but is probably simply an attempt to describe a process of transition. They held as a rule of King Edward. Perhaps all the very great number of King Edward’s tenants might have been called allodial tenants, but the Kentish Domesday singles out certain of them—Godric de Burnes, Godric Carlesone, Alnod cilt, Esber Biga, Siret de Cilleham, Turgis, Norman, and Azor—as alodiarii in the peculiar position of owing no relief to the king, but only ‘forfeiture of their heads,’ and ward of six days at Canterbury or Sandwich. The main information with regard to them is given in the enumeration of the rights of the king and the archbishop over the men of Kent.⁷⁵  The description of the relief due from alodiarii may be compared with other Domesday passages regarding relief, and seems here as elsewhere, in Berkshire, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire for example, to resemble rather the heriot than the relief as it appears in later military tenements.
   The mass of the peasant population in Kent is designated by the Survey as villani ; moreover, considerable land called terra villanorum is found in Folkestone and Thanet. It has often been pointed out by students of English agrarian conditions that notwithstanding the well-known passage in the Year Book of Edward I denying the existence of villeinage in Kent, yet the villani occur in the Survey as elsewhere with no evident differentiation from villeins of other counties. If the passage in the Year Book be taken to mean, as I have suggested elsewhere,⁷⁶  not that all in Kent at the time were free because they were not villein, but that the peasant class was ‘ gavelkind ‘ rather than villein, technically speaking, and that the contrast in the county was between gavelkind and free, not between villein and free, the appearance of the Domesday villein is reasonable enough. The difference in terminology probably developed later, as the contrast between the more stationary status of the Kentish peasant and the changing condition of the peasant in other counties became more marked. The peasant elsewhere was pushed into the mould of villeinage which the common law helped to build as the necessary accompaniment of the military or church fief; in Kent the crystallization of custom preserved peasant conditions as they were commonly existent in pre-Conquest days, and to these conditions the term tenure in gavelkind, the tenure of those that render gavol, came to be applied. The term seldom if ever occurs outside Kent; it implies a body of customary arrangements, some very old, some of later growth, the combination and legal sanction of which appear in Kent alone, although individual customs characteristic of the group, such as partibility of inheritance, may often appear elsewhere. The large numbers of villeins, and of others of the peasant class also, congregated in apparently small manors should be noticed. The low assessment of a manor cannot, of course, be taken as a gauge of its size ; for example, Dartford, although assessed at only 1½ sulungs, yet had 55 ploughs, and 142 villeins, 10 bordars (bordarii), and 3 serfs. Aylesford is more normal, with 1 sulung assessment, 3 ploughs, and 45 villeins and bordars, and so is Buckland with 1 sulung, 1½ ploughs, and 16 villeins and cottars.
   Of the other peasant classes the bordars were most common in Kent before and after the Conquest. They are usually to be found on manors where villeins also appear, but were fewer in number. Occasionally manors
   ⁷⁵  See p. 204a and b.
   ⁷⁶  Custom and the Common Law in Kent, Harvard Law Review, Feb. 192S, pp. 496—498.