The passage from one great class of society to the other was rendered easy in this way by the variety of combinations in which the distinguishing features of both classes appear. No wonder that we hear constantly of oppression which tended to substitute one form of subjection for another, and thus to lower the social standing of intermediate groups. The free socmen of Swaffham Prior, in Cambridgeshire[433], complain that they are made to bind sheaves while they did not do it before; they used to pay thirty-two pence for licence to marry a daughter, and to give a twofold rent on entering an inheritance, and now the lord fines them at will. One of the tenants of the Bishop of Lincoln[434] declares to the Hundred Roll Commissioners that his ancestors were free socmen and did service to the king for forty days at their own cost, whereas now the Bishop has appropriated the royal rights. The same grievances come from ancient demesne people. In Weston, Bedfordshire[435], the tenantry complain of new exactions on the part of the lord; in King's Ripton[436], Hunts, merchet is introduced which was never paid before; in Collecot, Berks[437], the lord has simply dispossessed the socmen. In some instances the claims of the peasantry may have been exaggerated, but I think that in all probability the chances were rather against the subjected people than for them, and their grievances are represented in our documents rather less than fairly[438]. [Law of Kent.] In speaking of those classes of peasants who were by no means treated as serfs to be exploited at will, I must not omit to mention one group which appears, not as a horizontal layer spread over England, but in the vertical cut, as it were. I mean the Kentish gavelkind tenantry. The Domesday Survey speaks of the population of this county quite in the same way as of the people of neighbouring shires; villains form the great bulk of it, socmen are not even mentioned, and to judge by such indications, we have here plain serfdom occupying the whole territory of the county. On the other hand the law of the thirteenth century puts the social standing of Kentish men in the most decided opposition to that of the surrounding people. The 'Consuetudines Kanciae,' the well-known list of special Kentish customs[439], is reported to have been drawn up during an eyre of John of Berwick in the twenty-first year of Edward I. Be its origin what it may, we come across several of its rules at much earlier times[440], and they are always considered of immemorial custom. The basis of Kentish social law is the assumption that every man born in the county is entitled to be considered as personally free, and the Common Law Courts recognised the notion to the extent of admitting the assertion that a person was born in Kent as a reply against the 'exceptio villenagii.' The contrast with other counties did not stop there. The law of tenure was as different as the law of status. It would