, _op. cit._, p. 342, note 2.

[82] Seebohm, _op. cit._, p. 30, note 2.

[83] Page, _End of Villainage_, p. 365.

[84] _Ibid._, p. 384.

[85] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 157.

[86] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 121.

CHAPTER III

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE OPEN-FIELDS

For the reasons given in the last chapter, bailiff-farming rapidly
gave way to the various forms of the leasehold system in the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The economic basis of
serfdom was destroyed; a servile tenement could no longer be depended
upon to supply an able-bodied man to do work on the demesne for
several days a week throughout the year, with extra helpers from his
family at harvest time. The money received in commutation of customary
labor, or as rent from land which had formerly been held for services
was far less than the value of the services, and would not pay the
wages of free men hired in place of the serfs who had formerly
performed the labor. Moreover, the demesne land itself was for the
most part so unproductive that it had hardly paid to cultivate it even
at the slight expense incurred in furnishing food for the serfs
employed; it was all the more a waste of money to hire men to plow it
and sow it.

The text books on economic history usually give a careful account of
the various forms of leases which were used as bailiff-farming was
abandoned. We are told how the demesne was leased either as a whole or
in larger or smaller pieces to different tenants and sets of tenants,
for lives, for longer or shorter periods of years, with or without the
stock which was on it, and, in some cases, with the servile labor of
some of the villains, when this had not all been excused or commuted
into money payments. Arrangements necessarily differed on the
different manors, and the exact terms of these first experimental
leases do not concern us here.

The fact which does interest us is that with the cessation of bailiff
farming the last attempt at keeping the land distributed in fairly
equal shares among a large number of tenants was abandoned. Bond land
had been divided into portions which were each supposed to be
sufficient for the maintenance of a laborer and his family. As long as
the demesne was cultivated for the lord, it was to his interest to
prevent the concentration of holdings in a few hands, unless some
certain provision could be made to insure the performance of the labor
due from all of the