military principle. It was the representative of authority, and the holder
or the owner took rank in the army of the State according to the nature of
his connection with it. It was first broadly divided among the great
nobility holding immediately under the crown, who, above and beyond the
ownership of their private estates, were the Lords of the Fee throughout
their presidency, and possessed in right of it the services of knights and
gentlemen who held their manors under them, and who followed their standard
in war. Under the lords of manors, again, small freeholds and copyholds
were held of various extent, often forty shilling and twenty shilling
value, tenanted by peasant occupiers, who thus, on their own land, lived as
free Englishmen, maintaining by their own free labour themselves and their
families. There was thus a descending scale of owners, each of whom
possessed his separate right, which the law guarded and none might violate;
yet no one of whom, again, was independent of an authority higher than
himself; and the entire body of the English free possessors of the soil was
interpenetrated by a coherent organisation which converted them into a
perpetually subsisting army of soldiers. The extent of land which was held
by the petty freeholders was very large, and the possession of it was
jealously treasured; the private estates of the nobles and gentlemen were
either cultivated by their own servants, or let out, as at present, to free
tenants; or (in earlier times) were occupied by villains, a class who,
without being bondmen, were expected to furnish further services than those
of the field, services which were limited by the law, and recognised by an
outward ceremony, a solemn oath and promise from the villain to his lord.
Villanage, in the reign of Henry VIII., had practically ceased. The name of
it last appears upon the statute book in the early years of the reign of
Richard II., when the disputes between villains and their liege lords on
their relative rights had furnished matter for cumbrous lawsuits, and by
general consent the relation had merged of itself into a more liberal form.
Thus serfdom had merged or was rapidly merging into free servitude; but it