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 most a farmer, and his tenants under him had to be farmers or farm labourers too. Domesday mentions, under strange names, a great number of different classes of farming tenants; but, within the next century, we find that all these are melted away into two, the free and the un-free, the freeholders and the ‘villeins’ or ‘serfs’. The former are men whose land averages perhaps forty acres. They pay some small rent in money or in produce to the squire or ‘lord of the manor’, they follow the sheriff to battle when he bids them. The villein perhaps farms nearly as much land as the freeholder. But he is not free; he is bound to pay a rent in labour, say two or even three days a week on the squire’s land, many extra days at harvest time, and perhaps to pay so many eggs or pigs or hens every year; nor may he sell his land or go away without his squire’s leave. In fact he is very much at the mercy of the squire until the latter half of the twelfth century, when the King’s Law begins to protect him against the squire, to hang him if he commits crimes, and to enroll him as a soldier. But it will not pay the squire to oppress him too much if he is to get good work out of him. These clever Normans, all but a few of the greatest barons, soon made common cause with their tenants, soon became English at heart. Over them, too, the good land threw its dear familiar spell, and made them love it beyond all things.

 

