An inquiry into the condition of villains would be altogether incomplete, if it did not touch on the questions of villain tenure and villain services. Both are intimately connected with personal status, as may be seen from the very names, and both have to be very carefully distinguished from it. I have had to speak of prescription as a source of villainage. Opinions were very uncertain in this respect, and yet, from the mere legal point of view, there ought not to have been any difficulty about the matter. Bracton takes his stand firmly on the fundamental difference between status and tenure in order to distinguish clearly between serfs and free men in a servile position[104]. The villain is a man belonging to his lord personally; a villain holding (_villenagium_) is land held at the will of the lord, without any certainty as to title or term of enjoyment, as to kind or amount of services[105]. Serfs are mostly, though not necessarily, found on villain land; it does not follow that all those seated on villain land are serfs. Free men are constantly seen taking up a _villenagium_; they do not lose by it in personal condition; they have no protection against the lord, if he choose to alter their services or oust them from the holding, but, on the other hand, they are free to go when they please. There is still less reason to treat as serfs such free peasants as are subjected to base services, i.e. to the same kind of services and payments as the villains, but on certain conditions, not more and not less. Whatever the customs may be, if they are certain, not only the person holding by them but the plot he is using are free, and the tenure may be defended at law[106]. Such are the fundamental positions in Bracton's treatise, and there can be no doubt that they are borne out in a general way by legal practice. But if from the general we turn to the particular, if we analyse the thirteenth-century decisions which are at the bottom of Bracton's teaching, we shall find in many cases notions cropping up, which do not at all coincide with the received views on the subject. In fact we come across many apparent contradictions which can be attributed only to a state of fermentation and transition in the law of the thirteenth century. [Martin of Bestenover's case.]