The original unity of purpose and firmness of distinction are even more broken up when we look at the criminal and the police law where they touch villainage. In the criminal law of the feudal epoch there is hardly any distinction between free men and villains. In point of amercements there is the well-known difference as to the 'contenement' of a free landholder, a merchant and a villain, but this difference is prompted not by privilege but by the diversity of occupations. The Dialogus de Scaccario shows that villains being reputed English are in a lower position than free men as regards the presumption of Englishry and the payment of the murder-fine,[72] but this feature seems to have become obliterated in the thirteenth century. In some cases corporal punishment may have differed according to the rank of the culprit, and the formalities of ordeal were certainly different[73]. The main fact remains, that both villains and free men were alike able to prosecute anybody by way of 'appeal'[74] for injury to their life, honour, and even property[75], and equally liable to be punished and prosecuted for offences of any kind. Their equal right was completely recognized by the criminal law, and as a natural sequence of this, the pleas of the crown generally omit to take any notice of the status of parties connected with them. One may read through Mr. Maitland's collection of Pleas of the Crown edited for the Selden Society, or through his book of Gloucestershire pleas, without coming across any but exceptional and quite accidental mentions of villainage. In fact were we to form our view of the condition of England exclusively on the material afforded by such documents, we might well believe that the whole class was all but an extinct one. One glance at Assize Rolls or at Cartularies would teach us better. Still the silence of the Corona Rolls is most eloquent. It shows convincingly that the distinction hardly influenced criminal law at all. [Police in relation to villainage.] It is curious that, as regards police, villains are grouped under an institution which, even by its name, according to the then accepted etymology, was essentially a free institution. The system of frank pledge (_plegium liberale_), which should have included every one 'worthy of his _were_ and his _wite_,' is, as a matter of fact, a system which all through the feudal period is chiefly composed of villains[76]. Free men possessed of land are not obliged to join the tithing because they are amenable to law which has a direct hold on their land[77], and so the great mass of free men appear to be outside these arrangements, for the police representation of the free, or, putting it the other way, feudal serfs actually seem to represent the bulk of free society. The thirteenth-century arrangements do not afford a clue to such paradoxes, and one has to look for explanation to the _history_ of the classes.