Note 195 — Chapter IV · AGRICULTURAL TRIBES.

And even if the statutes of labourers had been everywhere enforced, “many landowners would have been left in a position of great difficulty; if there was no one to do the work it did not much matter what they were to be paid, and in not a few villages scarcely any one was left to carry on the ordinary agricultural operations.” Therefore new expedients had to be devised, of which the most general appears to have been the stock and land lease; “the new tenant took the land and the stock off the lord’s hands and made in return a definite annual payment.” These tenants “probably sprang from the class of free labourers, as the surviving villains who already had their own holdings, would not be so easily able to offer for a portion of the domain land which the lord desired to let”195.