282 THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
serfs were contributing daily to their wealth and sustenance. To
have denied serfdom would have been wellnigh an impossibility
for them in practice, but at least we might have expected from
them some theoretical expression of a higher view. Yet, as
Pollock and Maitland write: "It is to the professed in religion
that we may look for a high theory of justice; and when we find
that it is against them that the peasants make their loudest com-
plaints, we may be pretty sure that the religion of the time saw
nothing very wrong in the proceedings of a lord who without any
cruelty tried to get the most he could out of his villein tene-
ments".1 Certainly the Church saw nothing very wrong with it,
for it was her own practice, and the manumission of any serf
represented a loss of property, and of present and future service
to the Church, and was, therefore, strictly forbidden by Canon
Law, unless there was a definite reason for the manumission.2 It
was the hope of a definite return that doubtless allowed the
Bishop of Worcester to manumit a serf of his who had done good
service as a bailiff. In the charter of manumission the Bishop
says that he has acted thus so that the man "may with the more
spirit devote himself to her [the Church of Worcester's] rights
and business; and that others, in hope of the like reward, may
with the more vigour and fidelity discharge the duties entrusted
to them".8
Naturally, from time to time both ecclesiastical and lay
lords found it to their own interests to free some serf. Then it is
that the fine-sounding phrases are rolled forth: it is pious and
meritorious to restore men to that state of natural freedom which
originally belonged to all human beings; it is an act of charity and
piety, acceptable to God and delightful to men and so on. But
these are, in general, but "common form" phrases, copied
mechanically by one scribe from another, and their effect is con-
siderably lessened when we observe that the lord often extracts a
handsome monetary payment for the enfranchisement he confers.
1 Op. cit. I, 378. For the Anglo-Saxon period see Vinogradoff, Growth of
the Manor; 332, where he says, "Manumissions of this period are best ex-
plained by the operation of economic and social considerations. Not philan-
thropy or influence of Christianity have reduced slavery to the modest
dimensions of Domesday.**
* See above, and cf. CaL Papal Regs. Papal Letters, I, 505; IV, 398; V, 71;
Hist. MSS. Com. Bath, n, 36.
8 Wore. Liber Albus, ed. J. M. Wilson, 223.