[Footnote 60: Reader, _Domesday for Warwickshire_, 9: "The countess held Coventry. There are 5 hides. The arable employs 20 ploughs, 3 are in the demesne, and 7 bondmen. There are 50 villeins, and 12 bordars, with 20 ploughs. A mill pays 3s. A wood 2 miles long and the same broad. In King Edward's time and afterwards it was worth 12 pounds, now 11 pounds by weight. These lands of the countess Godiva Nicholas holds to ferm of the king." See also _Vict. County Hist._, i. 310.] [Footnote 61: Add MS. Ch. 11,205. Leofric's gifts of lands, etc., with "sac and soc, toll and team," are therein confirmed to Leofwine, the abbot, and the brethren "sicut ... Edwardus, cognatus meus, melius et plenius eisdem concessit."] [Footnote 62: Bateson, _Rec. Leicester_, 42.] [Footnote 63: Ormerod, _Cheshire_, i. 10.] [Footnote 64: Dugdale, _Warw._, ii. 1107. The incident is commemorated in a modern window in Tamworth church.] [Footnote 65: Ormerod, i. 20-6. Dugdale, _Warw._, i. 137.] [Footnote 66: Ormerod, i. 26.] [Footnote 67: Thompson, _Hist. Leicester_, 42.] [Footnote 68: Dugdale, _Warw._, i. 197.] [Footnote 69: See Dormer Harris, _Troughton Sketches_, 24.] [Footnote 70: _Piers Ploughman_, Passus v. l. 402. Sloth (a personification of one of the Seven Deadly Sins) says:-- "I can nought perfitly my pater-noster ... But I can rymes of Robyn hood, and Randolf, erle of Chestre." It is more likely this earl is meant than his grandfather Gernons.] [Footnote 71: Hales, _Percy Folio_, i. 264-73.] CHAPTER IV _Beginnings of Municipal Government_ But how did the men live who inhabited Coventry, who were neither warriors nor monks, but the rank and file of the townsfolk, the mere tillers of the ground and retailers of food and clothing, farmers, bakers, butchers, shoemakers, weavers, and the like? These men owed fealty, according to the position of the land they held, either to the prior or the Earl of Chester. It is with the earl's burghers that the main part of our story lies. It was they who won, after many checks and struggles, such liberties of trading and self-rule as helped to make their city rich and famous in after days. For wherever townspeople found that their lord, whether he were a noble or the King himself, had need of their money or support, they bargained with him for a charter, a duly written and attested document giving them the power to exercise certain rights, such as the collecting of their own taxes or the managing of their own courts, without the interference of his officials. Just as the barons of England gained Magna Charta from John in his need and weakness, or forced Edward I. to confirm the same ere they would give him money to prosecute his wars, so the townsfolk played out the same play in their own much humbler theatre, and drove their bargain with this or that great owner of estates.