The manor was almost entirely self-sufficing; of necessity, for towns were few and distant, and the roads to them bad. Each would have its smith, millwright, thatcher, &c., paid generally in kind for their services. There was little trade with the outside world, except for salt—an invaluable article when meat had to be salted down every autumn for winter use, since there were no roots to keep the cattle on—and iron for some of the implements. Nearly everything was made in the village.

The mediaeval system of tillage was compulsory; even the freeholders could not manage their plots as they wished, because all the soil of the township formed one whole and was managed by the entire village. Even the lord[68] had to conform to the customs of the community. Any other system than this, which must have been galling to the more enterprising, was impossible, for as the various holdings lay in unfenced strips all over the great common fields, individual initiative was out of the question. As may be imagined, the great number of strips all mixed together often led to great confusion, sometimes 2 or 3 acres could not be found at all, and disputes owing to careless measurement were frequent.

The first money payments apparently date from as early as 900,[69] but must then have been very few, and services were the rule in the thirteenth and earlier centuries, though at the beginning of the twelfth we find a great number of rent-paying tenants.[70] In the fourteenth century money began to be more generally available, and the process of commutation grew steadily; a process greatly accelerated by the destruction of large numbers of tenants who paid rent in services by the Black Death of 1348-9, which forced lords of manors to let their lands for money or work them themselves with hired labour. Before that visitation, however, it appears that commutation of labour services for fixed annual payments had made very little progress.[71]

When these services were commuted for money in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were put at 1d. a day in winter, and 2d. a day in summer, and rather more in harvest[72]; and we may put the ordinary agricultural labourers' wages from 1250-1350 all the year round at 2d. a day, and from 1350-1400 at 3d., but few were paid in this way. Many were paid by the year, with allowances of food besides and sometimes clothes, and many were in harvest at all events paid by the piece. At Crondal in Hampshire in 1248 a carter by the year received 4s., a herdsman 2s. 3d., a day a or dairymaid, 2s.[73] The change to money payments was beneficial to both parties; it stopped many of the dishonest practices of the lord's bailiff, apart from the fact that farming by officials was an expensive method. It meant, too, that religious festivals and bad weather would no longer diminish the lord's profits; on the other hand, the tenant could devote himself entirely to his holding free from annoying labour services.[74]

The state of agriculture at the time of Domesday was apparently very low, judging by the small returns of manors,[75] but by the time of Edward I it had made considerable progress. During the reign of Henry III England had grown in opulence, and continued to do so under his great son, who found time from his manifold tasks to encourage agriculture and horticulture. Fruit and forest trees, shrubs and flowers, were introduced from the continent, and we are told that the hop flourished in the royal gardens.[76] At his death England was prosperous, the people progressing in comfort, the population advancing, the agricultural labourers were increasing in numbers, the value of the land had risen and was rising. Then came a reaction from which England did not recover for two centuries, and Harrison, who wrote his description of England at the end of the sixteenth century, says that many of the improvements began to be neglected in process of time, so that from Henry IV till the latter end of Henry VII there was little or no use for them in England, 'but they remained unknown.'

The Hundred Rolls of Edward I, which embody the results of the labours of a commission appointed by that monarch to inquire into encroachments on royal lands and royal jurisdiction, show clearly that there had been since the Domesday Survey a very great growth in the rural population, a sure sign that agriculture was flourishing; and on some estates the number of free tenants had increased largely, but the burdens of the villeins were not less onerous than they had been.

