Note the way in which Statute law is used to compel the agricultural labour which the vanishing jurisdiction of lord over serf is ceasing to be able to enforce.
[93] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke_, Manor of Chilmerke: "Johannes Reve tenet per indenturam totum illud capitale messuagium excepta et omnino reservata omnia wardas, maritagia fines ... nativos," &c.
One cannot, therefore, take the almost sanctimonious abhorrence of bondage expressed by the writers of the period quite at its face value. On the other hand, though villeinage by blood was still worth recording, since it offered an impecunious lord an opportunity for arbitrary taxation, and still sufficiently irksome for the rebels under Ket[94] (influenced perhaps by some dim memory of the German peasants' programme) to set its abolition among their demands, its practical importance was slight, and it was quite compatible with a good deal of prosperity on the part of those who were legally bondmen. How completely out of date it was by the middle of the sixteenth century is best shown by some of the cases in which attempts were made to enforce it. When the Earl of Bath[95] seizes £400 from a family on the ground that the members are his villeins, and is pursued by them for nine years from one court to another, or when a lord[96] of a manor is compelled by a royal commission appointed for the purpose of investigating the matter, to repay the value of the beast taken from a man who is proved by the court rolls to be his villein, and the latter, having received it back, declines to stop proceedings unless he be paid heavy compensation in addition, one must see rather a proof of the practical disappearance of villeinage than of its survival. Its occasional enforcement is clearly regarded as something outrageous; it is a freak of arbitrary despotism, which has hardly more historical significance than the seizure of the Derby winner as a copyhold heriot would have at the present day. Public opinion, even the opinion of those engaged in estate management, condemns such attempts unreservedly, and when they come to the ears of the authorities they strain the law on the side of the bondmen.