The tenements held in villenage of the lord of a manor, at least where they consisted of a messuage or dwelling-house, are often called astra in our older books and court-rolls.
Of the villenage of Neweham, with appurtenances (or members), and of the villeins' works and customs.
So that, summing up the evidence of this chapter, daylight seems to have dawned upon the meaning of the interesting gradation of holdings in villenage in the open fields.
The terms of the writ ordering the survey to be made on the Ely manors show clearly what classes of tenants in villenage were expected to be found on the manors.
In describing the tenants in villenage there is first a statement that A.
We have learned from a long line of evidence, leading backwards to the date of the Domesday Survey, that the community in villenage fitted into the open field system as a snail fits into a shell.
Further examination at once discloses a marked difference in kind between some classes of holdings in villenage and others.
The three classes of tenants in villenage actually mentioned in the Survey are almost universally the-- (1) Villani.
The immediate effect, as we learn from Knighton, as well as from the rolls of particular manor courts, was a remission of them by the lords, lest their tenants in villenage should quit the lands.
There is no trace of the villenage described in Glanville and Bracton, among the tenants of a manor 500 years ago.
The attack on villenage was too reasonable to be fruitless, and resistance to the popular demands could be but temporary.
And even the peasants themselves, though later than other orders of the state, made their escape from those bonds of villenage or slavery in which they had formerly been retained.
After this manner villenage went gradually into disuse throughout the more civilized parts of Europe: the interest of the master, as well as that of the slave, concurred in this alteration.
They who were born in villenage were born to an inheritance of labour, but not of inevitable depravity and wretchedness.
And as villenage disappeared, free labourers of various descriptions multiplied; of whom the more industrious and fortunate rose in society, and became tradesmen and merchants; the unlucky and the reprobate became vagabonds.
It had ceased, so as even to be forgotten in my youth; and villenage was advancing fast towards its natural extinction.
The services of villenage were gradually rendered less onerous and uncertain.
Villenage had a double sense, as it related to persons or to lands.
From so disadvantageous a condition as this ofvillenage it may cause some surprise that the peasantry of England should have ever emerged.
In the agricultural economy of Rome the labouring husbandman, a menial slave of some wealthy senator, had not even that qualified interest in the soil which the tenure of villenage afforded to the peasant of feudal ages.
From henceforward we find little notice taken of villenage in parliamentary records, and there seems to have been a rapid tendency to its entire abolition.
Contishall, that they shall be free from all villenage in body and blood, paying an aid of twenty shillings to knight the king's eldest son, and six shillings a year as a quit-rent.
The purchasers under these alienations had occasion for labourers; and these would be free servants in respect of such employers, though in villenage to their original lord.
See the rules of pleading and evidence in questions of villenage fully stated in Mr. Hargrave's argument in the case of Somerset.
It is said in a modern book that villenage was very rare in Scotland, and even that no instance exists in records of an estate sold with the labourers and their families attached to the soil.
And when these had lasted a considerable time in any manor, the villenage of the latter, without any manumission, would have expired by desuetude.
Proofs of this remarkable transformation from tenants in villenage to copyholders are found in the reign of Henry III.
Some faint traces of the institution of villenage were detected by the curious so late as the days of the Stuarts; nor has that institution ever, to this hour, been abolished by statute.
How great a part the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics subsequently had in the abolition ofvillenage we learn from the unexceptionable testimony of Sir Thomas Smith, one of the ablest Protestant counsellors of Elizabeth.
At any rate, villenagehas ceased in England, and it cannot be revived.
As to the period at which villenage in England became extinct, we find in Litt.
Villenage is supposed to have finally disappeared in the reign of James I.
