Surely the unlimited week-work marked the most complete serfdom. Surely the later services, limited in their amount and commutable into money payments, were clearly a mitigated service fast growing into a fixed money rent. In fact, the _gebur_ or _villanus_ was fast growing into a mere customary tenant in the time of Edward I. Indeed, he is not called in the 'Inquisition' a '_villanus_,' but a '_custumarius_,' and such he was. He was halfway on the road to freedom. Another sign of the times was this, that at the later date, side by side with the customary tenants on the land in villenage, a whole host of _libere tenentes_ had already grown up upon the lord's demesne, not, as we have more than once observed, necessarily _liberi homines_ at all, but some of them villein tenants or _custumarii_ holding additional pieces of free land of the lord's demesne. Of these free tenants there were none at the earlier period. So that the _gebur_, with his _weorc-ræden_ 100 years and more before the Norman Conquest, was much more clearly a serf, and rendered far more complete and servile services than his successor in the thirteenth century, with the Black Death and Wat Tyler's rebellion in the near future before him. Finally, let us look backward and ask how long this more complete serfdom had lasted on the manor of Tidenham. «They probably go back to near the first conquest.» If in the laws of King Ine are found, as we have seen, the '_geset land_' and '_gyrd lands_,' and the '_gafol_,' and the '_weorc_,' and the '_geneat_,' and the '_gebur_,' and the obligation not to leave the lord's [p159] land; and if all those were incidents of what in the '_Rectitudines_' and in the charter of King Edwy just examined was in fact serfdom--if the laws of Ine are good evidence that this serfdom existed in full force in the seventh century _anywhere_--they must surely be good evidence that it existed on the manor of Tidenham. For it was, as we have seen, a royal manor of King Edwy, and most probably he had received it through a succession of royal holders from King Ine. There is no evidence of its having ceased to be folcland, and so to be in the royal demesne of the kings of Wessex or of Mercia, from Ine's time to Edwy's. And if it was a royal manor of King Ine's, surely the laws of King Ine may be taken to interpret the serfdom on his own estate. Lastly, looking further back still, as King Ine probably held the manor in direct succession from Ceawlin, or whoever conquered it from the Welsh, and cut it from the diocese of Llandaff in A.D. 577 or thereabouts, the inference is very strong indeed that the _weorc-ræden_ had remained much the same ever since, 100 years before the date of King Ine's laws, it first fell under Saxon rule. «Changes in local customs very slow.»