28 THE MANORIAL SYSTEM 



other throughout England, except perhaps in the south-west. The 

 following description of the crofters' holdings in Skye in 1750 

 might have been written, with but few alterations, of half the cul- 

 tivated area of England in the eighteenth century : "A certain 

 number of tacksmen formed a copartnery and held a tract of land, 

 or township, for which they paid tribute to the chief, and each 

 member was jointly and severally responsible. The grazing was 

 in common. All the arable land was divided into ridges, assigned 

 annually by lot among the partners. Each might have a dozen 

 or more of these small ridges, and no two contiguous except by 

 accident ; the object being to give each partner a portion of the 

 better and inferior land. The copartner appears to have had 

 cotters under him, for whose w r ork he paid." The prevalence of 

 the system may still be traced with more or less distinctness in 

 rural England. The counties in which it was most firmly established 

 are counties of villages, not of scattered farmsteads and hamlets. 

 Turf balks and lynches record the time when " every rood of ground 

 maintained its man." Irregular and regular fences, narrow lanes 

 and wide highways, crooked and straight roads, respectively sug- 

 gest the piecemeal or the wholesale enclosure of common fields. 

 The waving ridges on thousands of acres of ancient pasture still 

 represent the swerve of the cumbrous village plough with its team 



\ of eight oxen. The age of the hedgerow timber sometimes tells 

 the date of the change. The pages appropriated to hedges by 

 agricultural writers of the eighteenth century indicate the era of the 



^ abolition of open fields, and the minuteness of their instructions 

 proves that the art of making hedges was still in its infancy. The 

 scattered lands of ordinary farms, compared with the compact 

 " court," " hall," or " manor " farm, recall the fact that the lord's 

 demesne was once the only permanent enclosure. The crowding 

 together of the rural population in villages betrays the agrarian 

 partnership, as detached farmsteads and isolated labourers' dwellings 

 indicate the system by which it has been supplanted. 



Accurate comparison between the conditions of the rural popula- 

 tion in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries seems impossible. 

 Calculations based on the prices of commodities, involving, as they 

 must, the translation of the purchasing power of mediaeval money 

 into its modern equivalent, are necessarily guess-work. They are 

 also to a great extent irrelevant, for few of the necessaries of life 

 were ever bought by the cultivators of the soil, and whether the 



