But the Danes were something more than tillers of the soil; they were traders too, and "tuns" became in many places more like our "towns" and trading-places than ever they had been before. In time we find the largest towns in the Danish part of England--Leicester, Lincoln, Derby, Nottingham, and Stamford--binding themselves together to protect their trading interests. [Illustration: _Saxon Church at Bradford-on-Avon_ _This little building, one of the earliest stone churches, lay hidden for centuries, but was rediscovered in 1857. The monastery once attached to it has long since perished._] CHAPTER XIII Towns and Villages in the Time of Cnut the Dane Now let us see what an ordinary village was like in the time of King Cnut, when Saxon and Dane were living pretty comfortably together, side by side, under good government. We find that each vill or tun had a lord, an eorl, or thane, who practically owned the place and everything in it, though he could not do entirely as he liked. There was the land which belonged to him, and which was in his own hands, or occupation, as we say; that was called his demesne. The rest of the land was also his, but it was let out to people who had lived on the land from time out of mind--the cheorls or villeins. The lord's house was on his demesne. The villeins' houses were all together in the tun, with the grass yards for the cattle close to them, and the open fields and pasture-lands outside the tun, just as they had been in the olden days. There seems to have been two classes of villeins--geburs and cottiers. The geburs were the higher class. They appear very frequently to have held about one hundred and twenty acres of land; they had to work on the lord's home farm two or three days a week, or pay him certain produce of the land as a rent; and they had to provide one or more oxen for the village plough, when there was ploughing to be done on the lord's farm, or in the common field. In the Danish part of the country there appears to have been a class of freeholders, in some places, called socmen, but there were not very many of them. They, no doubt, had had their rights granted to them for distinguished service in the Danish wars. The cottiers held only about five acres of land. They had to work for the thane or lord on certain days of the week; but, as they had no oxen, they had no ploughing to do for him. Below the geburs and the cottiers were the theows, thralls, or slaves, who could be bought and sold. They were captives taken in war, or men who, for their crimes, had been doomed to slavery. We must remember that the overlord might be the king or a bishop, a monastery or a thane. Their rights over their vills and tuns were much the same in each case, and their duties to those vills and tuns were also similar.