Page:The English Peasant.djvu/19

 This servile condition rendered him the man of his lord; he could be bought and sold together with his family and his goods and chattels; he could not marry nor give his daughter in marriage without permission of the lord; a serf, in fact, was so entirely at the mercy of his master, that where the latter had judicial authority he could torture his serf and put him to death. Outside the manor-house stood the dreadful symbols of his power: the gallows whereon to hang the men, the pit wherein to drown the women.

Nevertheless a serf could, saving his lord's right, possess property; and there must have been a certain limit to the torture that could be inflicted, since the German law fixed the highest number of blows a slave could receive at two hundred and twenty. When it was his fate to have a good master, existence was not intolerable; but under a bad one, or in times of anarchy, human imagination could hardly outstrip the fiendish cruelty of his tyrants.

The process by which the fat kine eat up the lean kine had been going on in England long before the Conquest, the old Saxon freeman losing ground before the new noble class. The Norman Conquest drove him down still lower, levelling into one common condition of serfdom, the ceorles and thrælls on the confiscated estates. The old order, however, was not swept away everywhere. Sir Henry Maine seems to think that the Village Community which arose out of relationship and the common possession of a tract of land maintained itself in England through all the revolutions of the feudal system.

This primeval communism which secured its members in the enjoyment of a certain degree of liberty, equality, and fraternity was continually broken up and lessened in its area by the ravages of the banditti, who, step by step, had founded another social system. That the Norman rulers were capable of anything, we may learn from the well-known passage in the Saxon Chronicle, describing the atrocities practised on the people by some of the barons in the reign of Stephen, and by the fact that, in 1102, the Synod of Westminster, over which Anslem presided, denounced "the wicked trade of selling men like brute beasts, which had," they said, "hitherto been the common custom."

Under the Normans all except the higher classes of villeins