66 The Tenants and their Land. 1272 — 1306. [ch. 



and the whole number of services of this kind due from the entire 

 manors Granting this assumption, a proportion may be formed 

 from the three known quantities that will give the total number of 

 tenements upon which a given service was formerly charged. The 

 data required for forming the proportion are obtained from the 

 account rolls. 



°/o ^f "^orks and payments decayed. 



In drawing up that part of the account that relates to the services 

 and customs due from the tenants of the manor the method was 

 regularly followed of first setting down the total number of services 

 of any kind with which the whole manor was charged, and then 

 recording how many of these services had been performed or sold or 

 were decayed. The number of the different sorts of services thus 

 charged upon the manor varied little from year to year. A com- 

 parison of the rolls of 1272 and 1376 shows that, except in the case 

 of summer works, there was little change in this respect for more 

 than a century. This the following table shows. 



1 It would be difficult to prove positively the validity of this assumption, unless precisely 

 what is sought for were already known, viz. the total number of tenements charged with a 

 given service ; but certain considerations make it probable that the ratios in question do not 

 differ very widely from one another. For, first, in the case of certain services and payments 

 the amount rendered by the several decayed tenements was uniform. Hence it seems probable 

 that the tenements that had not decayed likewise rendered, severally, the same amount of 

 these kinds of services. If this were so the ratios in question would clearly be the same. 

 Further, in most of the cases where the burden was not laid upon the several tenements with 

 exact uniformity, it was nevertheless imposed with a high degree of regularity. Again, as 

 the above table indicates, the number of decayed services is a large proportion of the total 

 number of services charged upon the manor. 



