34 THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR 



with its products. Famine trod hard on the heels of feasting. It 

 was not only that prices rose and fell with extraordinary rapidity ; 

 but both for men and beasts the absolute scarcity of winter always 

 succeeded the relative plenty of autumn. Except in monastic 

 granges no great quantities of grain were stored, and mediaeval 

 legislators eyed corn-dealers with the same hostility with which 

 modern engineers of wheat corners are regarded by their victims. 

 The husbandman's golden rule must have been often forgotten 

 that at Candlemas half the fodder and all the corn must be 

 untouched. Even the most prudent housekeepers found it difficult 

 always to remember the proverbial wisdom of eating within the 

 tether, or sparing at the brink instead of the bottom. Many, like 

 Panurge, eat their corn in the blade. Equally violent were the 

 alternations in the employment afforded by mediaeval farming. 

 Weeks of feverish activity passed suddenly into months of com- 

 parative indolence. Winter was in fact a season to be dreaded 

 alike by the husbandman and his cattle, and it is not without good 

 cause that the joyousness of spring is the key-note of early English 

 poetry. 



Under the conditions which prevailed in the fourteenth and 

 fifteenth centuries, little advance in farming practices could be 

 expected. During the greater part of the period, therefore, the 

 history of agriculture centres round those economic, social, and 

 political changes which shaped its future progress. Under the 

 pressure of these influences the structure of feudal society was 

 undermined. The social mould, in which the mediaeval world had 

 been cast, crumbled to powder under a series of transformations, 

 which, though they worked without combination or regularity, 

 proved to be, from the latter half of the fourteenth century onwards, 

 collectively and uniformly irresistible. From within, as well as 

 from without, the manor as an organisation for regulating rural 

 labour and administering local affairs was breaking up. As money 

 grew more plentiful, it became more and more universally the basis 

 on which services were regulated. Commerce, as it expanded, 

 cieated new markets for the sale of the produce of the soil. Parlia- 

 ment assumed new duties ; the Royal Courts of Justice extended 

 their jurisdiction ; and, as a consequence, manorial courts lost some 

 of their importance in matters of local self-government. Land was 

 beginning to be regarded as a source of income, not of military 

 power. As landowning became a business and farming a trade, 



