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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH AGRICULTURE
BY
W.H.R. CURTLER
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1909
HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK
TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
PREFACE
'A husbandman', said Markham, 'is the master of the earth, turning
barrenness into fruitfulness, whereby all commonwealths are
maintained and upheld. His labour giveth liberty to all vocations,
arts, and trades to follow their several functions with peace and
industrie. What can we say in this world is profitable where
husbandry is wanting, it being the great nerve and sinew which
holdeth together all the joints of a monarchy?' And he is confirmed
by Young: 'Agriculture is, beyond all doubt, the foundation of every
other art, business, and profession, and it has therefore been the
ideal policy of every wise and prudent people to encourage it to the
utmost.' Yet of this important industry, still the greatest in
England, there is no history covering the whole period.
It is to remedy this defect that this book is offered, with much
diffidence, and with many thanks to Mr. C.R.L. Fletcher of Magdalen
College, Oxford, for his valuable assistance in revising the proof
sheets, and to the Rev. A.H. Johnson of All Souls for some very
useful information.
As the agriculture of the Middle Ages has often been ably described,
I have devoted the greater part of this work to the agricultural
history of the subsequent period, especially the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
W.H.R. CURTLER.
_May 22, 1909._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Communistic Farming.--Growth of the Manor.--Early Prices.--The
Organization and Agriculture of the Manor
CHAPTER II
The Thirteenth Century.--The Manor at its Zenith, with Seeds of Decay
already visible.--Walter of Henley
CHAPTER III
The Fourteenth Century.--Decline of Agriculture.--The Black Death.--
Statute of Labourers
CHAPTER IV
How the Classes connected with the Land lived in the Middle Ages
CHAPTER V
The Break-up of the Manor.--Spread of Leases.--The Peasants'
Revolt.--Further Attempts to regulate Wages.--A Harvest
Home.--Beginning of the Corn Laws.--Some Surrey Manors
CHAPTER VI
1400-1540. The so-called 'Golden Age of the Labourer' in a Period of
General Distress
CHAPTER VII
Enclosure
CHAPTER VIII
Fitzherbert.--The Regulation of Hours and Wages
CHAPTER IX
1540-1600. Progress at last--Hop-growing.--Progress of Enclosure.--
Harrison's _Description_
CHAPTER X
1540-1600. Live Stock.--Flax.--Saffron.--The Potato.--The Assessment
of Wages
CHAPTER XI
1600-1700. Clover and Turnips.--Great Rise in Prices.--More
Enclosure.--A Farming Calendar
CHAPTER XII
The Great Agricultural Writers of the Seventeenth Century.--Fruit-growing.
--A Seventeenth-century Orchard
CHAPTER XIII
The Evils of Common Fields.--Hops.--Implements.--Manures.--Gregory
King.--Corn Laws
CHAPTER XIV
1700-65. General Characteristics of the Eighteenth Century.--Crops.
--Cattle.--Dairying.--Poultry.--Tull and the New Husbandry.--Bad
Times.--Fruit-growing
CHAPTER XV
1700-65. Townshend.--Sheep-rot.--Cattle Plague.--Fruit-growing
CHAPTER XVI
1765-93. Arthur Young.--Crops and their Cost.--The Labourers'
Wages and Diet.--The Prosperity of Farmers.--The Country
Squire.--Elkington.--Bakewell.--The Roads.--Coke of Holkham
CHAPTER XVII
1793-1815. The Great French War.--The Board of Agriculture.--High
Prices, and Heavy Taxation
CHAPTER XVIII
Enclosure.--The Small Owner
CHAPTER XIX
1816-37. Depression
CHAPTER XX
1837-75. Revival of Agriculture.--The Royal Agricultural
Society.--Corn Law Repeal.--A Temporary Set-back.--The Halcyon Days
CHAPTER XXI
1875-1908. Agricultural Distress again.--Foreign Competition.--
Agricultural Holdings Act.--New Implements.--Agricultural
Commissions.--The Situation in 1908
CHAPTER XXII
Imports and Exports.--Live Stock
CHAPTER XXIII
Modern Farm Live Stock
APPENDICES
I. Average Prices from 1259 to 1700
II. Exports and Imports of Wheat and Flour from and into England,
unimportant years omitted
III. Average Prices per Imperial Quarter of British Corn in England
and Wales, in each year from 1771 to 1907 inclusive
IV. Miscellaneous Information
LANDMARKS IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURE
1086. Domesday inquest, most cultivated land in tillage. Annual value
of land about 2d. an acre.
1216-72. Henry III. Assize of Bread and Ale.
1272-1307. Edward I. General progress. Walter of Henley.
1307. Edward II. Decline.
1315. Great famine.
1337. Export of wool prohibited.
1348-9. Black Death. Heavy blow to manorial system. Many demesne
lands let, and much land laid down to grass.
1351. Statute of Labourers.
1360. Export of corn forbidden.
1381. Villeins' revolt.
1393. Richard II allows export of corn under certain conditions.
1463. Import of wheat under 6s. 8d. prohibited.
End of fifteenth century. Increase of enclosure.
1523. Fitzherbert's _Surveying and Husbandry_.
1540. General rise in prices and rents begins.
1549. Kett's rebellion. The last attempt of the English peasant to
obtain redress by force.
