94 The Norman Conquest
villein presented his free side; as against them, his right
to have his property and personal safety protected was
practically the same as that of the freeholder upon the
same manor. As the system of king's courts developed,
its attitude towards the villein became a matter of great
importance as affecting his status. In a word, and by
way of anticipation, it may be stated here that the vil-
lein, by the early thirteenth century, stood on a prac-
tical equality with the freeman in a royal court in all
matters relating to its criminal jurisdiction. But it was
not for him a civil court; he could bring no action
there.1
The men above the villeins, the non-noble freemen, are
known usually as freeholders. As the mass of Anglo-
Saxon tenures became somewhat simplified after the
Conquest, this class held normally by one of the socage
tenures, tenure in free socage, the ancestor of the mod-
ern freehold, being the most important.2 Most manors
contained a number of freeholders in addition to its
villein tenants; but a freeholder might have a manor
with freehold and villein tenants of his own. The services
of the freeholder were much the same as those of the
villein, but possessed a kind of definiteness that left
him who rendered them less at his lord's disposal. The
freeholder lacked also the ascription to the soil and the
more personal incidents of servitude. But any general
description is likely to make the distinction between the
freehold and villein classes appear clearer than it actually
was. The more the investigator deals with details, the
more difficult he finds it to obtain a sure touchstone of
demarcation; even such servile marks as the payment of
the merchet become vague and unsatisfactory as guides.
What at first seems a less clear-cut test, definiteness of
service, has been found, in the long run, the best. It is
1 See below, pp. 194, 195.
2 See above, p. 32 ana note I. After the Conquest, free socage was
more widely used and often by people of higher rank than in Anglo-Saxon
times. See Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 66 ff. This tenure
was commonly known as fee farm from the Conquest to Edward I.