common waste, the rules for fencing and removal of hedges, the decisions as to rights of way over the "communal fields," and the maintenance of roads and paths. All this left little room for innovation or change, and the more enterprising farmer, tied hand and foot by the tyranny of custom and his dependence upon his neighbours, was not allowed to use his land to the best advantage. The culture of open fields afforded no scope for the exercise of special skill and no opportunity to try experiments. The husbandman had to plough and reap at the appointed times and work in accordance with time-honoured principles, however obsolete and futile. The system of intermixed holdings and the practice of co-aration largely help to explain why mediaeval husbandry remained for centuries so backward.

On the other hand, it is fair to remark that mediaeval agriculture was not altogether without its compensations. It served at any rate to prevent excessive negligence, for a definite standard of tillage could be maintained where every peasant worked under the eyes of his neighbours, and was subjected to the unremitting supervision of the manorial officials. Moreover, village life in the Middle Ages, in spite of a certain isolation and self-dependency, was much exposed to the disturbances of war. The tiller of the soil was often summoned away from the plough to meet his country's enemies, or to fight the king's quarrels with a turbulent nobility, and the fields were then abandoned to the care of those who remained at home. This would favour a system of joint husbandry and indeed render it an indispensable condition of tillage. But the real merit of the open-field system lay in the advantages it afforded to the small farmer and the rural labourer. Where the system of scattered ownership prevailed, every labourer enjoyed an opportunity to occupy a few acres of land and so attain some degree of economic independence; every cottager could strive to improve his position, adding strip to strip as economy and thrift enlarged his scanty resources; while, above all, rights of common proved an invaluable provision for poor and struggling villagers. The result of the enclosing movement, on the other hand, was ultimately to divorce the labourer from ownership of the soil, to develop the growth of large farms, to accumulate land in the hands of the few, and to drive the rural population from the country into the towns.

24. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MANORIAL GROUP1 The fundamental characteristic of the manorial group, regarded from the economic point of view, was its self-sufficiency, its social independence. The introduction of new tenants from outside was indeed always possible, either to take the place of villeins who had died without children, or to occupy portions of the demesne or waste. But it was probably very rare; the same families tilled the village fields from father to son. Each manor had its own law courts for the maintenance of order. Then, as now, every village had its church; with this advantage or disadvantage, whichever it may be reckoned, as compared with modern times, that the priest did not belong to a different social class from his parishioners. Indeed, in perhaps onehalf of the villages, he was as poor as most of them: for when the advowson belonged to an ecclesiastical body, the patrons took to themselves the tithes, and appointed a vicar who had often to be contented with the altar-dues for his subsistence, so that he was glad enough to get a few acres and add to his income by joining in the common agriculture.

The village included men who carried on all the occupations and crafts necessary for everyday life. There was always a water mill or a windmill, which the tenants of the manor were bound to use, paying dues which formed a considerable fraction of the lord's income. Again and again we find the lord's servants seizing the handmills of which the tenants had dared to make use in detriment of his rights. For a long time the lords kept the mills in their own hands, under the care of bailiffs, making what profit they could thereby, but in the twelfth century it began to be the practice to let the mill to one of the villeins at an annual rent, or ferm. Many villages, though not all, had their own blacksmith and carpenter, who probably were at first. communal officers, holding land on condition of repairing the ploughs of the demesne and of the villagers; though in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries this service also came to be commuted for money, and the craftsmen received pay for each piece of work. Another village officer, who sometimes appears as holding land in virtue of his high office, was the pounder.

The village "general shop" had not yet come into existence; in many places it did not appear until the present century; partly

1

Adapted by permission from W. J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory: The Middle Ages, pp. 33-37. (Longmans, Green, & Co.,

because many of the wants which it meets were not yet felt, partly because such wants as were felt were supplied either by journeys at long intervals to some distant fair or market, or by the labour of the family itself. The women wove rough linen and woolen cloth for clothing; the men tanned their own leather.

