INTRODUCTION xi 



the domain land can be best regarded as incident to the 

 tenure of a piece of servile land. We might thus have a 

 freeman who was not personally of villan status, but who 

 had undertaken to work a plot of servile land, and was to 

 that extent obliged to render his quota of villan services on 

 the domain land. From this point of view it is easy to see 

 that the relation of the villan to his lord may be compared, 

 not with that of the modern labourer, as is done above, but 

 with that of the modern farmer. He may be regarded as 

 a tenant who received a certain area of land ready stocked, 

 and who in return paid a rent in the form of service. 



The successful working of the domain land was the 

 really important thing for the lord in considering the man- 

 agement of his estates ; and the main element of success 

 depended on the labour available. The science of agri- 

 culture was in its infancy, root crops were unknown, and 

 there were no artificial grasses; a system of rotation as 

 practised in the present day was impossible. On some 

 estates each field was allowed to lie fallow every other year 

 (two-field system), on other estates every third year (three- 

 field system), and these different methods are described in 

 Walter of Henley's treatise. Though they were accus- 

 tomed to manure the land, and in some districts used marl, 

 they did comparatively little in the way of drainage. 1 

 Modern methods of agriculture and the modern applica- 

 tion of capital to land were impracticable. The one 

 necessity was labour ; from the estate which was well 

 stocked with men and with oxen a fair income could be 

 derived ; but if there was no labour available, the estate 

 could only have a prairie value. The consequence is that 

 the variations in the value of land at any time of social 

 convulsion might be very great ; if the labourers deserted 

 the estate, or died, the value declined immensely ; while if 

 the estate were restocked with labour, its value would 

 be restored almost as rapidly as it had sunk. The curious 

 variations in the value (not merely in the rating) of the 



1 See, however, Thorold Rogers, Agriculture and Prices, 1. 19, and in the 

 Glossary,' s.v. asseuer. 



