The one-sided conception of feudal law builds up the entire structure of social divisions on the principle of the lord's will. Custom, however sacred, is not equivalent to actionable right, and a person who has nothing but custom to lean upon is supposed to be at the will and mercy of his lord and of base or servile condition. But we find even in the domain of legal doctrine other notions less convenient for the purpose of classification, and more adapted to the practice of daily life. Servile persons and servile land are known from the nature of the services to which they are subject. This test is applied in two directions: (1) regular rural work, 'with pitch-fork and flail,' is considered servile; and this would exclude the payment of rents and occasional help in the performance of agricultural labour; (2) certain duties are singled out as marking servitude because they imply the idea of one person being owned by another, and this would exclude subjection derived from the possession of land, however burdensome and arbitrary such subjection might be. Turning next to manorial records, we find these abortive features of feudal law resting on a very broad basis. Only that land is considered servile which owes labour, if it renders nothing but rent it is termed free. We have here no mere commutation: the notion is an old one, and rather driven back by later law than emerging from it. It is natural enough that the holder of a plot is considered free if his relations with the lord are restricted to occasional appearances at court, occasional fines, and the payment of certain rents two or three times a year. It is natural enough that the holder of another plot should be treated as a serf because he is bound to perform work which is fitted as a part into the arrangement of his lord's husbandry, and constantly brought under the control and the coercive power of the steward. This matter-of-fact contrast comes naturally to the fore in documents which are drawn up as descriptions of daily transactions and not as evidence for a lawsuit. But the terms 'free' and 'servile' are not used lightly even in such documents. We may be sure that manorial juries and bailiffs would not have been allowed to displace at their pleasure terminological distinctions which might lead people to alter their legal position. The double sense of these terms cannot be taken as arranging society under the same two categories and yet in two entirely different ways: it must be construed as implying the two sides of one and the same thing, the substance in manorial records and the formal distinction in legal records. That is to say, when the test of legal protection was applied, the people who had to perform labour were deprived of it and designated as holding in villainage, and to the people who paid rent protection was granted and they were considered as holding freely. For this very reason the process of commutation creating mol-land actually led to an increase