Life and Work on the Barony. 201 



victual or provision for maintenance went by the legal term of 

 Corodies.^ 



Both villein and serf fared, lived, and died very similarly. 

 Existence from harvest up to the long nights and cold blasts 

 of winter must have been fairly bearable. There was more 

 milk than usual, eggs, and a fowl now and then, such garden 

 greenery as nettles, cabbages, and onions, and a warm early 

 rising and late setting sun, all of which helped to keep body 

 and soul together. But during the long, dreary, dark winter 

 the sufferings and discomforts of the majority must have been 

 considerable. The poor tenant came home on dark winter 

 nights to his draughty damp mud hut, with its glassless open- 

 ings for light and chimneyless holes for smoke, only to retire 

 at once to that straw kennel which served as bed, where he 

 shivered under the sheepskin coverlet till it was time to grope 

 his way out and resume work. Many a dark hour before day- 

 break must have brought home to some poor pious fellow the 

 magnitude of that sacrifice which had devoted a candle to the 

 shrine of his patron saint. Then, as the corn store grew less, 

 and the long diet on salted viands began to threaten his emaci- 

 ated frame with scurvy and leprosy,^ there is little wonder that 

 he constantly transgressed the forest laws, stringent though 

 they were, on the chance of capturing a plump partridge or 

 well-flavoured hare. One need not doubt, too, that the manor 

 grange and larder were then as now open to the genuine cry 

 of distress, and that many a famine-stricken household owed 

 relief to some Lady Bountiful, the progenitrix of a long line of 

 dames which will never die out until the landed gentry are 

 themselves extinct. 



The infield, or terra villanorum, where grew the crops on 

 which depended a man's very subsistence, must have been 

 watched with hopeful or sickening expectation in proportion 

 as the April showers or cold May winds respectively freshened 

 or withered the young corn. There is little wonder that the 

 utmost care was taken to insure absolute equality to all, both 

 in the contour of the land and variableness of the soil. The 



* Blackstone, Comm., Bk. II., chap. 3. 



^ Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 96. 



