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CHAPTER XIV. 



ESTATE MANAGEMENT, 



We have no means such as the lens, used in the analysis 

 of a beam of light, to focus all at once the component parts, 

 which in combination form a history of the land. "We are, 

 therefore, obliged to separate it out as through a prism into 

 its several rays, leaving for a time the agriculture in order to 

 fix our eye upon the laws, and turning from these to scrutinise 

 the owner's management. We have watched this last-named 

 process among British nomadic tribes, we have studied it 

 again under some modified system of the Mark, then under the 

 Anglo-Saxon allodialist, and now we propose to study it further 

 at a period when the Norman tenants in chief and subfeudarii 

 have erected their castles or manor houses on the sites of those 

 rude rambling sheds which served as board and shelter for the 

 Anglo-Saxon land proprietor. 



The country parish of the thirteenth century was not unlike 

 that of the present day. There was the manor house of the 

 lord surrounded by his demesne, the glebe of the parson, the 

 small estates of the freeholders, the allotments and tenements 

 of the villeins, and the common or waste ground on which all 

 the tenants had rights of pasturage and sometimes of turbary- . 

 It is only when one looks closer that a difference is detected 

 between the domestic economy of a.d. 1200 and that of a.d. 

 ISOO. Thus the hall of the manor house combined all the pur- 

 poses of a modern village room, local law-court, dining hall, and 

 estate office; the solar corresponded with our 19th century draw- 

 ing-room ; and the dormitory represented that sleeping space 



