Identifier: mediaevalmodernh00myer (find matches)
Title: Mediaeval and modern history
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors: Myers, P. V. N. (Philip Van Ness), 1846-1937
Subjects: Middle Ages History, Modern World War, 1914-1918
Publisher: Boston : Ginn & Company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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il his ward became of age. The right of marriage was the right of the lord toselect a husband for his female ward, lest he should get an enemy for a vassal. 5 The terms serf and villain, although in some countries they denoted differentclasses, are used interchangeably by many writers. Thus English writers usuallyemploy the terms villains and villanage in speaking of the servile English peasantryafter the Norman Conquest. We shall, however, throughout our work use the wordsserf and serfdom only in the sense defined in the present paragraph. 6 There were some free peasants and a larger number of free artisans and traders,inhabitants of the towns. The number of actual slaves was small. They had almostall disappeared before the end of the tenth century, either having been emancipatedor been lifted into the lowest order of serfs, which was an advance toward freedom.At the time of the great Domesday survey (sec. 117) there were, according to thisrecord, only about 25,000 slaves in England.
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Photograph of an Open Field in Hitchin Manor Showing the grassy balks, or unplowed furrows, which take the place of hedgesand divide the acre and half-acre strips of the great open field 1 This map is based on charts in Seebohms The English )iUas;e Comnnmity, andillustrates the open-field system of cultivation of the medi.Eval manor. The thirty scatteredstrips colored red represent the normal holding of a villain (zil/anHs); the strips coloredblue, comprising about one third of the land of the manor, show the way in which thedemesne of the lord was often made up of numerous tracts scattered about the open fieldsinstead of forming a continuous tract around the manor house ; the areas colored greenrepresent the meadows and common pasture lands. SERFS AND SERFDOM 85 of their own will leave the estate or manor to which they belonged ;nor, on the other hand, could their lord deprive them of theirholdings and set them adrift. When the land changed mastersthey passed with it, just like a roo

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