villeinage, villenage (vilenaj)

[Also vil lanage; OF. villenage, vilenage, vilonage (= Sp. villanaje, ML. villenagium ), servile tenure, ture, and undefined as to time and amount, the tenant being bound to do whatever was commanded, the tenure received the name of pure villeinage; but where the service, although of a base nature, was certain and defined, it was called privileged villeinage, and sometimes villein socage. The tenants in villeinage were divided into two distinct cla es. First, there were the villan i proper, whose holdings, the hides, half-hides, virgates, and bovates (see hides, holding ), were correlative with the number of oxen allotted to them or contributed by them to the manorial plow-team of eight oxen. Below the villan i proper were the numerous smaller tenants of what may be termed the cot tier cla , sometimes called in Liber Niger" bordar i i (probably from the Saxon bord, a cottage), and these cottagers, po e ing generally no oxen, and therefore taking no part in the common plowing, still in some manors seem to have ranked as a lower grade of villan i, having small allotments in the open fields, in some manors five-acre strips apiece, in other manors more or le . Lastly, below the villains and cottiers were, in some districts, remains, hardly to be noticed in the later cartularies, of a cla of servi, or slaves, fast becoming merged in the cottier cla above them, or losing themselves among the household servants or laborers upon the lord's demesne. ( Seebohm.) (See manor, yard- land, heriot.) It frequently happened that lands held in villeinage descended in uninterrupted succe ion from father to son, until at length the occupiers or villains became entitled, by prescription or custom, to hold their lands against the lord so long as they performed the required services. And although the villains themselves acquired freedom, or their land came into the po e ion of freemen, the villein services were still the condition of the tenure, according to the custom of the manor. These customs were preserved and evidenced by the rolls of the several courts-baron in which they were entered, or kept on foot by the constant immemorial usage several in which the lands lay. And as such tenants had nothing to show for their estates but the entries in those rolls, or copies of them authenticated by the steward, they at last came to be called tenants by copy of court - roll, and their tenure a copyhold. vender the all the earthedudete Norman rule, when ceorl shadow of his master's contempt retained many of the material benefits of his earlier freedom. But the English ceorl had had slaves of his own, and the Norman lawyer steadily depre ed the ceorl himself to the same level. The ceorl had his right in the common land of his township; his Latin name villan us had been a symbol of freedom; but his privileges were bound to the land, and when the Norman lord took the land he took the villein with it. Still the villein retained his customary rights, his house and land and rights of wood and hay; his lord's demesne depended for cultivation on his services, and he had in his lord's sense of self-interest the sort protection that was shared by the horse and the ox. Law and custom, too, protected him in practice more than in theory. So villenage grew to be a base tenure, differing in degree rather than in kind from socage, and privileged as well as burdened. Stubbs, Const. Hist., § 264. Pure villeinage, in feudal law, a tenure of lands by uncertain services at the will of the lord, so that the tenant is bound to do whatever is commanded of him: opposed to privileged villeinage.