Here too, if the lord possessed criminal jurisdiction, was held his justice court, and without its doors stood his gallows.

Around it lay the lord's demesne or home-farm, and the cultivation of this rested wholly with the "villeins" of the manor.

It was by them that the great barn was filled with sheaves, the sheep shorn, the grain malted, the wood hewn for the manor-hall fire.
These services were the labour-rent by which they held their lands, and it was the nature and extent of this labour-rent which parted one class of the population from another.

The "villein," in the strict sense of the word, was bound only to gather in his lord's harvest and to aid in the ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent.

The cottar, the bordar, and the labourer were bound to help in the work of the home-farm throughout the year.
But these services and the time of rendering them were strictly limited by custom, not only in the case of the ceorl or villein but in that of the originally meaner "landless man." The possession of his little homestead with the ground around it, the privilege of turning out his cattle on the waste of the manor, passed quietly and insensibly from mere indulgences that could be granted or withdrawn at a lord's caprice into rights that could be pleaded at law.