The eorls had a curious power of forbidding, if they so pleased, the marriages proposed by the ceorls and their children. Perhaps the power was originally {110} voted to them by the ceorls themselves as a means of controlling the population, so that there should not be more people than the available land could support; but it is a curious power for any authority to have over men who called and believed themselves "free." But the fact is that the so-called freedom of these men became more and more of an illusion; they became less and less free. After Christianity was accepted as the religion of England there was another person, besides those already mentioned, who had a right to be supported by the community of the village. This was the priest, and the tenth of some of the produce, which was allotted as his share, in return for his services as priest, is the origin of those "tithes" which still are paid to the clergy. All payments were, for a long time, made "in kind," that is to say, for instance, in corn, or in wool or milk, or in so many days' work. Coined metal, as what we call "a medium of exchange," had been known in England for a very long while, even before the coming of the Romans, but its use does not seem to have been common. After a while, however, its use increased, and gradually payment in coin, by the ceorls to the eorl, began to take the place of payment in kind, and the eorl might welcome the coin because of its ease of transmission to the king when the king required money for his wars. [Sidenote: The chapmen] At first, as you will see from all this, the villages were very much what we call self-supporting. They had all they required for food. They had the wool of their sheep and the hides of their cattle to be worked up into clothing. They had unlimited firewood from the forest. So they had little need of money, for exchange. But as they became more rich than their own needs demanded, in such things as wool and hides and the foods that did not perish quickly, such as {111} cheese, then they might begin to exchange these things for other produce which they could not make for themselves, and which might be brought in by the travelling merchants, called "chapmen" (from the word "cheap," to sell, whence we have the London street, called Cheapside, to-day). These chapmen came on horseback with their wares and bought and sold in the villages, and then it became most useful to have coin as a means of exchange. Even the wool was a bulky stuff to carry; yet it was less inconvenient than some of the other commodities. The two chief articles of necessity that the villagers could not supply themselves with were iron implements and salt.