United States or Germany ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But Coltishall is barely five miles from Norwich, and from the villages round the great city the villeins were always running away in the hopes of getting their freedom if they could keep in hiding within the city walls for a year and a day.
"My son," said the prelate kindly, "these are the things of childhood childhood ends sooner with princes than with common men. Leave thy lure and thy toys, and welcome these noble thegns, and address them, so please you, in our own Saxon tongue." "Saxon tongue! language of villeins! not I. Little do I know of it, save to scold a ceorl or a nurse.
But they were threatened by an adversary equally formidable with heresy in the person of the villeins whom the constantly increasing momentum of the time had raised into a position in which they undertook to compete for the ownership of the land which they still tilled as technical serfs.
The great mass of the population were, however, villeins, who were always at the beck and call of their lords, and had to do as much ploughing, sowing, and reaping of his land as he could make them. Theoretically they were his goods and chattels, who could obtain no redress against any one except in the lord's court, and none at all against him.
After the conquest villeins could neither in fact nor theory acquire or hold property as against their lord, and the class of landlords stretched upwards from the owner of a knight's fee to the king on his throne, who was the chief landlord of all, but by so narrow a margin that he often had enough to do to maintain some vestige of sovereignty.
The pretty romance of the old sailor who left England to become a sort of feudal seigneur here, with a holding of the entire island, and its fisher-folk for his villeins, forms a picturesque background for the aesthetic leisure and society in the three hotels remembering him and his language in their names, and housing with a few cottages all the sojourners on the island.
He threw open its doors to all except villeins, he transformed it from an occasional assembly of warlike barons into a regular court of trained lawyers mere servants of the royal household, the barons called them; and by means of justices in eyre he brought it into touch with all localities in the kingdom, and convinced his people that there was a king who meant to govern with their help.
They confine pleas of debt and disputes respecting advowsons to the cognizance of the king's justices; declare that clergymen who hold lands of the crown hold by barony, and are bound to the same services as the lay barons; and forbid the bishops to admit to orders the sons of villeins, without the license of their respective lords.
Luxury meanwhile distorts our whole attitude to our fellows, and in every effort to excel and shine we wrong the labouring millions. Aristocracy involves general degradation, and can survive only amid general ignorance. "To make men serfs and villeins it is indispensably necessary to make them brutes.... A servant who has been taught to write and read, ceases to be any longer a passive machine."
The wills are of all kinds; there are even villeins' wills, though in theory the villein's possessions were his lord's, and there are wills of kings and queens, lords and ladies, bishops and parsons and lawyers and shopkeepers. Such a living picture do men's wills give us of their daily lives. These, then, are the three sources from which the life and times of Thomas Paycocke may be drawn.
Word Of The Day