The division into classes—castes almost—was very rigidly observed by the Anglo-Saxons. The powers and rights of nobles, and of those who reached a high position as royal officials or owners of extensive landed property, were very great. The possession of land gave a higher political status, and conferred greater power among the Anglo-Saxons than among any of the other German tribes settled throughout Europe.
The free yeomen, or owners of land in fee simple, sought protection from the hlaford or mighty lord. For this they bartered away, partially, both their freedom and their right to the land—as was customary also among the German and all other ancient nations. The Anglo-Saxon yeomen were, in general, in a subordinate condition; they had no law, and their freedom consisted principally in having the right to change masters. The tradesmen also were, for the most part, in a servile state, and were manumitted like other chattels. Some of the manumitted slaves became agricultural laborers and hired land from the clergy, the great, the thanes or the ealdormen, paying them an annual rent in produce or money; but many of them also went into the towns and became burghers. Some of the burghers, also, were subject to barons and other lords, as the king; indeed, the burghers generally were not actual freeholders, and, if they were free, often had not wholly escaped the domestic service of their masters. The condition of the immense majority of Anglo-Saxons was therefore far from real freedom.
The Norman conquest transformed many landlords into tenants, while the humbler classes passed into the hands of the new masters. They became the tenants and laborers of the Norman, for whom otherwise the conquered land would have been worthless. But the Norman conquest rendered Saxon servitude so galling, that villeinage was nearly equal to chattelhood.
The "Domesday-book" gives 25,000 as the number of slaves in England. The great bulk of the rural population was composed of bondmen, or villeins under various designations—as bordiers, geburs, cotsetlas, etc.—who were compelled to pay oppressive imposts, and submit to various degrading and oppressing servitudes. These oppressions and exactions bore most heavily on the Anglo-Saxon population.
Slaves and serfs attached to the soil might be sold in the market-place, at the pleasure of their owners. Husbands sold their wives, and parents, unable or unwilling to support their children, might dispose of them in the same manner. The English slave-dealer of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, sold his Anglo-Saxon commodities to the Irish. A law enacted in 1102, prohibited this "wicked trade;" but the law was eluded, the trade continued, and when Henry II. invaded Ireland, he found English slaves there, whom he manumitted. In order to increase the revenue, as also from other motives of policy, the royal power in England, as all over Europe, generally favored the oppressed; its tendency always was to curb the arbitrary exactions of the barons, to promote emancipation, and generally to aid the serfs. William the Conqueror ordered that the lords should not deprive the husbandmen of their land; he enacted regulations to prevent arbitrary enslavement, and prohibited the sale of slaves out of the country. He also enacted a law which provided that the residence of any serf or slave for a year and a day, without being claimed, in any city, burgh, walled town or castle, should entitle him to perpetual liberty.
An independent freeholding yeomanry existed in comparatively small numbers. The recklessness of the feudal barons obliged the yeomanry, for the sake of protection, to render allegiance to the manor, and thus, about a century after the conquest, almost all the small homesteads disappeared. The conquered population held their property, not by absolute right, but by a tenure from the lord. Thus all individual freedom, except that of the nobles, became either entirely lost, or more and more contracted, till finally time and circumstance partly loosened, partly destroyed, the bonds which held the nation in slavery. In England as in the whole of Europe, feudal oppression was the growth of a very few generations; but it has required many hundreds of years to destroy it. A disease may be caught in an hour—years may be required for its cure. For the conquered race, the Norman had all the contempt common to conquerors. Macaulay says that when Henry I. married an Anglo-Saxon of princely lineage, many of the barons regarded it as a Virginia planter might regard marriage with a quadroon girl. But personal and economical interests obliged the barons to relent in their treatment of their serfs and chattels; and many of them were allowed under certain conditions to cultivate small portions of land.
The Saxon servile class, embraced under the general name of villeins, by and by began to have a permanent and legal interest in the land they cultivated, tilling it under the condition of a copyhold. The number of tenants on the manorial lands thus rapidly increased. But for a long period, even though the law declared that no man was a villein, still less a chattel, unless a master claimed him (and while to all others he was a freeman, eligible to have and hold property), still the nobles often seized and appropriated to themselves the property of the poorer class.
The laws under the Plantagenets, although in some respects hard for the villeins, indirectly favored their emancipation, and threw many obstacles in the way of suits brought to reclaim fugitives.
The influence of the cities on the condition of the serfs in England was similar to that which they exercised everywhere else in Europe. As under the Anglo-Saxons, so under the Normans, the inhabitants of the cities were originally serfs and villeins, or their descendants. The Plantagenets were unceasingly at war, and the enlistment of soldiers opened up an avenue to emancipation; and predial and feudal servitude of every kind ended forever with the performance of military service on land or sea. So also the serf or villein obtained freedom in various ways—through the law of refuge in cities, by being drafted into the royal service, and finally by the tenure of the land on which the baron may have established him at his own baronial pleasure. Thus by degrees arose the right of copyhold lands; and Edward III. prohibited the lords from appropriating such lands when service was rendered or the rent regularly paid.
Forced servitude steadily diminished, and the estate-holders complained that the cities and towns absorbed the labor necessary for agriculture. In 1345, Parliament regulated the wages for all kinds of farm-work, and made labor obligatory when paid for in money, but not as personal servitude. Gradually the economic and social relations became more and more those of employer and laborer, and less and less those of master and serf. Still the nobles and estate-holders continually evaded the laws, and preserved, as much as they possibly could, their oppressive rights. Against these the peasants protested by various petty insurrections.