Note 148 — Chapter IV · AGRICULTURAL TRIBES.

Though the change occurred at a time when personal serfdom was gradually declining, it is easy to see that this commutation is not identical with the transition from serfdom to freedom. A free tenant may by contract take upon himself to perform some kind of work for the landlord. This was the case in England where “the rendering of services reappeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not as the incidents of villanage, but as a form of agreement which proved more or less convenient to one party and perhaps to both”148. On the other hand, it is quite possible that a cultivator who pays money instead of rendering services, is yet bound to the soil and devoid of personal freedom. Ashley, speaking of the 13th century, states that most of the cultivators “had continued to hold by servile tenure, as villeins or customary tenants, even when they had commuted all or most of their services.… There can be no doubt that … they were bound to the soil; in the sense, at any rate, that the lord would demand a heavy fine before he would give one of them permission to leave the manor”149.