44 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



9. ORGANIZATION OF THE MANOR 1 

 BY W. J. ASHLEY 



Till nearly the end of the fourteenth century, England was a 

 purely agricultural country. In the eleventh century, and long after- 

 ward, the whole country, outside the larger towns, was divided into 

 manors into districts, that is to say, in each of which one person, 

 called the lord, possessed certain important and valuable rights over 

 all the other inhabitants. 



Let us picture to ourselves an eleventh-century manor in Middle 

 or Southern England. There was a village street, and along each 

 side of it the houses of the cultivators of the soil, with little yards 

 around them; as yet there were no scattered farmhouses, such as 

 were to appear later. Stretching away from the village was the 

 arable land, divided usually into three fields, sown one with wheat 

 or rye, one with oats or barley, while one was left fallow. The fields 

 were again subdivided into what were usually called "furlongs," and 

 each furlong into acre or half -acre strips, separated, not by hedges, 

 but by " balks" of unploughed turf; and these strips were divided 

 among the cultivators in such a way that each man's holding was 

 made up of strips scattered up and down the three fields, and no man 

 held two adjoining pieces. Each individual holder was bound to 

 cultivate his strips in accordance with the rotation of crops observed 

 by his neighbours. Besides the arable fields there were also meadows, 

 enclosed for hay-harvest, and divided into portions by lot or rotation 

 or custom, and after hay-harvest thrown open again for the cattle to 

 pasture upon. In most cases there was also some permanent pasture 

 or wood, into which the cattle were turned, either "without stint" or 

 in numbers proportioned to the extent of each man's holding. 



In a manor the land was regarded as the property, not of the cul- 

 tivators, but of a lord. It was divided into that part cultivated for 

 the immediate benefit of the lord, the demesne or inland, and that 

 held of him by tenants, the land in mllenage, the latter being usually 

 three-fifths or two-thirds of the whole. The demesne consisted partly 

 of separate closes, partly of acres scattered among those of the tenants 

 in the common fields; and we may, later, see reason to believe that 

 originally the lord's portion had consisted entirely of such scattered 

 acres, with possibly a rather larger farmyard around his house than 



1 Adapted from An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, 

 pp. 5-32. (Copyright by Longmans, Green, & Co., London. Used by permission 

 of the publisher.) 



