This was the economic condition in which England was left by the Saxons as the result of the 500 years of their rule. The agriculture of England, _as they left it_, was carried on under the open field system by village communities in villenage. It was under the system of Saxon serfdom, with some little help from the actual slaves on the lord's demesne, that the land was tilled throughout all those counties which the Saxons had thoroughly conquered, with some partial exception [p104] as regards the Danish districts, where the _sochmanni_ and _liberi homines_ were settled. This is the solid foundation of fact firmly vouched for by the Domesday Survey, read in the light of the evidence leading up to it. From this firm basis the inquiry must proceed, carefully following the same lines as before--working still from the known to the unknown--tracing the open field system, its villani, and their yard-lands still farther back into the earlier periods of Saxon rule. The question to be answered is, how far back into the earlier Saxon times the open field system and its yard-lands can be followed, and whether the serfdom connected with them was more or was less complete and servile in its character in the earlier than in the later period. FOOTNOTES: [107] Ellis's _Introduction_, i. p. 225. [108] Unfortunately the same contracted form serves in the Survey for both _carucata_ and _caruca_. [109] An elaborate argument was raised by Archdeacon Hale in the valuable introduction to the Camden Society's edition of the _Domesday of St. Paul's_, to show that the values given at the end of the entry for each manor in the Domesday Survey consisted of the rents of free tenants. He based his view on the fact that in two cases quoted by him the amount of the value so given was exceeded by the amount for which the manor, in these cases, was let 'ad firmam;' and, further, upon a comparison of the Domesday values of the manors of St. Paul's with the recorded 'Summæ denariorum' in 1181, and 'Tenants' rents' in 1222. But the figures given are probably a sufficient refutation of the view taken, inasmuch as though the latter have a certain general correspondence with the Domesday values in almost every case, if the view were correct, there must have been a falling off in the number and value of the tenants' rents between the two periods. The falling off for the whole of the 18 manors must have been in this case from 155l. 10s. T.R.E., and 157l. 13s. 4d. T.R.W., of Domesday amounts, to 112l. 16s. 4d. in 1181, and 126l. 10s. 3d. in 1222. The true reading of these figures, there can hardly be a doubt, is that the amount of _tenants' rents alone_ at the later date had become in the interval nearly as great as the _whole value_ of the manors (including the land both in demesne and in villenage) at the time of the Domesday Survey. There is abundant evidence of the rapid growth of population, and especially of the class of free