36 English and Continental Backgrounds
Ms lord. It was a personal relation and for mutual bene-
fit. The lord gave protection and guaranty, and was
often called the defensor or tutor of his man. In return, he
received the value of an armed retainer or some other more
or less clearly defined service. The object of the man in
getting a lord was to gain, by this private transaction,
greater security in troublous times than was afforded by
the crude local government, or it was to obtain some
economic advantage through connection with a great
landholder. Probably in most cases the man acted with
a mixed motive. Simple as this relation of lord and man
seems, it was capable of great variation: to become the
men of some lords, under some circumstances, meant an
actual rise in status; there was something honourable,
almost ennobling, about the act; on the other hand, com-
mendation often lowered the man's status, and, if it did
not mean an immediate loss of freedom, it looked in that
direction. There was no technical exactness, and the re-
lation of lord and man might imply almost anything.
But one generalisation can be made at this point: the
class of non-noble freemen was becoming less homo-
geneous, it was splitting. The change was that sharper
division into classes likely to result from a more settled
life and a denser population. No one was at first con-
cerned with furthering it; it took place naturally, for it
solved a problem of the times.
One cannot fully understand any medieval relation
between lord and man until he knows to what extent the
tenure of land was involved, for a man's legal status was
closely related to the character of his tenure and was
often affected by it. Indeed at this time the possession
of freehold land was coming to be the badge and guaranty
of full free status, whereas in an earlier state of society
free status ensured the possession of land. In Anglo-
Saxon commendation, land was sometimes involved and
sometimes not. The man might bring land to the lord
and, in some sort, hold it under him, being able to with-
draw the land at any time and "go with it" to another