Page "Paul Vinogradoff" Paragraph 3

Writing in 1911, the anonymous author of Vinogradoff's biography in the Encyclopædia Britannica thought that Vinogradoff's Villainage in England ( 1892 ) is perhaps the most important book written on the peasantry of the feudal age and the village community in England ; it can only be compared for value with FW Maitland's Domesday Book and Beyond.

In masterly fashion Vinogradoff here shows that the villein of Norman times was the direct descendant of the Anglo-Saxon freeman, and that the typical Anglo-Saxon settlement was a free community, not a manor, the position of the freeman having steadily deteriorated in the centuries just around the Norman Conquest.

The status of the villein and the conditions of the manor in the 12th and 13th centuries are set forth with a legal precision and a wealth of detail which shows its author, not only as a very capable historian, but also as a brilliant and learned jurist.