Among other benefits that the landed interest gained at this time was the more easy transference of land provided, inter alia, by the statute of Quia Emptores, which led to many tenants selling their lands, provided the rights of the lord were preserved, and to a great increase consequently of free tenants, many of whom had quite small holdings.[77] The amalgamation of holdings by the more industrious and skilful has, as we should expect, been a well-marked tendency all through the history of English agriculture, and began early. For instance, according to the records of S. Paul's Cathedral, John Durant, whose ancestor in 1222 held only one virgate in 'Cadendon', had in 1279 eight or ten at least. At 'Belchamp', Martin de Suthmere, one of the free tenants, held 245 acres by himself and his tenants, twenty-two in number, who rendered service to him; one of them being de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who held 17 acres under Martin. To such a position had the abler of the small holders of a century or so before already pushed their way, in spite of the heavy hand of feudalism, which did much to hinder individual initiative. At this period and until Tudor times England, as regards the cultivated land, was essentially a corn-growing country; the greater part of the lord's demesne was arable, and the tillage fields of the villeins largely exceeded their meadows. For instance, in 1285 the cultivated lands at Hawsted in Suffolk were nearly all under the plough; in seven holdings there were 968 acres of arable and only 40 of meadow, a proportion of 24 to 1. No doubt there was plenty of common pasture, but we cannot call this cultivated land. The seven holdings were as follows:[78]

These were the larger tenants; among the smaller several had no meadow at all.

We must not forget that the grazing of the tillage fields after the crops were off was of great assistance to those who kept stock; for there was plenty to eat on the stubbles. The wheat was cut high, the straw often apparently left standing 18 inches or 2 feet high; weeds of all kinds abounded, for the land was badly cleaned; and often only the upper part of the high ridges, into which the land was thrown for purposes of drainage, was cultivated, the lower parts being left to natural grass.[79]

The greatest authority for the farming of the thirteenth century is Walter of Henley, who wrote, about the middle of it, a work which held the field as an agricultural textbook until Fitzherbert wrote in the sixteenth century, and much of his advice is valuable to-day. There was from his time until the days of William Marshall, who wrote five centuries afterwards, a controversy as to the respective merits of horses and oxen as draught animals, and it is a curious fact that the later writer agreed with the earlier as to the superiority of oxen. 'A plough of oxen', says Walter, 'will go as far in the year as a plough of horses, because the malice of the ploughman will not allow the plough of horses to go beyond their pace, no more than the plough of oxen. Further, in very hard ground where the plough of horses will stop, the plough of oxen will pass. And the horse costs more than the ox, for he is obliged to have the sixth part of a bushel of oats every night, worth a halfpenny at least, and twelve pennyworth of grass in the summer. Besides, each week he costs more or less a penny a week in shoeing, if he must be shod on all four feet;' which was not the universal custom.

'But the ox has only to have 3¹/₂ sheaves of oats per week (ten sheaves yielding a bushel of oats), worth a penny, and the same amount of grass as the horse.[80] And when the horse is old and worn out there is nothing but his skin, but when the ox is old with ten pennyworth of grass he shall be fit for the larder.'[81]

The labourer of the Middle Ages could not complain of lack of holidays; Walter of Henley tells us that, besides Sundays, eight weeks were lost in the year from holidays and other hindrances.[82]

He advises the sowing of spring seed on clay or on stony land early, because if it is dry in March the ground will harden too much and the stony ground become dry and open; therefore fore sow early that corn may be nourished by winter moisture. Chalky and sandy ground need not be sown early. At sowing, moreover, do not plough large furrows, but little and well laid together, that the seed may fall evenly. Let your land be cleaned and weeded after S. John's Day, June 24, for before that is not a good time; and if thistles are cut before S. John's Day 'for every one will come two or three.' Do not sell your straw; if you take away the least you lose much; words which many a landlord to-day doubtless wishes were fixed in the minds of his tenants.

The return was wretched: 'at three times your sowing you ought to have 6 bushels, worth 3s.' The total cost is thus 3s. 1¹/₂d.; and without debiting anything for rent and manure, the loss would be 1¹/₂d. an acre.

