e the land was
entitled to the services of the man, he was equally entitled to the
support of the land. He could not be evicted; he could not even, in the
modern fashion, have his rent raised. At the beginning it was merely
that the slave was owned, but at least he could not be disowned. At the
end he had really become a small landlord, merely because it was not the
lord that owned him, but the land. It is hardly unsafe to suggest that
in this (by one of the paradoxes of this extraordinary period) the very
fixity of serfdom was a service to freedom. The new peasant inherited
something of the stability of the slave. He did not come to life in a
competitive scramble where everybody was trying to snatch his freedom
from him. He found himself among neighbours who already regarded his
presence as normal and his frontiers as natural frontiers, and among
whom all-powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition. By a
trick or overturn no romancer has dared to put in a tale, this prisoner
had become the governor of his own prison. For a little time it was
almost true that an Englishman's house was his castle, because it had
been built strong enough to be his dungeon.

The other notable element was this: that when the produce of the land
began by custom to be cut up and only partially transmitted to the lord,
the remainder was generally subdivided into two types of property. One
the serfs enjoyed severally, in private patches, while the other they
enjoyed in common, and generally in common with the lord. Thus arose the
momentously important mediaeval institutions of the Common Land, owned
side by side with private land. It was an alternative and a refuge. The
mediaevals, except when they were monks, were none of them Communists;
but they were all, as it were, potential Communists. It is typical of
the dark and dehumanized picture now drawn of the period that our
romances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on the forests
and the outlaw's den, but never describe him as falling back on the
common land, which was a much more common incident. Mediaevalism
believed in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the
communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants.
It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A
Common was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath we
call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth
like a reserve of g