Читать книгу Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John. With an Historical Introduction онлайн

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(5) The relation of the villein to the benefits of the Charter has been hotly discussed. Coke claims for him, in regard to the important provisions of chapter 39 at least, that he must be regarded as a liber homo, and therefore as a full participant in all the advantages of the clause.^[214] This contention is not well founded. Even admitting the relativity of the word liber in the thirteenth century, and admitting also that the villein performed some of the duties, if he enjoyed none of the rights of the free-born, still the formal description liber homo, when used in a feudal charter, cannot be stretched to cover those useful manorial chattels that had no recognized place in the feudal scheme of society or in the political constitution of England, however necessary they might be in the scheme of the particular manor to the soil of which they were attached.

Even if we exclude the villein from the general benefits of the grant, it may be, and has been, maintained that some few privileges were insured to him in his own name. One clause at least is specially framed for his protection. The villein, so it is provided in chapter 21, must not be so cruelly amerced as to leave him utterly destitute; his plough and its equipment must be saved to him. Such concessions, however, are quite consistent with a denial of all political rights, and even of all civil rights, as these are understood in a modern age. The Crown and the magnates, so it may be urged, were only consulting their own interests when they left the villein the means to carry on his farming operations, and so to pay off the balance of his debts in the future. The closeness of his bond to the lord of his manor made it impossible to crush the one without slightly injuring the other. The villein was protected, not as the acknowledged subject of legal rights, but because he formed a valuable asset of his lord. This attitude is illustrated by a somewhat peculiar expression used in chapter 4, which prohibited injury to the estate of a ward by “waste of men or things.” For a guardian to raise a villein to the status of a freeman was to benefit the enfranchised peasant at the expense of his young master.^[215]