We introduce FreeLence, a novel and simple single-rate compression coder for triangle manifold meshes. Our method uses free valences and exploits geometric information for connectivity encoding. Furthermore, we introduce a novel linear prediction scheme for geometry compression of 3D meshes. Together, these approaches yield a significant entropy reduction for mesh encoding with an average of 20-30% over leading single-rate regiongrowing coders, both for connectivity and geometry. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Surface mesh compression, connectivity coding, geometry coding.