CHAPTER IV 



HOW THE CLASSES CONNECTED WITH THE LAND 

 LIVED IN THE MIDDLE AGES 



THE castles of the great landowners have been so often 

 described that there is no need to do this again. The popular 

 idea of a baron of the Middle Ages is of a man who when he 

 was not fighting was jousting or hunting. Such were, no 

 doubt, his chief recreations; so fond was he of hunting, 

 indeed, that his own broad lands were not enough, and he 

 was a frequent trespasser on those of others ; the records of 

 the time are full of cases which show that poaching was quite 

 a fashionable amusement among the upper classes. But 

 among the barons were many men who, like their successors 

 to-day, did their duty as landlords. Of one of the Lords of 

 Berkeley in the fourteenth century, it was said he was ' some- 

 tyme in husbandry at home, sometyme at sport in the field, 

 sometyme in the campe, sometyme in the Court and Council 

 of State, with that promptness and celerity that his body might 

 have bene believed to be ubiquitary '. Many of them were 

 farmers on a very large scale, though they might not have so 

 much time to devote to it as those excellent landlords the 

 monks. 



Thomas, Lord Berkeley, who held the Berkeley estates 

 from 1336 to 1361, farmed the demesnes of a quantity of 

 manors, as was the custom, and kept thereon great flocks 

 of sheep, ranging from 300 to 1,500 on each manor. 1 The 

 stock of the Bishop of Winchester, by an inquisition taken at 

 his death in 1367, amounted to 127 draught horses, 1,556 head 

 of black cattle, and 12,104 sheep and lambs. Almost every 



1 Smyth, Lives of the Berkeley's, i. 302. No doubt the riches of the 

 Berkcleys were considerably greater than those of many of the barons. 



