LandmarJcs in British Farming. 
7 
partners in the common venture of the farm were gathered to- 
gether into wooded dwelling areas. In an enclosure of trees, 
which rose out of a bare, hedgeless clearing, was placed the vil- 
lage. The street, the church, the parsonage, stood much as they 
stand now. On either side of the street dwelt the cultivators 
of the soil. The more substantial peasants, who held from fif- 
teen to thirty acres of arable land, and were the owners of one 
or more oxen, lived in houses, which were surrounded by out- 
buildings, and small yards “ fenced al aboute with stikkes.” 
Their poorer neighbours, who owned no oxen, and rarely held 
more than from two to five acres of the arable soil, had no out- 
buildings or crofts. 
Village life was at once different and similar to that of our 
time. Agricultural writers who look at the surface of things, 
notice that the village merry-makings, rush-bearings. May- 
games, summering at St. John Baptist’s Eve, have ceased, 
and therefore conclude that the people are now less prosperous 
than heretofore. Precariousness of livelihood, alternations be- 
tween feasting and starvation, droughts, scarcities, famines, 
crime, violence, murrains, scurvy, leprosy, typhoid diseases, 
wars, pestilences and plagues would tell a different tale. 
The dwelling-houses were of the meanest description. A 
few boards, and a load of mud, mixed with leaves, moss, or 
straw, formed the walls of the hovels ; a few bundles of rushes, 
reeds, or heather, provided the thatch. Inside there was no 
plastering, no floor, no ceiling, no chimney, no fireplace, no bed. 
Sometimes a hurdle divided the single room, in which the owner 
and his family ate, slept, lived and died, and into which the 
live-stock were gathered for refuge. More often men, women, 
children and pigs, turned themselves round together on the 
floor, while “ Chanticlere,” with “ Damysel Pertilote,” and his 
other wives, roosted on rafters that were always sooty from the 
smoke escaping through the roof. Dark, unsavoury, unhealthy, 
the hovels of the peasantiy offered no domestic comforts. 
Then, as now, — but with greater excuse, — the rural popu- 
lation was attracted elsewhere. Alehouses, distinguished by 
ale-stakes, or by signs, were extraordinarily numerous. Here 
gathered together all the men and women who could afford a 
halfpenny for a gallon of ale, or who had any clothing or property 
to deposit in payment of their score. “ Till evensong,” and not 
seldom until matins, parish clerk and cobbler, hedger and rag- 
picker, delver and curate, sang, and drank, and swore, and 
gambled together. From the earliest times, Englishmen were 
famous as “ potent at potting.” In the sixteenth century their 
habits had passed iuto a proverb, Rabelais uses “ ivre comme 
