Our Legal Heritage | Page 5

were the cattle. Sheep were kept primarily for their wool. Flocks and herds were taken to pastures. The male cattle, with wood yokes, pulled ploughs in the fields of barley and wheat. The female goat and cow provided milk, butter, and cheese. The chickens provided eggs. The hoe, spade, and grinding stone were used. Cloth was woven for clothes. Pottery was made from clay and used for food preparation and consumption. During the period of "lent" [from the word "lencten", which means spring], it was forbidden to eat any meat or fish. This was the season in which many animals were born and grew a lot. The people also made boats.
Circles of big stones like Stonehenge were built so that the sun's position with respect to the stones would indicate the day of longest sunlight and the day of shortest sunlight. Between these days there was an optimum time to harvest the crops before fall, when plants dried up and leaves fell from the trees. The winter solstice, when the days began to get longer was cause for celebration. In the next season, there was an optimum time to plant seeds so they could spring up from the ground as new growth. So farming gave rise to the concept of a year. Certain changes of the year were celebrated, such as Easter; the twelve days of Yuletide when candles were lit and houses decorated with evergreen; Plough Monday for resumption of work after Yuletide; May Day when greenery was gathered from the woods and people danced around a May pole; Whitsun when Morris dancers leapt through their villages with bells, hobby-horses, and waving scarves; Lammas when the first bread was celebrated; and Harvest Home when the effigy of a goddess was carried with reapers singing and piping behind.
There were settlements on high ground and near rivers. Each settlement had a meadow, for the mowing of hay, and a mill, with wooden huts, covered with branches or thatch, of families clustered nearby. Grain was stored in pits in the earth. Each hut had a garden for fruit and vegetables. A goat or cow might be tied out of reach of the garden. There was a fence or hedge surrounding and protecting the garden area and dwelling. Outside the fence were an acre or two of fields of wheat and barley, and sometimes oats and rye. Wheat and rye were sown in the fall, and oats and barley in the spring. They were all harvested in the summer. These fields were usually enclosed with a hedge to keep animals from eating the crop. Flax was grown and made into linen cloth. Beyond the fields were pastures for cattle and sheep grazing. There was often an area for beehives.
Crops were produced with the open field system. In this system, there were three large fields for the heavy and fertile land. Each field was divided into long and narrow strips. Each strip represented a day's work with the plough. One field had wheat, or perhaps rye, another had barley, oats, beans, or peas, and the third was fallow. These were rotated yearly. Each free man was allotted certain strips in each field to bear crops. His strips were far from each other, which insured some very fertile and some only fair soil, and some land near his village dwelling and some far away. These strips he cultivated, sowed with seed, and harvested for himself and his family. After the year, they reverted to common ownership for grazing.
The plough used was heavy and made first of wood and later of iron. It had a mould-board which caught the soil stirred by the plough blade and threw it into a ridge. Other farm implements were: coulters, which gave free passage to the plough by cutting weeds and turf, picks, spades and shovels, reaping hooks and scythes, and sledge-hammers and anvils. With iron axes, forests were cleared to provide more arable land.
The use of this open field system instead of compact enclosures worked by individuals was necessary in primitive communities which were farming only for their own subsistence. Each ox was owned by a different man as was the plough. Strips of land for agriculture were added from waste land as the community grew.
There were villages which had one or two market days in each week. Cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, calves, and rabbits were sold there.
Flint workers mined with deer antler picks and ox shoulder blade shovels for flint to grind into axes, spearheads, and arrowheads. People used bone and stone tools, such as stone hammers, and then bronze and iron tools, weapons, breast plates, and horse bits, which were formed from moulds and/or forged by bronze smiths and blacksmiths. Weapons included bows and arrows, flint and copper daggers, stone axes, and shields of wood with bronze