Page:Archaeologia volume 38 part 1.djvu/160

136 pallets and on a chief as many mullets pierced; the legend is Sigillum ricardi akerman, in black letter. Though this is a good heraldic coat, there is nothing to indicate the rank or position in life of the bearer; nor do I find him mentioned elsewhere, or the coat ascribed to any one of the same surname. It may have been one of the many coats of arms met with on medieval seals, which, owing probably to an early failure of the issue of those who bore them, have never found their way into any of our ordinaries or heraldic collections. The surname, Acreman, having been derived from the occupation of those originally so called, may be found in various localities, without any ground for inferring consanguinity. In a few manors a small class of tenants of the humblest grade appear to have been called Acremen or Akermen, but the word had evidently a more extensive signification. Acre or Aker, in early times, did not mean any definite quantity of land, but, like Ager in Latin, was equivalent to field or plot of land; and it was the same in Anglo-Saxon and German. Acremen were, in our early English, fieldmen, men employed in agricultural labor, i.e., in modern language, husbandmen. At that time free laborers were few, and money wages rare: the demesnes of a manor, those parts which the lord retained in his own hands, were cultivated almost exclusively by men attached in various degrees of serfdom to the soil, who were allowed to occupy for their own benefit small pieces of ground, at low and sometimes almost nominal rents, and on the produce of those plots they chiefly subsisted. Such tenant-laborers were distinguished by several designations. Some rendered more days' work per annum than others, and some only certain kinds of work. Akerman occurs, as a surname, several times in the Hundred Rolls, under Cam-