40 ENGLISH RURAL LIFE 



English peasant did not have the intelligence to 

 build himself a wind and weather proof house. 

 Materials would come from the woods and wastes, 

 where ample timber was, in most manors, to be had 

 for the cutting. The walls of his home might be of 

 logs, or of wattle daubed with clay, or of rough stones 

 like an old-fashioned Irish cabin, or of clay bats or 

 clunch or turf, according to what was procurable in 

 the locality. The roof would be thatched with reeds 

 or straw. There could have been but little furniture 

 in such a house, the only household belongings of the 

 peasant of any value being his cooking pots. Brush- 

 wood, fern or straw would serve for beds. A wood 

 fire would burn in the centre of the room, from which 

 the smoke would find its way through a hole in the 

 roof. Round the house would be a yard, some out- 

 houses and perhaps a garden : this little holding might 

 still, as in Anglo-Saxon times, be called a toft, a name 

 still in use at Laxton. Such a toft would be occupied 

 by a freeman or a bondsman. The former might 

 perhaps have an enclosed farm of his own, but such 

 a condition was probably rare, and the freeman's 

 holding would approximate to the villein's now to be 

 described ; the difference between the condition of 

 freeman and bondsman lying, not in the nature of their 

 land, but in the fact that freemen's obligations were 

 less arduous than bondsmen's, whilst the freemen were 

 not astricted and their rights were protected by the 

 national law. The extent of the villeins' holdings 

 varied in the same manor, and in this, as in almost 

 all other details, the holdings differed in one manor 

 from another. But every villein toft-owner would have 

 a definite holding that went with the house. This 

 holding, if of the ordinary type, would consist of 



