labour services (it was the arbitrariness of the demands which distin-
guished a villein from a free peasant, who might owe heavy but fixed
work), and of a payment to the lord (called in England merchet) when
a villein woman married and took her breeding-power outside the
manor. Villein status was eventually destroyed by changing agrarian
conditions rather than by royal legislation, which was invoked mainly
in an attempt to preserve the landlords’ rights over the innobilesand
‘rustics’ in a worsening economy.^170 In France the landlords, the king at
their head, seem to have been more ready than in England to grant
rights to villeins. Philip IV extended the practice of enfranchisement to
entire administrative districts, and in 1315 Philip’s son Louis X offered
enfranchisement to the serfs on his demesne with a high-sounding con-
demnation of the ancient customs which had reduced to servitude so
many of the common people in his so-called ‘Royaume des Francs’:
surely all men were born free (franc) by natural right.^171 The declaration
that serfdom was an unfortunate product of human history, since (in
Beaumanoir’s words) ‘everyone of us is descended from one father and
one mother’ and ‘the many estates of people’ were ‘once of the same
freedom’, was a commonplace of the law-books.^172 But the freeing of
serfs was rarely an act of charity: Louis X’s serfs were to pay him com-
pensation individually for the loss of their services, the king needing
their money to help finance a military campaign against the Flemings.
Royal ordinances followed Beaumanoir in requiring a landlord to get
his lord’s permission to enfranchise serfs, for it diminished the value of
his fief.^173
In England escheators had standing instructions to investigate the
losses to the king from his tenants-in-chiefs’ enfranchisements of
serfs.^174 But the king’s own villeins gained from their landlord special
privileges short of enfranchisement in respect of the security and
inheritance of their tenancies and the definition of their services. These
privileges the villeins of any lord who had acquired once royal land
sought to assert as indelible rights, invoking the evidence of Domesday
Book that they indeed lived on ‘ancient demesne of the king’. The use of
‘exemplifications made out of the book of Domesday’ reached new
levels in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, as lords attempted
to confine the extra bargaining power and effective freedom conferred
Estates of people 225(^170) SRi. 227–8.
(^171) Les Olim, iii. 957 (xxii); Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, i. 490–4, ii. 230–7; Marc
Bloch, Rois et Serfs(Paris, 1920); F. J. Pegues, The Lawyers of the Last Capetians(Princeton
UP, 1962), 75, 116, 165–71, 185–6.
(^172) Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis,ii. 235 (§1453); Sachsenspiegel Landrecht, 223,
230–2; Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, ii. 30.
(^173) Ordonnances des Roys de France,i. 188 (g), 278–81, 575, 583, 653.
(^174) SRi. 239, 323.