XIV INTRODUCTION 



little to offer for sale ; if his granary was full and all pos- 

 sible requirements were provided for, he would be willing 

 to sell the surplus corn, if he could get a good price for it. 

 But if the harvest had been a scanty one, he would have 

 little if anything to spare, as he had to look to home re- 

 quirements first of all, and if the price was very low he 

 might prefer to store his grain rather than sell it at a very 

 low figure. This is a statement of the policy he aimed at, 

 but in practice it could not be fully carried out ; metals 

 and salt would be wanted on estates where they could only 

 be procured by trade. It would hardly have been possible 

 to levy a Danegeld unless rural proprietors generally were 

 accustomed to sell a portion of the produce and to lay up 

 a hoard of silver ; but the circulating medium was not 

 always available, and fiscal obligations were sometimes dis- 

 charged in kind as late as the time of Henry I. The rural 

 proprietors frequently had to buy and attempted to sell, 

 but they had no occasion to open up new markets or develop 

 internal trade, as the policy of each was to do without trade 

 as far as possible. 



The surplus available for sale would, generally speaking, 

 bear a very small proportion to the total crop. The seed was 

 generally provided by the villans, but the necessary stores for 

 their rations on boon days, together with the supplies for 

 the lord and his household, must have absorbed the greater 

 part. In some estates, where the owner was not even an 

 occasional visitor but an absentee, there would be no need 

 to retain provisions for his table ; hence on monastic estates, 

 when situated at a distance from the monastery, it would 

 be convenient to sell a larger proportion of the produce and 

 to transmit the value to the abbey. It is thus obvious that, 

 even on adjoining estates, there might be considerable dif- 

 ferences in the degree in which their respective managers 

 ventured to have recourse to trade ; some might be able to 

 sell half the produce or more in ordinary years, while others 

 would be forced to retain almost the whole crop to meet the 

 requirements of the villans and the household. 



It is hardly conceivable that there could be regular 



