42 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



Swine were the almost universal live stock of rich and poor. As 

 consumers of refuse and scavengers of the village, they would, on 

 sanitary grounds, have repaid their keepers. But mediaeval pigs 

 profited their owners much, and cost them little. A pig was more 

 profitable than a cow. For the greater part of the year pigs were 

 expected to pick up their own living. When the wastes and wood- 

 lands of a manor were extensive, they were, except during three 

 months of the year, self-supporting. They developed the qualities 

 necessary for taking care of themselves. The ordinary pigs of the 

 Middle Ages were long, flat-sided, coarse-boned, lop-eared, omniver- 

 ous animals, whose agility was more valuable than their early matur- 

 ity. Growth and flesh were the work of time; so also were thickened 

 skin, developed muscles, and increased weight of bone. The styes 

 were often built in the woods, whence the pigs were brought to feed 

 on the arable land only after the crops were cleared, or, at times of 

 exceptional frost, to subsist on the leavings of the threshing-floor. 

 During most months of the year they ranged the woods for roots, 

 wild pears, wild plums, crab apples, sloes, haws, beech mast, and 

 acorns. 



The poultry yard was under the care of the dairywoman, who 

 sometimes seems to have had the poultry to farm at so much a head. 

 Pucks are not mentioned in any of the mediaeval treatises on farming, 

 though they appear in the Berkeley accounts of 1321 ; guinea-fowl and 

 turkeys were unknown. But the number of geese and fowls, and, on 

 important estates, of peacocks and swans, was large, and it was 

 swollen by the produce-rents, which were often paid in poultry and 

 eggs. The author of Hosbonderie gives minute instructions as to the 

 produce for which the dairywoman ought to account. "Each goose 

 ought to have five goslings a year"; each hen was to answer for 

 115 eggs and seven chickens. Besides the poultry yard, the dove- 

 cote or pigeon-house was a source of profit to the lord and of 

 loss to the tenant. Prodigious numbers of pigeons were kept. 

 The privilege of keeping a pigeonhouse was confined to manorial 

 lords and jealously guarded, and every manor had its dovecote. 

 The story of the French Revolution shows how bitterly the 

 peasants resented the plunder of their hard-earned crops by the 

 lord's pigeons. 



On the outskirts of the arable fields nearest to the village lay one 

 or more "hams" or stinted pastures, in which a regulated number of 



