'In May, June, and July one may harrow, carry out manure, set up sheep hurdles, shear sheep, do repairs, hedge, cut wood, weed, and make folds. In harvest one may reap; in August, September, and in October one may mow, set woad with a dibble, gather home many crops, thatch them and cover them over, cleanse the folds, prepare cattle sheds and shelters ere too severe a winter come to the farm, and also diligently prepare the soil. In winter one should plough and in severe frosts cleave timber, make an orchard, and do many affairs indoors, thresh, cleave wood, put the cattle in stalls and the swine in pigstyes, and provide a hen roost. In spring one should plough and graft, sow beans, set a vineyard, make ditches, hew wood for a wild deer fence; and soon after that, if the weather permit, set madder, sow flax seed and woad seed, plant a garden and do many things which I cannot fully enumerate that a good steward ought to provide.'[48]
The methods of cultivation were simple. The plough, if we may judge by contemporary illustrations, had in the eleventh century a large wheel and very short handles.[49] In the twelfth century Neckham describes its parts: a beam, handles, tongue, mouldboard, coulter, and share.[50] Breaking up the clods was done by the mattock or beetle, and harrowing was done by hand with what looks like a large rake; the scythes of the haymakers and the sickles of the reapers were very like those that still linger on in some districts to-day.
Here is a list of tools and implements for the homestead: an axe, adze, bill, awl, plane, saw, spokeshave, tie hook, auger, mattock, lever, share, coulter, goad-iron, scythe, sickle, weed-hook, spade, shovel, woad dibble, barrow, besom, beetle, rake, fork, ladder, horse comb, shears, fire tongs, weighing scales, and a long list of spinning implements necessary when farmers made their own clothes. The author wisely remarks that one ought to have coverings for wains, plough gear, harrowing tackle, &c.; and adds another list of instruments and utensils: a caldron, kettle, ladle, pan, crock, firedog, dishes, bowls with handles, tubs, buckets, a churn, cheese vat, baskets, crates, bushels, sieves, seed basket, wire sieve, hair sieve, winnowing fans, troughs, ashwood pails, hives, honey bins, beer barrels, bathing tub, dishes, cups, strainers, candlesticks, salt cellar, spoon case, pepper horn, footstools, chairs, basins, lamp, lantern, leathern bottles, comb, iron bin, fodder rack, meal ark or box, oil flask, oven rake, dung shovel; altogether a very complete list, the compiler of which ends by saying that the reeve ought to neglect nothing that should prove useful, not even a mousetrap, nor even, what is less, a peg for a hasp.
Manors in 1086 were of all sizes, from one virgate to enormous organizations like Taunton or Leominster, containing villages by the score and hundreds of dependent holdings.[51] The ordinary size, however, of the Domesday manor was from four to ten hides of 120 acres each, or say from 500 to 1,200 acres,[52] and the Manor of Segenehou in Bedfordshire may be regarded as typical. Held by Walter brother of Seiher it had as much land as ten ploughs could work, four plough lands belonging to the demesne and six to the villeins, of whom there were twenty-four, with four bordarii and three serfs; thus the villeins had 30 acres each, the normal holding. The manorial system was in fact a combination of large farming by the lords, and small farming by the tenants. Nor must we compare it to an ordinary estate; for it was a dominion within which the lord had authority over subjects of various ranks; he was not only a proprietor but a prince with courts of his own, the arbiter of his tenants' rights as well as owner of the land.
One of the most striking features of the Domesday survey is the large quantity of arable land and the small quantity of meadow, which usually was the only land whence they obtained their hay, for the common pasture cannot often have been mown.[53] Indeed, it is difficult to understand how they fed their stock in hard winters.
According to the returns, in many counties more acres were ploughed in 1086 than to-day; in some twice as much. In Somerset in 1086 there were 577,000 acres of arable; in 1907, 178,967. In Gloucestershire, in 1086, 589,000 acres; in 1907, 238,456.[54] These are extreme instances; but the preponderance of arable is startling, even if we allow for the recent conversion of arable to pasture on account of the low price of corn. Between the eleventh century and the sixteenth, the laying down of land to grass must have proceeded on a gigantic scale, for Harrison tells us that in his day England was mainly a grazing country. No wonder Harrison's contemporaries complained of the decay of tillage.
