The yeoman farmer, or vavassour, was the aristocrat of his condition; his ancestors were freemen, and he himself, though less than noble, had certain of a noble’s privileges: he was free to quit or sell his estates at will, free to marry whom he would; there were even vavassours who held their land by military service. But as a class they paid a rent to their lord, were constrained to till a portion of his lands, and to furnish him yearly with a draught-horse for his stable; differing in this from the noble, who held his lands by faith, by homage, and by military service, paid no rent, and owed no _corvée_. Nevertheless a wealthy vavassour was, as we should say, a country gentleman of the humbler sort: a “half-sir,” as they say in Ireland. In time of peace he lived with a certain state and order; in time of war he carried a lance and rode to battle on horseback, with his men behind him. There were, of course, poor vavassours, who paid less rent and performed a more considerable _corvée_, and (for the limits of class were little less elastic then than now) if some among the yeoman-farmers rose almost to equality with the noble, there were also unthrifty and ruined vavassours[7] who were merely the equals of the saving cottager or the tenant on the estate. The vavassour, or yeoman, with the colon or rich farmer, formed an upper class among the rural population. Immediately below them came the tenants-on-the-estate, men who were not wholly free, who might not, for instance, sell their lands or marry without the express permission of their feudal lord, and who, should their seigneur be taken in battle, might be taxed to the verge of ruin in order to raise his ransom. These men, in fact, were serfs; but there were degrees in servage. In the meaning that we attach to the word, servage was extinct by the end of the fourteenth century. There was no acknowledged exercise of arbitrary power. The relations of the peasant to the lord of the manor were as well defined as those of the lord himself towards his feudal suzerain. In theory, the peasant might not sell his lands or marry without leave; but, in practice, this meant merely that he paid his landlord a slight tax on these occasions, even as we pay the death-dues to the State on coming into an inheritance. Certainly he was, in theory, “_taillable et corvéable à volonté_;” but these dues and _corvées_ were almost invariable; they were attached rather to the land than to the lessee. A certain property carried with it a certain tax and _corvée_, let who would be the tenant. That is to say, that in an age when ready money was locked up in the hands of the merchants or in the excommunicated treasury of the Jews, rent was paid, not only in cash, but also in kind and in labour. For instance, a farmer renting an estate worth £20 a-year, would agree to pay £5 in cash, £10 in corn and poultry, and the remaining £5 in a certain number of days’ labour spent in performing