villeins's Usage Examples:

A portion of the manor, generally about a third, constituted the lord's demesne, which, though sometimes separate, usually consisted of strips intermingled with those of his villeins.

(2) Politically the villeins were not eliminated from the body of citizens: they had to pay taxes, to serve in great emergencies in the militia, to serve on inquests, 'c.

At the latter date besides seventy-three villeins, bordars and serfs there were forty cervisarii, a species of unfree tenants who rendered their custom in the form of beer.

The royal courts refused to entertain suits of villeins against their lords, although there was a good deal of vacillation before this position was definitely taken up.

English lurked in farms and hovels, amongst villeins and serfs, in the outlying country-districts, in the distant ' See Stevenson, Waring and Skeat, op.

There was one exception to this harsh treatment of villeins, namely, the rustic tenantry in manors of ancient demesne, that is, in estates which had belonged to the crown before the Conquest, had a standing-ground even against their lords as regards the tenure of their plots and the fixity of their services.

"Secondly, all independent proprietary rights were denied to the villein as against his lord, and the legal rule " quicquid servo acquiritur domino acquiritur " was extended to villeins.

In the military sphere, though his normal army is the feudal force composed of the tenants-in-chief and the knights whom they have enfeoffed, he retains the power to call out the fyrd, the old national levee en masse, without regard to whether its members are freemen or villeins of some lord.

On the other hand, at Messina there were few or none, and we hear of both Saracen and Greek villeins, the latter doubtless abiding as they were in Saracen times.

As personal dependents of the lord native villeins were liable to be sold, and we find actual sales recorded: Glastonbury Abbey e.