The "Domesday-book" gives 25,000 as the number of slaves in England. The great bulk of the rural population was composed of bondmen, or villeins under various designations--as _bordiers_, _geburs_, _cotsetlas_, etc.--who were compelled to pay oppressive imposts, and submit to various degrading and oppressing servitudes. These oppressions and exactions bore most heavily on the Anglo-Saxon population. Slaves and serfs attached to the soil might be sold in the market-place, at the pleasure of their owners. Husbands sold their wives, and parents, unable or unwilling to support their children, might dispose of them in the same manner. The English slave-dealer of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, sold his Anglo-Saxon commodities to the Irish. A law enacted in 1102, prohibited this "wicked trade;" but the law was eluded, the trade continued, and when Henry II. invaded Ireland, he found English slaves there, whom he manumitted. In order to increase the revenue, as also from other motives of policy, the royal power in England, as all over Europe, generally favored the oppressed; its tendency always was to curb the arbitrary exactions of the barons, to promote emancipation, and generally to aid the serfs. William the Conqueror ordered that the lords should not deprive the husbandmen of their land; he enacted regulations to prevent arbitrary enslavement, and prohibited the sale of slaves out of the country. He also enacted a law which provided that the residence of any serf or slave for a year and a day, without being claimed, in any city, burgh, walled town or castle, should entitle him to perpetual liberty. An independent freeholding yeomanry existed in comparatively small numbers. The recklessness of the feudal barons obliged the yeomanry, for the sake of protection, to render allegiance to the manor, and thus, about a century after the conquest, almost all the small homesteads disappeared. The conquered population held their property, not by absolute right, but by a tenure from the lord. Thus all individual freedom, except that of the nobles, became either entirely lost, or more and more contracted, till finally time and circumstance partly loosened, partly destroyed, the bonds which held the nation in slavery. In England as in the whole of Europe, feudal oppression was the growth of a very few generations; but it has required many hundreds of years to destroy it. A disease may be caught in an hour--years may be required for its cure. For the conquered race, the Norman had all the contempt common to conquerors. Macaulay says that when Henry I. married an Anglo-Saxon of princely lineage, many of the barons regarded it as a Virginia planter might regard marriage with a quadroon girl. But personal and economical interests obliged the barons to relent in their treatment of their serfs and chattels; and many of them were allowed under certain conditions to cultivate small portions of land.