We feel our way with much greater security in another direction. The fields of the village contain many a nook or odd bit which cannot be squeezed into the virgate arrangement and into the system of work and duties connected with it. These 'subsecivae,' as the Romans would have said, were always distributed for small rents in kind or in money.(50*) The manorial administration may also exclude from the common arrangement entire areas of land which it is thought advantageous to give out for rent. Those who take it are mostly the same villagers who possess the regular holdings, but their title is different; in one case it is based on agreement, in the other on custom.(51*) Plots of this kind are called forlands.(52*) In close connexion with them we find the essarts or assarts-land newly reclaimed from the waste, and therefore not mapped out according to the original plan of possession and service. The Surveys often mark the different epochs of cultivation -- the old and the new essarts.(53*) The documents show also that the spread of the area under cultivation was effected in different ways;sometimes by a single settler with help from the lord,(54*) and sometimes by the entire village, or at any rate by a large group of peasants who club together for the purpose.(55*) In the first case there was no reason for bringing the reclaimed space under the sway of the compulsory rotation of crops or the other regulations of communal agriculture. In the second, the distribution of the acres and strips among the various tenants was proportioned to their holdings in the ancient lands of the village. The rents on essart land seem very low, and no wonder:
everywhere in the world the advance of cultivation has been made the starting-point of privileged occupation and light taxation.
The Roman Empire introduced the emphyteusis as a contract in favour of the pioneers of cultivation, the French feudal law endowed the hotes (hospites) on newly reclaimed land with all kinds of advantages. English practice is not so explicit on this point, but it is not difficult to gather from the Surveys that it was not blind to the necessity of patronising agricultural progress and encouraging it by favourable terms.
Of mol-land I have already spoken in another chapter. I will only point out now that this class of tenements appears to have been a very common one. Thirteenth century surveys often describe certain holdings in two different ways-on the supposition of their paying rent, and also on that of their rendering labour-services; when they pay rent they pay so much, when they supply labour they supply so much. By the side of such holdings, which are wavering, as it were, between the two systems, we find the terra assisa or ad censum. This class, to which molland evidently belongs, is distinguished from free tenure by the fact that its rent is regarded as a manorial arrangement; there is no formal agreement and no charter, and therefore no action before the king's courts to guard against disseisin or increase of services. In practice the difference is not felt very keenly, and these tenements gradually came to be regarded as 'free' in every sense. A characteristic feature of the movement may be noticed in the terms 'Socagium ad placitum' and 'Socagium villani'.(56*)These expressions occur in the documents, although they are not very common. It would be hard to explain them otherwise than from the point of view indicated just now. The tenement is paying a fixed and certain rent and therefore socage, but it is not defended by feoffment and charter. It is not recognised by law, and therefore it remains at the will of the lord and unfree.(57*)The grant of a charter would raise it to the legal standing of free land.
Every student of manorial documents will certainly be struck by one well-marked difference between villain tenements and free tenements as described in the extents and surveys. The tenants in villainage generally appear arranged into large groups, in which every man holds, works, and pays exactly as his fellows; so that when the tenement and services of some one tenant have been described we then read that the other tenants hold similar tenements and owe similar services. On the other hand, the freeholds seem scattered at random without any definite plan of arrangement, parcelled up into unequal portions, and subjected to entirely different duties. One man holds ten acres and pays three shillings for them; another has eight and a half acres and gives a pound of pepper to his lord; a third is possessed of twenty-three acres, pays 4s. 6d., and sends his dependants to three boonworks; a fourth brings one penny and some poultry in return for his one acre. The regularity of the villain system seems entirely opposed to the capricious and disorderly phenomena of free tenure.
