THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 49 



10. THE SELF-SUFFICING CHARACTER OF THE MANOR 1 

 BY W. J. ASHLEY AND R. E. PROTHERO 



In the Middle Ages agriculture was a self-supporting industry 

 rather than a profit-making business. The fundamental character of 

 the manorial group, regarded from the economic point of view, was 

 its self-sufficiency, its social independence. Few of the necessaries of 

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

 corn that they raised was fetching 35. or 65. in a distant market made 

 little difference to the inhabitants of the villages. They grew it for 

 their own consumption. Owing to difficulties of communication, 

 every village raised its own bread-supply. Hence a great extent of 

 land, which from a farming point of view formed an excessive pro- 

 portion of the total area, was tilled for corn, however unsuited it 

 might be for arable cultivation. As facilities of transport increased, 

 this necessity became less and less paramount. Land best adapted 

 to pasture no longer required to be ploughed, but might be put to the 

 use for which it was naturally fitted. Improvements in means of 

 communication were thus among the changes which helped to extin- 

 guish village farms. But for the time, and so long as the open-field 

 system prevailed, farming continued to be in the main a self-sufficing 

 industry. Except for the payment of rent, little corn was needed or 

 used in rural districts. Parishes till the middle of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury remained what they were in the thirteenth century isolated and 

 self-supporting. The inhabitants had little need of communication 

 even with their neighbours, still less with the outside world. The 

 fields and the live stock provided their necessary food and clothing. 

 Whatever wood was required for building, fencing, and fuel was sup- 

 plied from the wastes. 



Each village had its mill, and nearly every house had its oven and 

 brewing kettle. Women spun and wove wool into coarse cloth and 

 hemp or nettles into linen; men tanned their own leather. The 

 rough tools required for cultivation of the soil and the rude house- 

 hold utensils needed for the comforts of daily life were made at home. 

 In the long winter evenings, farmers, their sons, and their servants 

 carved the wooden spoons, the platters, and the beechen bowls. They 

 fitted and riveted the bottoms to the horn mugs, or closed, in coarse 

 fashion, the leaks in the leathern jugs. They plaited the osiers and 



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

 35-48, and English Farming, Past and Present, pp. 28-31 (Copyright by Long- 

 mans, Green, & Co., London. Used by permission of the publisher.) 



