SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



were becoming clothiers, and clothiers weavers. 1 This shows that the new 

 woollen industry was carried on in conjunction with farming, the same man 

 often growing the wool and hiring weavers to work it in one large room, in 

 his farmhouse. 



This influx of trade into agriculture completed the destruction of the 

 manorial system. Gloucestershire was one of the last counties where vil- 

 leinage lingered. In a survey of the duke of Buckingham's lands at Thorn- 

 bury in 1521, besides complaints of his enclosures of freeholds and copyholds 

 to make his park and ' conyngry ' (rabbit-warren), it was reported that there 

 were 'of bondmen a good number.'* In 1567 almost the last case relating 

 to villeinage was tried in the law courts, between the lord of Badminton and 

 a certain Crouch, whom he claimed as his villein. In 1574', however, com- 

 missions were issued by the queen for enfranchisement of the remaining 

 bondmen in Gloucestershire.* Henceforth copyholders, freeholders, and 

 small farmers were all classed together among the famous ' yeoman ' class of 

 which we hear so much in the Civil War of the next century. Manor 

 courts might continue, as at Guiting, into the eighteenth century, 4 but 

 now that the judiciary rights of the lords were absorbed by the judges of 

 the crown and justices of the peace they were of little importance. Where 

 they survived they assumed more and more the character of a village meeting 

 for the discussion of economic needs. At Weston-sub-Edge, till its enclosure 

 in 1852, a special vestry meeting, the descendant of the old manor court, 

 had the management of the common-fields, and elected the hayward and 

 fieldsmen, or meresmen, receiving their yearly accounts, levying rates, and 

 deciding in concert as to the course of crops, and the number of beasts which 

 every occupier of a yardland might graze on the common pastures and 

 fallows.' At Upton Saint Leonards, where the common-fields were not 

 enclosed till 1897, where tne ' rneerstones ' that divided the strips are still 

 visible, and the newly-planted hedges are only a few feet high (1906), the 

 governing assembly was a real manor court, with a jury of fifteen good and 

 lawful men and a regular form of presentment. The holdings, which were 

 partly freehold and partly copyhold, were still in scattered strips,' and very 

 clear evidence of the effect of strip-ploughing upon a sloping ground may 

 be seen in a field called ' the lynches. 7 The holdings have been re-arranged 

 and enclosed, with the result that the value of the land has risen enormously. 

 Thirteen acres of allotments and two recreation grounds have been provided 

 to atone to the labourer for the loss of common rights ; and the old 

 terms of the open-field ' balk,' ' meerstone,' and ' lammas-road ' are already 



1 Lamond, op. cit. 



' I. S. Leadam, 'The Inquisition of 1517,' Trans. o/Engt. Roy. Hitt. See. (new scr.), vi, 167-344. 



1 I. S. Leadam, Late Quarterly Rev. ix, 348-65. 



4 See loose sheet in C.C.C. Bunarj Books, 22, containing an account of a court-baron attended by 

 two suitors. 



4 See C. R. Ashbce, Last Records of a Cotswold Community, which gives interesting extracts from the 

 Fieldsmen's Boob. 



* See plan. 



' See Seebohm, Engl. Pillage Community, pp. 5-6. On a slope ' the process of ploughing would result in 

 the soil of the field travelling gradually from the top to the bottom of the field. But the balks between the 

 strips would prevent this." Thus ' every year's ploughing took a sod from the higher edge of the strip and 

 put it on the lower edge ; and the result was that the strips became in time long level terraces, one above the 

 other, and the balks between them grew into steep rough banks of long grass, covered often with natural 

 self-sown brambles and bushes.' 



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