Of the legal position of the _servus_ Domesday Book tells us little or nothing; but earlier and later documents oblige us to think of him as a slave, one who in the main has no legal rights. He is the _theów_ of the Anglo-Saxon dooms, the _servus_ of the ecclesiastical canons. But though we do right in calling him a slave, still we might well be mistaken were we to think of the line which divides him from other men as being as sharp as the line which a mature jurisprudence will draw between thing and person. We may well doubt whether this principle--'The slave is a thing, not a person'--can be fully understood by a grossly barbarous age. It implies the idea of a person, and in the world of sense we find not persons but men.
Thus degrees of servility are possible. A class may stand, as it were, half-way between the class of slaves and the class of free men. The Kentish law of the seventh century as it appears in the dooms of Æthelbert[66], like many of its continental sisters, knows a class of men who perhaps are not free men and yet are not slaves; it knows the _læt_ as well as the _theów_. From what race the Kentish _læt_ has sprung, and how, when it comes to details, the law will treat him--these are obscure questions, and the latter of them can not be answered unless we apply to him what is written about the _laeti_, _liti_ and _lidi_ of the continent. He is thus far a person that he has a small wergild but possibly he is bound to the soil. Only in Æthelbert's dooms do we read of him. From later days, until Domesday Book breaks the silence, we do not obtain any definite evidence of the existence of any class of men who are not slaves but none the less are tied to the land. Of men who are bound to do heavy labour services for their lords we do hear, but we do not hear that if they run away they can be captured and brought back. As we shall see by and by, Domesday Book bears witness to the existence of a class of _buri_, _burs_, _coliberti_, who seem to be distinctly superior to the _servi_, but distinctly inferior to the villeins, bordiers and cottiers. It is by no means impossible that they, without being slaves, are in a very proper and intelligible sense unfree men, that they have civil rights which they can assert in courts of law, but that they are tied to the soil. The gulf between the seventh and the eleventh centuries is too wide to allow of our connecting them with the _læt_ of Æthelbert's laws, but still our documents are not exhaustive enough to justify us in denying that all along there has been a class (though it can hardly have been a large class) of men who could not quit their tenements and yet were no slaves. As we shall see hereafter, liberty was in certain contexts reckoned a matter of degree; even the _villanus_, even the _sochemannus_ was not for every purpose _liber homo_. When this is so, the _theów_ or _servus_ is like to appear as the unfreest of persons rather than as no person but a thing.