36 THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR 



of competition to money rents and money wages ; in another, it 

 encouraged enterprising tenants to I'ecognise that the best results 

 of farming could only be obtained on compact holdings, large enough 

 for the employment of money as well as of labour. 



The tendency towards the separate occupation and individual 

 management of land had already begun, though it was most marked 

 on the new land which was brought into cultivation. On the ancient 

 arable land it was checked by the rights of common which were 

 enjoyed, not only over the waste, but over the open arable fields. 

 In their origin these rights were arable and attached only to arable 

 land. Each occupier of an arable holding was entitled to graze on 

 the common pastures the horses and oxen required for his tillage 

 operations, and to feed the sheep needed for manuring his cultivated 

 land. Without this right the associated partners in the common 

 venture of farming would have had no means of supporting their 

 beasts after the crops were sown. Common rights of pasture were 

 therefore integral portions of, and essential adjuncts to, the ancient 

 tillage system.^ No rights of common of pasture could be claimed 

 by the general pubhc. The only persons by whom they could be 

 acquired and enjoyed were the occupiers of arable holdings. It was 

 as occupiers of portions of the tilled land, which was in fact or in 

 theory attached to their homes, that cottagers claimed and exercised 

 grazmg privileges. On most manors three distinct kinds of common 

 rights existed. The first kind is, in this connection, unimportant, 

 though its creation marks an improvement in agricultural practices 

 and a step towards the break-up of the early open-field system. It 

 arose when the partners in a village farm agreed, Avith the sanction 

 of the lord of the manor, to set aside a portion of their joint arable 

 holdings for pasture, to be used m common in a " stinted " or 

 regulated manner. " There is commonly," says Fitzherbert,^ " a 

 common close taken in out of the common fields by tenants of the 

 same towne, in which close every man is stinted and set to a cer- 

 taintie how many beasts he shall have in common." The second 

 class of common of pasture consisted of rights enjoyed by the 

 partners of the agrarian association over the whole cultivated area 

 of the village farm, both over the arable portion that lay fallow in 

 rotation, and over all the other arable lands and meadows, after 

 the crops had been cleared and before the land was again sown or 



^ See chapter i. pp. 23-27. 



2 The Boke of Surveyeng and Improvementea (1523), ed. 1539, chap. ix. 



