Such is the merchet of our extents and Court rolls. As I said, it has great importance from the point of view of social history. Still it would be wrong to consider it as an unfailing test of _status_. Although it is often treated expressly as a note of serfdom[298], some facts point to the conclusion that its history is a complex one. In the first place this merchet fine occurs in the extents sporadically as it were. The Hundred Rolls, for instance, mention it almost always in Buckinghamshire, and in some hundreds of Cambridgeshire. In other hundreds of this last county it is not mentioned. However much we lay to the account of casual omissions of the compilers, they are not sufficient to explain the general contrast. It would be preposterous to infer that in the localities first mentioned the peasants were one and all descended from slaves, and that in those other localities they were one and all personally free. And so we are driven to the inference, that different customs prevailed in this respect in places immediately adjoining each other, and that not all the feudal serfs descended from Saxon slaves paid merchet. If, on the one hand, not all the serfs paid merchet, on the other there is sufficient evidence to show that it was paid in some cases by free people. A payment of this kind was exacted sometimes from free men in villainage, and even from socage tenants. I shall have to speak of this when treating of the free peasantry; I advert to the fact now in order to show that the most characteristic test of personal servitude does not cover the whole ground occupied by the class, and at the same time spreads outside of its boundary.