Thus the inhabitants of an average English village went onyear in, year out-with the same customary methods of cultivation, living on what they produced, and scarcely coming in contact with the outside world. The very existence of towns, indeed, implied that the purely agricultural districts produced more than they required for their own consumption; and corn and cattle were regularly sent, even to distant markets, by lords of manors and their bailiffs, in increasing quantities as the great lords or corporations came to desire money payments instead of payments in kind. But the other dealings of the villagers with the outside world were very few. First, there was the purchase of salt, an absolute necessity in the mediaeval world, when people lived on salted meat for five months in the year. The salt most commonly used came from the southern coast, especially the Cinque Ports, where it was made by the evaporation of sea water. The West of England drew large supplies from the salt-works at Droitwich, belonging to Worcester Priory. There was a large importation also of salt of a better quality from Guienne. Secondly, iron was continually needed for the ploughs and other farm implements. It was to be had both of home manufacture, especially from the weald of Sussex, and of foreign importation, chiefly from Spain; and it was bought at fairs and markets. It was the general practice for the bailiff to make large purchases of iron and keep it in stock, handing over to the blacksmith the necessary quantities as they were needed for the repair of the lord's ploughs. A very dry summer caused much wear and tear of implements, and consequently an increased demand and a higher price; so that the bailiff's accounts frequently mention the "dearness of iron on account of drought." A further need was felt when, at the end of the thirteenth century, a fresh disease, the scab, appeared among the sheep, and tar became of great importance as a remedy. It was produced in Norway, and exported by the Hanse merchants from Bergen to the Norfolk ports. In years of murrain the cost incurred under this head was a considerable item in the bailiff's expenses. Perhaps the only other regular recurring need, which the village could not itself supply, was that of millstones. Of these the better qualities came from the neighborhood of Paris, and were

brought to the ports on the Eastern and Southern coasts, whither we often find the bailiff or miller journeying to purchase them. The duty of assisting the bailiff in conveying the millstone from the neighboring town was sometimes an obligation weighing on all the tenants of a manor, free and villein alike.

Not only was the village group thus self-contained and complete within itself; the sense of unity was so strong that it was able to act as a corporate body. From early times the great lords, possessing manors at a distance which they could not easily inspect themselves or by their stewards, had let them for fourteen, twenty-one, or thirtyfive years at a ferm, or fixed annual payment, to men who would take the place of the lord and try to make a profit. Now, we find many cases, even as early as 1183, in which the whole body of villeins, the villata, of particular manors made contracts with their lords identical with those which an individual firmar might have made, promising an annual sum and taking the management of the land into their own hands.

25. THE MANOR VERSUS THE MODERN VILLAGE'

It is instructive to compare the village, as we have seen it, with the village of today.

I. In one respect there might seem to be a close resemblance. Then, as usually now, the village was made up of one street, with a row of houses on each side. But the inhabitants of the village street now are the labourers, the one or two village artisans-such as a tailor, a blacksmith, a saddler, a cobbler-and one or two small shopkeepers. The farmers live in separate homesteads among the fields they rent, and not in the village street. Then all the cultivators of the soil lived side by side.

II. Secondly, notice the difference as to the agricultural operations themselves. Now each farmer follows his own judgment in what he does. He sows each field with what he thinks fit, and when he sees fit, and chooses his own time for each of the agricultural operations. But the peasant farmer of the period we have been considering, and for long afterwards, was bound to take his share in a common system of cultivation, in which the time at which everything should be done and the way in which everything should be done were regulated by custom enforced by the manor courts.

I

Taken by permission from W. J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory: The Middle Ages, pp. 40-43. (Longmans, Green, & Co.,

III. A further difference is seen in the relations of lord and tenant as to the cultivation. Nowadays either the landlord does not himself farm any land in the parish, or, if he does, his management of it is as independent of the cultivation of any other land by any tenants he may have as that of his tenants is of his own farming. But then almost all the labour upon the demesne was furnished by the villein tenants, who contributed ploughs, oxen, and men for the bailiff's disposal. Long after commutation of services had largely taken place the lords retained the right to assistance in all the more important processes-ploughing, reaping, threshing, carting. And the demesne itself was often made up in great part of virgates in the common fields, so that the lord himself was bound to submit, so far as these were concerned, to the same rigid system of joint cultivation as was maintained by the rest of the members of the village community.

IV. Compare, finally, the classes in a manor with those in a village today. In a modern parish there will usually be a squire, some three or four farmers-all of them large farmers when compared with peasant holders—and beneath them a comparatively large number of agricultural labourers. Even when the agricultural labourer has a good garden or an allotment, there is still a great gulf between him and the farmer of a couple of hundred acres. But in the mediaeval manor, as we have seen, much the greater part of the land was cultivated by small holders. Between the lord of the manor and the villein tenants there was, indeed, a great gulf fixed-a gulf wider far than that between the farmer and the squire of today. And it was probably a hard matter for the cotter to rise to be a yardling. But, putting the lord on one side, there was nothing like that social separation between the various classes of actual cultivators that there is today. The yardling and cotter worked in the same way; their manner of life was the same; and in the system of joint cultivation and the life of the village street they were made to feel their common interests.

It may be well to notice the non-existence in the village group of certain elements which modern abstract economics is apt to take for granted. Individual liberty, in the sense in which we understand it, did not exist; consequently, there could be no such complete competition as we are wont to postulate. The payments made by the villeins are not rents in the abstract economist's sense, for the economist assumes competition, assumes that landlord and farmer are guided only by commercial principles; that there is an average rate of profit, which the farmer knows; that he will not take less and cannot get