LEGAL ASPECT OF VILLAINAGE. CONCLUSIONS 127 CHAPTER V. THE SERVILE PEASANTRY OF MANORIAL RECORDS 138 CHAPTER VI. FREE PEASANTRY 178 CHAPTER VII. THE PEASANTRY OF THE FEUDAL AGE. CONCLUSIONS 211 SECOND ESSAY. _The Manor and the Village Community._ CHAPTER I. THE OPEN FIELD SYSTEM AND THE HOLDINGS 223 CHAPTER II. RIGHTS OF COMMON 259 CHAPTER III. RURAL WORK AND RENTS 278 CHAPTER IV. THE LORD, HIS SERVANTS AND FREE TENANTS 313 CHAPTER V. THE MANORIAL COURTS 354 CHAPTER VI. THE MANOR AND THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY. CONCLUSIONS 397 APPENDIX 411 INDEX 461 FOOTNOTES INTRODUCTION. When the time comes for writing a history of the nineteenth century, one of the most important and attractive chapters will certainly be devoted to the development of historical literature. The last years of a great age are fast running out: great has been the strife and the work in the realm of thought as well as in the material arrangement of life. The generations of the nineteenth century have witnessed a mighty revival of religious feeling; they have attempted to set up philosophical systems as broad and as profound as any of the speculations of former times; they have raised the structure of theoretical and applied science to a height which could hardly have been foreshadowed some two hundred years ago. And still it is to historical study that we have to look as the most characteristic feature of the period. Medieval asceticism in its desperate struggle against the flesh, and Puritanism with its sense of individual reconciliation with God, were both more vigorous forms of religious life than the modern restorations of faith and Church, so curiously mixed up with helplessness, surrender of acquired truth, hereditary instincts, and utilitarian reflection. In philosophy, Hegel's metaphysical dialectic, Schopenhauer's transformation of Kant's teaching, and the attempts of English and French positivism at encyclopaedical science may be compared theoretically with Plato's poetical idealism or with the rationalistic schools of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it would be difficult to deny, that in point of influence on men's minds, those older systems held a more commanding position than these: Hegel seems too arbitrary and phantastical, Schopenhauer too pessimistic, positivism too incomplete and barren as to ultimate problems to suit the practical requirements of philosophy; and people are already complaining of the decay of philosophical study. In science, again, the age of Darwin is certainly second to none, but it has to share its glory with the age of Newton,