mong several holders, the interest of the lord in the labor supply on
the manor was very much diminished. Even if he agreed in his lease of
the demesne to the new farmer that the villains should perform their
customary services in as far as these had not been commuted, yet the
farmer could not enforce this of himself, and the lord of the manor
was probably languid or careless or dilatory in doing so. The other
payments and burdens of serfdom were not so lucrative, and as the
ranks of the old villain class were depleted by the extinction of
families, and fewer inhabitants were bound to attend the manor courts,
they became less so. It became, therefore, gradually more common, then
quite universal, for the lords of manors to cease to enforce the
requirements of serfdom. A legal relation of which neither party is
reminded is apt to become obsolete; and that is what practically
happened to serfdom in England. It is true that many persons were
still legally serfs, and occasionally the fact of their serfdom was
asserted in the courts or inferred by granting them manumission. These
occasional enfranchisements continued down into the second half of the
sixteenth century, and the claim that a certain man was a villain was
pleaded in the courts as late as 1618. But long before this time
serfdom had ceased to have much practical importance. It may be said
that by the middle of the fifteenth century the mass of the English
rural population were free men and no longer serfs. With their labor
services commuted to money and the other conditions of their
villainage no longer enforced, they became an indistinguishable part
either of the yeomanry or of the body of agricultural laborers.

[Illustration: Town Houses in the Fifteenth Century. (Wright, T.:
_History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments_.)]

*34. Changes in Town Life and Foreign Trade.*--The changes discussed in
the last three sections apply in the main to rural life. The economic
and social history of the towns during the same period, except in as
far as it was part of the general national experience, consisted in a
still more complete adoption of those characteristics which have
already been described in Chapter III. Their wealth and prosperity
became greater, they were still more independent of the rural
districts and of the central government, the intermunicipal character
of their dealings, the closeness of connection between their
industrial interests and their governmen