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"Thank you," said the Wheel. "Let me see if I can tabulate it properly. Nothing like system in accounts of all kinds. On the side of the Wheel towards the hundred of Burgelstaltone, where till now was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins, and two carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of five yards and a half, and one roof of iron and a floor of cement.
The urged Wheel was fairly clattering now: "In Burgelstaltone a monk holds of Earl Godwin one hide and a half with eight villeins. There is a church and a monk.... I remember that monk. Blessed if he could rattle his rosary off any quicker than I am doing now ... and wood for seven hogs. I must be running twelve to the minute ... almost as fast as Steam.
The commune had well tried to free the peasants, but her wars against the lords became, as already mentioned, wars for freeing the city itself from the lords, rather than for freeing the peasants. She left to the lord his rights over the villeins, on condition that he would molest the city no more and would become co-burgher.
The monasteries were passing rich in the Middle Ages, because their valves opened only one way they received much and paid out nothing. To save the souls of men was a just equivalent for accepting their services for the little time they were on earth. The monasteries owned the land, and the rentals paid by the fiefs and villeins went into the church treasuries.
But the progress of emancipation was slow; the improved condition of their former fellows served only to embitter the discontent of those who still wore the fetters of servitude; and in many places the villeins formed associations for their mutual support, and availed themselves of every expedient in their power to free themselves from the control of their lords.
From the days in which our British progenitors rushed to battle in their war-paint, or those more recent times when the whole of the labouring people were villeins and serfs, bought and sold with the soil which they tilled, to the times in which we now live, how wide the difference, how gratifying the contrast.
The appearance of emancipated villeins side by side with earls and prelates in the great council of the realm is the most significant fact of thirteenth-century English history.
Men had heard tales of his ferocity on the Continent how he starved his prisoners to death rather than hold them to ransom; how, when besieging a castle, he threw in the horses to fill up the moat, and when these were not enough he gave orders to seize the villeins and throw them in, that his battering rams might go forward on a writhing mass of living human bodies.
Now, while such a practice exists, the relation of employer and employed is not that of independent contractors, but so far that of the feudal baron and his villeins, or of a chieftain and his 'following. It is, in effect, a voluntarily maintained slavery on the part of the operatives a habit as incompatible with political liberty as with moral dignity and progress, and therefore a sore evil in our state.
Now it so happened that as Prosper le Gai entered the purlieus of Morgraunt, the Countess Isabel sat in the Abbey parlour of Saint Thorn, knitting her fine brows over a business of the Abbot's, no less than the granting of a new charter of pit and gallows, pillory and tumbril to him and his house over the villeins of Malbank, and the whole fee and soke.
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