ants were bound only to serve their own
masters, and might, and in fact often did, take up arms against the
King. William removed this serious defect. By doing so he did the
country an incalculable service. He completed the organization of
feudal land tenure, but he never established the Continental system of
feudal government. (See, too, the Constitutional Summary in the
Appendix, p. v, S6.)

[2] See the Constitutional Summary in the Appendix, pp. iii-v, SS5, 6.

The building is Ludlow Castle, Shropshire. Manor houses proper, as
distinct from castles, existed in England at least from the thirteenth
century

(See Gibbin's "Industrial History of England" and Cheyney's
"Industrial and Social England")

The inhabitants of a manor, or the estate of a lord, were: (1) the
lord himself, or his representative, who held his estate on condition
of furnishing the King a certain number of armed men (SS113, 150); (2)
the lord's personal followers, who lived with him, and usually a
parish priest or a number of monks; (3) the farm laborers, or
villeins, bound to the soil, who could not leave the manor, were not
subject to military duty, and who paid rent in labor or produce; there
might also be a few actual slaves, but this last class gradually rose
to the partial freedom of villenage; (4) certain free tenants or
"sokemen," who paid a fixed rent either in money or service and were
not bound to the soil as the villeins were.

Next to the manor house (where courts were also held) the most
important buildings were the church (used sometimes for markets and
town meetings); the lord's mill (if there was a stream), in which all
tenants must grind their grain and pay for the grinding; and finally,
the cottages of the tenants, gathered in a village near the mill.

The land was divided as follows: (1) the "demesne" (or domain)
surrounding the manor house; this was strictly private--the lord's
ground; (2) the land outside the demesne, suitable for cultivation;
this was let in strips, usually of thirty acres, but was subject to
certain rules in regard to methods of tillage and crops; (3) a piece
of land which tenants might hire and use as they saw fit; (4) common
pasture, open to all tenants to pasture their cattle on; (5) waste or
untilled land, where all tenants had the right to cut turf for feul,
or gather plants or shrubs for fodder; (6) the forest or woodland,
where all tenants had the right to turn their hogs out to feed on