1586. Potatoes introduced.
1601. Poor Law Act of Elizabeth.
1645. Turnips and clover introduced as field crops.
1662. Statute of Parochial Settlement.
1664. Importation of cattle, sheep, and swine forbidden.
1688. Bounty of 5s. per quarter on export of wheat, and high duty on
import.
1733. Tull publishes his _Horse-hoeing Husbandry_.
1739. Great sheep-rot.
1750. Exports of corn reached their maximum.
1760. Bakewell began experimenting.
1760 (about). Industrial and agrarian revolution, and great increase
of enclosure.
1764. Elkington's new drainage system.
1773. Wheat allowed to be imported at a nominal duty of 6d. a quarter
when over 48s.
1777. Bath and West of England Society established, the first in
England.
1789. England definitely becomes a corn-importing country.
1793. Board of Agriculture established.
1795. Speenhamland Act.
About same date swedes first grown.
1815. Duty on wheat reached its maximum.
1815-35. Agricultural distress.
1825. Export of wool allowed.
1835. Smith of Deanston, the father of modern drainage.
1838. Foundation of Royal Agricultural Society.
1846. Repeal of the Corn Laws.
1855-75. Great agricultural prosperity.
1875. English agriculture feels the full effect of unrestricted
competition with disastrous results.
" First Agricultural Holdings Act.
1879-80. Excessive rainfall, sheep-rot, and general distress.
CHAPTER I
COMMUNISTIC FARMING.--GROWTH OF THE MANOR.--EARLY PRICES.--THE
ORGANIZATION AND AGRICULTURE OF THE MANOR
When the early bands of English invaders came over to take Britain
from its Celtic owners, it is almost certain that the soil was held by
groups and not by individuals, and as this was the practice of the
conquerors also they readily fell in with the system they found.[1]
These English, unlike their descendants of to day, were a race of
countrymen and farmers and detested the towns, preferring the lands of
the Britons to the towns of the Romans. Co-operation in agriculture
was necessary because to each household were allotted separate strips
of land, nearly equal in size, in each field set apart for tillage,
and a share in the meadow and waste land. The strips of arable were
unfenced and ploughed by common teams, to which each family would
contribute.
Apparently, as the land was cleared and broken up it was dealt out
acre by acre to each cultivator; and supposing each group consisted of
ten families, the typical holding of 120 acres was assigned to each
family in acre strips, and these strips were not all contiguous but
mixed up with those of other families. The reason for this mixture of
strips is obvious to any one who knows how land even in the same field
varies in quality; it was to give each family its share of both good
and bad land, for the householders were all equal and the principle on
which the original distribution of the land depended was that of
equalizing the shares of the different members of the community.[2]
In attributing ownership of lands to communities we must be careful
not to confound communities with corporations. Maitland thinks the
early land-owning communities blended the character of corporations
and of co-owners, and co-ownership is ownership by individuals.[3] The
vills or villages founded on their arrival in Britain by our English
forefathers resembled those they left at home, and even there the
strips into which the arable fields were divided were owned in
severalty by the householders of the village. There was co-operation
in working the fields but no communistic division of the crops, and
the individual's hold upon his strips developed rapidly into an
inheritable and partible ownership. 'At the opening of Anglo-Saxon
history absolute ownership of land in severalty was established and
becoming the rule.'[4]
In the management of the meadow land communal features were much more
clearly brought out; the arable was not reallotted,[5] but the meadow
was, annually; while the woods and pastures, the right of using which
belonged to the householders of the village, were owned by the village
'community'. There may have been at the time of the English conquest
Roman 'villas' with slaves and _coloni_ cultivating the owners'
demesnes, which passed bodily to the new masters; but the former
theory seems true of the greater part of the country.
At first 'extensive' cultivation was practised; that is, every year a
fresh arable field was broken up and the one cultivated last year
abandoned, for a time at all events; but gradually 'intensive' culture
superseded this, probably not till after the English had conquered the
land, and the same field was cultivated year after year.[6] After the
various families or households had finished cutting the grass in their
allotted portions of meadow, and the corn on their strips of tillage,
both grass and stubble became common land and were thrown open for the
whole community to turn their stock upon.
