ANGLO-SAXON VILLAGE COMMUNITY 15 



and their lords. Every tun was regulated by its own 

 customs, and every estate was managed in its own 

 way ; there was no uniformity. Moreover, whilst most 

 of the tuns were of the form described above, and were 

 inhabited by the various classes of people already 

 referred to, this was not always so. There were villages 

 consisting of freemen of military origin, there were 

 villages of peasant farmers only, and there were slave 

 colonies working under the direction of a bailiff. The 

 variation of character both in the estates and the 

 village communities was, in early days, most marked *in 

 those parts of England where Celtic customs remained 

 unchanged, and later on in the districts which were 

 colonized by the Danes. 



Conditions of life were always changing. The 

 custom of dividing yearly the strips of arable land by 



lot disappeared in very early days, though 

 The develop- in a few places it continued for many 

 iTfe nt< J centuries. 1 When it disappeared the 



peasant families would have had permanent 

 occupation of their scattered strips, and whilst recog- 

 nizing the rights that existed in most communities of 

 grazing stock over all fallow land, they must have come 

 to consider themselves owners of the land they occupied. 

 Again, some of the larger farmers, as time went on, 

 kept their own ploughs and teams and cultivated their 

 land without having to resort to the common plough. 

 Moreover, /fn some places, as generations passed and 

 population grew, a third great open field would come 

 into cultivation : then a new rotation would be 

 introduced, every field in turn being cultivated in the 



1 In Gomme's "Village Community" a case of such annual 

 redivision is mentioned as still occurring in the XlXth century. 



