It would appear that the produce of the arable land was nearly all required for feeding its human occupants, and that the geese and the pigs and other animals would be limited to such numbers as could find food for themselves in the woods and wild land which was common to the lords and tenants of each manor. These returns of live stock, although they would have been very valuable to the Conqueror and ourselves, if they were complete and trustworthy, are so manifestly defective and irregularly made in most cases, that they furnish very unsatisfactory materials for forming an idea of the general condition of the peasantry. But as we know that all the tenants of a manor—even the lowest class of bondmen—occupied some land for the maintenance of themselves and their families, with rights of pasturage on the common lands, probably most had some cattle and pigs of their own, and were well provided with the necessaries of life. The country must have been in a stationary condition for hundreds of years in the Saxon period owing to the entire absence of trade, and the almost entire absence of money. The silver penny was the only coin in circulation, and indeed for some two centuries after. With little or no opportunities for selling the produce of their estates, the landowners had little reason to improve them, nor could they increase their land under tillage without interfering with the rights of their tenants on the waste land. The system of serfdom, moreover, whilst it secured a living to a large number of people, bound them and their children to the estates on which they held their land, and must have tended to deprive a large part of the population of the country of any stimulus to enterprise or self improvement. SERFDOM. It appears from Mr. Turner’s computation of the different classes forming the population of Suffolk, as shown in Domesday, that some 10,000 out of the 22,000 were in the condition of serfs, bound to some manor, either as small tenant farmers paying rent as well as services for their land, or as cottage tenants working on the demesne, or as mere slaves or thralls, the absolute property of the lords. {21} I will not take you further into this obscure and complicated question than to say that the bondage of the greater part of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry implied little more than that they were bound to remain on the estate to perform the services for which they held their land. These services were fixed as strictly as a money rent would be, and left them plenty of time for working on their own land, while the law provided various means by which they could obtain freedom for themselves and their children. The Church—at all events the parish clergy—always used their influence to obtain the freedom of the lowest and most servile class. We read of a case where an hereditary serf was holding the high position of bailiff of a large manor. Turner says:—