In Brandone, Warwickshire, the typical villain, William Bateman, pays for his virgate 5_s._ 3_d._, and sends one man to work twice a week from the 29th of June until the 1st of August, and thence onward his man has to work two days one week and three days the next. The free half-virgate merely pays five shillings, and does suit to the manorial court. This last point makes no difference, because the villain had to attend the manorial court quite as regularly as the freeholder, and indeed more regularly, because he was obliged to serve on inquests[754]. In Bathekynton, Warwickshire, the difference in favour of the free is also noticeable, but not so great[755]. And these are by no means exceptional cases. Nothing is more common than to find free tenements held by trifling services, and whatever we may think of single cases, it would be absurd to explain such arrangements in the aggregate as the results of a bargain between lord and serfs. It is evident, therefore, that a reference to 'molland,' to a commutation of labour into rent, does not suit these cases[756]. Can we explain these cases of 'free shareholding' by feoffments made to favoured persons? We have seen that the lord used to recompense his servants by grants of land and that he favoured the spread of cultivation by exacting but a light rent from newly reclaimed land. Such transactions would undoubtedly produce free tenements held on very advantageous terms, but still they seem incapable of solving our problem. Tenements created by way of beneficial feoffment are in general easily recognised. The holdings of servants and other people endowed by favour are always few and interspersed among the plots of the regular occupiers of the land, be they free or serfs. The 'essarted' fields are sometimes numerous, but usually cut up into small strips and as it were engrafted on the original stock of tenements. Altogether privileged land mostly appears divided into irregular plots and reckoned by acres and not by shares. And what we have to account for is a vast number of instances in which what seem to be some of the principal and original shares in the land are held freely and by comparatively light services. I do not think that we can get rid of a very considerable residue of cases without resorting to the last of the suppositions mentioned above. We must admit that some of the freeholders in the Hundred Rolls are possessed of shares in the fields not because they have emerged from serfdom, but because they were from the first members of a village community over which the lord's power spread. It would be very hard to draw absolute distinctions in special cases, because the terminology of our records does not take into account the history of tenure and only indicates net results. But a comparison of facts _en bloc_ points to at least three distinct sources of the freehold virgates. Some may be due to commutation, others to beneficial feoffments, but there are yet