6 THE MANORIAL SYSTEM 



hay-rick and straw-stack ; and the cottages and curtilages of the 

 cottagers, " fenced al aboute with stikkes." Here were the scanty 

 gardens in which grew the vegetables, few but essential to the health 

 of a population which lived almost entirely on salted meat and 

 fish often half -cured and half -putrid. These homesteads were in 

 early times the only property held by members of the township in 

 exclusive separate occupation. They were also, at first, the only 

 permanent enclosures on the commonable land. But, as agri- 

 culture advanced, pasture paddocks (" gerstuns " or " garstons ") 

 for rearing stock, calves, or fattening beasts, or for the working 

 oxen, which could not endure his " warke to labour all daye, and 

 then to be put to the commons or before the herdsman," were 

 enclosed in the immediate neighbourhood of the village. In these 

 enclosures, or " happy garstons " as they were called at Aston 

 Boges, were held the village merrymakings, the rush-bearings, the 

 May games, the summerings at St. John's Eve, the public break- 

 fasts, and the distribution of bread and ale in Rogation week. 



The land comprised in a thirteenth century manor was generally 

 divided into four main portions, and, speaking generally, was cul- 

 tivated on co-operative principles ; the demesne or " board " 

 land, reserved for the lord's personal use, surrounding the manor- 

 house, and forming the smaller portion of the whole ; the free land, 

 occupied by freemen holding by military service, or by some 

 form of fixed rent in money or in kind ; the unfree land, occupied 

 by various classes of bondmen, holding by produce-rents and 

 labour services which varied with the custom of the manor ; the 

 common pastures and untilled wastes on which the tenants of the 

 manor and the occupiers of certain cottages, in virtue of their 

 holdings, fed their live stock. This right of pasture must be 

 clearly distinguished from those rights which, at certain seasons of 

 the year, were exercised by the associated partners over the cul- 

 tivated arable and meadow lands of the village farm. 1 Thus the 

 lord's demesne, using the word in its narrower sense, might be 

 kept in hand, or let on lease to free or unfree tenants, or thrown 



1 By " village farm " is meant the land in the village which was occupied 

 by an association of partners, who were bound by the same rules of cultiva- 

 tion, held intermixed strips of arable land over which at certain seasons the 

 whole body exercised common rights, annually received allotted portions of 

 meadow for hay, and enjoyed, in virtue of their arable holdings, the right to 

 turn out stock on the common pasture. This open-field system of farming 

 is described pp. 23-27. 



