Villenage and operative tenancy were almost extinct at the time of the
Reformation. The few villeins, or operative tenants, then remaining,
were in the occupation of small plots of land, or were, in fact,
agricultural labourers, working for wages, rather than tenants _paying
their rent in labour_. They were scarcely to be found except upon
Church-lands, or upon lands which had lately belonged to the Church.
An operative tenant of five acres usually worked once a week for the
lord. We learn from Domesday that bordars were tenants of five acres,
and that the bordars under the Castle of Ewias worked once a week: the
Saxon cottar held at least five acres, and was accustomed to work for
the lord every Monday. This custom prevailed in later times. If a tenant
worked for the lord once a week, the working-day was commonly Monday.
The Monday-men at East Brent, in Somerset, had the following customs in
the year 1517:--Each of them, by ancient usage, should annually, in
forty days selected by the lord's steward, do forty works of summer and
winter husbandry, called Monday-works, working and labouring well each
day for six whole hours; each of them receiving, while at work, a
halfpenny, the sum of which is twenty pence per annum: and each of them
who should do eight autumnal works, working well six hours a day as
before said, should receive one penny a day. At the same time there were
Monday-men at Limpesham in the same county; and they are noticed in
earlier rentals at Castle Combe in Wiltshire, at Leighton in
Huntingdonshire, in East Kent, and at Bocking and Hadleigh in the
eastern counties.
At Bury St. Edmund's anciently, there were humble servitors called
Lancetts, who were bound by their tenure to clean the chambers of the
monastery. A tenant of the abbey at Cokefield, whose tenure is not
called lancettage, was obliged to thatch, to wattle and daub, to do
carpenter's work, to collect compost, to clean houses, &c.--but was not
required to clean out the lord's _latrines_.
Although villeins were said to hold their land at the will of the lord,
their position was not really precarious; they did not hold at the
lord's arbitrary will, but at the will of the lord subject to the
custom of the manor. While they paid their dues and performed their
services, the lord could not molest them; if the lord ejected a sick
villein, the villein was emancipated. For trivial offences the villein
was amerced, or was at the lord's mercy; that is, was obliged to pay a
fine assessed by a jury who were sworn to spare no one for love or fear,
and to punish no one too severely; for disobedience and disloyalty the
lord could set his villein in the stocks; if others then came and broke
the stocks to let the villein out, the lord could have an action of
trespass: the stocks were chiefly designed for vagrants and unruly
servants.
At one time the ties which bound a peasant to his landlord were like
those which bound a soldier to his martial chief. Dependence on a lord
was thought no degradation, and the state of society made independence
impossible. The feudal system was exhausted as soon as the law became
strong enough to protect an independent man.