vill2 [3]
or special plea of villainage.* That is, if the defendant pleaded in bar of an action that the plaintiff was his bondman he generally said, I am not bound to answer A, because he is my villain and I am seised of him as of my villain as regardant to my manor of C. Of course there are other cases when the term is employed, but the plea in bar is by far the most common one and may stand for a test. This manner of pleading is only coming gradually into use in the fourteenth century, and we actually see how it is taking shape and spreading. As a rule the Year Books of Edward I's time have not got it. The defendant puts in his plea unqualified. 'He ought not to be answered because he is our villain' (Y.B. 21/22 Edward I, p. 166, ed. Horwood). There is a case in 1313 when a preliminary skirmish between the counsel on either side took place as to the sufficiency of the defendant's plea in bar, the plaintiff contending that it was not precise enough. Here, if any where, we should expect the term 'regardant,' but it is not forthcoming1. What is more, and what ought to have prevented any mistake, the official records of trials on the Plea Rolls up to Edward II always use the plain assertion, 'villanus... et tenet in villenagio.'* The practice of naming the manor to which a villain belonged begins however to come in during the reign of Edward II, and the terminology is by no means settled at the outset; expressions are often used as equivalent to 'regardant' which could hardly have misled later antiquaries as to the meaning of the qualification.* In a case of 1322, for instance, we have 'within the manor' where we should expect to find 'regardant to the manor.'* This would be very nearly equivalent to the Latin formula adopted by the Plea Rolls, which is simply ut de manerio.* Every now and then cases occur which gradually settle the terminology, because the weight of legal argumentation in them is made to turn on the fact that a particular person was connected with a particular manor and not with another. A case from 1317 is well in point. B.P. the defendant excepts against the plaintiff T.A. on the ground of villainage (qil est nostre vileyn, and nothing else). The plaintiff replies that he was enfranchised by being suffered to plead in an assize of mort d'ancestor against B.P.'s grandmother. By this the defendant's counsel is driven to maintain that his client's right against T.A. descended not from his grandmother but from his grandfather, who was seised of the manor of H. to which T.A. belonged as a villain.* The connexion with the manor is adduced to show from what quarter the right to the villain had descended, and, of course, implies nothing as to any peculiarity of this villain's status, or as to the kind of title, the mode of acquiring rights, upon which the lord relies -- it was ground common to both parties that if the lord had any rights at all he acquired them by inheritance. Another case seems even more interesting. It dates from 1355, that is from a time when the usual terminology had already become fixed. It arose under that celebrated Statute of Labourers which played such a prominent part in the social history of the fourteenth century. One of the difficulties in working the statute came from the fact that it had to recognise two different sets of relations between the employer and the workman. The statute dealt with the contract between master and servant, but it did not do away with the dependence of the villain on the lord, and in case of conflict it gave precedence to this latter claim; a lord had the right to withdraw his villain from a stranger's service. Such cross influences could not but occasion a great deal of confusion, and our case gives a good instance of it. Thomas Barentyn has reclaimed Ralph Crips from the service of the Prior of the Hospitalers, and the employer sues in consequence both his former servant and Barentyn. This last answers, that the servant in question is his villain regardant to the manor of C. The plaintiffs counsel maintains that he could not have been regardant to the manor,