6 AN AGRICULTURAL FAGGOT. 



pleted by Edward the Confessor (now known as West- 

 minster), was on the manor of an abbot. 



It consisted of 25 houses of the abbot's immediate followers, 

 19 homesteads of villani, 42 cottagers with their little gardens, 

 and one of them with 5 acres of land. There was also the 

 larger homestead of the sub-manor of the abbot's under-tenant, 

 with a single cottage and a vineyard of four half-acres newly 

 planted. There was meadow enough by the riverside to make 

 hay for the herd of oxen belonging to the dozen plough-teams 

 of the village, and pasture for them and other cattle. Further 

 round the village in open fields were about 1,000 acres of arable 

 land mostly in acre strips, lying no doubt in their shots or 

 furlongs, and divided by green turf balks and field-ways. 

 Lastly, surrounding the whole on the land side were the woods, 

 where the swineherd found mast for the 200 pigs of the place. 1 



This was the structure of English rural life, which, 

 except for a gradual tendency to commute personal 

 service into more definite and less irksome forms of rent, 

 and a tendency also to relax the rigidity of the bonds 

 which held tenant and serf alike bound to the manor, 

 remained practically universal and unchanged until the 

 fourteenth century. The manor was not only the 

 agricultural unit, self-contained and self-sufficient, but 

 also the social unit holding the community together, by 

 economic interests as well as by semi-patriarchal rules. 

 But while the power of the lord was great, his authority 

 was not altogether despotic. There were customs of the 

 manor which regulated and circumscribed his rights, 

 while in the common life of the village, the community 

 was, subject to the lord's rights, self-governing. 



In the middle of the fourteenth century we come to 

 the " great watershed of English economic history " — 

 the Black Death (1348-9), which destroyed from one- 

 third to one-half the total population. It was no 

 respecter of persons. The King's daughter was a victim, 

 and three Archbishops of Canterbury perished in the 

 same year. 



1 " The English Village Community," p. 98. 



