When we turn over the pages in which the writers of the sixteenth century declare that bondage is contrary to "the Christian religion which maketh us all in Christ breathren, and in respect of God and Christ _conservos_,"[100] and congratulate themselves on its disappearance, we must not doubt their sincerity, but we may envy their inexperience. We must remember that a condemnation of villeinage was quite compatible with a policy of great severity towards the wage-labourer, and was in fact not unconnected with it, since the latter had almost everywhere stepped into places and functions formally held by the bondman. Villeinage disappeared in England earlier than on the continent of Europe, not for the ethical reasons given by Fitzherbert and Smith and Norden, but because the growth of a commercial organisation of agriculture had made its maintenance both useless and impossible. The intellectual conversion did little more than follow on the economic change to make a virtue of necessity. The personal rightlessness of the villein and the hateful incidents of villeinage, such as chevage, merchet, and leyrwite, had had their utility in the fact that they kept him at the disposal of the manorial authorities as an instrument of agriculture. With the substitution of hired labour for the cultivation of the demesne by the services of bond tenants, their maintenance lost its attractiveness. No employer wants to retain a permanent staff, if there are "hands" whom he can take on and put off at pleasure. Villeinage ceases but the Poor Laws begin.
[100] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib. III., ch. 8. See also Fitzherbert, _Surveying_ (1539): "How be it, in some places the bondmen continue as yet, the which me seemeth is the greatest inconvenience that now is suffered by the law." Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_ (1608): "Which kinde of service and slavery, thanks be to God, is in most places of this Realme quite abolished and worne out of memory.... Truly I think it is a Christian parte so to do [_i.e._ manumit bondsmen], for seeing we be nowe all as the children of one father, the servants of one God, and the subjects of one king, it is very uncharitable to retain our brethren in bondage, sith, when we were all bond, Christ did make us free."