OWNERSHIP AND TENANCY. 119 



houses have disappeared and a number of smaller huts have 

 arisen, each occupied by a householder and his immediate family, 

 that is to say, his wife and children. They are built as a rule 

 close together and form what we might call a street. The 

 cultivation of the arable land is on much the same lines except 

 that the heavy cumbersome plough drawn by eight oxen has 

 gone as a rule and a lighter wooden plough drawn by four or 

 two oxen is commoner. As a rule each man ploughs his own 

 acre, and reaps his own harvest, but the same open field culti- 

 vation remains the order of the day. There are no hedges round 

 the arable fields, but the balks are now permanently grass or 

 weeds, for they are never ploughed up. The same system 

 of common pasture for the meadows and of the stubble after the 

 harvest is reaped is pursued just as it was five hundred years 

 before. The general standard of Agriculture has improved a little 

 and more attention is paid to arable than before, for the com- 

 munity is passing slowly from the more purely pastoral condition 

 of the early settlers to a more definite system of tillage. This is 

 chiefly shown in the area under cultivation rather than in the 

 method of dealing with it. In the earlier period there was as a 

 rule, I believe, only one field under cultivation, and this was 

 ploughed year after year without rest or abandoned for a new 

 site. Now, however, that the population has increased, and 

 the old family group has been split up into a number of house- 

 holds, more land has been put under the plough. There are two 

 or perhaps even three fields under tillage, cultivated in turn, 

 and one of them is always under fallow for a year. I presume 

 that as soon as the advantage of autumn sowing was realised, 

 the breaking up of a second and even a third field became a 

 necessity. The new fields are, however, divided into acre strips 

 exactly as before and in strict equality, and the householder 

 now finds himself cultivating perhaps thirty acre strips scattered 

 through the whole estate. This statement applies only to the 

 land within the boundaries of the village or manor, to use an 

 expression which is just coming into use, for outside of it there 

 are clearings in the forest or fields in the open country where 

 small farms are cultivated on lines approximating to those with 

 which we are now familiar. These farms, however, are not 

 occupied by the men of the village. They are the lord's demesne 

 or the land of the freeholders. 



If we follow the same course as we did when we visited the 

 village in the sixth century, we shall get a very different answer 

 from the reeve. To the question, " Who is the owner of the 

 land ? " we shall be told it is such and such a lord that is to say, 

 the King perhaps, or the Abbot of Westminster, or the Earl 

 Waltheof, or Count Eudo. The fact is, the King has bit by bit 

 surrendered his rights of free entertainment, or a great part of 



