LABOUR MORE NEEDED THAN MONEY 7 



into the village farm, or dealt with as to portions in each of these 

 three ways. But whether the land was treated as a compact 

 whole, Kke a modern home-farm, or whether the landlord, as a 

 shareholder in the village association, allowed it to be cut up into 

 strips and intermixed with other holdings, the demesne was mainly 

 cultivated by the labour services of the unfree peasantry. The 

 rest of the land of the manor, forming the larger portion of the 

 cultivated area, was farmed by village partners, whose rent chiefly 

 consisted in the labour, more or less definite in amount, which they 

 were obhged to perform on the lord's demesne. 



In this method of cultivating a manorial estate there are many 

 contrasts with the modern system. The three-fold division of the 

 agricultural interests into landlord, tenant farmer, and wage- 

 earning labourer was practically unknown. Landowner and tenant- 

 labourer owned, occupied, and cultivated the soil, and the gradual 

 relaxation of the labourer's tenure of the land, and the inter- 

 position of the tenant farmer between the two existing classes, 

 sum up the early social history of Enghsh farming. In the thirteenth 

 century, muscles were more essential to the prosperity of the land- 

 lord than money rents. The cultivators of the soil grew their 

 produce, not for sale, but for their own consumption. Each manor 

 or village was isolated and self-sufficing. Only in the neighbour- 

 hood of towns was there any market for the produce of the farm. 

 Few manufactured articles were bought. Salt, tar, iron (bought in 

 four-pound bars), mill-stones, steel for tipping the edges of imple- 

 ments, canvas for the sails of the wind-mill, cloths for use in the 

 dairy, in the malthouse, or in the grange, together with the dresses 

 of the inhabitants of the hall, and a few vessels of brass, copper, or 

 earthenware, satisfied the simple needs of the rural population. 

 Hands were therefore more required than money on manorial 

 estates. If the manor was well stocked with labour, the land paid ; 

 when the stock of labour shrank, the profits dwindled. It was in 

 order to retain a sufficient supply of labour on the land that bond- 

 men were restrained from leavmg the manor to assume the tonsure 

 of the clerk or the flat cap of the apprentice, to become soldiers 

 or to work outside the manor. Even their marriages were carefully 

 controlled by licences. It was, again, in order to exact and super- 

 vise the due performance of labour services that the lord of the 

 manor maintained his large official staff — his seneschal, if he owned 

 several manors, his steward, his bailiff, and the various foremen of 



