i5o SERVILE BURDENS
Everywhere we turn we find local custom interpreting the way
in which heriot is to be claimed. Sometimes, as at Vale Royal, it
presses with intolerable harshness on the peasant: at other times,
as at Melbourne, it is merciful and humane. But, looked at
generally, it must be said that it was a heavy burden, and was the
more grievous since it could but aggravate the keen sense of loss
which the household had already sustained by the death of the
head of the house. We must not easily allow ourselves to believe
that "the power of the lord" was not a very real thing. True, in
some fortunate manors it was softened and controlled to some
extent by the "custom of the manor", but even so it remained a
powerful force which could exhibit itself in such ways as this—
ways repugnant, not only to our modern ideas, but, as we have
seen, to such men as St Hugh, or to a moralist such as Jacques de
Vitry, who characterised the lords who took heriots as " vultures
that prey upon death—or more loathsome still, as worms
feeding upon the corpse".