FARMING IN OLDEN TIMES. 3 



one man might be lord of many manors. Let us very 

 briefly try to realise the conditions of an agricultural 

 estate — i.e., a manor — in the eleventh or twelfth century. 



The conspicuous buildings on a manorial estate were 

 only the church, the manor-house, and perhaps the mill ; 

 the remaining buildings were the homes of the cultivators 

 of the soil, clustered together, as a rule, in a street. The 

 ground plan, indeed, remains in hundreds of villages 

 to-day, but the detached, isolated farmhouses are mostly of 

 later date. The manor-house, with its outbuildings, garden 

 and fishponds, was built either of timber and clay or of 

 stone, for brickmaking was still a forgotten art. It often 

 consisted of a single hall, open to the roof and earth- 

 floored, which served as a court of justice, dining-room 

 and bedchamber. At one end of the hall was a stable, at 

 the other a kitchen, or larder. Below one part of the hall 

 was a cellar, and above another part was a parlour, 

 approached by an outside staircase. There might also be 

 a detached building for the farm servants and a chamber 

 for the bailiff. The outbuildings comprised bakehouse, 

 dairy, cattle and poultry houses, granary and dovecot. 1 



Beyond the lord's household the population of a manor 

 consisted of three main classes, who in modern language 

 may be described as tenant farmers (villani) , smallholders 

 {cottarii) and labourers (servi). (There were also, mostly 

 in the Eastern counties, a number of " free tenants " and 

 ' sokemen," who were perhaps more analogous to the 

 modern tenant farmer.) These three main classes com- 

 prised 79 per cent, of the total population of England, 

 tenant farmers representing 32 per cent., smallholders 

 38 per cent., and labourers, or serfs, 9 per cent. 2 The 

 last-named class held no land, and seem, in fact, to have 

 been household thralls of the lord ; but there was, even in 

 the thirteenth century, a certain amount of casual labour, 

 the inhabitants of the towns migrating into the neigh- 



1 Prothero, " English Farming, Past and Present," pp. 5 et seq. 

 % " The English Village Community," p. 90. 



B 2 



