KINDLY CONCESSIONS

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These crucial tests of manumission and heriot, therefore, do not permit us to draw an essential distinction between the lay landlord and the ecclesiastic. To both, the main question was a business question; and, though manumission for money was often a great economic advantage to the master, yet it cannot be said that the monks saw this more clearly than the squires. I will ask my readers to keep in mind, all through these next chapters, that rough estimate to which I have come after some years of deliberation, that it was possibly about 5 per cent. better for the peasant, on an average, to live on a monastic than on a lay estate; except, that is, on a royal estate, where the conditions were distinctly more favourable than on the monastic. This is proved most clearly by the constant attempt of peasants to escape from monastic bondage by pleading that they were originally of “ancient demesne”—i.e. the king's own peasants. The fact that they did this desperately, in the face of plain Dom

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