The size of the strips of land in the arable fields varied, but was
generally an acre, in most places a furlong (furrow long) or 220 yards
in length, and 22 yards broad; or in other words, 40 rods of 5-1/2
yards in length and 4 in breadth. There was, however, little
uniformity in measurement before the Norman Conquest, the rod by which
the furlongs and acres were measured varying in length from 12 to 24
feet, so that one acre might be four times as large as another.[7] The
acre was, roughly speaking, the amount that a team could plough in a
day, and seems to have been from early times the unit of measuring the
area of land.[8] Of necessity the real acre and the ideal acre were
also different, for the reason that the former had to contend with the
inequalities of the earth's surface and varied much when no scientific
measurement was possible. As late as 1820 the acre was of many
different sizes in England. In Bedfordshire it was 2 roods, in Dorset
134 perches instead of 160, in Lincolnshire 5 roods, in Staffordshire
2-1/4 acres. To-day the Cheshire acre is 10,240 square yards. As,
however, an acre was and is a day's ploughing for a team, we may
assume that the most usual acre was the same area then as now. There
were also half-acre strips, but whatever the size the strips were
divided one from another by narrow grass paths generally called
'balks', and at the end of a group of these strips was the 'headland'
where the plough turned, the name being common to-day. Many of these
common fields remained until well on in the nineteenth century; in
1815 half the county of Huntingdon was in this condition, and a few
still exist.[9] Cultivating the same field year after year naturally
exhausted the soil, so that the two-field system came in, under which
one was cultivated and the other left fallow; and this was followed by
the three-field system, by which two were cropped in any one year and
one lay fallow, the last-named becoming general as it yielded better
results, though the former continued, especially in the North. Under
the three-field plan the husbandman early in the autumn would plough
the field that had been lying fallow during summer, and sow wheat or
rye; in the spring he broke up the stubble of the field on which the
last wheat crop had been grown and sowed barley or oats; in June he
ploughed up the stubble of the last spring crop and fallowed the
field.[10] As soon as the crops began to grow in the arable fields and
the grass in the meadows to spring, they were carefully fenced to
prevent trespass of man and beast; and, as soon as the crops came off,
the fields became common for all the village to turn their stock upon,
the arable fields being usually common from Lammas (August 1) to
Candlemas (February 2) and the meadows from July 6, old Midsummer Day,
to Candlemas[11]; but as in this climate the season both of hay and
corn harvest varies considerably, these dates cannot have been fixed.
The stock, therefore, besides the common pasture, had after harvest
the grazing of the common arable fields and of the meadows. The common
pasture was early 'stinted' or limited, the usual custom being that
the villager could turn out as many stock as he could keep on his
holding. The trouble of pulling up and taking down these fences every
year must have been enormous, and we find legislation on this
important matter at an early date. About 700 the laws of Ine, King of
Wessex, provided that if 'churls have a common meadow or other
partible land to fence, and some have fenced their part and some have
not, and cattle stray in and eat up their common corn or grass; let
those go who own the gap and compensate to the others who have fenced
their part the damage which then may be done, and let them demand such
justice on the cattle as may be right. But if there be a beast which
breaks hedges and goes in everywhere, and he who owns it will not or
cannot restrain it, let him who finds it in his field take it and slay
it, and let the owner take its skin and flesh and forfeit the rest.'
England was not given over to one particular type of settlement,
although villages were more common than hamlets in the greater part of
the country.[12] The vill or village answers to the modern civil
parish, and the term may be applied to both the true or 'nucleated'
village of clustered houses and the village of scattered hamlets, each
of a few houses, existing chiefly on the Celtic fringe. The population
of some of the villages at the time of the Norman Conquest was
numerous, 100 households or 500 people; but the average townships
contained from 10 to 20 households.[13] There was also the single
farm, such as that at Eardisley in Herefordshire, described in
Domesday, lying in the middle of a forest, perhaps, as in other
similar cases, a pioneer settlement of some one more adventurous than
his fellows.[14]
* * * * *
Such was the early village community in England, a community of free
landholders. But a change began early to come over it.[15] The king
would grant to a church all the rights he had in the village,
reserving only the _trinoda necessitas_, these rights including the
feorm or farm, or provender rent which the king derived from the
land--of cattle, sheep, swine, ale, honey, &c.--which he collected by
visiting his villages, thus literally eating his rents. The churchmen
did not continue these visits, they remained in their monasteries, and
had the feorm brought them regularly; they had an overseer in the
village to see to this, and so they tightened their hold on the
village. Then the smaller people, the peasants, make gifts to the
Church. They give their land, but they also want to keep it, for it is
their livelihood; so they surrender the land and take it back as a
lifelong loan. Probably on the death of the donor his heirs are
suffered to hold the land. Then labour services are substituted for
the old provender rents, and thus the Church acquires a demesne, and
thus the foundations of the manorial system, still to be traced all
over the country, were laid. Thegns, the predecessors of the Norman
barons, become the recipients of grants from the churches and from
kings, and householders 'commend' themselves and their land to them
also, so that they acquired demesnes. This 'commendation' was
furthered by the fact that during the long-drawn out conquest of
Britain the old kindred groups of the English lost their corporate
sense, and the central power being too weak to protect the ordinary
householder, who could not stand alone, he had to seek the protection
of an ecclesiastical corporation or of some thegn, first for himself
and then for his land. The jurisdictional rights of the king also
passed to the lord, whether church or thegn; then came the danegeld,
the tax for buying off the Danes that subsequently became a fixed land
tax, which was collected from the lord, as the peasants were too poor
for the State to deal with them; the lord paid the geld for their
land, consequently their land was his. In this way the free ceorl of
Anglo-Saxon times gradually becomes the 'villanus' of Domesday.
Landlordship was well established in the two centuries before the
Conquest, and the land of England more or less 'carved into
territorial lordships'.[16] Therefore when the Normans brought their
wonderful genius for organization to this country they found the
material conditions of manorial life in full growth; it was their task
to develop its legal and economic side.[17]
As the manorial system thus superimposed upon the village community
was the basis of English rural economy for centuries, there need be no
apology for describing it at some length.
