means of a bailiff. Professor Thorold Rogers gives us a description of it,1 drawn from the annual accounts of this bailiff, which he examined along with many others from other manors. We find one or two changes have taken place, for the bondsmen have entirely disappeared, as indeed they did in less than a century after the Conquest all through the land. The number of villeins and bordars has increased, for there are now 13 villeins and 8 cottars and 1 free tenant. There is also a prior, who holds land (6 acres) in the manor but does not live in it; also two other tenants, who do not live in the manor, but hold "a quarter of a knight's fee" (here some 40 or 50 acres)— a knight's fee 2 comprising an area of land varying from 2 hides to 4 or even 6 hides, but in any case worth some £20. As the Cuxham land was good, the quantity necessary for the valuation of a fee would probably be only the small hide or carucate of 80 acres, and the quarter of it, of course, 20 acres or a little more. The 13 serfs hold 170 acres, but the 8 cottars only 30 acres, including their tenements. The free tenant holds 12 acres, and Merton College as lord of the manor some 240 acres of demesne. There are now two mills instead of three, one belonging to the prior and the other to another tenant. There were altogether, counting the families of the villeins and cottars, but not the two tenants of military fees, about 60 or 70 inhabitants, the most important being the college bailiff and the miller.

§ 46. Description of a Manor Village.

Now in both these country manors, as in all others, the central feature would be the dwelling of the lord, or manorhouse. It was substantially built, and served as a courthouse for the sittings of the court baron and the court leet.3

1 Six Centuries, p. 41.

21t is very difficult to state exactly what a knight's fee really was; Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. xi. p. 431. Cf. Pearson, Early and Middle Ages, i. 375, and ii. 463, who puts it at about 5 hides, or a rental of £20.

3 Manorial Courts.-The court baron was composed of a kind of jury of freeholders, and was concerned with civil proceedings. The court leet was composed of all tenants, both free and serf, who acted as a jury in criminal cases, minor offences, and so forth. Both courts were presided

If the lord did not live in it, his bailiff did so, and perhaps the lord would come occasionally himself to hold these courts, or his bailiff might preside. Near the manorhouse generally stood the church, often large for the size of the village, because the nave was frequently used as a town-hall for meetings or for markets. Then there would be the house of the priest, possibly in the demesne; and after these two the most important building was the mill, which, if there was a stream, would be placed on its banks in order to use the water-power. The rest of the tenants generally inhabited the principal street or road 2 of the village, near the stream, if one ran through the place. The average population of an eleventh century village must have been about 150 persons.3 The houses of these villages were poor and dirty, not always made of stone, and never (till the fifteenth century) of brick, but built of posts wattled and plastered with clay or mud, with an upper storey of poles reached by a ladder. The articles of furniture would be very coarse and few, being necessarily of home manufacture; a few rafters or poles overhead, a bacon-rack, and agricultural tools being the most conspicuous objects. Chimneys were unknown, except in the manorhouses, and so too were windows, and the floor was of bare earth. Outside the door was the "mixen," a collection of every kind of manure and refuse, which must have rendered the village street alike unsavoury, unsightly, and over by the lord of the manor or his bailiff. Thus local discipline and law was concentrated in the hands of the inhabitants of the parish themselves, and the manorial courts were a very useful means of education in local self-government. Unfortunately their power, utility, and educational influence declined with the decay of the whole manorial system. Cf. Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 63 and 420; Stubbs, Const. Hist., I. xi. 399; Maitland, Select Pleas, I. lxv. ; and Vinogradoff, V. in E., pp. 362, 365, and ch. v. of Essay II.

1 Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 66.

2 Gomme, Vill. Comm., p. 173.

3 We can easily compute this by dividing the Domesday population (283,342) by the number of manors (9250), which gives about 30 able-bodied men per village, or 150 persons if we multiply by five.

*Rogers, Econ. Interpretation of History, p. 279.

5 Cf. Gomme, Vill. Comm., p. 44.

This is very noticeable in certain villages of the Belgian Ardennese.g., Sommière, near Dinant.

