indicate molecular changes in the structure of society scarcely less important than those political and intellectual revolutions which are usually taken as the turning-points of ancient, medieval, and modern history.
And still we must not forget, in drawing such definitions, that we reach them only by looking at things from such a height that all lesser inequalities and accidental features of the soil are no longer sensible to the eyesight. In finding one's way over the land one must needs go over these very inequalities and take into account these very features. If, from a general survey of medieval servitude, we turn to the actual condition of the English peasantry, say in the thirteenth century, the first fact we have to meet will stand in very marked contrast to our general proposition.
The majority of the peasants are villains, and the legal conception of villainage has its roots not in the connexion of the villain with the soil, but in his personal dependence on the lord.
If this is a fact, it is a most important one. It would be reckless to treat it as a product of mere legal pedantry.* The great work achieved by the English lawyers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was prompted by a spirit which had nothing to do with pedantry. They were fashioning state and society, proudly conscious of high aims and power, enlightened by the scholastic training of their day, but sufficiently strong to use it for their own purposes; sound enough not to indulge in mere abstractions, and firm enough not to surrender to mere technicalities.* In the treatment of questions of status and tenure by the lawyers of Henry II, Henry III, and Edward I, we must recognise a mighty influence which was brought to bear on the actual condition of things, and our records show us on every page that this treatment was by no means a matter of mere theory.
Indeed one of the best means that we have for estimating the social process of those times is afforded by the formation and the break up of legal notions in their cross influences with surrounding political and economic facts.
As to the general aspect of villainage in the legal theory of English feudalism there can be no doubt. The 'Dialogus de Scaccario' gives it in a few words: the lords are owners not only of the chattels but of the bodies of their ascripticii, they may transfer them wherever they please, 'and sell or otherwise alienate them if they like.'* Glanville and Bracton, Fleta and Britton* follow in substance the same doctrine, although they use different terms. They appropriate the Roman view that there is no difference of quality between serfs and serfs: all are in the same abject state. Legal theory keeps a very firm grasp of the distinction between status and tenure, between a villain and a free man holding in villainage, but it does not admit of any distinction of status among serfs: servus, villanus, and nativus are equivalent terms as to personal condition, although this last is primarily meant to indicate something else besides condition, namely, the fact that a person has come to it by birth.* The close connexion between the terms is well illustrated by the early use of nativa, nieve, 'as a feminine to villanus.'