The term 'manor', which came in with the Conquest,[18] has a technical
meaning in Domesday, referring to the system of taxation, and did not
always coincide with the vill or village, though it commonly did so,
except in the eastern portion of England. The village was the agrarian
unit, the manor the fiscal unit; so that where the manor comprised
more than one village, as was frequently the case, there would be more
than one village organization for working the common fields.[19]
The manor then was the 'constitutive cell' of English mediaeval
society.[20] The structure is always the same; under the headship of
the lord we find two layers of population, the villeins and the
freeholders; and the territory is divided into demesne land and
tributary land of two classes, viz. that of the villeins and that of
the freeholders. The cultivation of the demesne (which usually means
the land directly occupied and cultivated by the lord, though legally
it has a wider meaning and includes the villein tenements), depends to
a certain extent on the work supplied by the tenants of the tributary
land. Rents are collected, labour superintended, administrative
business transacted by a set of manorial officers.
We may divide the tillers of the soil at the time of Domesday into
five great classes[21] in order of dignity and freedom:
1. Liberi homines, or freemen.
2. Socmen.
3. Villeins.
4. Bordarii, cotarii, buri or coliberti.
5. Slaves.
The two first of these classes were to be found in large numbers in
Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and
Northamptonshire. It is not easy to draw the line between them, but
the chief distinction lay in the latter being more burdened with
service and customary dues and more especially subject to the
jurisdictional authority of the lord.[22] They were both free, but
both rendered services to the lord for their land. Both the freemen
and the slaves by 1086 were rapidly decreasing in number.
The most numerous class[23] on the manors was the third, that of the
villeins or non-free tenants, who held their land by payment of
services to the lord. The position of the villein under the feudal
system is most complicated. He both was and was not a freeman. He was
absolutely at the disposal of the lord, who could sell him with his
tenement, and he could not leave his land without his lord's
permission. He laboured under many disabilities, such as the merchet
or fine for marrying his daughter, and fines for selling horse or ox.
On the other hand, he was free against every one but his lord, and
even against the lord was protected from the forfeiture of his
'wainage' or instruments of labour and from injury to life and
limb.[24]
His usual holding was a virgate of 30 acres of arable, though the
virgate differed in size even in the same manors; but in addition to
this he would have his meadow land and his share in the common pasture
and wood, altogether about 100 acres of land. For this he rendered the
following services to the lord of the manor:
1. Week work, or labour on the lord's demesne for two or three days a
week during most of the year, and four or five days in summer. It was
not always the villein himself, however, who rendered these services,
he might send his son or even a hired labourer; and it was the holding
and not the holder that was considered primarily responsible for the
rendering of services.[25]
2. Precarii or boon days: that is, work generally during harvest, at
the lord's request, sometimes instead of week work, sometimes in
addition.
3. Gafol or tribute: fixed payments in money or kind, and such
services as 'fold soke', which forced the tenants' sheep to lie on the
lord's land for the sake of the manure; and suit of mill, by which the
tenant was bound to grind his corn in the lord's mill.
With regard to the 'boon days' in harvest, it should be remembered
that harvest time in the Middle Ages was a most important event.
Agriculture was the great industry, and when the corn was ripe the
whole village turned out to gather it, the only exceptions being the
housewives and sometimes the marriageable daughters. Even the larger
towns suspended work that the townsmen might assist in the harvest,
and our long vacation was probably intended originally to cover the
whole work of gathering in the corn and hay. On the occasion of the
'boon-day' work, the lord usually found food for the labourers which,
the Inquisition of Ardley[26] tells us, might be of the following
description: for two men, porridge of beans and peas and two loaves,
one white, the other of 'mixtil' bread; that is, wheat, barley, and
rye mixed together, with a piece of meat, and beer for their first
meal. Then in the evening they had a small loaf of mixtil bread and
two 'lescas' of cheese. While harvest work was going on the better-off
tenants, usually the free ones, were sometimes employed to ride about,
rod in hand, superintending the others.
The services of the villeins were often very comprehensive, and even
included such tasks as preparing the lord's bath; but on some manors
their services were very light.[27] When the third of the above
obligations, the gafol or tribute, was paid in kind it was most
commonly made in corn; and next came honey, one of the most important
articles of the Middle Ages, as it was used for both lighting and
sweetening purposes. Ale was also common, and poultry and eggs, and
sometimes the material for implements.
These obligations were imposed for the most part on free and unfree
tenants alike, though those of the free were much lighter than those
of the unfree; the chief difference between the two, as far as tenure
of the land went, lay in the fact that the former could exercise
proprietary rights over his holding more or less freely, the latter
had none.[28] It seems very curious to the modern mind that the
villein, a man who farmed about 100 acres of land, should have been in
such a servile condition.
The amount of work due from each villein came to be fixed by the
extent or survey of the manor, but the quality of it was not[29];
that is, each one knew how many days he had to work, but not whether
he was to plough, sow, or harrow, &c. It is surprising to find, that
on the festival days of the Church, which were very numerous and
observed as holy days, the lord lost by no work being done, and the
same was the case in wet weather.