F

unwholesome. But though their life was rude and rough, it seems that the villagers were fairly happy, and, considering all things, not much worse off than their descendants are now.1 Of course it is very difficult to compare the life of different ages, especially of periods so diverse as the eleventh or thirteenth century and the nineteenth. But it would be true to say that a mediæval labourer was often better oft as regards food 2 than the unskilled labourer of to-day, though, on the other hand, he may have been worse clad and worse housed. One thing, perhaps, balances another. Yet probably the social life of the mediæval village, with its active manor courts and parish councils, was more interesting than that of a nineteenth century country parish, and the villager, though a villein, had a greater voice in parish affairs than his modern representative, except quite recently, possessed.

It is necessary, in order to complete our sketch of the manorial system from the time of the Conquest onwards, to understand how the land was divided up. We may say that there were seven kinds of land altogether. (1) First came the lord's land round about the manor-house, the demesne land, which was strictly his own, and generally cultivated in early times by himself or his bailiff. other land held by tenants was called land in villeinage. (2) Next came the arable land of the village, held by the tenants in common fields.3 Now these fields were all divided up into many strips, and tenants held their strips generally in quite different places, all mixed up in any order

All

1 I am inclined to follow the view of Thorold Rogers in this (cf. Six Centuries, pp. 68, 69), with whom Dr Cunningham, after all, practically agrees (Eng. Industry, i. 275). In estimating comparative prosperity, we must regard the possibilities of each age, and how far the villager attained them then or can do so now. Almost certainly he came nearer to such possibilities as there were than his modern brother does. Hasty denials of medieval prosperity and comfort only betoken ignorance.

2 Cunningham, i. 275.

3 Seebohm, Vill. Comm., pp. 1-27, and the maps there; Gomme, Village Community, pp. 194, 166; Cunningham, Eng. Industry and Commerce, i. 70, 71. 4"A single farmer might have to cut his portion of grass from twenty different places, though the tenants frequently accommodated one another by exchanging allotments when it was convenient to do so." Gomme, Vill. Comm., p. 166.

(cf. diagram, where the tenants are marked A, B, C, &c.).
The lord and the parson might also have a few strips in
these fields. There were at least three fields, in order to
allow the rotation of crops mentioned before (p. 40). Each
tenant held his strip only till harvest, after which all fences
and divisions were taken away, and the cattle turned out
to feed on the stubble. (3) Thirdly came the common
pasture, for all the tenants. But each tenant was restricted
or stinted in the number of cattle that he might pasture,2
lest he should put on too many, and thus not leave enough
food for his neighbours' cattle. Sometimes, however, we
find pasture without stint, as in Port Meadow at Oxford to
this day. (4) Then comes the forest or woodland, as in
Estone, which belonged to the lord, who owned all the
timber. But the tenants had rights, such as the right of
lopping and topping certain trees, collecting fallen branches
for fuel, and the right of "pannage "-i.e., of turning cattle,
especially swine, into the woods to pick up what food they
could. (5) There was also in most manors what is called
the waste-i.e., uncultivated land, affording rough pasture,
and on which the tenants had the right of cutting turf and
bracken for fuel and fodder. Then near the stream there
would perhaps be some (6) Meadow land, as at Cuxham,
but this generally belonged to the lord, who, if he let it
out, always charged an extra rent (and often a very high
one), for it was very valuable as affording a good supply of
hay for the winter. Lastly, if the tenant could afford it,
and wanted to have other land besides the common fields,
where he could let his cattle lie, or to cultivate the ground
more carefully, he could occupy (7) a close, or a portion of
land specially marked off and let separately.5 The lord
always had a close on his demesne, and the chief tenants
would generally have one or two as well. The close land was
of course rented more highly than land in the common fields.
The accompanying diagram shows a typical manor, held
by a sub-tenant from a tenant-in-chief, who holds it of the
king. It contains all the different kinds of land, though,
' Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 90.
5 Ib., p 89.

1 Vinogradoff, V. in E.,
p. 406.
3 Ib., p. 74.
4 Ib., p. 73.

2

of course, they did not always all exist in one manor. It also shows the manor-house, church, mill, and village.

THE KING (supreme landlord).

TENANT-IN-CHIEF, owning various manors.

A SUB-TENANT, or tenant-in-mesne, the lord of the
manor below.

§ 47. The Decay of the Manorial System. Such, then, was the manorial village and the manorial system generally in the eleventh century, and thus it lasted