es was
the accumulation of capital in the hands of the villains, and their
desire to improve their social condition. The immediate affect of the
commutation of services and similar changes at this time was to leave
their social condition untouched, whatever the final result may have
been. These villains did not buy themselves free of the marks of
servitude. Their gradual emancipation came for other reasons. At
Witney, for example, where the works of all the native tenants had
been commuted by 1376, they were still required to perform duties of a
servile character:

they were all to join in haymaking and in washing and shearing
the lord's sheep, to pay pannage for their pigs, to take their
turn of service as reeve and tithingman, and to carry the lord's
victuals and baggage on his departure from Witney as the natives
were formerly wont to do.[75]

This example, taken at random, is typical of the continuance of
conditions which should make the historian hesitate before adopting
the view that the social condition of the peasants was improved by the
new arrangements made as to the bulk of their services and rents. But
more than that, the terms of the new arrangements are not those which
would be offered by well-to-do cultivators in whose hands the profits
from the soil had accumulated. In all of these cases the new terms
were advantageous to the tenants, not to the lord, and advantageous in
a strictly pecuniary way. The lord had to grant these terms because
the tenants were in the most miserable poverty, and could no longer
pay their accustomed rent.

Neither the Black Death, whose effects were evanescent, nor the desire
of prosperous villains to free themselves of the degrading marks of
serfdom was an important cause in the sequence of agrarian changes
which took place in the fourteenth century. Serfdom as a status was
hardly affected, but a thousand entries record the poverty and
destitution which made it necessary to lighten the economic burdens of
the serfs. At Brightwell, for example, the works of three
half-virgaters were relaxed, the record reads, because of their
poverty (1349-1350).[76] Some villains had no oxen, and were excused
their plowing on this account, or were allowed to substitute manual
labor for carting services.[77] At Weston, in 1370, a tenant "_non
arat terram domini causa paupertate_."[78] At Downton, in 13766-1377,
no money could be collected from the villains in place o