certain tasks, always rigorously determined beforehand. These were the _corvée_. It was left for later centuries to abuse a custom which, in its origin, was at least as convenient to the tenant as to the proprietor of the estate. The tenant on the estate--serf as he was, and object of our hereditary pity--occupied, in fact, a situation not unlike that which Mr. Chamberlain once wished to assure to every cottager in his kingdom. In Normandy the cottage and outhouses of the tenant covered a square of eighty feet, the paddock and garden adjoining measured two Norman acres--nearly six acres of to-day. These dimensions appear to have been invariable, but the amount of income derived from the farm varied naturally with the quality of the soil and the character of the tenant. A rich tenant-farmer was the equal of an unthrifty yeoman. Nor was it uncommon for the same person to be a tenant-farmer in the country and a provision-merchant in the market-town, so that the tenants furnished many thriving and adventurous recruits to the burgher class. They were often men of means, living very simply, and amassing year by year the greater part of the profits of their farm. The names of many among them are registered as the donators of the abbeys and churches of their countryside. Below this solid, thriving, and generous class, whose serfdom in the fourteenth century was merely the matter of a traditionary tax or two, came the real children of the soil, the _peasants_, _villains_, or _rustics_, renters of a tiny holding, for which they paid with little money and much service; and, lower still, the _cottars_, or _labourers_, holders of a mere hut and patch of garden--men who seldom, if ever, handled coin, who paid for their bread with the sweat of their brow, and for whom the heaviest _corvées_ were reserved. I have never yet met in mediæval documents with anything resembling the refined and fantastic _corvées_ of the eighteenth century: no mediæval peasants that I know of were stationed by the moat all night to beat the water with their flails and keep the frogs from croaking. The first and most essential _corvée_ of the fourteenth century--which cottars, tenants, yeomen, were all alike compelled to perform in due degree--was the service of transport.