The anonymous Treatise on Husbandry of about the same date says, however, that 'wheat ought to yield to the fifth grain, oats to the fourth, barley to the eighth, beans and peas to the sixth.'[84] In the years 1243-8 the average yield of wheat at Combe, Oxfordshire, was 5 bushels per acre, of barley a little over 5, oats 7. In the Manor of Forncett, in various years from 1290 to 1306, wheat yielded about 10 bushels, oats from 12 to 16, barley 16, and peas from 4 to 12 bushels per acre.[85]

As for the dairy, 2 cows, says Walter, should yield a wey, (2 cwt) of cheese annually, and half a gallon of butter a week, 'if sorted out and fed in pasture of salt marsh;' but 'in pasture of wood or in meadows after mowing, or in stubble, it should take 3 cows for the same.' Twenty ewes, which it was then the custom to milk, fed in pasture of salt marsh, ought to yield the same as the 2 cows. A gallon of butter was worth 6d., and weighed 7 lb. And the anonymous treatise says each cow ought to yield from the day after Michaelmas until the first kalends of May, twenty-eight weeks, 10d. more or less; and from the first kalends of May till Michaelmas, twenty-four weeks, the milk of a cow should be worth 3s. 6d.; and she should give also 6 stones (14 lb. per stone) of cheese, and 'as much butter as shall make as much cheese.'[86] It was a common practice all through the Middle Ages, and survives in localities to-day, to let out the cows by the year, at from 3s. to 6s. 8d. a head, often to the daya or dairymaid, the owner supplying the food, and the lessee agreeing to restore them in equal number and condition at the end of the term.[87] The anonymous treatise tells us that 'if you wish to farm out your stock you can take 4s. 6d. clear for each cow and the tithe, and for a sheep 6d. and the tithe, and a sow should bring you 6s. 6d. a year and acquit the tithe, and each hen 9d. and the tithe; and Walter says, 'When I was bailiff the dairymaids had the geese and hens to farm, the geese at 12d. and the hens at 3d.'

Among other information conveyed by these two treatises we learn that the poor servants or labourers were accustomed to be fed on the diseased sheep, salted and dried; but Walter adds, 'I do not wish you to do this.' Nor can we point the finger of scorn at this: for in the disastrous season of 1879 numbers of rotten sheep were sold to the butcher and consumed by the unsuspecting public without even being salted and dried.

He further tells us that 'you can well have 3 acres weeded for 1d., and an acre of meadow mown for 4d., and an acre of waste meadow for 3¹/₂d. And know that 5 men can well reap and bind 2 acres a day of each kind of corn, and where each takes 2d. a day then you must give 5d. an acre.'[88] 'One ought to thresh a quarter of wheat or rye for 2d. and a quarter of oats for 1d. A sow ought to farrow twice a year, having each time at least 7 pigs; and each goose 5 goslings a year and each hen 115 eggs and 7 chicks, 3 of which ought to be made capons; and for 5 geese you must have one gander, and for 5 hens one cock.' The laying qualities of the hen, in spite of the talk of the 200-egg bird, were evidently as good then as to-day. In those days of self-supporting farms it was the custom to put together the farm implements at home, and the farmer is advised that it will be well if he can have carters and ploughmen who should know how to work all their own wood, though it should be necessary to pay them more.[89] The village smith, however, seems, as we should expect, to have done most of the iron work that was needed.[90]

These extracts have given the reader some insight into thirteenth-century prices, prices which in the case of grain altered very little for nearly 300 years: for instance, the average price of wheat from 1259 to 1400 was 5s. 10³/₄d. a quarter, and from 1401 to 1540 5s. 11³/₄d.; of barley, 4s. 3³/₄d. from 1259 to 1400, 3s. 8³/₄d. from 1401 to 1540; of oats, 2s. 5³/₄d. and 2s. 2¹/₄d. in the same two periods respectively; of rye, 4s. 5d. and 4s. 7³/₄d.; and of beans, 4s. 3¹/₂d. and 3s. 9¹/₄d.[91] Wheat fluctuated considerably, being as we have seen 2s. a quarter at Hawsted in 1243 and in 1290 14s. 10d., a most exceptional price. Oxen, which were chiefly valued as working animals, were about 13s. apiece[92]; cows, 9s. 5d. Farm horses were of two varieties: the 'affer' or 'stott', a rough small animal, generally worth about 13s. 5d., and the cart-horse, probably the ancestor of our shire horses, whose average price was 19s. 4d. A good saddle-horse fetched as much as £5. Sheep were from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 5d. each. In Hampshire in 1248 shoeing ten farm horses for the plough for a year cost 5s.; making a gate cost 12d. As Walter of Henley said, it cost a penny a week to shoe a horse on all four feet; these horses must have been very roughly shod.[93] It is evident, from what Walter of Henley says, that horses were not always shod on all four feet, and their shoes were generally very light. The roads were mere tracks without any metalling, so that there was little necessity for heavy shoes; and as Professor Thorold Rogers suggests, it is quite possible that the hoofs of our horses have become weaker by reason of the continual paring and protection which modern shoeing involves.[94] They weighed usually less than half a pound, and cost about 4s. a hundred.

The most striking fact about agricultural prices at this date is the low price of land compared with that of its products. The annual rent of land was from 4d. to 6d.[95] an acre, and it was worth about ten years' purchase. Consequently, a quarter of wheat was often worth more than an acre of land, a good ox three times as much, a good cart-horse four times, while a good war-horse was worth the fee-simple of a small farm. A greater breadth of wheat was sown than of any other crop; but it seems that none was ever stored except in the castles and monasteries, for in spite of successive abundant harvests a bad season would send the price up at once. Barley was, as now, chiefly used for making beer, which was also made from oats and wheat, of course without hops, which were not used till the fifteenth century; and sometimes it was made of oats, barley, and wheat, a concoction worth ³/₄d. a gallon in 1283.[96] Cider was also drunk, and was sold at Exminster in Devonshire in 1286 at ¹/₂d. a gallon, and apples fetched 2d. a bushel. Thorold Rogers[97] says that wheat was the chief food of the English labourer from the earliest times until perhaps the seventeenth century, when the enormous prices were prohibitive; but this statement must be taken with reserve, as must that of Mr. Prothero[98] that rye was the bread-stuff of the peasantry. Where the labourer's food is mentioned as part of his wages, wheat, barley, and rye all occur, wheat and rye being often mixed together as 'mixtil'; and it is most probable that in one district wheat, in another one of the other cereals, formed his chief bread-stuff, according to the crop best adapted to the soil of the locality.

Walter of Henley mentions wheat as if it was the chief crop, for he selects it as best illustrating the cost of corn-growing[99]; and from the enormous number of entries enumerated by Thorold Rogers in his mediaeval statistics it was apparently more grown than other cereals. The chief meat of the lower classes then, as to-day, was bacon from the innumerable herds of swine who roamed in the woods and wastes, but in bad years, when food was scarce, the poor ate nuts, acorns, fern roots, bark, and vetches.[100]

As the cattle of the Middle Ages were like the mountain cattle of to-day, so were the sheep like many of the sheep to be seen in the Welsh mountains; yet, unlike the cattle, an attempt seems to have been made, judging by the high price of rams, to improve the breed; but they were probably poor animals worth from 1s. to 1s. 6d. each, with a small fleece weighing about a pound and a half, worth 3d. a lb. or a little more.

CHAPTER III

English wool, which came to be called 'the flower and strength and revenue and blood of England', was famous in very early times, and was exported long before the Conquest. In Edgar's reign the price was fixed by law, to prevent it getting into the hands of the foreigner too cheaply; a wey, or weigh, was to be sold for 120d.[101] Patriotic Englishmen asserted it was the best in the world, and Henry II, Edward III, and Edward IV are said to have improved the Spanish breed by presents of English sheep. Spanish wool, however, was considered the best from the earliest times until the Peninsular War, when the Saxon and Silesian wools deposed it from its pride of place. Smith, in his Memoirs of Wool,[102] is of the opinion that England 'borrowed some parts of its breed from thence, as it certainly did the whole from one place or another.' Spanish wool, too, was imported into England at an early date, the manufacture of it being carried on at Andover in 1262.[103] Yet until the fourteenth century it was not produced in sufficient quantities to compete seriously with English wool in the markets of the Continent; and it appears to have been the long wools, such as those of the modern Leicester and Lincoln, from which England chiefly derived its fame as a wool-producing country.

Our early exports went to Flanders, where weaving had been introduced a century before the Conquest, and, in spite of the growth of the weaving industry in England, to that country the bulk of it continued to go, all through the Middle Ages, though in the thirteenth century a determined effort was made to divert a larger share of English wool to Italy.[104] During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the export of wool was frequently forbidden,[105] sometimes for political objects, but also to gain the manufacture of cloth for England by keeping our wool from the foreigner; but these measures did not stop the export, they only hampered it and encouraged much smuggling. It commanded what seems to us an astonishing price, for 3d. a lb. in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is probably equal to nearly 4s. in our money. Its value, and the ease with which it could be packed and carried, made it an object of great importance to the farmer. In 1337[106] we have a schedule of the price of wool in the various counties of England, for in that year 30,000 sacks of the best wool was ordered to be bought in various districts by merchants for Edward III, to provide the sinews of war against France. The price for the best wool was to be fixed by the king, his council, and the merchants; the 'gross' wool being bought by agreement between buyer and seller. Of the former the highest price fixed was for the wool of Hereford, then and for long afterwards famous for its excellent quality, 12 marks the sack of 364 lb.; and the lowest for that of the northern counties, 5 marks the sack.

Somewhat more than a century afterwards we have another similar list of wool prices, when in 1454 the Commons petitioned the king that 'as the wools growing within this realm have hitherto been the great commodity, enriching, and welfare of this land, and how of late the price is greatly decayed so that the Commons were not able to pay their rents to their lords', the king would fix certain prices under which wools should not be bought. The highest price fixed was for the wool of 'Hereford, in Leominster', £13 a sack; the lowest for that of Suffolk, £2 12s.[107]; the average being about £4 10s.

The manorial accounts of the Knights' Hospitallers, who then held land all over England, afford valuable information as to agriculture in 1338.[108] From these we gather that the rent of arable land varied from 2d. to 2s. an acre; but the latter sum was very exceptional, and there are only two instances of it given, in Lincolnshire and Kent. Most of the tillage rented for less than 1s. an acre, more than half being at 6d. or under, and the average about 6d. On the other hand, meadow land is seldom of less value than 2s. an acre, and in Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and Norfolk rose to 3s. This is one of the numerous proofs of the great value of meadow land at a time when hay was almost the sole winter food of stock; in some places it was eight or ten times as valuable as the arable.[109] The pasture on the Hospitallers' estates was divided into several and common pasture, the former often reaching 1s. an acre and sometimes 2s., the latter rarely exceeding 4d. The most usual way, however, of stating the value of pasture was by reckoning the annual cost of feeding stock per head, cows being valued at 2s., oxen at 1s., a horse at a little less than an ox, a sheep at 1d. The reign of Edward III was a great era for wool-growers, and the Hospitallers at Hampton in Middlesex had a flock of 2,000 sheep whose annual produce was six sacks of wool of 364 lb. each, worth £4 a sack, which would make the fleeces weigh a little more than 1 lb. each. The profit of cows on one of their manors was reckoned at 2s. per head, on another at 3s.; and the profit of 100 sheep at 20s.[110] The wages paid to the labourers for day work were 2d. a day, and we must remember that when he was paid by the day his wages were rightly higher than when regularly employed, for day labour was irregular and casual. The tenants about the same date obtained the following prices[111] for some of their stock:—