Convention-—Agriculture in Middle Ages. 209 
favorite drink, mead. Bee-tending was, therefore, a considerable 
branch of rural economy, and not only for the honey, but also for 
tlie wax. Candles were almost exclusively employed for artificial 
light; and while the poorer classes made use of tallow the richer 
classes had nothing but wax — sperm came in with the whale fish¬ 
eries of modern times, and stearine and similar materials are purely 
the outgrowth of modern manufactures. Moreover, as in the case 
of wine, wax candles were essential for the services of the church 
— another reason for the great attention given to bees. 
None of the branches of industry which I have mentioned—nei¬ 
ther cattle nor bees, nor the dairy—come very directly into the 
field of agriculture in the strict sense of the word; that is, the til¬ 
ling of the soil. When we turn to this, bearing in mind that we 
have under consideration a commodity which produces neither for 
manufacture nor commerce, but simply to supply its own wants, we 
are still struck by the meagreness of the objects of cultivation. It 
was the cereals and scarcely anything else; no maize or buckwheat, 
no roots, clover or artificial grasses (these came in in the seventeenth 
century), scarcely any fruits but apples and pears, although I find 
plums and cherries also mentioned. 
First, a few words upon the crops produced for the food of ani¬ 
mals. The cattle grazed for the most part upon the natural pas¬ 
tures and the stubble, and this pasturage was, like everything else 
in medieval husbandry, managed and superintended with great care 
and precision. The number of animals which each person was en¬ 
titled to keep upon the common pasture and the stubble was reg¬ 
ulated generally in accordance with his share in the arable land; 
tenure of arable land carried wdth it, as a general thing, a specific 
and definite right of common. A common rule was to allow each 
person to pasture as many animals as he had means to keep over 
winter. The preservation of the common for pasturage was an im¬ 
portant matter, and I find it distinctly provided, in a document de¬ 
fining the rights of common, that nc tree shall be planted upon the 
land, unless to take the place of one which should perish by decay. 
After the crops were harvested, the fences were removed and the 
stubble thrown open to pasture. In regard to this, I find a by-law 
laid down in one manor, for which I cannot understand the reason, 
that from Ascension Day (May 5th) to Christmas, no mares with 
14 —A 
