[191] _e.g._ at Hadleigh in 1305 (_Victoria County History_, Suffolk, Unwin's article); at Crondal in 1287 (_Crondal Records_, p. 110); at Ormsby in 1324 (Massingberd, _History of Ormsby_).
[192] _e.g._ Scrope, _Castle Combe_, p. 164. Court Rolls of 1357: "Johannis filius Johannis Payn venit et finem fecit cum domino per 12d. pro ingressu habendo in illo messuagio et virgata terræ quæ Johannis le Parkare quondam tenuit.... Et dictum tenementum concessum est ei ad tam parvam finem eo quod dictum tenementum est ruinosum et decassum; et existebat in manu domini a tempore pestilentiæ pro defectu emptorum." Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls for years 1349?-1352. Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_. Page, _The End of Villeinage in England_.
At the same time by the beginning of the fifteenth century another force of great importance was beginning to operate. The increase in the size of the customary tenants' holdings, and the growth of a class occupying much more land than the ordinary villein tenancy, was brought about not only by encroachment on the waste and the aggregation of holdings, but also by the transference to the tenants of that part of the manorial land which has been the lord's demesne. The process by which the demesne ceased to be cultivated by villein labour, and became frequently an area subject to the more elastic arrangements of leasehold tenure, has been often described, and we shall have to return to it later in speaking of the development of the large capitalist farm. Here it is sufficient to point out that, the abandonment of the primitive system, by which the tenants worked out their rents in labour on the demesne, had two consequences which are of great significance in the development of the villein into the prosperous peasantry of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
In the first place, it meant that one great force making for equality between the holdings of different tenants was removed. The system which gave each customary tenant on a manor what may be called a standard holding was surely an artificial one, in the sense that it bears the mark of deliberate arrangement, and is not one which would tend to be established by the play of economic forces. As we have seen, economic forces did begin to impair it at an early date. Its persistence is more remarkable than its disappearance, and why had it persisted? Partly, no doubt, because the idea that each full household should be equipped with a standard holding was part of the original organisation of the village community, upon which the feudal superstructure had been imposed, and which it used as a machine for grinding out its revenue. Partly also through the needs of that superstructure itself. As the tenants were the instruments by which the demesne was cultivated, and as the demesne could not be cultivated unless the tenants were adequately equipped with the means of livelihood, the rough equality which existed between their holdings, though arising from the communal arrangement of village life, and not deliberately imposed from above, had, nevertheless, been, in fact, a quite necessary condition for the working of the lord's private estate. A settled relation between holdings and services was a convenience to the manorial authorities, and in this sense the work done on the demesne was a force tending to keep the tenants' holdings fixed, as it were, on a scale which did not easily allow of much variation.[193] When the demesne ceased to be cultivated by labour services, what had been from the point of view of the manorial officers, though not from that of the villagers, the chief practical reason for maintaining equality between the different holdings disappeared, and the inequality which economic forces were tending to produce developed more rapidly.