CHAPTER I. 

 THE MANORIAL SYSTEM OF FARMING. 



Virgin soils : traces of sites of early villages : " wild field-grass" husbandry ; 

 the permanent division of pasture from tillage ; manors and trade-guilds ; 

 origin of manors ; the thirteenth century manor and village ; divisions 

 of land according to differences of tenure ; villages isolated and self- 

 sufficing; importance of labour-rents in the economy of a manor; the 

 cultivation of the demesne ; the crops grown ; the live-stock ; miscel- 

 laneous produce ; the manorial courts : the social grades among the 

 villagers ; the system of open-field farming ; the arable land ; the meadows ; 

 the hams ; the pasture commons ; the prevalence and permanence of 

 the open-field system ; the domestic industries of the village. 



Improvements in the art and science of English agriculture were 

 in its infancy dependent on the exhaustion of virgin soils. So 

 long as land was abundant, and the people few or migratory, no 

 rotation of crops was needed. Fresh land could be ploughed each 

 year. It was only when numbers had increased and settlements 

 became permanent, that farmers were driven to devise methods of 

 cultivation which restored or maintained the fertility of their 

 holdings. 



The progress of farming is recorded in legal documents, in manorial 

 accounts, in agricultural literature. But the story is also often 

 preserved in the external aspect which the land, the villages, or the 

 hedgerows bear in the twentieth century. Dry uplands, where the 

 least labour told the most, were first occupied and cultivated ; 

 rich valleys, damp and filled with forest growth, remained unin- 

 habited and untilled. In spite of difiiculties of water-supply, 

 light or sandy soils, or chalky highlands seem to have been the 

 sites of the oldest villages. Patches of the lower slopes of downs 

 were cleared of self-sown beech, and sheltered dips tilled for corn ; 

 the high ground behind was grazed by flocks and herds ; the beech 

 woods supplied mast for the swine. Sahsbury Plain, a century 

 ago, bore no sign of human life except the proverbial " thief or 



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