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. So, to help himself, it came to pass that the king
intrigued with the serfs against their restive masters, and the abler the
king, the more he intrigued, like Henry I, until the villeins gained very
substantial advantages. Thus it was that toward 1215, or pretty nearly
contemporaneously with the epoch when men like Grosseteste began to show
restlessness under the extortionate corruption of the Church, the villein
was discovered to be able to defend his claim to some portion of the
increment in the value of the land which he tilled and which was due to
his labor: and this title the manorial courts recognized, because they
could not help it, as a sort of tenant right, calling it a customary
tenancy by base service. A century later these services in kind had been
pretty frequently commuted into a fixed rent paid in money, and the serf
had become a freeman, and a rather formidable freeman, too. For it was
largely from among these technical serfs that Edward III recruited the
infantry who formed his line at Crecy in 1346, and the archers of Crecy
were not exactly the sort of men who take kindly to eviction, to say
nothing of slavery. As no one meddled much with the villeins before 1349,
all went well until after Crecy, but in 1348 the Black Death ravaged
England, and so many laborers died that the cost of farming property by
hired hands exceeded the value of the rent which the villeins paid. Then
the landlords, under the usual reactionary and dangerous legal advice,
tried coercion. Their first experiment was the famous Statute of Laborers,
which fixed wages at the rates which prevailed in 1347, but as this
statute accomplished nothing the landlords repudiated their contracts, and
undertook to force their villeins to render their ancient customary
services. Though the lay landlords were often hard masters, the