The result of conquest seems thus to have been chiefly a change of lordship, both as regards the private villas and the public lands. The conquered districts seem to have become in a wholesale way practically _terra regis_. There is no evidence that the modes of agriculture on the one hand or the modes of management on the other hand were materially changed. The conquering king would probably at once put followers of his own into the place of the Roman fiscal officers. These would become _quasi_-lords of the royal manors on the _terra regis_. Then by degrees would naturally arise the process whereby under lavish royal grants manors were handed one after another into the private ownership of churches and monasteries and favourites of the king, thus honey-combing the _terra regis_ with private manors. This seems to have been what happened in the Frankish provinces, and in the Alamannic and Bavarian districts, where the process can be most clearly traced. And the result seems to have been the almost universal prevalence of the manorial system in these districts. Even the towns came to be regarded as in the demesne of the king. And [p416] gradually manorial lordship extended itself over the free tenants as well as over the various semi-servile classes who were afterwards confused together in the general class of serfs. The community of serfs was fed from above and from below. Free 'coloni,' by their own voluntary surrender, and free tribesmen, perhaps upon conquest or gradually by the force of long usage, sank into serfs. Slaves, on the other hand, by their lord's favour, or to meet the needs of agriculture, were supplied with an outfit of oxen and rose out of slavery into serfdom. But what was this serfdom? It was not simply the old prædial slavery of the Germans of Tacitus. Nor was it merely a continuance of the slavery on the Roman villa. «Slavery mitigated by Christian humanity.» For finally, in the period of transition from Roman to German lordship, a new moral force entered as a fresh factor in the economic evolution. The silent humanising influence of Christianity seems to have been the power which mitigated the rigour of slavery, and raised the slave on the estates of the Church into the middle status of serfdom, by insisting upon the limitation of his labour to the three days' week-work of the mediæval serf. Thus, from the point of view alike of the German and the Roman 'servi,' mediæval serfdom, except to the freemen who by their own surrender or by conquest were degraded into it, was a distinct step upward in the economic progress of the masses of the people towards freedom. * * * * * «The pre-Roman _one-field_ system in England.»