Estate Economy. 



3^5 



same date.^ In sole return for all this we seem, according to 

 Tusser, to have constantly sold the Fleming our diseased pork 

 already salted and pickled. 



Turning now to an English estate of the period, we shall be 

 content with a cursory glance at the beautiful Elizabethan 

 manor house, with its two cross chambers and central hall of 

 stone, brick, or timber, its barns and outbuildings, and its sur- 

 roundings of garden and demesne. We pass on to examine the 

 distribution of the land amongst the lord and his tenants, and 

 see how the system worked. The tenants themselves are easily 

 recognisable, though changed both in name and circumstance, 

 since last we discussed their life during the old niedigeval era, 

 The base tenure of the villein may still cling as an expression 

 to the position held by the copyholder, but it signifies no 

 more than an expression to an individual who, though origin- 

 ally holding his parcel of land at the will of his lord, could 

 flourish his copy of court roll in the face of any aggressor who 

 attempted to dispossess him. So is it also with the cottagers 

 and all the smaller fry of the estate. They still pay their 

 curious mixture of rents and produce for the self-same cottages 

 and curtilages that their forefathers held of yore ; but they 

 are (especially if they choose to hire themselves out as 

 labourers) far more prosperous and far more secure from violent 

 or arbitrary action than in the old days of their serfdom. 

 There is also much the same old system of land distribution. 

 Every substantial man of the township has "lands" in the 

 infield, but no two of them adjoin, and never more than two 

 or three are in the same division. In the meadow land of the 

 township, the lord, the parson, the freeholders and the other 

 tenants share unequally the various plots. Here may be seen 

 staked out the four acres of the lord, and next to them the two 

 of some freeholder.^ 



Lastly there was the common pasture, of which there were 

 three kinds, viz. one taken in out of the fields by all the 

 tenants of the township in the which every person was stinted > 



^ Thoi-old Rogers, Prices and Agricvltnre^ vol. iv., p. 60. 

 " Fitzherbert's Boke of Surveying : Parish of Dale. 



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