d in the worthlessness of the mob of footmen who were
driven by their lords to the camp. In England, on the other hand, the
failure of feudalism to win a complete hold on the country was seen in the
persistence of the older national institutions which based its defence on
the general levy of its freemen. If the foreign kings added to this a
system of warlike organization grounded on the service due from its
military tenants to the Crown, they were far from regarding this as
superseding the national "fyrd." The Assize of Arms, the Statute of
Winchester, show with what care the fyrd was held in a state of efficiency.
Its force indeed as an engine of war was fast rising between the age of
Henry the Second and that of Edward the Third. The social changes on which
we have already dwelt, the facilities given to alienation and the
subdivision of lands, the transition of the serf into a copyholder and of
the copyholder by redemption of his services into a freeholder, the rise of
a new class of "farmers" as the lords ceased to till their demesne by means
of bailiffs and adopted the practice of leasing it at a rent or "farm" to
one of the customary tenants, the general increase of wealth which was
telling on the social position even of those who still remained in
villenage, undid more and more the earlier process which had degraded the
free ceorl of the English Conquest into the villein of the Norman Conquest,
and covered the land with a population of yeomen, some freeholders, some
with services that every day became less weighty and already left them
virtually free.

[Sidenote: The Bow]

Such men, proud of their right to justice and an equal law, called by
attendance in the county court to a share in the judicial, the financial,
and the political life of the realm, were of a temper to make soldiers of a
different sort from the wretched serfs who followed the feudal lords of the
Continent; and they were equipped with a weapon which as they wielded it
was enough of itself to make a revolution in the art of war. The bow,
identified as it became with English warfare, was the weapon not of
Englishmen but of their Norman conquerors. It was the Norman arrow-flight
that decided the day of Senlac. But in the organization of the national
army it had been assigned as the weapon of the poorer freeholders who were
liable to serve at the king's summons; and we see how closely it had become
associated with them in the picture of Chaucer's ye