although we have a compromise before us in this respect, it must be noted that the relation between the parts and the whole is obviously different under the system of labour services from what it was under the farm-system. It has been pointed out that the food-rent arrangement was imposed from above without much trouble being taken to ascertain the exact value and character of the tributary units subjected to it. This later element is certainly very prominent in the customary labour-system, which on the whole appears to be constructed from below. Is it necessary to add that this second form of subjection was by no means the lighter one? The very differentiation of the burden means that the aristocratical power of the landlord has penetrated deep enough to attempt an exact evaluation of details. [Money-rents system.] I have had occasion so many times already to speak of the process of commutation, that there is no call now to explain the reasons which induced both landlords and peasants to exchange labour for money-rents. I have only to say now that the same remark which applied to the passage from produce 'farms' to labour holds good as to the passage from labour to money payments. There is no break between the arrangements. In a general way the money assessment follows, of course, as the third mode of settling the relation between lord and tenant, and we may say that _rentals_ are as much the rule from the fourteenth century downwards as _custumals_ are the rule in the thirteenth and earlier centuries. But if we take up the Domesday of St. Paul's of 1222, or the Glastonbury Inquest of 1189, or even the Burton Cartulary of the early twelfth century, in every one of these documents we shall find a great number of rent-paying tenants[673], and even a greater number of people fluctuating, as it were, between labour and rent. In some cases peasants passed directly from the obligation of supplying produce to the payment of corresponding rents in money. The gradual exemption from labour is even more apparent in the records. It is characteristic that the first move is generally a substitution of the money arrangement with the tacit or even the expressed provision that the assessment is not to be considered as permanent and binding[674]. It remains at the pleasure of the lord to go back to the duties in kind. But although such a retrogressive movement actually takes place in some few cases, the general spread of money payments is hardly arrested by these exceptional instances[675]. One more subject remains to be discussed. Is there in the surveys any marked difference between different classes of the peasantry in point of rural duties? [Influence of social distinction on the distribution of duties.]