X INTRODUCTION 



farms. In the thirteenth century, however, there were 

 only two economic classes, 1 not three, and the lord had a 

 large home farm or domain land which was his chief source 

 of income. 



This home farm was cultivated by the labour of the 

 villans, who were required to spend on it so many days 

 each week, according to the season of the year, and who 

 had to discharge certain occasional services as well. In 

 return the lord supplied them with small holdings which 

 they could cultivate on their own account on any days 

 when they were not obliged to be at work on the domain 

 lands ; and the villan when he entered on his holding 

 received an outfit from the lord of the stock which was 

 requisite to work ' his holding. The villan may thus be 

 regarded as a labourer on the home farm, whose regular 

 days of labour (week work, dies operabiles) and times of 

 special employment (boon work, precaiice) were accurately 

 denned, and whose rations on his working days were care- 

 fully specified, but who had all the rest of his time to himself, 

 and whose chief maintenance came from his own holding. 

 The villan was not paid wages like the modern labourer, 

 but in an ordinary way he worked three days a week on the 

 domain land, he gave besides extra days in autumn, 

 and performed other incidental duties, and he had in return 

 his meals on some of the working days, and a holding 

 (virgata) of about thirty acres, which his lord stocked with 

 a yoke of oxen and half-a-dozen sheep when the villan 

 first entered on his tenancy. 



By a process which has many parallels in feudal times, 

 the obligations which originally attached to the villans per- 

 sonally came to be connected with the holdings they 

 enjoyed. We thus get the whole of the villan's virgates 

 spoken of as servile land, and the obligations of work on 



1 There were, of course, an extra- tenants (and the redditus assises, 



ordinary number of social grades, cf. p. 60), as their relations to the 



whose status differed for legal pur- manorial lord appear to have been 



poses ; the statement above has fiscal, and they lay outside the 



mere reference to an economic ordinary processes of agriculture as 



grouping. It also ignores the free he was concerned in directing them. 



