40 THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR 



tinuously and exclusively, to the cultivation of their own holdings. 

 Their places on the demesne land were taken by wage-earning farm- 

 servants or hired labourers, recruited from the landless sons of 

 tenants, or from cottagers who either had no holding at all or not 

 enough to supply them with the necessaries of life. Thus there 

 were hired farm-servants and day-labourers cultivating the 

 demesne land for money wages ; tenants paying money rents 

 only for their holdings ; others who still paid then- whole rent 

 in produce or in labour ; others whose labour services had been 

 partially commuted for money payments, either for a period or 

 permanently. 



The local and gradual break-up of the manorial organisation of 

 agricultural labour was accelerated by the Black Death (1348-9). 

 Entering England through the port of Weymouth in August, 1348, 

 the plague spread to the north before it died out in the autumn of 

 the following year. It had been preceded by several years of 

 dearth and pestilence, and it was succeeded by four outbreaks of 

 similar disease before the end of the century. During its ravages 

 it destroyed from one-third to one-half of the population. Lords 

 of manors suffered both as owners of land and as employers of 

 labour. Whole families were swept away, and large quantities of 

 land were thrown on the hands of landlords by the deaths of free- 

 holders and customary tenants without heirs or descendants. 

 Numbers of bondmen took advantage of the general confusion, 

 threw up their holdings, escaped into the towns, or joined the ranks 

 of free labourers. Their derelict holdings increased the mass of 

 untenanted land, and their flight diminished the amount of resident 

 labour available for the cultivation of the home farm. Those 

 tenants who remained on the manor found in the landlord's diffi- 

 culty their opportunity of demanding increased wages, of commuting 

 labour services for money payments, 1 of enlarging the size of their 



1 Before the Black Death, on 81 manors, the services of tenants supplied 

 the necessary farm labour on the demesnes in the following proportions : 

 on 44, the whole ; on 22, the half ; on 9, an inconsiderable portion ; on 6, 

 all labour services were commuted. After the Black Death (1371-80), on 

 126 manors, the proportions were as follows : on 22, the whole ; on 25, the 

 half ; on 39, an inconsiderable portion ; on 40, all labour services were com- 

 muted. The End of Villainage in England, by T. W. Page (Publications of 

 the American Economic Association, May, 1900), pp. 44-40, 59-65. 



Miss Davenport (The Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor, 1906, 

 pp. 52, 58) says that, out of 3219 services charged on the lands of Forncett 

 Manor in 1376, only 195 were available in 1406. 



