[94] Russell, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, p. 49: "We pray that all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood shedding." The German peasants in the articles drawn up at Memmingen in 1525 demanded the abolition of serfdom "since Christ hath purchased and redeemed us all with his precious blood." The Christian appeal is a common one; see below.
[95] Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Requests_, John Burde and another v. The Earl of Bath. The quarrel dragged on from 1535 to 1544, when the plaintiff's goods were restored. (In 1551, however, when all bad landlords were raising their heads, his house and cattle were again seized.)
[96] _Ibid._, Netheway _v._ George, 1534. For other cases see Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber_. Carter _v._ Abbot of Malmesbury (vol. i., 1500), and Selby _v._ Middlemore (vol. ii., 1516-1522). Mr. Leadam's remarks (int. cxxix.) show that a man who was legally a villein might be economically very prosperous: "Thomas Carter ... was charged 40 marks for his enfranchisement. He kept a man-servant. He rode on horseback. He gave a feast to celebrate his freedom. He was even on friendly terms with the gentlemen of the Abbot's household." See also Savine, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xvii. Lord Stafford actually tried to seize the Mayor of Bristol and his brother as bondmen!
This change from servile to free labour, begun some two centuries before, and virtually completed in the reign of Elizabeth, is a high landmark in the development both of economic and political society. It is a long step towards modern industrialism on the one hand and the modern all-inclusive state on the other. By sapping the organisation of society on the basis of tenure, and thus making room for the more elastic relationships of the wage-contract, it prepared the way for new methods of production and for the growth of new centres of economic power. The refusal of the courts to allow that the lord of a manor had, _qua_ lord, a theoretical right to dispose of the persons and chattels of his unfree tenants, meant the final triumph of the common law in regions with which for four centuries after the Norman Conquest it had not dared to interfere. Henceforward, while the German peasant is driven afield to gather snails and wild strawberries for his lord, is plundered and harried and tortured without hope of redress, his English brother is a member of a society in which there is, nominally at least, one law for all men. His liberty may be more in shadow than in substance, yet the shadow is itself an earnest of greater things. To us who know the misery of many of the poorer classes in the sixteenth century the boast that "if any slaves or bondmen come here from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they became so free of condition as their masters," may read like a bitter mockery. But it is something that the boast should be made, and when England is confronted with the greatest moral issue of the modern world, that boast will stand her in good stead.[97] She owes some acknowledgment to the nameless serfs who fled from farm and homestead, till villeinage, in spite of the law, bled gradually to death.