FEUDAL BARONS AT CORN-MARKETS 31 



CHAPTER II. 

 THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR. 1300-1485. 



Great landlords as farmers : horrors of winter scarcity : gradual decay of 

 the manorial system and the increased struggle for life : aspects of the 

 change : common rights over cultivated and uncultivated land : tendency 

 towards separate occupation : substitution of labour-rente for money- 

 rents; the Black Death; Labour legislation, and its effect; Manor of Castle 

 Combe and Berkeley Estates ; new relations of landlords and tenants 

 substituted for old relations of feudal lords and dependents ; tenant- 

 farmers and free labourers ; leases and larger farms ; increase of separate 

 occupations : William Paston and Hugh Latimer ; wage-earning labourers ; 

 voluntary surrender of holdings ; freedom of movement and of contract. 



CHANGES in farming practices are always slow ; without ocular 

 demonstration of their superiority, and without experience of 

 increased profits, new methods are rarely adopted. In the Middle 

 Ages agriculture was a self-supporting industry rather than a 

 profit-making business. The immediate neighbourhood of large 

 towns created markets for the surplus produce that remained after 

 satisfying the needs of the cultivators of the soil. But remoter 

 villages contained neither buyers of produce nor pioneers of improve- 

 ments. Edward I. was a gardener, and Edward II. a farmer, 

 horse-breeder, and thatcher. These royal tastes may have set the 

 fashion. Here and there great lay landowners, as well as great 

 ecclesiastics, actively interested themselves in farming progress. 

 Thomas, first Lord Berkeley, who held the family estates from 1281 

 to 1321, encouraged his tenants to improve their land by marling, 

 or by taking earth from the green highways of the manors. Another 

 famous farmer was his grandson, the third Lord (1326-61). Feudal 

 barons are rarely represented as fumbling in the recesses of their 

 armour for samples of corn. But " few or noe great faires or 

 marketts were in those parts, whereat this lord was not himself, as 

 at Wells, Gloucester, Winchcomb, Tetbury, and others ; where also 

 hee new bought or changed the severall grains that sowed his 