One of the most important duties of the tenant was the 'averagium', or
duty of carrying for the lord, especially necessary when his manors
were often a long way apart. He would often have to carry corn to the
nearest town for sale, the products of one manor to another, also to
haul manure on to the demesne. If he owned neither horse nor ox, he
would sometimes have to use his own back.[30]
The holding of the villein did not admit of partition by sale or
descent, it remained undivided and entire. When the holder died all
the land went to one of the sons if there were several, often to the
youngest. The others sought work on the manor as craftsmen or
labourers, or remained on the family plot. The holding therefore might
contain more than one family, but to the lord remained one and
undivided.[31]
In the fourth class came the bordarii, the cotarii, and the coliberti
or buri; or, as we should say, the crofters, the cottagers, and the
boors.
The bordarii numbered 82,600 in Domesday, and were subject to the same
kind of services as the villeins, but the amount of the service was
considerably less.[32] Their usual holding was 5 acres, and they are
very often found on the demesne of the manor, evidently in this case
labourers on the demesne, settled in cottages and provided with a bit
of land of their own. The name failed to take root in this country,
and the bordarii seem to become villeins or cottiers.[33]
The cotarii, cottiers or cottagers, were 6,800 in number, with small
pieces of land sometimes reaching 5 acres.[34] Distinctly inferior to
the villeins, bordarii, and cottars, but distinctly superior to the
slaves, were the buri or coliberti who, with the bordars and cottars,
would form a reserve of labour to supplement the ordinary working days
at times when work was pressing, as in hay time and harvest. At the
bottom of the social ladder in Domesday came the slaves, some 25,000
in number, who in the main had no legal rights, a class which had
apparently already diminished and was diminishing in numbers, so that
for the cultivation of the demesne the lord was coming to rely more on
the labour of his tenants, and consequently the labour services of the
villeins were being augmented.[35] The agricultural labourer as we
understand him, a landless man working solely for wages in cash, was
almost unknown.
All the arrangements of the manor aimed at supplying labour for the
cultivation of the lord's demesne, and he had three chief officers to
superintend it:
1. The seneschal, who answers to our modern steward or land agent, and
where there were several manors supervised all of them. He attended to
the legal business and held the manor courts. It was his duty to be
acquainted with every particular of the manor, its cultivation,
extent, number of teams, condition of the stock, &c. He was also the
legal adviser of his lord; in fact, very much like his modern
successor.
2. The bailiff for each manor, who collected rents, went to market to
buy and sell, surveyed the timber, superintended the ploughing,
mowing, reaping, &c., that were due as services from the tenants on
the lord's demesne; and according to _Fleta_ he was to prevent their
'casting off before the work was done', and to measure it when
done.[36] And considering that those he superintended were not paid
for their work, but rendering more or less unwelcome services, his
task could not have been easy.
3. The praepositus or reeve, an office obligatory on every holder of a
certain small quantity of land; a sort of foreman nominated from among
the villeins, and to a certain extent representing their interests.
His duties were supplementary to those of the bailiff: he looked after
all the live and dead stock of the manor, saw to the manuring of the
land, kept a tally of the day's work, had charge of the granary, and
delivered therefrom corn to be baked and malt to be brewed.[37]
Besides these three officers, on a large estate there would be a
messor who took charge of the harvest, and many lesser officers, such
as those of the akermanni, or leaders of the unwieldy plough teams;
oxherds, shepherds, and swineherds to tend cattle, sheep, and pigs
when they were turned on 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 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, the amount of land that could be ploughed by a
team of 8 oxen in a year; a quarter of this was the virgate, an eighth
the bovate, which would therefore supply one ox to the common team.
These teams, however, varied; on the manors of S. Paul's Cathedral in
1222 they were sometimes composed of horses and oxen, or of 6 horses
only, sometimes 10 oxen.[47]
The farming year began at Michaelmas when, in addition to the sowing
of wheat and rye, the cattle were carefully stalled and fed only on
hay and straw, for roots were in the distant future, and the corn was
threshed with the flail and winnowed by hand. In the spring, after the
ploughing of the second arable field, the vineyard, where there was
one, was set out, and the open ditches, apparently the only drainage
then known, cleansed. In May it was time to set up the temporary
fences round the meadows and arable fields, and to begin fallowing the
third field.
A valuable document, describing the duties of a reeve, gives many
interesting details of eleventh-century farming:--
'In May, June, and July one may harrow, carry out manure, set
up sheep hurdles, shear sheep, do repairs, hedge, cut wood,
weed, and make folds. In harvest one may reap; in August,
September, and in October one may mow, set woad with a dibble,
gather home many crops, thatch them and cover them over,
cleanse the folds, prepare cattle sheds and shelters ere too
severe a winter come to the farm, and also diligently prepare
the soil. In winter one should plough and in severe frosts
cleave timber, make an orchard, and do many affairs indoors,
thresh, cleave wood, put the cattle in stalls and the swine in
pigstyes, and provide a hen roost. In spring one should plough
and graft, sow beans, set a vineyard, make ditches, hew wood
for a wild deer fence; and soon after that, if the weather
permit, set madder, sow flax seed and woad seed, plant a garden
and do many things which I cannot fully enumerate that a good
steward ought to provide.'[48]
The methods of cultivation were simple. The plough, if we may judge by
contemporary illustrations, had in the eleventh century a large wheel
and very short handles.[49] In the twelfth century Neckham describes
its parts: a beam, handles, tongue, mouldboard, coulter, and
share.[50] Breaking up the clods was done by the mattock or beetle,
and harrowing was done by hand with what looks like a large rake; the
scythes of the haymakers and the sickles of the reapers were very like
those that still linger on in some districts to-day.
