Villeins
group · 4 works · 15 mentions · 27 anchored passages
villeins · villanus · villein · a villein · bondmen · ceorls · free cultivating communities · serfs · sub-tenants · the King's villeins
spoken of as
1 expressionthe villeins1 mention
Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John (English)
The leaders of the “national” movement gave no political rights to the despised villeins, who comprised more than three quarters of the population of England;
in the texts
Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John
The unfree peasant class excluded from access to Henry II's royal courts.
” A striking feature of Henry’s policy was the bold manner in which he threw open the doors of his royal Courts of Law to allcomers (excepting villeins), and provided there—always in return for hard cash, be it said—a better article in name of justice than could be procured elsewhere in England, or, for that matter, elsewhere in Europe.
The rights and status of innocent sub–tenants must not be prejudiced by the misdeeds of defaulting lords.
If the defaulter was a Crown tenant, all his former sub–tenants, whether freeholders or villeins, moved up one rung in the feudal ladder and held henceforward directly of the king, who took over the entire complexus of legal rights previously enjoyed by the defaulter:
An Essay on the Trial by Jury
Class of unfree agricultural laborers whose means of subsistence are protected under Magna Carta.
and in the case of a villein, his waynage, or plough-tackle and carts.
And a villein shall be amerced after the same manner, saving to him his waynage,† if he fall under our mercy;
Under the Saxon laws, fines, payable to the injured party, seem to have been the common punishments for all offences.
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
The unfree or semi-free cultivating class of the manor
and below them are the true bondmen, the slaves, or thralls, or, in later legal language, the villeins in gross.
The villeins owe to the lord all sorts of dues and services, personal labour, among others, on the lands which form his domain;
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
Servile agricultural class into which free cultivators in Western Europe were reduced.
The enormous importation of slaves into the central territories of the Roman Commonwealth, and the wholesale degradation of the free cultivating communities of Western Europe into assemblages of villeins, seem to be expedients of the same nature as restrictions on the alienation of the ox and on its consumption for food, and to have been alike suggested by the same imperious necessity of procuring …