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They lived only to worship, and therefore lived under the same roof with their place of worship, which, of course, was the principal object in the edifice, and hallowed the whole of it. We found, too, at one end of the ruins, what is supposed to have been a school-house for the children of the tenantry or villeins of the abbey.
A statute of 1377, which requires villeins refusing to labor to be committed to prison on complaint of the landlord, without bail, itself recognizes that villeins fleeing to a town are made free after a year and day's habitation therein. The Statute of Richard II restricts laborers to their hundred and makes it compulsory for them to follow the same trade as their father after the age of twelve.
They spent an enormous amount of money on crusades and in the French wars; later they began to maintain always abroad what we should call standing armies, and they needed money for all those purposes. And money could yet be only got from the barons, the nobility, or at least the landed gentry, because the people, the agricultural laborers or serfs, villeins, owned no land.
But in my childhood, there was a fierce outbreak of rebellion among the villeins, needing bloody example to check, and the memories of wrath between lord and villein must sleep before we can do justice between them, as please St. Peter, and by Lanfranc's aid, we hope to do. Meanwhile, one great portion of our villeinage in our larger towns we have much mitigated.
As tenants, these men acquired, from generation to generation, sacred rights over the soil which they cultivated in the interest of lazy and pillaging masters. As fast as the social tempest abated, it became necessary to respect the union and heritage of these villeins, who by their labor had truly prescribed the soil for their own profit."
In feudal countries the lord imposed no tax on his villeins; these were mere chattels, ascripti gleboe, who tilled the land for their masters, and, as good serfs, could own nothing but the few utensils of their miserable hovels. They were just allowed what sufficed to support their own life and that of their families, and consequently they could bear no additional tax.
The first attempt was little more than a sketch. 5,497 acres were marked off for the new house, in a wet corner of Selwood forest. But the land was not transferred from William FitzJohn and the villeins were not evicted or otherwise disposed of. The place was worse than a desert, for it contained possessors not dispossessed.
It was exactly this which she was not very ready to give, for though she knew nothing of his villeins, she knew much of the Abbot, and was of many minds concerning him. There was yet time; their colloquy was in secret; but now she tapped with her foot upon the stool, and the Abbot watched her narrowly.
Then, now, and afterwards beer in large tankards. And Felden, a stranger, with three villeins and one very great cart, deposits on it one engine of iron and brass and a small iron mill of four feet, and a broad strap of leather. And Mangles, the builder, with two villeins, constructs the floor for the same, and a floor of new brick with wires for the small mill.
As no one meddled much with the villeins before 1349, all went well until after Crecy, but in 1348 the Black Death ravaged England, and so many laborers died that the cost of farming property by hired hands exceeded the value of the rent which the villeins paid. Then the landlords, under the usual reactionary and dangerous legal advice, tried coercion.
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