m 



WALTER OF HENLEY 31 



poses of drainage, was cultivated, the lower parts being left 

 to natural grass.^ 



The greatest authority for the farming of the thirteenth 

 century is Walter of Henley, who wrote, about the middle of 

 it, a work which held the field as an agricultural textbook 

 until Fitzherbert wrote in the sixteenth century, and much of 

 is advice is valuable to-day. There was from his time until 

 e days of William Marshall, who wrote five centuries after- 

 wards, a controversy as to the respective merits of horses and 

 oxen as draught animals, and it is a curious fact that the 

 later writer agreed with the earlier as to the superiority of 

 oxen. ' A plough of oxen *, says Walter, * will go as far in the 

 year as a plough of horses, because the malice of the plough- 

 man will not allow the plough of horses to go beyond their 

 pace, no more than the plough of oxen. Further, in very 

 hard ground where the plough of horses will stop, the plough 

 of oxen will pass. And the horse costs more than the ox, for 

 he is obliged to have the sixth part of a bushel of oats every 

 night, worth a halfpenny at least, and twelve pennyworth of 

 grass in the summer. Besides, each week he costs more or 

 less a penny a week in shoeing, if he must be shod on all four 

 feet ; ' which was not the universal custom. 



* But the ox has only to have 3I sheaves of oats per week 

 (ten sheaves yielding a bushel of oats), worth a penny, and 

 the same amount of grass as the horse.^ And when the horse 

 is old and worn out there is nothing but his skin, but when 

 the ox is old with ten pennyworth of grass he shall be fit for 

 the larder.' ^ 



The labourer of the Middle Ages could not complain of 



lack of holidays ; Walter of Henley tells us that, besides 



Sundays, eight weeks were lost in the year from holidays and 



other hindrances.* 



' Ballard, Domesday, p. 207. 



^ Walter of Henley, Royal Historical Society, p. 12. 



* Walter reckons the above food of the horse at 12s. 3^., and of the ox 

 at 3 J. id. ; but both are wrong. * Ibid. p. 15. 



