Note c — Chapter VIII · (continued 4)

I must confess that I have some doubts how far this was law at the epoch of Magna Charta. Glanvil and Bracton both speak of the status villenagii, as opposed to that of liberty, and seem to consider it as a civil condition, not a merely personal relation. The civil law and the French treatise of Beaumanoir hold the same language. And Sir Robert Cotton maintains without hesitation that villeins are not within the 29th section of Magna Charta, "being excluded by the word liber." Cotton's Posthuma, p. 223. Britton, however, a little after Bracton, says that in an action the villein is answerable to all men, and all men to him. p. 79. And later judges, in favorem libertatis, gave this construction to the villein's situation, which must therefore be considered as the clear law of England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.