d the villagers in their tithing. Here too, if the lord
possessed criminal jurisdiction, was held his justice court, and without
its doors stood his gallows. Around it lay the lord's demesne or
home-farm, and the cultivation of this rested wholly with the "villeins"
of the manor. It was by them that the great barn was filled with sheaves,
the sheep shorn, the grain malted, the wood hewn for the manor-hall fire.
These services were the labour-rent by which they held their lands, and
it was the nature and extent of this labour-rent which parted one class
of the population from another. The "villein," in the strict sense of the
word, was bound only to gather in his lord's harvest and to aid in the
ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent. The cottar, the bordar, and the
labourer were bound to help in the work of the home-farm throughout the
year.

But these services and the time of rendering them were strictly limited
by custom, not only in the case of the ceorl or villein but in that of
the originally meaner "landless man." The possession of his little
homestead with the ground around it, the privilege of turning out his
cattle on the waste of the manor, passed quietly and insensibly from mere
indulgences that could be granted or withdrawn at a lord's caprice into
rights that could be pleaded at law. The number of teams, the fines, the
reliefs, the services that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of
oral tradition, came to be entered on the court-roll of the manor, a copy
of which became the title-deed of the villein. It was to this that he
owed the name of "copy-holder" which at a later time superseded his older
title. Disputes were settled by a reference to this roll or on oral
evidence of the custom at issue, but a social arrangement which was
eminently characteristic of the English spirit of compromise generally
secured a fair adjustment of the claims of villein and lord. It was the
duty of the lord's bailiff to exact their due services from the villeins,
but his coadjutor in this office, the reeve or foreman of the manor, was
chosen by the tenants themselves and acted as representative of their
interests and rights. A fresh step towards freedom was made by the
growing tendency to commute labour-services for money-payments. The
population was slowly increasing, and as the law of gavel-kind which was
applicable to all landed estates not held by military tenure divided the
inheritance of the tenantry equally among t