by them as tenants on condition of rendering various services to the
landlord, such as ploughing his land, reaping his crops, and other
work. Generally, too, the tenant became the landlord's "man," and did
him homage; and, thirdly, he would be bound to attend the court in
which the lord or his steward exercised jurisdiction.

This growth of private jurisdiction was another sign of the times.
Justice had once been administered in the popular moots, though from
very early times there had been social distinctions. Each village had
its "best" men, generally four in number, who attended the moots of the
larger districts called the Hundreds; and the "best" were probably
those who had inherited or acquired the best homesteads. This
aristocracy sometimes shrank to one, and the magnate, to whom the poor
surrendered their land in return for protection, often acquired also
rights of jurisdiction, receiving the fines and forfeits imposed for
breaches of the law. He was made responsible, too, for the conduct of
his poorer neighbours. Originally the family had been made to answer
for the offences of its members; but the tie of blood-relationship
weakened as the bond of neighbourhood grew stronger with attachment to
the soil; and instead of the natural unit of the family, an artificial
unit was created for the purpose of responsibility to the law by
associating neighbours together in groups of ten, called peace-pledges
or frith-borhs. It is at least possible that the "Hundred" was a
further association of ten frith-borhs as a higher and more responsible
unit for the administration of justice. But the landless man was
worthless as a member of a frith-borh, for the law had little hold over
a man who had no land to forfeit and no fixed habitation. So the
landless man was compelled by law to submit to a lord, who was held
responsible for the behaviour of all his "men"; his estate became, so
to speak, a private frith-borh, consisting of dependents instead of the