The double sense in which the terms 'free tenure' and 'servile tenure' are used should be specially noticed, because it lays bare the intimate connexion between the formal divisions of feudal law and the conditions of economic reality. I have laid stress on the contrast between the two phraseologies, but, of course, they could not be in use at the same time without depending more or less on each other. And it is not difficult to see, that the legal is a modification of the economic use of terms, that it reduces to one-sided simplicity those general facts which the evidence of every day life puts before us in a loose and complex manner: that land is really free which is not placed in a constant working submission to the manor, in constant co-operation with other plots, similarly arranged to help and to serve in the manor. However heavy the rent, the land that pays it has become independent in point of husbandry, its dependence appears as a matter of agreement, and not an economic tie. When a tenement is for economic purposes subordinated to the general management of the manor, there is almost of necessity a degree of uncertainty in its tenure; it is a satellite whose motions are controlled by the body round which it revolves. On the other hand, mere payments in money look like the outcome of some sort of agreement, and are naturally thought of as the result of contract. [Custom in the exercise of manorial rights.] Everything is subject to the will and pleasure of the lord; but this will and pleasure does not find expression in any capricious interference which would have wantonly destroyed order and rule in village life. Under cover of this will, customs are forming themselves which regulate the constantly recurring events of marriage, succession, alienation, and the like. Curious combinations arise, which reflect faithfully the complex elements of village life. An instruction for stewards provides, for instance, that one person ought not to hold several tenements; where such agglomerations exist already they ought to be destroyed, _if it can be done conveniently and honestly_[353]. In one of the manors of St. Paul of London the plots held by the ploughmen are said to be resumable by the lord without any injury to hereditary succession[354]. 'The rule of hereditary succession' is affirmed in regard to normal holdings by this very exception. We find already the phrase of which the royal courts availed themselves, when in later days they extended their protection to this base tenure: the tenants hold 'by the custom of the manor[355].' On the strength of such custom the life of the unfree peasantry takes a shape closely resembling that of the free population; transactions and rights spring into being which find their exact parallel in the common law of the 'free and lawful' portion of the community. Walter, a villain of St. Alban's, surrenders into the hand of the monastery two curtilages, which are thereupon granted to