Villenage Sentence Examples

Ashley's Economic History, while Vinogradoff's Villenage in England and The Growth of the Manor, as well as Maitland's Domesday Studies, are of great importance to the student of early economic institutions.

The descendants of the original settlers kept the land in their own hands, and they gradually brought the Sicel inhabitants to a state not unlike villenage.

This increase of villenage morally depressed the peasantry, and widened still further the breach between the yeomanry and the gentry.

The royal courts refused to entertain suits of villeins against their lords, although there was a good deal of vacillation before this position was definitely taken up. Bracton still speaks in his treatise of the possibility for the courts to interfere against intolerable cruelty on the part of the lord involving the destruction of the villein's waynage, that is, of his ploughteam, and in the Notebook of Bracton there are a couple of cases which prove that r3th-century judges occasionally allowed themselves to entertain actions by persons holding in villenage against their lords.

Gradually, however, the exception of villenage became firmly settled.

Bracton fits his definition of villenage into the Romanesque scheme of Azo's Summa of the Institutes, and the judges of the royal courts made sweeping inferences from this general position.

But there were numbers of cases when the discussion as to servile status turned not on these formal points but on an examination of the services performed by the person claimed as a villein or challenged as holding in villenage.

Another service, the performance of which established a presumption as to villenage, was compulsory service as a reeve.

While the occasional services, even when agricultural, in no way established a presumption of villenage, and many socmen, freemen and holders by serjeanty submitted to them, agricultural week-work was primarily considered as a trait of villenage and must have played an important part in the process of classification of early Norman society.

As is shown by the Hundred Rolls, the Domesday of St Paul, the Surveys of St Peter, Glouc., Glastonbury Abbey, Ramsey Abbey and countless other records of the same kind, the customary conditions of villenage did not tally by any means with the identification between villenage and slavery suggested by the jurists.

Economically the institution of villenage was bound tip with the manorial organization - that is, with the fact that the country was.divided into a number of districts in which central home farms were cultivated by the help of work supplied by villein households.

Still, even at that time it might happen that a freeholder owned some land in villenage by the side of his free tenement, and that a villein held some land freely by agreement with his lord or with a third person.

At that time the courts of law begin to do away with the denial of protection to villeins which, as we have seen, constituted the legal basis of villenage.

The personal condition of villenage did not, however, disappear at once with the rise of copyhold.

With the growing needs of the state this taxation became more rigorous and was one of the great grievances of the population, especially of the sections that were declining in status and passing into the condition of villenage.

This mode of colonization was especially favourable to the peasantry, who seem in Brandenburg to have retained the disposal of their persons and property at a time when villenage or serfdom was the ordinary status of their class elsewhere.

The condition of the peasantry, however, during this reign reached its lowest point, and the " recess," or charter, of 1653 practically recognizes the existence of villenage.

The rustic class appears in them to be differentiated into several subdivisions - the geneats performing riding duties and occasional services, the geburs burdened with week work and the cotsets holding cottages and performing light work in the shape of one day in the week and services to match (see Villenage).