A Short History of English Agriculture | Page 7

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 shared with his live stock, as in parts of Ireland to-day. Indeed, in some parts of Yorkshire at the beginning of the nineteenth century this primitive simplicity still prevailed, live stock were still kept in the house, the floors were of clay, and the family slept in boxes round the solitary room. Examples of farmhouses clustered together at some distance from their respective holdings still survive, though generally built of stone. Next the village, though not always, for they were sometimes at a distance by the banks of a stream, were the meadows, and right round stretched the three open arable fields, beyond which was the common pasture and wood,[46] and, encircling all, heath, forest, and swamp, often cutting off the manor from the rest of the world.
The basis of the whole scheme of measurement in Domesday was the hide, usually of 120 acres,