SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MANORS 99 



ways for centuries ; and lastly he erected his fences : the 

 bounds of the strips, however, were sometimes left to show 

 which were freehold and which copyhold. On the other hand, 

 there were exceptions to the curtailment of the demesne : on 

 an Oxfordshire manor of the sixteenth century the greater 

 part of the 64 yard-lands of which it consisted had by then 

 passed from the possession of the peasants to, the private 

 use of the lord of the manor.^ To each yard-land belonged 

 a house and farmyard, 24 to 28| acres of arable land, a share 

 in the commonable meadows which for each occupier came to 

 some 8 acres, also the right to turn out 8 oxen or cows, 

 or 6 horses and 40 sheep on to the common pasture. Pro- 

 bablyj as in other manors in ancient times,, each occupier had 

 a right to as much firewood as was necessary, and timber for 

 building purposes and fences. The arable land lay in numer- 

 ous small plots of half an acre each and less, mingled together 

 in a state of great confusion, and was farmed on the four-field 

 system — wheat, beans, oats, fallow — though 200 years before 

 the three-field system had been most common in the district. 

 Many of the common arable fields evidently often contained, 

 in those days of poor cultivation and inefficient drainage, 

 patches of boggy and poor land which were left uncultivated.^ 

 In the rolls of the Manor of Scotter in Lincolnshire, in the 

 early part of the sixteenth century, no one was to allow his 

 horses to depasture in the arable fields unless they were 

 tethered on these bad spots to prevent them wandering into 

 the growing com." Many of the other regulations of this 

 manor throw a flood of light on the farming of the day. In 

 1557 it was ordered that no man should drive his cattle 

 unyoked through the corn-field under a penalty of ^s. ^d. 



' Nasse, Agricultural Community of the Middle Ages, p. 9. Archcuor 

 login, xxxiii. 270. 



* In the still surviving open fields at Laxton, mentioned above, there 

 are certain unploughed portions called ' sicks ', or grassy patches, never 

 cultivated. — Slater, op. cit. p. 9. 



* Archaeologia, xlvi. 374. 



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