[558]. Cod. Dipl. No. 314.
[559]. Wages of course need not comprise money, or be the result of a compact between free parties. We pay a slave wages, though no penny fee. It is a different question whether it is advisable that labourers should be slaves: the Anglosaxons had their peculiar views on that subject, which we are not to discuss now.
[560]. “Alio quoque tempore, in adolescentia sua, dum adhuc esset in populari vita, quando in montanis iuxta fluvium, quod dicitur Leder, cum aliis pastoribus, pecora domini sui pascebat,” etc. Anon. Cuðberht, cap. 8. (Beda, Op. Min. ii. 262.) “Contigit eum remotis in montibus commissorum sibi pecorum agere custodiam.” Beda, Cuðb. c. 4. Op. Min. ii. 55. The Hungarian Salas on the Pusta is much the same thing, at the present day.
[561]. The “Rectitudines Singularum Personarum” inform us that they were very different in different places, which necessarily would be the case. We can imagine that a butsecarl or fisherman of Kent was not so anxious to have a holding as a peasant in Gloucestershire.
[562]. Even in the eighth century Ini found it necessary to enact, that if a man took land on condition of gafol or produce-rent, and his lord endeavoured to raise his rent also to service, he need not abide by the bargain, unless the lord would build him a house: and he was, in such a case, not to lose the crop he had prepared. Ini, § 67. Thorpe, i. 146.
[563]. The transitory possessions of this life were often so described, in reference to the Almighty: “ða ǽhta ðe him God álǽned hæfð.” Cod. Dipl. No. 699. A lǽn for life, even though guarded by a very detailed bóc or charter, is distinctly called beneficium by the grantee, Æðelbald of Wessex. Cod. Dipl. No. 1058.
[564]. Cod. Dipl. No. 328.
[565]. Thus Ealhfrið bishop of Winchester (871-877) making a grant for lives to duke Cúðred, properly calls it a lǽn: “Ealferð ⁊ ða higan habbað gelǽned,” etc. Cod. Dipl. No. 1062. They reserved ecclesiastical, but no secular dues.
[566]. Oswald’s grants generally contain a special clause to that effect: see Cod. Dipl. Nos. 494, 495, 506, 507, 509, 511, 529, 531, 538, 540, 552.
[567]. MS. Cott. Vitel. A. xv. fol. 2. “Ac ǽlcne man lyst, siððan he ǽnig cotlif on his hláfordes lǽne mid his fultume getimbred hæfð, ðæt he hine móte hwílum ðǽron gerestan, ⁊ huntigan, ⁊ fuglian ⁊ fiscan, ⁊ his on gehwylicwísan tó ðǽre lǽnan tilian, ǽgðer ge on sǽ ge on lande, oð oð ðone fyrst ðe he bócland ⁊ éce yrfe þurh his hláfordes miltse ge-earnige.” Whether land so put out was called earningland, I will not affirm; but at the close of a grant for three lives I find this memorandum: “Two of the lives have fallen in; then Eádwulf took it, and granted it to whomsover he would as earningland.” Cod. Dipl. No. 679. Cotlif seems in other passages to denote small estates not necessarily on lǽn. The Saxon Chronicle, an. 963, for example uses that term of the lands which Æðelwold gave to Ely, after purchasing them of the king. This it is clear he could not have done, had they been on any person’s lǽn. Were they not perhaps settlements of unlicensed squatters who had built their cottages on the king’s waste and deserted lands—the old Mark—in the isle of Ely and Cambridgeshire? But again the Chronicle, an. 1001, speaks of the hám or vill at Waltham, and many other cotlifs.