lord. He could leave neither land nor lord at his will. He was bound to
render due service to his lord in tillage or in fight. So long however as
these services were done the land was his own. His lord could not take it
from him; and he was bound to give him aid and protection in exchange for
his services.

Far different from the position of the læt was that of the slave, though
there is no ground for believing that the slave class was other than a
small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine
drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor,
unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and
spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave
within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up
his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a
father pressed by need sold children and wife into bondage. In any case
the slave became part of the live stock of his master's estate, to be
willed away at death with horse or ox, whose pedigree was kept as
carefully as his own. His children were bondsmen like himself; even a
freeman's children by a slave mother inherited the mother's taint. "Mine
is the calf that is born of my cow," ran an English proverb. Slave cabins
clustered round the homestead of every rich landowner; ploughman,
shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman,
sower, hayward and woodward, were often slaves. It was not indeed slavery
such as we have known in modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare:
if the slave was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his
master could slay him if he would; it was but a chattel the less. The
slave had no place in the justice court, no kinsmen to claim vengeance or
guilt-fine for his wrong. If a stranger slew him, his lord claimed the
damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, "his skin paid for him" under his
master's lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed beast, and