Villenage
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 2 anchored passages
villeinage · villenagium
in the texts
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
Medieval English tenurial status distinguished from personal servitude.
Bracton most clearly explains that in the thirteenth century Villenage was a tenure and not a personal status.
Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John
The distinctive unfree tenure by which villeins held land, subject to manorial custom rather than the common law.
These rights, such as they were, could not be pled elsewhere than before the court customary of that manor over which the lord’s steward presided with powers wide and undefined.
The normal villein possessed his virgate or half virgate (thirty or fifteen scattered acres) under a tenure known as villenagium, sharply distinguished from the freeholder’s tenures.