SKETCH OF MODERN AGRICULTURE 



45 



Inflexibility of the manorial system. As suggested above, 

 the open-field system prevailed on the manors, as it had within 

 the village communities. There grew up a great many special 

 offices, such as cowherd, shepherd, swineherd, etc., whose duties 

 consisted in looking after the live stock of the entire village 

 while it was out on the common pasture. All of these offices 

 tended to become hereditary, being handed down from father 

 to son, as a matter of legal right, generation after generation. 

 The same rigid customs prevailed with respect to the rotation 

 of different crops and the time and manner of harvesting them. 

 Thus there was very little room for private initiative except 

 on the part of the lords, and the art of agriculture made very 

 little advancement. Even the change from the two-field to the 

 three-field system, obvious as the advantages of the change 

 must; have been, came about very slowly. It could not come 

 about in a village until the majority could be convinced that it 

 was desirable, and it is difficult to convince the average man by 

 words alone that there is a better way of doing a thing than the 

 way he has always been doing it. Under a more individualistic 

 system the change could have been made by one man as soon as 

 there was one man wise enough to see the advantage of it. His 

 success, if it proved a success, would have convinced his neigh- 

 bors much sooner than argumentation and arithmetic could have 

 convinced them. Accordingly, it is no accident that the next 

 stage i in the progress of English agriculture was delayed until 

 after the break-up of the manorial system. 



Decay of the manor. The transition from the manorial to the 

 modern individualistic system of rural economy was a long and 

 complicated process, which need not be described in detail. In 

 fact, historians are not agreed as to many of these details. Two 

 practices which grew up in England after the thirteenth cen- 

 tury may be said to have been chiefly instrumental in bringing 

 the manorial system to an end. These are called commutation, 



