ABSTRACT
The chronology of labour services in the Middle Ages has been agitating agrarian historians for nearly a hundred years. Economic historians have been inclined to assume a gradual dissolution of the manorial structure, which extended over two or three centuries and was due to a gradually expanding money economy. The dimensions of both demesne and villein land fluctuated throughout the Middle Ages, but on the whole the fluctuations of the area under demesne cultivation were far more marked than those of the area in villeinage. Thus the typical sequence is from labour services to partial or complete commutation, and then back again to partial or complete return of labour services. To say that this sequence was typical is also to insist on the fact that it was not universal. The rise of money economy has not always been the great emancipating force which nineteenth-century historians believed it to have been.
