CHAPTER III 



The Disintegration of the Open-fields 



For the reasons given in the last chapter, bailiff- farming 

 rapidly gave way to the various forms of the leasehold sys- 

 tem in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The 

 economic basis of serfdom was destroyed; a servile tene- 

 ment could no longer be depended upon to supply an able- 

 bodied man to do work on the demense for several days a 

 week throughout the year, with extra helpers from hisi 

 family at harvest time. The money received in commuta- 

 tion of customary labor, or as rent from land which had 

 formerly been held for services was far less than the value of 

 the services, and would not pay the wages of free men hired 

 in place of the serfs who had formerly performed the labor. 

 Moreover, the demense land itself was for the most part so 

 improductive that it had hardly paid to cultivate it even at 

 the slight expense incurred in furnishing food for the serfs 

 employed ; it was all the more a waste of money to hire men 

 to plow it and sow it. 



The text books on economic history usually give a care- 

 ful account of the various forms of leases which were used 

 as bailiff-farming was abandoned. We are told how the 

 demense was leased either as a whole or in larger or smaller 

 pieces to different tenants and sets of tenants, for lives, for 

 longer or shorter periods of years, with or without the stock 

 which was on it, and, in some cases, with the servile labor 

 of some of the villains, when this had not all been excused or 

 commuted into money payments. Arrangements neces- 

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