Mediaeval prices and statistics are, it is well known, to be taken with great caution; but we may assume that the normal annual value of land under cultivation in 1086 was about 2d. an acre.[55] Land indeed, apart from the stock upon it, was worth very little: in the tenth and eleventh centuries it appears that the hide, normally of 120 acres, was only worth £5 to buy, apparently with the stock upon it. In the time of Athelstan a horse was worth 120d., an ox 30d., a cow 20d., a sheep 5d., a hog 8d., a slave £1—so that a slave was worth 8 oxen[56]; and these prices do not seem to have advanced by the Domesday period.
According to the Pipe Roll of 1156, wheat was 1s. 6d. a quarter; but prices then depended entirely on seasons, and we do not know whether that was good or bad. However, many years later, in 1243 it was only 2s. a quarter at Hawsted.[57] In dear years, nearly always the result of wet seasons, it went up enormously; in 1024 the English Chronicle tells us the acre seed of wheat, that is about 2 bushels, sold for 4s.,[58] 3 bushels of barley for 6s. and 4 bushels of oats for 4s. In 1190 Holinshed says that, owing to a great dearth, the quarter of wheat was 18s. 8d. The average price, however, in the twelfth century was probably about 4s. a quarter.
In 1194 Roger of Hoveden[59] says an ox, a cow, and a plough horse were the same price, 4s.; a sheep with fine wool 10d., with coarse wool 6d.; a sow 12d., a boar 12d.
Sometimes prices were kept down by imports; 1258 was a bad and dear year, 'most part of the corn rotted on the ground,' and was not all got in till after November 1, so excessive was the wet and rain. And upon the dearth a sore death and mortality followed for want of necessary food to sustain the pining bodies of the poor people, who died so thick that there were great pits made in churchyards to lay the dead bodies in. And corn had been dearer if great store had not come out of Almaine, but there came fifty great ships with wheat and barley, meal and bread out of Dutchland, which greatly relieved the poor.[60]
Were the manors as isolated as some writers have asserted? Generally speaking, we may say the means of communication were bad and many an estate cut off almost completely from the outside world, yet the manors must often have been connected by waterways, and sometimes by good roads, with other manors and with the towns. Rivers in the Middle Ages were far more used as means of communication than to-day, and many streams now silted up and shallow were navigable according to Domesday. Water carriage was, as always, much cheaper than land carriage, and corn could be carried from Henley to London for 2d. or 3d. a quarter. The roads left by the Romans, owing to the excellence of their construction, remained in use during the Middle Ages, and must have been a great advantage to those living near them; but the other roads can have been little better than mud tracks, except in the immediate vicinity of the few large towns. The keeping of the roads in repair, one part of the trinoda necessitas was imposed on all lands; but the results often seem to have been very indifferent, and they appear largely to have depended on chance, or the goodwill or devotion of neighbouring landowners.[61] Perhaps they would, except in the case of the Roman roads, have been impassable but for the fact that the great lords and abbots were constantly visiting their scattered estates, and therefore were interested in keeping such roads in order. But in those days people were contented with very little, and though Edward I enforced the general improvement of roads in 1285, in the fourteenth century they were decaying. Parliament adjourned thrice between 1331 and 1380 because the state of the roads kept many of the members away. In 1353 the high road running from Temple Bar, then the western limit of London, to Westminster was 'so full of holes and bogs' that the traffic was dangerous for men and carriages; and a little later all the roads near London were so bad, that carriers 'are oftentimes In peril of losing what they bring.' What must remote country roads have been like when these important highways were in this state? If members of Parliament, rich men riding good horses, could not get to London, how did the clumsy wagons and carts of the day fare? The Church might well pity the traveller, and class him with the sick 'and the captive among the unfortunates whom she recommended to the daily prayers of pious souls.'[62] Rivers were mainly crossed by ford or ferry, though there were some excellent bridges, a few of which still remain, maintained by the trinoda necessitas, by gilds, by 'indulgences' promised to benefactors, and by toll, the right to levy which, called pontage, was often spent otherwise than on the repair of the bridge.
A few of the old open fields still exist, and the best surviving example of an open-field parish is that of Laxton in Nottinghamshire.[63] Nearly half the area of the parish remains in the form of two great arable fields, and two smaller ones which are treated as two parts of the third field. The different holdings, freehold and leasehold, consist in part of strips of land scattered all over these fields. The three-course system is rigidly adhered to, first year wheat, second year spring corn, third year fallow.
