[67] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 135. [68] Page, _op. cit._, p. 344, note 2. [69] Davenport, _Decay of Villainage_, p. 127. For further evidence of the voluntary relinquishment of land in this period, see Seebohm, _Eng. Village Community_ (London, 1890), p. 30, note 4, and Davenport, _Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor_, pp. 91, 71, 72. [70] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, pp. 42-43. [71] Davenport, _Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor_, p. 78, and Smyth, _op. cit._, vol. i, p. 113. [72] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 157. "On many manors the majority of the services owed were simply dropped, neither sold nor commuted. They were evidently in many cases inefficient, expensive, and inelastic." [73] _Ibid._, p. 89. [74] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. v. [75] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 199. [76] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 108. [77] _Ibid._, pp. 38, 115. [78] Page, _op. cit._, p. 342, note 2. [79] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 115. [80] _Ibid._, p. 200. [81] Page, _op. cit._, p. 342, note 2. [82] Seebohm, _op. cit._, p. 30, note 2. [83] Page, _End of Villainage_, p. 365. [84] _Ibid._, p. 384. [85] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 157. [86] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 121. CHAPTER III THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE OPEN-FIELDS For the reasons given in the last chapter, bailiff-farming rapidly gave way to the various forms of the leasehold system in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The economic basis of serfdom was destroyed; a servile tenement could no longer be depended upon to supply an able-bodied man to do work on the demesne for several days a week throughout the year, with extra helpers from his family at harvest time. The money received in commutation of customary labor, or as rent from land which had formerly been held for services was far less than the value of the services, and would not pay the wages of free men hired in place of the serfs who had formerly performed the labor. Moreover, the demesne land itself was for the most part so unproductive that it had hardly paid to cultivate it even at the slight expense incurred in furnishing food for the serfs employed; it was all the more a waste of money to hire men to plow it and sow it. The text books on economic history usually give a careful account of the various forms of leases which were used as bailiff-farming was abandoned. We are told how the demesne was leased either as a whole or in larger or smaller pieces to different tenants and sets of tenants, for lives, for longer or shorter periods of years, with or without the stock which was on it, and, in some cases, with the servile labor of some of the villains, when this had not all been excused or commuted into money payments. Arrangements necessarily differed on the different manors, and the exact terms of these first experimental leases do not concern us here.