Here is a list of tools and implements for the homestead: an axe,
adze, bill, awl, plane, saw, spokeshave, tie hook, auger, mattock,
lever, share, coulter, goad-iron, scythe, sickle, weed-hook, spade,
shovel, woad dibble, barrow, besom, beetle, rake, fork, ladder, horse
comb, shears, fire tongs, weighing scales, and a long list of spinning
implements necessary when farmers made their own clothes. The author
wisely remarks that one ought to have coverings for wains, plough
gear, harrowing tackle, &c.; and adds another list of instruments and
utensils: a caldron, kettle, ladle, pan, crock, firedog, dishes, bowls
with handles, tubs, buckets, a churn, cheese vat, baskets, crates,
bushels, sieves, seed basket, wire sieve, hair sieve, winnowing fans,
troughs, ashwood pails, hives, honey bins, beer barrels, bathing tub,
dishes, cups, strainers, candlesticks, salt cellar, spoon case, pepper
horn, footstools, chairs, basins, lamp, lantern, leathern bottles,
comb, iron bin, fodder rack, meal ark or box, oil flask, oven rake,
dung shovel; altogether a very complete list, the compiler of which
ends by saying that the reeve ought to neglect nothing that should
prove useful, not even a mousetrap, nor even, what is less, a peg for
a hasp.
Manors in 1086 were of all sizes, from one virgate to enormous
organizations like Taunton or Leominster, containing villages by the
score and hundreds of dependent holdings.[51] The ordinary size,
however, of the Domesday manor was from four to ten hides of 120 acres
each, or say from 500 to 1,200 acres,[52] and the Manor of Segenehou
in Bedfordshire may be regarded as typical. Held by Walter brother of
Seiher it had as much land as ten ploughs could work, four plough
lands belonging to the demesne and six to the villeins, of whom there
were twenty-four, with four bordarii and three serfs; thus the
villeins had 30 acres each, the normal holding. The manorial system
was in fact a combination of large farming by the lords, and small
farming by the tenants. Nor must we compare it to an ordinary estate;
for it was a dominion within which the lord had authority over
subjects of various ranks; he was not only a proprietor but a prince
with courts of his own, the arbiter of his tenants' rights as well as
owner of the land.
One of the most striking features of the Domesday survey is the large
quantity of arable land and the small quantity of meadow, which
usually was the only land whence they obtained their hay, for the
common pasture cannot often have been mown.[53] Indeed, it is
difficult to understand how they fed their stock in hard winters.
According to the returns, in many counties more acres were ploughed in
1086 than to-day; in some twice as much. In Somerset in 1086 there
were 577,000 acres of arable; in 1907, 178,967. In Gloucestershire, in
1086, 589,000 acres; in 1907, 238,456.[54] These are extreme
instances; but the preponderance of arable is startling, even if we
allow for the recent conversion of arable to pasture on account of the
low price of corn. Between the eleventh century and the sixteenth, the
laying down of land to grass must have proceeded on a gigantic scale,
for Harrison tells us that in his day England was mainly a grazing
country. No wonder Harrison's contemporaries complained of the decay
of tillage.
Mediaeval prices and statistics are, it is well known, to be taken
with great caution; but we may assume that the normal annual value of
land under cultivation in 1086 was about 2d. an acre.[55] Land indeed,
apart from the stock upon it, was worth very little: in the tenth and
eleventh centuries it appears that the hide, normally of 120 acres,
was only worth £5 to buy, apparently with the stock upon it. In the
time of Athelstan a horse was worth 120d., an ox 30d., a cow 20d., a
sheep 5d., a hog 8d., a slave £1--so that a slave was worth 8
oxen[56]; and these prices do not seem to have advanced by the
Domesday period.
According to the Pipe Roll of 1156, wheat was 1s. 6d. a quarter; but
prices then depended entirely on seasons, and we do not know whether
that was good or bad. However, many years later, in 1243 it was only
2s. a quarter at Hawsted.[57] In dear years, nearly always the result
of wet seasons, it went up enormously; in 1024 the English Chronicle
tells us the acre seed of wheat, that is about 2 bushels, sold for
4s.,[58] 3 bushels of barley for 6s. and 4 bushels of oats for 4s. In
1190 Holinshed says that, owing to a great dearth, the quarter of
wheat was 18s. 8d. The average price, however, in the twelfth century
was probably about 4s. a quarter.
In 1194 Roger of Hoveden[59] says an ox, a cow, and a plough horse
were the same price, 4s.; a sheep with fine wool 10d., with coarse
wool 6d.; a sow 12d., a boar 12d.
