he
produce from his own yard-land was put in a position to hire helpers for
himself, and to develop his own agricultural resources. Nor was it the
tenant alone who stood to gain by this arrangement. The lord, too, was
glad of being possessed of money. He, too, needed it as a substitute for
his duty of military service to the king, for scutage (the payment of a
tax graduated according to the number of knights, which each baron had
to lead personally in time of war as a condition of holding land at all)
had taken the place of the old feudal levy. Moreover, he was probably
glad to obtain hired labour in exchange for the forced labour which the
system of tenure made general; just as later the abolition of slavery
was due largely to the fact that, in the long run, it did not pay to
have the plantations worked by men whose every advantage it was to shirk
as much toil as possible.

But in most cases, as far as can be judged now, the lord was methodical
in releasing services due to him. The week-work was first and freely
commuted, for regular hired labour was easy to obtain; but the
boon-work--the work, that is, which was required for unusual
circumstances of a purely temporary character (such as harvesting,
&c.)--was, owing to the obvious difficulty of its being otherwise
supplied, only arranged for in the last resort. Thus, by one of the many
paradoxes of history, the freest of all tenants were the last to achieve
freedom. When the serfs had been set at liberty by manumission, the
socage-tenants or free-tenants, as they were called, were still bound by
their fixed agreements of tenure. It is evident, however, that such
emancipation as did take place was conditioned by the supply of free
labour, primarily, that is, by the rising surplus of population. Not
until he was certain of being able to hire other labourers would a
landholder let his own tenants slip off the burdens of their service.

But this process, by which labour was rendered less stationary, was
immeasurably hastened by the advent of a terrible catastrophe. In 1347
the Black Death arrived from the East. Across Europe it moved, striking
fear by the inevitableness of its coming. It travelled at a steady rate,
so that its arrival could be easily foretold. Then, too, the
unmistakable nature of its symptoms and the suddenness of the death it
caused also added to the horror of its approach.

On August 15, 1349, it got to Bristol, and by Michaelmas had reached
London.