ELEVENTH-CENTURY FARMING 207 



Those who are accustomed to see the corn reaped by 

 machinery, and the stubble cut down as short as possible, 

 cannot understand how the cattle could find sufficient food 

 on the fields after the corn had been cut. But till the end of 

 the eighteenth and far on into the nineteenth century corn 



was reaped with a sickle, and the stubble was left standing 

 some 1 8 inches or 2 feet high. Then, again, the land was 

 not so clean as it is to-day, and the weeds grew in profusion. 

 Possibly the exuberant growth of these weeds, many of which 

 are of a poisonous nature, may account for the mortality among 

 the lambs, which is such a feature of mediaeval manorial 

 accounts. And old men, who have heard from their fathers 

 how the land was tilled before the Enclosure Acts, tell that 

 in the low-lying fields, where the ridges were very high and 

 the furrows very deep, the higher part only of the ridges would 

 be ploughed, and the lower parts adjoining the furrows would 

 be left in natural grass. 



In speaking of the " carucate," or teamland, we said that 

 the average area cultivated by one team in one year was 

 120 acres. Walter of Henley 1 fixes a higher average, and 

 considers the carucate to be equal to 160 acres in a two-field 

 manor, and 180 acres in a three-field manor. But his figures 

 have been severely criticized by Professor Maitland, 2 and it 

 seems probable that in this, as in other matters, he set up 

 a standard which was unattainable in actual practice. 



After all this ploughing, and after the land had been 

 harrowed and weeded and reaped, what crop rewarded the 



1 Page 9. 2 D. B. and B., 398. 



