sons apprentices
to any trade. They found already that the cities began to
drain the country of the laborers and husbandmen: and did
not foresee how much the increase of commerce would increase
the value of their estates. See further, Cotton, p. 179. The
kings, to encourage the boroughs, granted them this
privilege, that any villein who had lived a twelvemonth in
any corporation, and had been of the guild, should be
thenceforth regarded as free.

The relaxation of the feudal tenures, and an execution somewhat stricter
of the public law, bestowed an independence on vassals which was unknown
to their forefathers. And even the peasants themselves, though later
than other orders of the state, made their escape from those bonds of
villenage or slavery in which they had formerly been retained.

It may appear strange that the progress of the arts, which seems, among
the Greeks and Romans, to have daily increased the number of slaves,
should, in later times, have proved so general a source of liberty; but
this difference in the events proceeded from a great difference in the
circumstances which attended those institutions. The ancient barons,
obliged to maintain themselves continually in a military posture, and
little emulous of elegance or splendor, employed not their villains
as domestic servants, much less as manufacturers; but composed their
retinue of freemen, whose military spirit rendered the chieftain
formidable to his neighbors, and who were ready to attend him in
every warlike enterprise. The villains were entirely occupied in the
cultivation of their master's land, and paid their rents either in corn
and cattle, and other produce of the farm, or in servile offices, which
they performed about the baron's family, and upon the farms which he
retained in his own possession. In proportion as agriculture improved
and money increased, it was found that these services, though extremely
burdensome to the villain, were of little advantage to the master;
and that the produce of a large estate could be much more conveniently
disposed of by the peasants themselves, who raised it, than by the
landlord or his bailiff, who were formerly accustomed to receive it. A
commutation was therefore made of rents for services, and of money-rents
for those in kind; and as men, in a subsequent age, discovered that
farms were better cultivated where the farmer enjoyed a security in
his possession, the p