o them
also, so that they acquired demesnes. This 'commendation' was
furthered by the fact that during the long-drawn out conquest of
Britain the old kindred groups of the English lost their corporate
sense, and the central power being too weak to protect the ordinary
householder, who could not stand alone, he had to seek the protection
of an ecclesiastical corporation or of some thegn, first for himself
and then for his land. The jurisdictional rights of the king also
passed to the lord, whether church or thegn; then came the danegeld,
the tax for buying off the Danes that subsequently became a fixed land
tax, which was collected from the lord, as the peasants were too poor
for the State to deal with them; the lord paid the geld for their
land, consequently their land was his. In this way the free ceorl of
Anglo-Saxon times gradually becomes the 'villanus' of Domesday.
Landlordship was well established in the two centuries before the
Conquest, and the land of England more or less 'carved into
territorial lordships'.[16] Therefore when the Normans brought their
wonderful genius for organization to this country they found the
material conditions of manorial life in full growth; it was their task
to develop its legal and economic side.[17]

As the manorial system thus superimposed upon the village community
was the basis of English rural economy for centuries, there need be no
apology for describing it at some length.

The term 'manor', which came in with the Conquest,[18] has a technical
meaning in Domesday, referring to the system of taxation, and did not
always coincide with the vill or village, though it commonly did so,
except in the eastern portion of England. The village was the agrarian
unit, the manor the fiscal unit; so that where the manor comprised
more than one village, as was frequently the case, there would be more
than one village organization for working the common fields.[19]

The manor then was the 'constitutive cell' of English mediaeval
society.[20] The structure is always the same; under the headship of
the lord we find two layers of population, the villeins and the
freeholders; and the territory is divided into demesne land and
tributary land of two classes, viz. that of the villeins and that of
the freeholders. The cultivation of the demesne (which usually means
the land directly occupied and cultivated by the lord, though legally
it has a wider meaning and includes the villein tenements), depen