villain tenants of the
manor for a sum of L8 a year. The person who took the land was usually
either a free or a villain tenant of the same or a neighboring manor.
The land was let only for a certain number of years, but afterward was
usually relet either to the same or to another tenant. The word
_farmer_ originally meant one of these tenants who took the demesne or
some other piece of land, paying for it a "farm" or _firma_, that is,
a settled established sum, in place of the various forms of profit
that might have been secured from it by the lord of the manor. The
free and villain holdings which came into the hands of the lord by
failure of heirs in those times of frequent extinction of families
were also granted out very generally at a money rent, so that a large
number of the cultivators of the soil came to be tenants at a money
rent, that is, lease-holders or "farmers." These free renting farmers,
along with the smaller freeholders, made up the "yeomen" of England.

*33. The Decay of Serfdom.*--It is in the changes discussed in the last
two paragraphs that is to be found the key to the disappearance of
serfdom in England. Men had been freed from villainage in individual
cases by various means. Manumission of serfs had occurred from time to
time through all the mediaeval centuries. It was customary in such
cases either to give a formal charter granting freedom to the man
himself and to his descendants, or to have entered on the manor court
roll the fact of his obtaining his enfranchisement. Occasionally men
were manumitted in order that they might be ordained as clergymen. In
the period following the pestilences of the fourteenth century the
difficulty in recruiting the ranks of the priesthood made the practice
more frequent The charters of manumission issued by the king to the
insurgents of 1381 would have granted freedom on a large scale had
they not been disowned and subsequently withdrawn. Still other
villains had obtained freedom by flight from the manors where they had
been born. When a villain who had fled was discovered he could be
reclaimed by the lord of the manor by obtaining a writ from the court,
but many obstacles might be placed in the way of obtaining this writ,
and it must always have involved so much difficulty as to make it
doubtful whether it was worth while. So long as a villain was anywhere
else than on the manor to which he belonged, he was practically a free
man, but few of the disabiliti