i6 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



family slept in boxes round the solitary room. Examples of 

 farm-houses clustered together at some distance from their re- 

 spective holdings still survive, though generally built of stone. 

 Next the village, though not always, for they were sometimes 

 at a distance by the banks of a stream, were the meadows, and 

 right round stretched the three open arable fields, beyond 

 which was the common pasture and wood,^ and, encircling all, 

 heath, forest, and swamp, often cutting off the manor from the 

 rest of the world. 



The basis of the whole scheme of measurement in Domesday 

 was the hide, usually of lao acres, the amount of land that 

 could be ploughed by a team of 8 oxen in a year ; a quarter 

 of this was the virgate, an eighth the bovate, which would 

 therefore supply one ox to the common team. These teams, 

 however, varied ; on the manors of S. Paul's Cathedral in 

 1222 they were sometimes composed of horses and oxen, or 

 of 6 horses only, sometimes lo oxen.^ 

 The farming year began at Michaelmas when, in addition to the 

 sowing of wheat and rye, the cattle were carefully stalled and 

 fed only on hay and straw, for roots were in the distant future, 

 and the corn was threshed with the flail and winnowed by hand. 

 In the spring, after the ploughing of the second arable field, the 

 vineyard, where there was one, was set out, and the open 

 ditches, apparently the only drainage then known, cleansed. 



^ Woods were used as much for pasture as for cutting timber and 

 underwood. Not only did the pigs feed there on the mast of oak, beech, 

 and chestnut, but goats and horned cattle grazed on the grassy portions. 



^ The illustrations of contemporary MSS. usually show teams in the 

 plough of 2 or 4 oxen, and 4 was probably the team generally used, 

 according to Vinogradoff, op. cit. p. 253. It must, of course, have varied 

 according to the soil. Birch, in his Domesday, p. 219, says he has never 

 found a team of 8 in contemporary illustrations. To-day oxen can be still 

 seen ploughing in teams of two only. However, about a hundred years 

 ago, when oxen were in common use, we find teams of 8, as in Shrop- 

 shire, for a single-furrow plough, ' so as to work them easily.' Six hours 

 a day was the usual day's work, and when more was required one team 

 was worked in the morning, another in the afternoon. — Victoria County 

 History : Shropshire, Agriculture. Walter of Henley says the team 

 stopped work at three. 