Sometimes prices were kept down by imports; 1258 was a bad and dear
year, 'most part of the corn rotted on the ground,' and was not all
got in till after November 1, so excessive was the wet and rain. And
upon the dearth a sore death and mortality followed for want of
necessary food to sustain the pining bodies of the poor people, who
died so thick that there were great pits made in churchyards to lay
the dead bodies in. And corn had been dearer if great store had not
come out of Almaine, but there came fifty great ships with wheat and
barley, meal and bread out of Dutchland, which greatly relieved the
poor.[60]
Were the manors as isolated as some writers have asserted? Generally
speaking, we may say the means of communication were bad and many an
estate cut off almost completely from the outside world, yet the
manors must often have been connected by waterways, and sometimes by
good roads, with other manors and with the towns. Rivers in the Middle
Ages were far more used as means of communication than to-day, and
many streams now silted up and shallow were navigable according to
Domesday. Water carriage was, as always, much cheaper than land
carriage, and corn could be carried from Henley to London for 2d. or
3d. a quarter. The roads left by the Romans, owing to the excellence
of their construction, remained in use during the Middle Ages, and
must have been a great advantage to those living near them; but the
other roads can have been little better than mud tracks, except in the
immediate vicinity of the few large towns. The keeping of the roads in
repair, one part of the _trinoda necessitas_ was imposed on all lands;
but the results often seem to have been very indifferent, and they
appear largely to have depended on chance, or the goodwill or devotion
of neighbouring landowners.[61] Perhaps they would, except in the case
of the Roman roads, have been impassable but for the fact that the
great lords and abbots were constantly visiting their scattered
estates, and therefore were interested in keeping such roads in order.
But in those days people were contented with very little, and though
Edward I enforced the general improvement of roads in 1285, in the
fourteenth century they were decaying. Parliament adjourned thrice
between 1331 and 1380 because the state of the roads kept many of the
members away. In 1353 the high road running from Temple Bar, then the
western limit of London, to Westminster was 'so full of holes and
bogs' that the traffic was dangerous for men and carriages; and a
little later all the roads near London were so bad, that carriers 'are
oftentimes In peril of losing what they bring.' What must remote
country roads have been like when these important highways were in
this state? If members of Parliament, rich men riding good horses,
could not get to London, how did the clumsy wagons and carts of the
day fare? The Church might well pity the traveller, and class him with
the sick 'and the captive among the unfortunates whom she recommended
to the daily prayers of pious souls.'[62] Rivers were mainly crossed
by ford or ferry, though there were some excellent bridges, a few of
which still remain, maintained by the _trinoda necessitas_, by gilds,
by 'indulgences' promised to benefactors, and by toll, the right to
levy which, called pontage, was often spent otherwise than on the
repair of the bridge.
A few of the old open fields still exist, and the best surviving example
of an open-field parish is that of Laxton in Nottinghamshire.[63]
Nearly half the area of the parish remains in the form of two great
arable fields, and two smaller ones which are treated as two parts of
the third field. The different holdings, freehold and leasehold,
consist in part of strips of land scattered all over these fields. The
three-course system is rigidly adhered to, first year wheat, second
year spring corn, third year fallow.
In a corner of the parish is Laxton Heath, a common covered with
coarse grass where the sheep are grazed according to a 'stint'
recently determined upon, for when it was unstinted the common was
overstocked. The commonable meadows which the parish once had were
enclosed at a date beyond anyone's recollection, though the
neighbouring parish of Eakring still has some. There are other
enclosures in the remote parts of the parish which apparently
represent the old woodland. The inconvenience of the common-field
system was extreme. South Luffenham in Rutland, not enclosed till
1879, consisted of 1,074 acres divided among twenty-two owners into
1,238 pieces. In some places furrows served to divide the lands
instead of turf balks, which were of course always being altered.
Another difficulty arose from there being no check to high winds,
which would sometimes sweep the whole of the crops belonging to
different farmers in an inextricable heap against the nearest
obstruction.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Vinogradoff, _Growth of the Manor_, p. 18; Medley, _Constitutional
History_, p. 15.
[2] Vinogradoff, _Villeinage in England_, p. 257.
[3] Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, pp. 341 et seq.
[4] Stubbs, _Constitutional History_, §36.
[5] Vinogradoff, _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p. 282,
says, 'As a rule it was not subject to redivision.'
[6] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i. 42.
[7] Maitland, _op. cit._ p. 368.
[8] _Anonymous Treatise on Husbandry_, Royal Historical Society, pp.
xli. and 68. About 1230, Smyth, in his _Lives of the Berkeleys_, i.
113, says, 'At this time lay all lands in common fields, in one acre
or ridge, one man's intermixt with another.'
[9] See below.
[10] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i. 74.
Maitland thinks the two-field system was as common as the three-field,
both in early and mediaeval times. _Domesday Book and Beyond_, p. 366.
[11] Nasse, _Agricultural Community of the Middle Ages_, p. 5. To-day
harvest generally commences about August 1, so that this, like the
growth of grapes in mediaeval times, seems to show our climate has
grown colder.
[12] Vinogradoff, _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p. 264.
[13] Maitland, _op. cit._ p. 17.
[14] Vinogradoff, _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p. 265.
[15] Maitland, _op. cit._ pp. 318 et seq.
[16] Vinogradoff, _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p. 345.
