16 years at a rent of 7. It is always recognized that the subject of this demise comprises "the customs and works of the customary tenants of the lord." Meanwhile the "Rent of Bond" or "Natives' Land," which has declined from 22l. to about 17l., remains

constant.

This evidence therefore seems to point to a great change under Henry V (1413-1422). In the last year of Henry IV the rent of the bond lands is entered at 11l. 5s. 6d.; it is still reckoned that 1056 halfpenny works and 336 penny works are due; many of these are actually done in kind, though some are "sold." When the account begins again under Henry VI the rent of bond lands is 22l. 28. 10d., almost exactly double the old amount, and all the works that are accounted for are 76 diets of ploughing. This change was immediately followed by another namely, the letting of the demesne, the scitus manerii, as it is sometimes calledtogether with the benefit of whatever opera remained uncommuted. Whether the commutation under Henry V was originally regarded as more than a temporary or revocable measure does not appear; practically it seems to have been the final step.

...

§ 6. Summary of the Development of the Manor

The conclusions to which these rolls would lead us may now be stated in a summary fashion.

Before 1350 or thereabouts. The lord gets very little by way of money rent. His demesne is cultivated for him by the "works" of his customary tenants. More works are due than are wanted, and each year he sells a certain number of works at a customary rate that is to say, he takes from the person liable to work a penny or, as the case may be, a halfpenny in respect of each work that he does not want. The customary tenants are for the most part, if not altogether, unfree men, and are treated as such. From 1350 to 1410 or thereabouts. There is as yet no permanent commutation of work for rent. The lord, however, finds the greatest difficulty in keeping old and obtaining new tenants; his tenants, more especially the cottagers, run away and relinquish their tenements. The lord still hopes to obtain tenants on the old terms, but in the meanwhile has to make temporary grants or leases at money rents, and from time to time to reduce those rents. From the tenants who still hold on the old terms, he still exacts a considerable number of works, while other works he "sells"

to them year by year. Many of the tenants are still unfree and are treated as such.

After 1410 or thereabouts. It having at last been recognized that many of the tenements are no longer in opere, and that there is no prospect of a return to the old state of things, a general commutation of all works (except some ploughing) takes place. Perhaps this is not at once conceived as a final change, but practically it is irrevocable. The rents are the best rents that the lord can get, and in course of time it is necessary to reduce them. The demesne land, together with the benefit of such works as are uncommuted, is now let, for short terms of years, to a farmer. The lord of the manor becomes, in effect, little more than a receiver of rent. Very few practical traces of personal servitude remain, but we read of no formal emancipation of the bondmen, and the lord is careful to preserve a record of their bondage.

In the Sixteenth Century. — Owing to the fall in the value of money, the copyholder gradually acquires a valuable right in his holding. His rent less than a shilling an acre becomes light. I will not gereralize, but to me it seems that in this instance the copyholder's vendible interest is almost entirely an unearned increment, the product of American mines.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Cheney, The Disappearance of English Serfdom, in the English Historical Review, 1900, pp. 20-37. Leadam, The Security of Copyholders in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, in the English Historical Review, 1893, pp. 684 ff. Page, The End of Villeinage in England. Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe.

CHAPTER II

THE MEDIEVAL GILDS

A STUDY of the manor as a part of mediæval economy must be supplemented by an examination of the towns and their gilds. Though the population of the towns at the Norman Conquest constituted a small part of the population of the kingdom, their political and financial influence was doubtless out of proportion to their numerical strength. Moreover, they steadily increased in numbers and power, especially after the introduction of parliamentary institutions. Though the origins of early towns and their internal government are the subjects of considerable controversy, the student will do well to take as his starting-point Professor Ashley's chapter on the gilds, which is a very clear and systematic treatment of the subject.

At the time of the Norman Conquest there were some eighty towns in England. Most of these were what we should now consider but large villages; they were distinguished from the villages around only by the earthen walls that surrounded them, or the earthen mounds that kept watch over them. London, Winchester, Bristol, Norwich, York, and Lincoln were far in advance of the rest in size and importance; but even a town of the first rank cannot have had more than seven or eight thousand inhabitants. We shall perhaps be not far wrong if we estimate the town population at about a hundred and fifty thousand out of a total population of about a million and a half.

