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The same privileges were extended to the cities, but the serfs or villeins had no part in them; the nobility of England had not yet learnt to consider them worthy of regard. Much, however, was done by the recognition of the law, and Magna Charta has been the foundation of all subsequent legislation in England.
Now, owing to the necessities of the time, owing to the need of protection, to violence, and to religious motives, it passed into the hands of the overlord, temporal or spiritual, as his possession; and the inhabitants, even in the case of populations which had not been actually conquered, became his vassals, villeins, or serfs, as the case might be.
Their first experiment was the famous Statute of Laborers, which fixed wages at the rates which prevailed in 1347, but as this statute accomplished nothing the landlords repudiated their contracts, and undertook to force their villeins to render their ancient customary services.
The landlords were claiming new services, or forcing men who looked on themselves as free to prove they were no villeins by law. The free labourer was struggling against the attempt to exact work from him at low wages. The wandering workman was being seized and branded as a vagrant. The abbey towns were struggling for freedom against the abbeys.
The process of converting slaves and villeins into servants and free peasantry had ended; that of raising a manufacturing populace and converting peasantry into poor was but begun; and it proceeded slowly for a full hundred years. Montesinos. Those hundred years were the happiest which England has ever known. Sir Thomas More. Montesinos.
Norman-French literature reeks with the outbreak of this feeling toward the ancestors, whether Jews or villeins, of the very men who are now the aristocracy of South Carolina, a feeling as intense, as nauseous in its expression, and as utterly groundless, as that against the negro now.
In some, adopting the liberal principle that all freemen were to be admitted, householders of all kinds, down to the lowest degree, and even sometimes beyond, were admitted. In others, adopting the exclusive principle that villeins and strangers were no part of the burgesses, new corporations were erected, and the elective franchise was more or less confined to a select body."
The 1st Richard II. recites: "That grievous complaints had been made to the Lords and Commons, that villeins and land tenants daily withdraw into cities and towns, and a special commission was appointed to hear the case, and decide thereon."
That is to say, it was in the hands of others, who had conditional use of it. In England these tenants were chiefly of three kinds the villeins, the cottiers, the serfs. The first held a house and yard in the village street, and had in the great arable fields that surrounded them strips of land amounting sometimes to thirty acres.
The serfs, the villeins and the town plebs were almost alone the victims of the scourge. The little that they produced met the needs of their masters the seigneurs, counts, dukes, bishops or abbots; the producers themselves, however, expired under the tortures of starvation.
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