[17] Vinogradoff, _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p. 339.
[18] Maitland, _Domesday Book_, p. 110
[19] Vinogradoff, _op. cit._ p. 395.
[20] Vinogradoff, _Villeinage in England_, pp. 225 et seq.
[21] Maitland, _op. cit._ p. 23.
[22] Vinogradoff, _op. cit._ p. 433.
[23] In Domesday they number 108,500. Maitland, _Domesday Book_.
[24] Maitland, _op. cit._.
[25] Vinogradoff, _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p. 300.
[26] _Domesday of S. Paul_, p. lxviii.
[27] Maitland, _Domesday Book_, p. 56.
[28] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i. 166. In
some manors free tenants could sell their lands without the lord's
licence, in others not.
[29] Vinogradoff, _Villeinage in England_, p. 279.
[30] Vinogradoff, _Villeinage in England_, p. 285.
[31] Ibid. p. 246; and _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p.
448. At the end of the eighteenth century, in default of sons, lands
in some manors in Shropshire descended to the youngest
daughter.--Bishton, _General View of the Agriculture of Shropshire_,
p. 178.
[32] Vinogradoff, _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p. 456.
[33] Maitland, Domesday Book, p. 40.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Maitland, _Domesday Book_, p. 35.
[36] _Fleta_, c. 73.
[37] _Domesday of S. Paul_, xxxv. _Fleta_, 'an anonymous work drawn up
in the thirteenth century to assist landowners in managing their
estates' says, the reeve 'shall rise early, and have the ploughs
yoked, and then walk in the fields to see that all is right and note
if the men be idle, or if they knock off work before the day's task is
fully done.'
[38] Vinogradoff, _Villeinage in England_, p. 321.
[39] Ibid. p. 324.
[40] _Manor of Manydown_, Hampshire Record Society, p. 17. Breaking
the assize of beer meant selling it without a licence, or of bad
quality. The village pound was the consequence of the perpetual
straying of animals, and later on the vicar sometimes kept it. See
ibid. p. 104.
[41] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i. 106.
[42] Vinogradoff, _Villeinage in England_, p. 264.
[43] Andrews, _Old English Manor_, p. 111.
[44] _Domesday of S. Paul_, p. xxxvii.
[45] Thorold Rogers, _Agriculture and Prices_, i. 17: Cunningham,
_Industry and Commerce_, i. 55: Neckham, _De Natura Rerum_, Rolls
Series, ch. clxvi. Rogers says there were no plums, but Neckham
mentions them. See also Denton, _England in the Fifteenth Century_, p.
64. Matthew Paris says the severe winter in 1257 destroyed cherries,
plums and figs. _Chron. Maj._, Rolls Series, v. 660.
[46] Woods were used as much for pasture as for cutting timber and
underwood. Not only did the pigs feed there on the mast of oak, beech,
and chestnut, but goats and horned cattle grazed on the grassy
portions.
[47] The illustrations of contemporary MSS. usually show teams in the
plough of 2 or 4 oxen, and 4 was probably the team generally used,
according to Vinogradoff, _op. cit._ p. 253. It must, of course, have
varied according to the soil. Birch, in his _Domesday_, p. 219, says
he has never found a team of 8 in contemporary illustrations. To-day
oxen can be still seen ploughing in teams of two only. However, about
a hundred years ago, when oxen were in common use, we find teams of 8,
as in Shropshire, for a single-furrow plough, 'so as to work them
easily.' Six hours a day was the usual day's work, and when more was
required one team was worked in the morning, another in the
afternoon.--_Victoria County History: Shropshire, Agriculture_. Walter
of Henley says the team stopped work at three.
[48] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, i. 570.
[49] See the excellent reproductions of the Calendar of the Cott. MSS.
in Green's _Short History of the English People_, illustrated edition,
i. 155.
[50] _De Natura Rerum_, Rolls Series, p, 280.
[51] Vinogradoff, _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p. 307.
[52] Ibid. p. 312. Perhaps one of the most interesting features of the
smaller manors is that they were constantly being swallowed up by the
larger.
[53] As some of the common pasture was held in severalty, this may
perhaps have been mown in scarce years. Walter of Henley mentions
mowing the waste, see below, p. 34.
[54] Maitland, _Domesday Book_, 436; _Board of Agriculture Returns_,
1907.
[55] Vinogradoff, _English Society in the Eleventh Century_, p. 310;
Birch, _Domesday_, p. 183.
[56] Maitland, _Domesday Book_. 44; Cunningham, _Growth of Industry
and Commerce_, i. 171; _Domesday of S. Paul_, pp. xliii. and xci.
[57] Cullum, _History of Hawsted_, p. 181.
[58] Rolls Series, ii. 220. According to this, the price of a bushel
of wheat reckoned in modern money was £3 in that year
[59] Ibid. iii. 220.
[60] Holinshed, who is supported by William of Malmesbury in the
assertion that in time of scarcity England imported corn. Matthew
Paris, _Chron. Maj._, v. 673.
[61] Jusserand, _English Wayfaring Life_, p. 79.
[62] Jusserand, _English Wayfaring Life_, p. 89.
[63] Gilbert Slater, _The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of
Common Fields_, p. 8.