MR. W. G. CLARKE OX THE COMMONS OF NORFOLK. 53 
being for the most part divided into strips which were held 
by individuals for six months of the year, and used as grazing 
grounds by the community for the remaining moiety ; pasture 
land was similarly held by householders until mown, and then 
the boundaries were removed, and for six months it was common 
to all the dwellers in the village. Between the lands thus 
used by the various village communities there was in many 
cases a belt of waste, or “ no man’s land ” used for hunting, 
for fuel, for timber, or for feeding swine. 
With the gradual development of the manorial system, in 
theory much of this was altered, but in practice the changes 
were not very important. The lord of the manor had his 
own demesne lands ; all the tenants still held their strips in 
the common arable fields and their rights of mowing in the 
common meadows, both for six months of the year being 
common pasturage, though the number of animals for each 
tenant was subject to strict regulation. As to the waste 
lands under the manorial system, there are divergent views, 
one school of antiquaries holding that all waste within manorial 
limits was subject to the regulation of the lord of the manor, 
while others hold that his title was purely nominal and that 
the waste was the common land of the community, not subject 
in any way to the w r ill of the lord of the manor. For both 
views there is evidence and it is obvious that practice was 
not uniform, though it seems to me that the case for considering 
the waste land a survival of the communal period of ownership 
is much stronger than that for believing it to have originated 
in the comparatively modern manorial system and to have 
been granted at the will of the lord of the manor. The 
interest of manorial lords in the common lands has always 
been small and when it has become necessary to place values 
upon the relative interest of the lord of the manor and the 
commoners, the interest of the lord has generally been taken 
as about one-sixteenth. 
However, it is well to bear in mind that in the early parish, 
both pre-Conquest and post-Conquest, with the exception 
of the demesne lands, the tenants of the manor only, in some 
cases, the general body of the inhabitants in others, had 
