vill2 [49]
the contradictions and confused notions they contain actually helps us to an insight into the historical stratification of ideas and facts, a stratification which cannot be abolished however much lawyers may crave for unity and logic. In the particular case under discussion medieval law is especially rich in such historical clues. The law writers are trying hard to give a construction of villainage on the basis of the Roman doctrine of slavery, but their fabric gives way at every point. It would be hardly a fair description to say that we find many survivals of an older state of things and many indications of a new development. Everything seems in a state of vacillation and fermentation during the thirteenth century. As to the origin of the servile status the law of bastards gets inverted; in the case of matrimony the father-rule is driving the mother-rule from the ground; the influence of prescription is admitted by some lawyers and rejected by others. As to the means whereby persons may issue out of that condition, the views of Glanville and Bracton are diametrically opposed, and there are still traces in practice of the notion that a villain cannot buy his freedom and that he cannot be manumitted by the lord himself in regard to third persons. In their treatment of services in their reference to status the courts apply the two different tests of certainty and of kind. In their treatment of tenure they still hesitate between a complete denial of protection to villainage and the recognition of it as a mode of holding which is protected by legal remedies. And even when the chief lines are definitely drawn they only disclose fundamental contradictions in all their crudeness. In civil law, villains are disabled against their lords but evenly watched against strangers; even against a lord legal protection is lingering in the form of an action upon covenant and in the notion that the villain's wainage should be secure. In criminal and in police law villains are treated substantially as free persons: they have even a share, although a subordinate one, in the organisation of justice. The procedure in questions of status is characterised by outrageous privileges given to the lord against a man in 'a villain nest,' and by distinct favour shown to those out of the immediate range of action of the lord. The law is quite as much against giving facilities to prove a man's servitude as it is against granting that man any rights when once his servitude has been established. The reconciliation of all these contradictions and anomalies cannot be attempted on dogmatic grounds. The law of villainage must not be constructed either on the assumption of slavery, Or on that of liberty, or on that of colonatus or ascription. It contains elements from each of these three conditions, and it must be explained historically. The material hitherto collected and discussed enables us to distinguish different layers in its formation. To begin with, the influence of lawyers must be taken into account. This is at once to be seen in the treatment of distinctions and divisions. The Common Law, as it was forming itself in the King's Court, certainly went far to smoothe down the peculiarities of local custom. Even when such peculiarities were legally recognised, as in the case of ancient demesne, the control and still more the example of the Common Law Courts was making for simplification and reducing them wore or less to a generally accepted standard. The influence of the lawyers was exactly similar in regard to subdivisions on the vertical plane (if I may use the expression): for these varieties of dependence get fused into general servitude, and in this way classes widely different in their historical development are brought together under the same name. The other side of this process of simplification is shown where legal theory hardens and deepens the divisions it acknowledges. In this way the chasm between liberty and servitude increases as the notion of servitude gets broader. In order to get sharp boundaries and clear definitions to go by,