relations on this basis. The lord, instead of clumsy work, got clear money, a much-coveted means of satisfying needs and wishes of any kind—instead of cumbrous performances which did not come always at the proper moment, were carried out in a half-hearted manner, yielded no immediate results, and did not admit of convenient rearrangement. The peasant got rid of a hateful drudgery which not only took up his time and means in an unprofitable manner, but placed him under the rough control and the arbitrary discipline of stewards or reeves and gave occasion to all sorts of fines and extortions.
With the growth of intercourse and security money became more frequent and the number of such transactions increased in proportion. But it must be kept in mind that the conversion of services into rents went on very gradually, as a series of private agreements, and that it would be very wrong to suppose, as some scholars have done, that it had led to a general commutation by the middle or even the end of the 14th century. The 14th century was marked by violent fluctuations in the demand and supply of labour, and particularly the tremendous loss in population occasioned in the middle of this century by the Black Death called forth a most serious crisis. No wonder that many lords clung very tenaciously to customary services, and ecclesiastical institutions seem to have been especially backward in going over to the system of money rents. There is evidence to show, for instance, that the manors of the abbey of Ramsey were managed on the system of enforced labour right down to the middle of the 15th century, and, of course, survivals of these customs in the shape of scattered services lived on much longer. A second drawback from the point of view of the landlords was called forth by the fact that commutation for fixed rents gradually lessened the value of the exactions to which they were entitled. Money not only became less scarce but it became cheaper, so that the couple of pence for which a day of manual work was bought off in the beginning of the 13th century did not fetch more than half of their former value at its end. As quit rents were customary and not rack rents, the successors of those who had redeemed their services were gaining the whole surplus in the value of goods and labour as against money, while the successors of those who had commuted their right to claim services for certain sums in money lost all the corresponding difference. These inevitable consequences came to be perceived in course of time and occasioned a backward tendency towards services in kind which could not prevail against the general movement from natural economy to money dealings, but was strong enough to produce social friction and grave disturbances.
The economic crisis of the 14th century has its complement in the legal crisis of the 15th. At that time the courts of law begin to do away with the denial of protection to villeins which, as we have seen, constituted the legal basis of villeinage. This is effected by the recognition of copyhold tenure (see Copyhold).
It is a fact of first-rate magnitude that in the 15th century customary relations on one hand, the power of government on the other, ripened, as it were, to that extent that the judges of the king began to take cognizance of the relations of the peasants to their lords. The first cases which occur in this sense are still treated not as a matter of common law, but as a manifestation of equity. As doubtful questions of trust, of wardship, of testamentary succession, they were taken up not in the strict course of justice, but as matters in which redress was sorely needed and had to be brought by the exceptional power of the court of chancery. But this interference of 15th-century chancellors paved the way towards one of the greatest revolutions in the law; without formally enfranchising villeins and villein tenure they created a legal basis for it in the law of the realm: in the formula of copyhold—tenement held at the will of the lord and by the custom of the manor—the first part lost its significance and the second prevailed, in downright contrast with former times when, on the contrary, the second part had no legal value and the first expressed the view of the courts. One may almost be tempted to say that these obscure decisions rendered unnecessary in England the work achieved with such a flourish of trumpets in France by the emancipating decree of the 4th of August 1789.
The personal condition of villenage did not, however, disappear at once with the rise of copyhold. It lingered through the 16th century and appears exceptionally even in the 17th. Deeds of emancipation and payments for personal enfranchisement are often noticed at that very time. But these are only survivals of an arrangement which has been destroyed in its essence by a complete change of economic and political conditions.
Bibliography.—P. Vinogradoff, Villainage in England (Oxford, 1892); Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law (1895), book ii. c. i. §§ 5, 12, 13; F. W. Maitland, Domesday and Beyond (1897), Essay I. §§ 2, 3, 4; F. Seebohm, The English Village Community (1883); W. S . Holdsworth, History of English Law, iii. (1909); P. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor (1905); P. Vinogradoff, English Society in the XIth Century (1908); A. Savine in the English Historical Review, xvii. (1902); A. Savine in the Economic Quarterly Review (1904); A. Savine, “Bondmen under the Tudors,” in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xvii. (1903). (P. Vi.)
VILLENEUVE, PIERRE CHARLES JEAN BAPTISTE SILVESTRE (1763–1806), French admiral, was born at Valensoles in Provence on the 31st of December 1763. He entered the French royal navy as a “garde du Pavilion.” Although he belonged to the corps of “noble” officers, who were the object of peculiar animosity to the Jacobins, he escaped the fate of the majority of his comrades, which was to be massacred, or driven into exile. He sympathized sincerely with the general aims of the Revolution, and had a full share of the Provençal fluency which enabled him to make a timely and impressive display of “civic” sentiments. In the dearth of trained officers he rose with what for the French navy was exceptional rapidity, though it would have caused no surprise in England in the case of an officer who had good interest. He was named post-captain in 1793, and rear-admiral in 1796. At the close of the year he was appointed to take part in the unsuccessful expedition to Ireland which reached Bantry Bay, but the ships which were to have come to Brest from Toulon with him arrived too late, and were forced to take refuge at L’Orient. He accompanied the expedition to Egypt, with his flag in the “Guillaume Tell” (86). She was the third ship from the rear of the French line at the battle of the Nile, and escaped from the general destruction in company with the “Généreux” (78). Villeneuve reached Malta on the 23rd of August. His conduct was severely blamed, and he defended himself by a specious letter to his colleague Blanquet-Duchayla on the 12th of November 1800, when he had returned to Paris. At the time, Napoleon approved of his action. In a letter written to him on the 21st of August 1798, three weeks after the battle, Napoleon says that the only reproach Villeneuve had to make against himself was that he had not retreated sooner, since the position taken by the French commander-in-chief had been forced and surrounded. When, however, the emperor after his fall dictated his account of the expedition to Egypt to General Bertrand at St Helena, he attributed the defeat at the Nile largely to the “bad conduct of Admiral Villeneuve.” In the interval Villeneuve had failed in the execution of the complicated scheme for the invasion of England in 1805. Napoleon must still have believed in the admiral’s capacity and good fortune, a qualification for which he had a great regard, when he selected him to succeed Latouche Tréville upon his death at Toulon in August 1804. The duty of the Toulon squadron was to draw Nelson to the West Indies, return rapidly, and in combination with other French and Spanish ships, to enter the Channel with an overwhelming force. It is quite obvious that Villeneuve had from the first no confidence in the success of an operation requiring for its execution an amazing combination of good luck and efficiency on the part of the squadrons concerned. He knew that the French were not efficient, and that their Spanish allies were in a far worse state than themselves. It required a very tart order from Napoleon to drive him out of Paris in October 1804. He took the
