The luxury of the castle-hall, the splendour and pomp of chivalry, the cost of campaigns drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom to a serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an easy and tempting mode of refilling them.

In this process even kings took part.

At a later time, under Edward the Third, commissioners were sent to royal estates for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the king's serfs; and we still possess the names of those who were enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard cash in aid of the exhausted exchequer.
[Sidenote: England] Such was the people which had been growing into a national unity and a national vigour while English king and English baronage battled for rule.
But king and baronage themselves had changed like townsman and ceorl.

The loss of Normandy, entailing as it did the loss of their Norman lands, was the last of many influences which had been giving through a century and a half a national temper to the baronage.

Not only the "new men," the ministers out of whom the two Henries had raised a nobility, were bound to the Crown, but the older feudal houses now owned themselves as Englishmen and set aside their aims after personal independence for a love of the general freedom of the land.