Laet

in Old English Law. One of a class between the servile and free. 1 Palg. Rise & Prog. 334. - Of this class it is said: “Thus degrees of servility are possible. A class may stand, as it were, halfway between the class of slaves and the class of free men. The Kentish law of the seventh century as it appears in the dooms of ^thelbert, like many of its continental sisters, knows a class of men who perhaps are not free men and yet are not slaves; it knows the laet as well as the theow. Prom what race the Kentish laet has sprung, and how, when it comes to details, the law will treat him— these are obscure questions, and the latter of them cannot be Answered unless we apply to him what is written about the laeti, Utij and lidi of the continent. He is thus far a person that he has a small wergild, but possibly he ie bound to the soil. Only in ^Ethelbert’s dooms do we read of him. From later days, until Domesday Book breaks the silence, we do not.obtain any definite evidence of the existence of any class of men who are not slaves but none the less are tied to the land." Maitl. Domesd. 27. The laete were afterwards termed by the Normans huiri, tura or coliberti; id, 86. “His services, we are told, vary from place to place; in some districts he works for his lord two days a week and during harvest^time three days a week; he pays gafol in money, barley, sheep, and poultry; also he has ploughing to do besides his week-work; he pays hearth-penny; he and one of his fellows must between them feed a dog. It is usual to provide him with an outfit of two oxen, one cow, six sheep, and seed for seven acres of his yardland, and also to provide him with household stuff; on his death all these chattels go back to his lord. Thus the boor is put before us as a tenant with a house and a yardland or vlrgate, and ent person: his beasts, even the poor fumltttre of his house, his pots and crocks, are provided for him by his lord. Probably it is this that marks him off from the ordinary villanus or 'townsman' and brings him near the serf. In a sense he may be a free man." id. 87. In an earlier work of the same author it is said: “Once and only once, in the earliest of our Anglo- Saxon text (^thelb. 26), we find mention, under the name of laet, of the half-free class of persons called litua and other like names in continental documents. To all appearance there had ceased to be any such class before the time of Alfred: it is therefore needless to discuss their condition or origin." 1 Poll. & Maitl. 18.