As to how these towns had come into existence, it were scarcely profitable to construct any definite theory until the condition of

1

1 Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, Pt. I, pp. 68 ff. By permission of Professor Ashley and G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers.

the body of the population of early England has been more satisfactorily determined than it is at present. But it is readily seen that population would tend to congregate at places where highroads crossed one another, or where rivers could be forded; such places, indeed, would in many cases be of strategic importance, and so would come to be fortified. There is no reason to suppose that any monastic orders, before the Cistercians, "lived of set purpose in the wilderness"; monasteries and cathedral churches were placed where villages were already in existence. But beneath the shelter of the monasteries the villages soon grew into small towns; the labor services to which their inhabitants were bound, or the commutation for them which they paid, long testifying to the originally servile character of the holdings. Many a village around the fortified house or castle of some great noble had a similar history.

Such towns necessarily became centres of what little internal trade there was. For although agriculture long remained one of the principal employments of the burgesses, yet it must have early been necessary for supplies of food to be brought from the country around; this is the most primitive and essential form of trade. The lords, to whom the towns were subject, would see their interest in the establishment of markets in which protection was guaranteed, and paid for in the shape of tolls; and so came into existence those weekly or half-weekly market days which, in spite of improved means of communication, are still so important in England.

Commerce with the Frank kingdom had long been carried on from London and the ports of Kent, especially Sandwich and Dover. Traffic with the Danish settlements on the Irish coast, a traffic in which slaves were the chief commodities, brought Chester and Bristol into prominence in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and the connection with the Scandinavian kingdoms, caused by Canute's conquest, brought York, Grimsby, Lincoln, Norwich, Ipswich, and many other ports along the eastern coast, into active commercial communication with the Baltic countries. Yet the trade with foreign countries cannot have been large; the wares which, in an old English dialogue, the merchant describes himself as bringing with him, seem to be all articles of luxury such as would be needed only by the higher classes,-"purple cloth, silk, costly gems and gold, garments, pigments, wine, oil, ivory and brass, copper and tin, sulphur, glass, and such like." The mention of merchants in the English laws is so infrequent that we can

hardly suppose existence.

that any considerable trading class had come into

In the troublous years which followed the landing of the Conqueror the more important English towns suffered greatly; in some cases a third or half the houses were destroyed, and the population reduced in like proportion a result to which the chances of war and William's policy of castle-building contributed in equal measure. But even during the twenty years before the great survey of 1086, the towns on the southern coast had begun to profit by the closer connection with the opposite shore. And as soon as the Norman rule was firmly established, it secured for the country an internal peace and order such as it had never before enjoyed; the temporary retrogression was more than made up for, and in town after town arose the merchant gild.

§2. Character and Origin of the Merchant Gild

The merchant gild, or hanse, for the words are used synonymously, was a society formed primarily for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining the privilege of carrying on trade-a privilege which implied the possession of a monopoly of trade in each town by the gild brethren as against its other inhabitants, and also liberty to trade in other towns. The exact character of the monopoly probably varied somewhat from place to place. Everywhere, apparently, non-members were left free to buy and sell victuals; but if they went further and engaged in regular trade, they became subject to tolls from which the gild brethren were free. If the trader was prosperous enough to pay the entrance money and become a member of the gild, but obstinately refrained from doing so, he was coerced into compliance by re peated fines. In some places a promise to inform the gild officers of any man trafficking in the town and able to enter the gild was part of the entrance oath of every brother. Each member paid an entrance fee, and probably other dues to the gild chest, which were spent for the common purposes of the gild, especially in festivities. And since no society could be conceived of in the Middle Ages without some sort of jurisdiction over its members, the gild merchant, in its meetings known as "morning-speeches," drew up regulations for trade and punished breaches of commercial morality.

Now there certainly had existed before the Conquest both religious gilds and frith gilds, i.e. clubs or societies for the per