Law Courts 193
It has been seen that the outward mark of unfreedom in the
case of the villein was that he could not bring an action
in the king's courts, and that these courts came to their
conclusion upon an individual's status by ascertaining the
degree of uncertainty in his service. * Two changes/ which
began in the thirteenth century, so fundamentally modified
manorial conditions in the two following centuries as to
do away with this uncertainty of service. The first was
the commutation of payments in kind and labour to pay-
ments in money. The increasing use of money as a med-
ium of exchange made it possible for the lord to give
something for labour other than land, and for the tenant
to give something for land other than labour. A man
could leave the manor with some chance of placing him-
self more advantageously elsewhere; at least, he could sell
his labour where he could get the most for it. This tended
to break up the manorial economy and to make labour
free. Fugitives from manors increased; and such fugi-
tives, if no proofs were brought to the contrary, were
always accounted free before the king's courts.3 This
rise in the position of the servile classes was favoured by
the Black Death of 1348, which, for a time, placed the
peasantry upon the right side of the labour market, and
possibly to a slight extent by the peasant revolt of 1381.
The growth of copyhold tenure was a partial reflection
of this change.4 This tenure certainly looked toward
that definiteness in the kind of service to be rendered from
day to day which was the touchstone of the royal courts
1 See above, pp. 94, 95.
* These changes were caused mainly by economic and social forces that
can not be considered here. See Cheyney, The Disappearance of English
Serfdom, The English Historical Review, xv., 20-37; Page, The End of
Villainage in England; Gray, The Commutation of Villein Services in Eng-
land Before the Black Death, English Historical"Review, xxix., 625-656;
and for some illustrative documents, W. and N., Problem IV. (A Fourteenth-
Century Labor Problem).
* See Frances G. Davenport, The Economic Development of a Norfolk
Manor, 1086-1565.
* In copyhold tenure, instead of the service being based upon the mem-
ory of man, an entry of the service was made upon the manor roll, and ordi-
narily a copy of this, in the nature of an indenture was placed in the hands
of the peasant.