The feudal system once established produced certain effects quite apart from the Conquest, effects which flowed from its own inherent properties. The Conquest had cast free and unfree peasantry together into the one mould of villainage; feudalism prevented villainage from lapsing into slavery. I have shown in detail how the manor gives a peculiar turn to personal subjection. Its action is perceivable in the treatment of the origin of the servile status. The villain, however near being a chattel, cannot be devised by will because he is considered as an annex to the free tenement of the lord. The connexion with a manor becomes the chief means of establishing and proving seisin of the villain. On the other hand, in the trial of _status_, manorial organisation led to the sharp distinction between persons in the power of the lord and out of it. This fact touches the very essence of the case. The more powerful the manor became, the less possible was it to work out subjection on the lines of personal slavery. Without entering into the economic part of the question for the present, merely from the legal point of view it was a necessary consequence of the rise of a local and territorial power that the working people under its sway were subjected by means of its territorial organisation and within its limited sphere of local action. Of course, the State upheld some of the lord's rights even outside the limits of the manor, but these were only a pale reflection of what took place within the manor, and they were more difficult to enforce in proportion as the barriers between the manors rose higher; it became very difficult for one lord to reclaim runaways who were lying within the manor of another lord. [Survivals of pre-feudal condition.]