COMMUNISTIC FARMING 5 



Ine, King of Wessex, provided that if ' churls have a common 

 meadow or other partible land to fence, and some have 

 fenced their part and some have not, and cattle stray in and 

 eat up their common corn or grass ; let those go who own 

 the gap and compensate to the others who have fenced their 

 part the damage which then may be done, and let them 

 demand such justice on the cattle as may be right. But 

 if there be a beast which breaks hedges and goes in every- 

 where, and he who owns it will not or cannot restrain it, let 

 him who finds it in his field take it and slay it, and let the 

 owner take its skin and flesh and forfeit the rest.' 



England was not given over to one particular type of 

 settlement, although villages were more common than ham- 

 lets in the greater part of the country.^ The vill or village 

 answers to the modern civil parish, and the term may be 

 applied to both the true or ' nucleated ' village of clustered 

 houses and the village of scattered hamlets, each of a few 

 houses, existing chiefly on the Celtic fringe. The population 

 of some of the villages at the time of the Norman Conquest 

 was numerous, 100 households or 500 people ; but the aver- 

 age townships contained from 10 to 20 households.^ There 

 was also the single farm, such as that at Eardisley in 

 Herefordshire, described in Domesday, lying in the middle 

 of a forest, perhaps, as in other similar cases, a pioneer 

 settlement of some one more adventurous than his fellows.'"^ 



Such was the early village community in England, a com- 

 munity of free landholders. But a change began early to 

 come over it.* The king would grant to a church all the 

 rights he had in the village, reserving only the trinoda 

 necessitas, these rights including the feorm or farm, or 

 provender rent which the king derived from the land — of cattle, 



^ Vinogradoflf, English Society in the Eleventh Century y p. 264. 

 ^ Maitland, op. cit. p. 17. 



^ Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 265. 

 * Maitland, op. cit. pp. 318 et seq. 



