law-courts, to regard them as holding their land at the will of their
lord. In practice the lord finds that he cannot insist upon the full
measure of his legal right. Though he has the right to reclaim all
runaways, it is difficult to hunt them down; though he can fix the
measure of his own demands, it is dangerous and unprofitable to arouse a
spirit of mutiny. A judge from whom his serfs have no appeal in matters
that concern their tenure, he finds it politic to make and to observe
definite contracts, which remain unaltered from one generation to
another. Hence the condition of the serfs, though hard, is less
precarious than we might suppose if we only studied what the feudal
lawyer has to say about them. Turning from the country to the towns, we
find that all are subject to a lord or to the King; that some are only
half-emancipated communities of serfs; that in others the burgesses have
the status of small free-holders; that in a minority, but a growing
minority, of cases the burgesses have established the right to deal
collectively with the lord, to be regarded as _communes_ or free
cities. In these cases there is a form of popular self-government under
elected magistrates. Through the magistrates the town pays a fixed rent
to the former lord; usually it claims the special protection of the
King, and comes to hold the position of a tenant-in-chief (_une
seigneurie collective populaire_). No society could be, in spirit and
in organisation, more anti-feudal than the free town of the Middle Ages;
but it can only secure a safe existence by obtaining a definite position
in the feudal hierarchy. In fact, the clergy are the only considerable
class who succeed in resisting the universal tendency to feudalise all
landed property and to find for every man a lord. Even they are
compelled to make large concessions to the spirit of the age. It is only
at the cost of long and ruinous conflicts that bishops and other
prelates establish some distinction between their position and that of
the ordinary tenant-in-chief. Even so it remains the law that the