heir sons, the holding of each
tenant and the services due from it became divided in a corresponding
degree. A labour-rent thus became more difficult to enforce, while the
increase of wealth among the tenantry and the rise of a new spirit of
independence made it more burthensome to those who rendered it. It was
probably from this cause that the commutation of the arrears of labour
for a money payment, which had long prevailed on every estate, gradually
developed into a general commutation of services. We have already
witnessed the silent progress of this remarkable change in the
case of St. Edmundsbury, but the practice soon became universal, and
"malt-silver," "wood-silver," and "larder-silver" gradually took the
place of the older personal services on the court-rolls. The process of
commutation was hastened by the necessities of the lords themselves. The
luxury of the castle-hall, the splendour and pomp of chivalry, the cost
of campaigns drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of
freedom to a serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an
easy and tempting mode of refilling them. In this process even kings took
part. At a later time, under Edward the Third, commissioners were sent to
royal estates for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the
king's serfs; and we still possess the names of those who were
enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard cash in aid of the
exhausted exchequer.

[Sidenote: England]

Such was the people which had been growing into a national unity and a
national vigour while English king and English baronage battled for rule.
But king and baronage themselves had changed like townsman and ceorl. The
loss of Normandy, entailing as it did the loss of their Norman lands, was
the last of many influences which had been giving through a century and a
half a national temper to the baronage. Not only the "new men," the
ministers out of whom the two Henries had raised a nobility, were bound
to the Crown, but the older feudal houses now owned themselves as
Englishmen and set aside their aims after personal independence for a
love of the general freedom of the land. They stood out as the natural
leaders of a people bound together by the stern government which had
crushed all local division, which had accustomed men to the enjoyment of
a peace and justice that imperfect as it seems to modern eyes was almost
unexampled elsewhere in Europe, and which had trained