scribe them, that
none were left in his time. But some may be found in an earlier age. In
the ninth of John, William sued Ralph the priest for granting away lands
which he held to Canford priory. Ralph pleaded that they were his
freehold. William replied that he held them in villenage, and that he
(the plaintiff) had sold one of Ralph's sisters for four shillings.
(Blomefield's Norfolk, vol. iii. p. 860, 4to. edition.) And Mr. Wright
has found in Madox's Formulare Anglicanum not less than five instances
of villeins sold with their family and chattels, but without land.
(Archaeologia, xxx. 228.) Even where they were sold along with land,
unless it were a manor, they would, as has been observed before, have
been villeins in gross. I have, however, been informed that in
valuations under escheats in the old records a separate value is never
put upon villeins; their alienation without the land was apparently not
contemplated. Few cases concerning villeins in gross, it has been said,
occur in the Year-books; but villenage of any kind does not furnish a
great many; and in several I do not perceive, in consulting the report,
that the party can be shown to have been regardant. One reason why
villeins in gross should have become less and less numerous was that
they could, for the most part, only be claimed by showing a written
grant, or by prescription through descent; so that, if the title-deed
were lost, or the descent unproved, the villein became free.

Manumissions were often, no doubt, gratuitous; in some cases the villein
seems to have purchased his freedom. For though in strictness, as
Glanvil tells us, he could not "libertatem suam suis denariis quaerere,"
inasmuch as all he possessed already belonged to the lord, it would have
been thought a meanness to insist on so extreme a right. In order,
however, to make the deed more secure, it was usual to insert the name
of a third person as paying the consideration-money for the
enfranchisement. (Archaeologia, xxx. 228.)

It appears not by any means improbable that regular money payments, or
other fixed liabilities, were often substituted instead of uncertain
services for the benefit of the lord as well as the tenant. And when
these had lasted a considerable time in any manor, the villenage of the
latter, without any manumission, would have expired by desuetude. But,
perhaps, an entry of his tenure on the court-roll, with a copy given to
himself, would operate of itself, in con