The final chapter of Part II considers the evidence for the decline of serfdom on 23 manors distributed across Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Oxfordshire and Suffolk, i.e. the Category B manors described in Chapter Five. This category is mainly comprised of small- and medium-sized manors held by lower-status landlords. These were the most common types of manor in medieval England, but they rarely feature in academic studies, because their archives have seldom survived. The assessment of the decline of villeinage across a sample of such ubiquitous, but under-researched, manorial forms is essential if a balanced and representative picture of the processes of that decline is to be formed.

The individual manors included in this sample have all left a run of court rolls sufficiently informative to take a reliable snapshot of the profile of villeinage, and its management, over at least two decades. In some cases, the court rolls are supplemented with a handful of manorial accounts or rentals. In each case the body of documents is smaller than for each of the individual case studies in chapters Six to Eleven, which means that it is not possible to apply the detailed methodology used there. The information relating to the management of the incidents of villeinage, and to land values and patterns of peasant resistance, is either too fragmentary or limited to warrant separate analysis and presentation for each manor. However, there is still much to be gleaned from the general patterns that emerge from the sample.