A HISTORY OF DURHAM 



offence to destroy the herbage on these balks, or to damage them in any way,^ 

 for they were as much landmarks as the merstanes, or markstones, which 

 parted holdings and estates.* In early times, when the agricultural com- 

 munity was in its primitive form, every man had one-third of his holding in 

 each of the three fields, and in each field his holding was scattered about the 

 various sheths or flattes, so that no two rigs lay together. It is clear from 

 various things in the rolls that this ideal system had ceased to correspond 

 to the actual even before the Black Death ; but even in the fourteenth 

 century no two men were allowed to change their rigs without the lord's 

 consent, for which, of course, they had to pay.* The various balks and paths 

 naturally wasted a great deal of the common fields, to say nothing of the 

 misfortunes that a careless farmer might bring to his more industrious neigh- 

 bours, but the system underwent no great change till the great inclosures of 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is customary with some writers 

 to instance the open field system as a proof of the Anglo-Saxon sturdy love of 

 equality, but the probable explanation is that few peasants were rich enough 

 to provide the team of eight oxen, or oxen and horses, which were needed to 

 draw the cumbrous wooden plough then in use, and so the four nearest neigh- 

 bours found two beasts each, and by having their holdings in strips they 

 ensured that each of them should be able to reap their crops at the same time. 

 It is quite possible that the strips were originally changed each year, but the 

 rolls sanction no theory of co-ownership ; co-operation and co-aration are far 

 better terms to use in this connexion. Legally, the whole land of the vill 

 belonged to the lord, and the tenant's privileges were dependent upon his 

 occupation of a cottage or messuage to which a certain amount of land was 

 attached by custom. 



Not much is told us of the way in which the peasantry tilled their land, 

 but there are no indications of special progress or backwardness in historic 

 times. From the payments referred to in Boldon Book it is clear that oats 

 were the most important crop in early times, at any rate between the Tyne 

 and Wear, but wheat was also grown in large quantities. That oats were at 

 first the more common is to be deduced from the fact that the work of the 

 peasantry was among the oat crop at Boldon, while their payment of grain in 

 kind also took the form of oats, probably because it was the main crop. The 

 demesne lands, however, paid as part of their rent i6 chalders of wheat, 

 1 6 chalders of oats, and 8 chalders of barley. Under what circumstances 

 wheat ousted oats as the premier crop of the tenantry we do not know, but 

 in the earliest surviving Halmote Roll, that for 1296, we find that at Bil- 

 lingham 7 acres of wheat and 2 acres of barley were worth 6^. %d. per acre, 

 while, presumably in the second field, 3 acres of beans and peas and 7 acres 

 of oats were only worth 2j. an acre.* After the Black Death both wheat 

 and barley showed a tendency to rise in value, and oats shared the movement. 

 In 1373, at Bellasis in Billinghamshire, wheat was valued at 6j-. 8^. an acre, 

 rising perhaps to 8j., while barley might range from ioj. to 15X., but only 

 7 acres of Bellasis manor were devoted to barley, as opposed to 66 acres under 

 wheat. Oats, peas, and hay were each worth /\.s^ In 1376, at the neigh- 

 bouring village of Wolviston, an acre of wheat was worth loj-., and an acre 



' Dur. Halmote R. (Surtees Soc. Ixxxii), 67. ' Ibid. 26, 27, 52, 87, &c. 



' Ibid. 80; Dur. Curs. No. 12, fol. 63. ■■ Dur. Halmote R. (Surtees Soc. Ixxxii), I. ' Ibid. 120-1. 



196 