In a corner of the parish is Laxton Heath, a common covered with coarse grass where the sheep are grazed according to a 'stint' recently determined upon, for when it was unstinted the common was overstocked. The commonable meadows which the parish once had were enclosed at a date beyond anyone's recollection, though the neighbouring parish of Eakring still has some. There are other enclosures in the remote parts of the parish which apparently represent the old woodland. The inconvenience of the common-field system was extreme. South Luffenham in Rutland, not enclosed till 1879, consisted of 1,074 acres divided among twenty-two owners into 1,238 pieces. In some places furrows served to divide the lands instead of turf balks, which were of course always being altered. Another difficulty arose from there being no check to high winds, which would sometimes sweep the whole of the crops belonging to different farmers in an inextricable heap against the nearest obstruction.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 18; Medley, Constitutional History, p. 15.
[2] Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, p. 257.
[3] Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 341 et seq.
[4] Stubbs, Constitutional History, §36.
[5] Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 282, says, 'As a rule it was not subject to redivision.'
[6] Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i. 42.
[7] Maitland, op. cit. p. 368.
[8] Anonymous Treatise on Husbandry, Royal Historical Society, pp. xli. and 68. About 1230, Smyth, in his Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 113, says, 'At this time lay all lands in common fields, in one acre or ridge, one man's intermixt with another.'
[9] See below.
[10] Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i. 74. Maitland thinks the two-field system was as common as the three-field, both in early and mediaeval times. Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 366.
[11] Nasse, Agricultural Community of the Middle Ages, p. 5. To-day harvest generally commences about August 1, so that this, like the growth of grapes in mediaeval times, seems to show our climate has grown colder.
[12] Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 264.
[13] Maitland, op. cit. p. 17.
[14] Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 265.
[15] Maitland, op. cit. pp. 318 et seq.
[16] Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 345.
[17] Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 339.
[18] Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 110
[19] Vinogradoff, op. cit. p. 395.
[20] Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, pp. 225 et seq.
[21] Maitland, op. cit. p. 23.
[22] Vinogradoff, op. cit. p. 433.
[23] In Domesday they number 108,500. Maitland, Domesday Book.
[24] Maitland, op. cit..
[25] Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 300.
[26] Domesday of S. Paul, p. lxviii.
[27] Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 56.
[28] Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i. 166. In some manors free tenants could sell their lands without the lord's licence, in others not.
[29] Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, p. 279.
[30] Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, p. 285.
[31] Ibid. p. 246; and English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 448. At the end of the eighteenth century, in default of sons, lands in some manors in Shropshire descended to the youngest daughter.—Bishton, General View of the Agriculture of Shropshire, p. 178.
[32] Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 456.
[33] Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 40.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 35.
[36] Fleta, c. 73.
[37] Domesday of S. Paul, xxxv. Fleta, 'an anonymous work drawn up in the thirteenth century to assist landowners in managing their estates' says, the reeve 'shall rise early, and have the ploughs yoked, and then walk in the fields to see that all is right and note if the men be idle, or if they knock off work before the day's task is fully done.'
[38] Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, p. 321.
[39] Ibid. p. 324.
[40] Manor of Manydown, Hampshire Record Society, p. 17. Breaking the assize of beer meant selling it without a licence, or of bad quality. The village pound was the consequence of the perpetual straying of animals, and later on the vicar sometimes kept it. See ibid. p. 104.
[41] Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i. 106.
[42] Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, p. 264.
[43] Andrews, Old English Manor, p. 111.
[44] Domesday of S. Paul, p. xxxvii.
[45] Thorold Rogers, Agriculture and Prices, i. 17: Cunningham, Industry and Commerce, i. 55: Neckham, De Natura Rerum, Rolls Series, ch. clxvi. Rogers says there were no plums, but Neckham mentions them. See also Denton, England in the Fifteenth Century, p. 64. Matthew Paris says the severe winter in 1257 destroyed cherries, plums and figs. Chron. Maj., Rolls Series, v. 660.
[46] Woods were used as much for pasture as for cutting timber and underwood. Not only did the pigs feed there on the mast of oak, beech, and chestnut, but goats and horned cattle grazed on the grassy portions.
