VILLEIN. The villeins are a composite class. They are made up of those slaves which were known to the Anglo-Saxon law and of those free yet dependent cultivators of the soil whose tenure was defined by the Norman lawyers to be unfree. These diverse classes were thrown together by the Norman and Angevin lawyers and classed as villeins; and under the influence of conceptions bor rowed from Roman law many of the rules and maxims of the Roman conception of slavery were applied to them. Their lord has absolute power over their bodies and their goods. He can sell them and treat them as he pleases ; for they are his They are all equally things—"there are no degrees of personal unfreedom." Subse quently the general theory of the law was modified in every direction, and the status of the villein became one of the greatest curiosities of the medieval common law.
The villein held a plot of land and made a living out of it ; while the lord might change his tenement, it appears that sales of villeins were infrequent. There came to be a great
gulf between the villein and the slave. While the lord might imprison and beat his villein, the criminal law protected him against grosser forms of violence. While be was, as against his lord, rightless, or nearly so, as against the rest of the world he was regarded as free. It was purely a relation of a person to his lord. It came to be a very relative kind of prmdial serfdom, tempered by custom of the manor and by communal life. In the last phase, the chief profit to be made from villeins is from manumissions. At the end of the sixteenth century, both villein tenure and villein status were obso lete. 3 Holdsw. list. E. L. 376-395. See also A. M. Eaton in 1902 Rept. Am. Bar Assoc. 299.
• See SERF.