vill2 [83]
words to show that the two sets were to be taken from different classes? And does not the expression 'lawful,' extending to both sets, point to people who are 'worthy of their law' that is to free men? The Assize of Clarendon and the constitution of the tourn are especially interesting because they give a new bearing to an old institution: both divisions of the population which they have in view appear in the ordinary hundred and county court, and in the 'law day' of the 'great' hundred instituted for the view of frankpledge. In the ordinary court the lord, his steward, and the reeve, priest, and four men, interchange, according to the clear statement of Leg. Henrici I. c. 7, that is to say, the vill is to be represented either by the lord, or by his steward, or again by the six men just mentioned. They are not called out as representing different classes and interests, but as representing the same territorial unity. If the landlord does not attend personally or by his personal representative, the steward, then six men from the township attend in his place. The question arises naturally, where is one to look for the small freeholders in the enactment? However much we may restrict their probable number, their existence cannot be simply denied or disregarded. It does not seem likely that they were treated as landlords (terrarum domini), and one can hardly escape the inference that they are included in the population of the township, which appears through the medium of the six hundredors: another hint that the class division underlying the whole structure did not coincide with the feudal opposition between freeholder and villain. Again, in the great hundred for the view of frankpledge, which is distinguished from the ordinary hundred by fuller attendance, and not by any fundamental difference in constitution, all men are to appear who are 'free and worthy of their wer and their wite:'(36*) this expression seems an equivalent to the 'free and lawful' men of other cases, and at the same time it includes distinctly the great bulk of the villain population as personally free. I have not been able, in the present instance, to keep clear of the evidence belonging to the intermediate period between the Saxon and the feudal arrangements of society; this deviation from the general rule, according to which such evidence is to be discussed separately and in connexion with the Conquest, was unavoidable in our case, because it is only in the light of the laws of Henry I that some important feudal facts can be understood. in a trial as to suit of court between the Abbot of Glastonbury and two lay lords, the defendants plead that they are bound to appear at the Abbot's hundred court personally or by attorney only on the two law-days, whereas for the judgment of thieves their freemen, their reeves and ministers have to attend in order to take part in the judgment.(37*) It is clearly a case of substitution, like the one mentioned in Leg. Henrici, c. 7, and the point is, that the representatives of the fee are designated as reeves and freemen. Altogether the two contradictory aspects in which the hundredors are made to appear can hardly be explained otherwise than on the assumption of a fluctuation between the conception of the hundred as of an assembly of freemen, and its treatment under the influence of feudal notions as to social divisions. In one sense the hundredors are villains: they come from the vill, represent the bulk of its population, which consists of villains, and are gradually put on a different footing from the greater people present. In another sense they are free men, and even treated as freeholders, because they form part of a communal institution intended to include the free class and to exclude the servile class.(38*) If society had been arranged consistently on the feudal basis, there would have been no room for the representation of the vill instead of the manor, for the representation of the vill now by the lord and now by a deputation of peasants, for a terminology which appears to confuse or else to neglect the