THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 39 



successively taken in, ploughed, and tilled for corn. As the soil 

 became exhausted, they reverted to pasture. Such a practice may 

 belong to some portion of the Celtic race or to nomadic stages of 

 civilization. 



This "wild field-grass" husbandry was displaced in most parts of 

 England by the permanent separation of arable from pasture land. 

 This fixed division of tillage and grass, introduced into this country 

 possibly by people accustomed, like the Romans or the Anglo-Saxons, 

 to a drier and less variable climate, became the basis of the agricul- 

 tural organization of the mediaeval manor. On it also were founded 

 the essential features of those village communities which at one time 

 tilled two-thirds of the cultivated soil of England, survived the criti- 

 cism of Fitzherbert in the sixteenth century, outlived the onslaught 

 of Arthur Young in the eighteenth century, clung to the land in spite 

 of thousands of enclosure acts, and were carried to the New World 

 by the Pilgrim Fathers. 



The crops grown were, as winter seeds, wheat and rye, and, as 

 spring seeds, oats, barley, beans, peas, or vetches. Flax, hemp, and 

 saffron were locally raised in separate plots. Roots, clover, and 

 artificial grasses were still unknown. Rotations of crops, as they are 

 now understood, were therefore impossible. The soil was rested by 

 fallowing the one-half, or the one-third, of the arable land, required 

 by the two- or the three-course system. On the tenant's land, rye 

 was the chief grain crop, and rye was then the breadstuff of the Eng- 

 lish peasantry, as it still is in Northern Europe. Barley was the 

 drink-corn, as rye was the bread-corn, of the Middle Ages. In the 

 north, oats were extensively cultivated but they were gray-awned, 

 thin, and poor. 



The ploughings were performed, and the teams supplied and 

 driven, partly by the servants of the demesne, partly by the tenants. 

 Sometimes ploughmen seemed to have been hired. The harrowings 

 were similarly provided for, and the harrow, often a hawthorn tree, 

 weighted on its upper side with logs, was supplied from the lord's 

 waste. Here also harrowers seem to have been sometimes specially 

 hired. In this case they possibly provided their own home- 

 constructed implements with sharp points or teeth like the modern 

 type of harrow. When the fallows were first broken up, as was then 

 the practice, in March, or when the land was prepared for barley, the 

 ground was often so hard that the clods had to be subsequently 

 broken. For this purpose the ploughman, holding the principal hale 



