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Updated: June 12, 2025
"It was his " Mabel tried to say, but Sigbert hushed her. "Let be, let be, my sweet lady; it was but my bounden duty." "What's that? Speak out what passes there," demanded young Courtwood, half-jealously still. "A mere English villein, little better than a valet of the camp!" were the exclamations around. "A noble damsel take note of him! Fie for shame!"
The cottar, the bordar, and the labourer were bound to help in the work of the home-farm throughout the year. But these services and the time of rendering them were strictly limited by custom, not only in the case of the ceorl or villein but in that of the originally meaner "landless man."
"You deem it in sooth," said the Dutchman, "for know you that the parish priest swears, and so do the more part of the villein fisher folk, that there's no sorcery in the matter, but that she is a true and holy maid, with no powers save what the Saints had given her, and that her cures were by skill. Yet such was scarce like to a mere Jungvrow."
By degrees, therefore, the knight, chafed and foiled, drew into himself; and seeing no farther use could be made of the Saxon, suffered his own national scorn of villein companionship to replace his artificial urbanity.
And above all, the lowest serf ever had the great hope both of freedom and of promotion; but the beast of the field was holier in the eyes of the Norman, than the wretched villein . We have likened the Norman to the Spartan, and, most of all, he was like him in his scorn of the helot.
As far back as they could look, they saw only the tyranny of one class and the degradation of another, Frank and Gaul, knight and villein, gentleman and roturier. They hated the monarchy, the church, the nobility. They cared nothing for the States or the Parliament. It was long the fashion to ascribe all the follies which they committed to the writings of the philosophers.
On the other part, a villein cannot be a judge, by reason of the two estates, which are repugnants; persons attainted of false judgments cannot be judges, nor infants, nor any under the age of twenty-one years, nor infected persons, nor idiots, nor madmen, nor deaf, nor dumb, nor parties in the pleas, nor men excommunicated by the bishop, nor criminal persons.
These services were the labour-rent by which they held their lands, and it was the nature and extent of this labour-rent which parted one class of the population from another. The "villein," in the strict sense of the word, was bound only to gather in his lord's harvest and to aid in the ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent.
Here Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough and wood for six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings unum molinum one mill. Reinbert's mill Robert's Mill. Then and afterwards and now tunc et post et modo Robert's Mill.
'That is as may be, was the reply, 'but I may tell you naught, if it please you, lord. Then King Arthur called Sir Kay, his steward, and bade him tend the young man for a year as if he were a lord's son. 'There is no need that he should have such care, sneered Sir Kay, who was a man of a sour mind. 'I dare swear that he is but a villein born.
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