Estate Management. 185 



ing each niglifc with their charges in wiiatever shelter their 

 ingenuity has been able to construct. This then is the common 

 ground, where the villagers' cattle feed, "horn with horn,"^ 

 and just before we turn to look elsewhere, the eye is caught 

 by a flash of bright colours among its trees, then a heron flaps 

 slowly upward, and a mounted hawking party riding into the 

 open, let loose their falcons on the prey. These no doubt are 

 the inmates of that manor house over there, which is easily 

 distinguishable from the other neighbouring village tenements 

 on account of its superior size, and surroundings of garden, 

 fishpond, pigeon cote, grange, and rabbit warren. Around it 

 lies the arable land of the demesnes, on which the boon 

 labourers are just finishing harvest. The seneschal rides about 

 supervising the work, and the provost flings the last armful of 

 the crop up to the waggoners with a gesture of relief, while 

 the large crowd of boon tenants" can scarcely refrain a cheer. 

 They, poor fellows, have been on short commons the last month 

 or so, and are eagerly looking forward to the annual replenish- 

 ing of their diminished stores. 



On another spot down by the river the eye lingers to note, 

 even thus early in this glorious August morning, the milch 

 cows greedily browsing on the unwonted feast of meadow 

 aftermath. Busy groups of people under the watchful eye 

 of the hayward are removing the temporary fences, and it is 

 not too late in the season for us to detect the rougher herbage 

 where these temporary fences had divided the growing hay 

 into those separate doles for which the community earlier in 



' There were four kinds of common rights— common of pasture, ^.e. 

 cattle feed ; common of i^iscary, i.e. catching fish ; common of turhary, i.e. 

 digging turf ; common of estovers, i.e. cutting wood. — Blackstone, Coinm., 

 Bk. II., ch. 3. Common appendant was the right to put beasts of the 

 plough or such as maniire the ground on the lord's waste ; common ap- 

 purtenant was tlie right to put other beasts there, sucli as hogs, goats, 

 etc. — Ibid. 



2 This boon service is not yet extinct. There is a book kept on an 

 estate in Lancashire where the tenants still perform certain boon services. 

 The book records the practice. 



The custom of harvest labourers in parts of Norfolk to go round at the 

 completion of their work and shout largess at all the better classes of 

 houses, is a survival no doubt of this period. 



