The economic side concerned the relations of the cultivators of the soil with the man who was, in relation to them, the owner of that soil; it regulated the tenures by which they held the little pieces which they cultivated, their rights over that land and its produce, their obligations to the owner of service in cultivating for him the lands which he reserved for his own use, and, in addition, of payments to him in kind and perhaps in money on a variety of occasions and occurrences throughout the year; it defined and practically limited, also, the owner's right of exaction from these cultivators. These regulations were purely customary; they had grown up slowly out of experience, and they were not written. But this was true also of almost all the law of that age, and this law of the cultivators was as valid in its place as the king's law, and was enforced in its own courts. It is true that most of these men who cultivated the soil were serfs, at least not entirely free; but that fact made no difference in this particular; they had their standing, their voice, and their rights in their lord's "customary" court, and the documents which describe to us these arrangements call them, as they do the highest barons of the realm, "peers,"--that is, peers of these customary courts. Not all, indeed, were serfs; many freemen, small farmers, possibly it would not be wrong to say all who had formerly belonged to that class, had been forced by one necessity or another to enter into this system, to surrender the unqualified ownership of their lands, and to agree to hold them of some lord, though traces of their original full ownership may long have lingered about the land. When they did this, they were brought into very close relations with the unfree cultivators; they were parts of the same system and subject to some of the same regulations and services but their land was usually held on terms that were economically better than the serfs obtained, and they retained their personal freedom. They were members of the lords' courts, and there the serfs were their peers; but they were also members of the old national courts of hundred and shire, and there they were the peers of knights and barons.