a serf "_recessit a dominio et dereliquit terram suam_." At
Chilton, between 1356 and 1359, eleven men and two women fled, some of
whom were recaptured. At Therfield in 1369 a man who held twenty-three
acres of land fled with his whole family. In the same year at Abbot's
Ripton a man escaped with his horses, and three years later another
villain left Weston by night.[68] At Forncett, "Before 1378 from 60 to
70 tenements had fallen into the lord's hands. It was the serfs
especially who were relinquishing their land; for a larger proportion
of the tenements charged with week-work were abandoned than of the
more lightly burdened tenements."[69] This, of course, is what we should
expect, as the lighter burdens of these holdings caused their tenants to
feel less severely than the ordinary serfs the declining productivity of
the land.

The method of compulsion failed to keep the tenants on the land. They
ran off, and the holdings remained vacant. It was necessary to make
concessions of a material nature in order to persuade men to take up
land or to keep what they had. They were excused of a part of their
services in some cases, and in others all of the services were
definitely commuted for small sums of money. When no tenants for
vacant land could be secured who would perform the customary services
due from it, the bailiff was forced to commute them. "'So and so holds
such land for rent, because no one would hold it for works,' is a
fairly frequent entry both before and after 1349," on the records of
the Bishopric of Winchester. The important point to be noticed here is
that the money rent paid in these cases was always less than the value
of the services which had formerly been exacted from the land; not
only that, it was less than the money equivalent for which those
services had sometimes been commuted, an amount far less than the
market value of the services in the fourteenth century at the
prevailing rates of wages. For instance, when Roger Haywood took up
three virgates and a cotland at a money rent instead of for the
traditional services, "_quia nullus tenere voluit_," he contracted to
pay rents whose total sum amounted to less than twenty-five shillings
and included the church scot for one virgate and the cotland. On this
manor, Sutton, the total services of _one_ virgate valued at the rate
at which they were ordinarily "sold" must have amounted to at least
eighteen or twenty shillings. At Wargrave the services of th