[47] The illustrations of contemporary MSS. usually show teams in the plough of 2 or 4 oxen, and 4 was probably the team generally used, according to Vinogradoff, op. cit. p. 253. It must, of course, have varied according to the soil. Birch, in his Domesday, p. 219, says he has never found a team of 8 in contemporary illustrations. To-day oxen can be still seen ploughing in teams of two only. However, about a hundred years ago, when oxen were in common use, we find teams of 8, as in Shropshire, for a single-furrow plough, 'so as to work them easily.' Six hours a day was the usual day's work, and when more was required one team was worked in the morning, another in the afternoon.—Victoria County History: Shropshire, Agriculture. Walter of Henley says the team stopped work at three.
[48] Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i. 570.
[49] See the excellent reproductions of the Calendar of the Cott. MSS. in Green's Short History of the English People, illustrated edition, i. 155.
[50] De Natura Rerum, Rolls Series, p, 280.
[51] Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 307.
[52] Ibid. p. 312. Perhaps one of the most interesting features of the smaller manors is that they were constantly being swallowed up by the larger.
[53] As some of the common pasture was held in severalty, this may perhaps have been mown in scarce years. Walter of Henley mentions mowing the waste, see below, p. 34.
[54] Maitland, Domesday Book, 436; Board of Agriculture Returns, 1907.
[55] Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 310; Birch, Domesday, p. 183.
[56] Maitland, Domesday Book. 44; Cunningham, Growth of Industry and Commerce, i. 171; Domesday of S. Paul, pp. xliii. and xci.
[57] Cullum, History of Hawsted, p. 181.
[58] Rolls Series, ii. 220. According to this, the price of a bushel of wheat reckoned in modern money was £3 in that year
[59] Ibid. iii. 220.
[60] Holinshed, who is supported by William of Malmesbury in the assertion that in time of scarcity England imported corn. Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj., v. 673.
[61] Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life, p. 79.
[62] Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life, p. 89.
[63] Gilbert Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, p. 8.
CHAPTER II
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.—THE MANOR AT ITS ZENITH, WITH SEEDS OF DECAY ALREADY VISIBLE.—WALTER OF HENLEY
In the thirteenth century the manorial system may be said to have been in its zenith; the description therefore of Cuxham Manor in Oxfordshire at that date is of special interest. According to Professor Thorold Rogers[64] there were two principal tenants, each holding the fourth part of a military fee. The prior of Holy Trinity, Wallingford, held a messuage, a mill, and 6 acres of land in free alms; i.e. under no obligation or liability other than offering prayers on behalf of the donor. A free tenant had a messuage and 33/4 acres, the rent of which was 3s. a year. He also had another messuage and nine acres, for which he paid the annual rent of 1 lb. of pepper, worth about 1s. 3d. The rector of the parish had part of a furrow, i.e. one of the divisions of the common arable field, and paid 2d. a year for it. Another tenant held a cottage in the demesne under the obligation of keeping two lamps lighted in the church. Another person was tenant-at-will of the parish mill, at a rent of 40s. a year. The rest of the tenants were villeins or cottagers, thirteen of the former and eight of the latter. Each of the villeins had a messuage and half a virgate, 12 to 15 acres of arable land at least, for which his rent was chiefly corn and labour, though there were two money payments, a halfpenny on November 12 and a penny whenever he brewed. He had to pay a quarter of seed wheat at Michaelmas, a peck of wheat, 4 bushels of oats, and 3 hens on November 12, and at Christmas a cock, two hens, and two pennyworth of bread. His labour services were to plough, sow, and till half an acre of the lord's land, and give his work as directed by the bailiff except on Sundays and feast days. In harvest time he was to reap three days with one man at his own cost.
Some of these tenants held, besides their half virgates, other plots of land for which each had to make hay for one day for the lord, with a comrade, and received a halfpenny; also to mow, with another, three days in harvest time, at their own charges, and another three days when the lord fed them. After harvest six pennyworth of beer was divided among them, each received a loaf of bread, and every evening when work was over each reaper might carry away the largest sheaf of corn he could lift on his sickle.
The cottagers paid from 1s. 2d. to 2s. a year for their holdings, and were obliged to work a day or two in the hay-making, receiving therefor a halfpenny. They also had to do from one to four days' harvest work, during which they were fed at the lord's table. For the rest of the year they were free labourers, tending cattle or sheep on the common for wages or working at the various crafts usual in the village. This manor was a small one, and contained in all twenty-four households, numbering from sixty to seventy inhabitants.[65]
On most manors, as in Forncett,[66] which contained about 2,700 acres, from the preponderance of arable, the chief source of income to the lord was from the grain crops; other sources may be seen from the following table of the lord's receipts and expenses in 1272-3: