A Short History of English Agriculture | Page 7

the common fields or wandered in the waste; also
wardens of the woods and fences, often paid by a share in the profits
connected with their charge; for instance, the swineherd of Glastonbury
Abbey received a sucking-pig a year, the interior parts of the best pig,
and the tails of all the others slaughtered.[38] On the great estates these
offices tended to become hereditary, and many families did treat them
as hereditary property, and were a great nuisance in consequence to
their lords. At Glastonbury we find the chief shepherd so important a
person that he was party to an agreement concerning a considerable
quantity of land.[39] There were also on some manors 'cadaveratores',
whose duty was to look into and report on the losses of cattle and sheep

from murrain, a melancholy tale of the unhealthy conditions of
agriculture.
The supervision of the tenants was often incessant and minute.
According to the Court Rolls of the Manor of Manydown in Hampshire,
tenants were brought to book for all kinds of transgressions. The fines
are so numerous that it almost appears that every person on the estate
was amerced from time to time. In 1365 seven tenants were convicted
of having pigs in their lord's crops, one let his horse run in the growing
corn, two had cattle among the peas, four had cattle on the lord's
pasture, three had made default in rent or service, four were convicted
of assault, nine broke the assize of beer, two had failed to repair their
houses or buildings. In all thirty-four were in trouble out of a
population of some sixty families. The account is eloquent of the
irritating restrictions of the manor, and of the inconveniences of
common farming.[40]
It is impossible to compare the receipts of the lord of the manor at this
period with modern rents, or the position of the villein with the
agricultural labourer; it may be said that the lord received a labour rent
for the villein's holding, or that the villein received his holding as
wages for the services done for the lord,[41] and part of the return due
to the lord was for the use of the oxen with which he had stocked the
villein's holding.
Though in 1066 there were many free villages, yet by the time of
Domesday they were fast disappearing and there were manors
everywhere, usually coinciding with the village which we may picture
to ourselves as self-sufficing estates, often isolated by stretches of
dense woodland and moor from one another, and making each veritably
a little world in itself. At the same time it is evident from the extent of
arable land described in Domesday that many manors were not greatly
isolated, and pasture ground was often common to two or more
villages.[42]
If we picture to ourselves the typical manor, we shall see a large part of
the lord's demesne forming a compact area within which stood his
house; this being in addition to the lord's strips in the open fields

intermixed with those of his tenants. The mansion house was usually a
very simple affair, built of wood and consisting chiefly of a hall; which
even as late as the seventeenth century in some cases served as kitchen,
dining room, parlour, and sleeping room for the men; and one or two
other rooms.[43] It is probable that in early times the thegns possessed
in most cases only one manor apiece,[44] so that the manor house was
then nearly always inhabited by the lord, but after the Conquest, when
manors were bestowed by scores and even hundreds by William on his
successful soldiers, many of them can only have acted as the temporary
lodging of the lord when he came to collect his rent, or as the house of
the bailiff. According to the Gerefa, written about 1000--and there was
very little alteration for a long time afterwards--the mansion was
adjacent to a court or yard which the quadrangular homestead
surrounded with its barns, horse and cattle stalls, sheep pens and
fowlhouse. Within this court were ovens, kilns, salt-house, and
malt-house, and perhaps the hayricks and wood piles. Outside and
surrounding the homestead were the enclosed arable and grass fields of
the portion of the demesne which may be called the home farm, a
kitchen garden, and probably a vineyard, then common in England. The
garden of the manor house would not have a large variety of vegetables;
some onions, leeks, mustard, peas, perhaps cabbage; and apples, pears,
cherries, probably damsons, plums,[45] strawberries, peaches, quinces,
and mulberries. Not far off was the village or town of the tenants, the
houses all clustering close together, each house standing in a toft or
yard with some buildings, and built of wood, turf, clay, or wattles, with
only one room which the tenant