emand a money
equivalent for services not required for any reason. We have here the
reason why so few services are demanded, but no explanation of the
failure to require money instead. The fundamental cause of the
worthlessness of the labor on the demesne is the fact which accounts
for the absence of a money payment for the work not performed. The
demesne land was worn out, and did not repay costs of cultivation; the
bond land was worn out, and the villains were too poor to "buy" their
labor.

The profits of cultivating this unproductive land were so small that a
deficit arose when it was necessary to meet the cost of maintaining
for a few days the men employed on it. It is not surprising that men
who had families to support and were trying to make a living from the
soil abandoned their worthless holdings and left the manor. The lord
had only to meet the expense of food for the laborers during the few
days when they were actually at work plowing the demesne or harvesting
the crop. How could the villain support his whole family during the
entire year on the produce of worse land more scantily manured? In
this low productivity of the land is to be found the reason for the
conversion of much of the demesne into pasture land, as soon as the
supply of servile labor failed. It was, of course, impossible to pay
the wages of free men from the produce of soil too exhausted to repay
even the slight cost incidental to cultivating it with serf labor.
The bailiffs complained of the exorbitant wages demanded by servants
in husbandry; these wages were exorbitant only because the produce of
the land was so small that it was not worth the pains of tillage.

The most important of the many causes which were at work to undermine
the manorial system in the fourteenth century is, therefore, plain.
The productivity of the soil had declined to a point where villain
holdings would no longer support the families which cultivated them
and where demesne land was sometimes not worth cultivation even by
serf labor. Under these conditions, the very basis of the manor was
destroyed. The poverty of the peasants, the difficulty with which
tenants could be found for vacant holdings, even though the greatest
pressure was brought to bear upon eligible villains, and even though
the servile burdens were considerably reduced, and the frequency with
which these serfs preferred the uncertainty and risk of deserting to
the certain destitution and misery of lan