Towards the northern and north-western boundary of the parish, at no great distance from, but above, the stream, stands the village. In it are gathered practically all the population. Though the danger of isolation and the need for combined defence have passed away, detached farmhouses and cottages are still almost as rare as they were in Norman times. Surrounded by the wide expanse of meadow, arable pasture, and moorland, the occupiers clustered round the church and manor house for mutual help and protection in this world and the next. The village was laid out on no plan. It grew. Straight lines are rare. Nothing shows its natural growth more clearly than the labyrinth of winding lanes which saunter from one homestead to another. Apparently engineered on the medieval principle that one good or bad turn deserves another, their direction is mostly governed by ancient enclosures of individual occupiers. One called 'Cat Street' commemorates St Catharine, on whose festival was held one of the two annual fairs, abandoned three centuries ago. Two others, Ford Lane and King Lane, leading to one of the mills, strike towards the stream with the purposeful directness of public utility.

Timber-framed, straw-thatched, or tile-roofed, most of the houses belong to Tudor times. But they have displaced the mud-built, earth-floored, single-roomed, one-storied, chimney-less structures which sheltered the families and the live-stock of the earlier settlers. Bishop Hall's picture of the interior of the home of the Elizabethan copyholder, with its outside walls of timber uprights and cross-beams forming raftered panels daubed with clay or cob, was at least true of three previous centuries:

'Of one bay's breadth, God wot, a silly cote

Whose thatched spars are furred with sluttish soote

A whole inch thick, shining like blackmoor's brows

Through smoke that through the headlesse barrel blows;
At his bed's feete feeden his stalled teame,

His swine beneath, his pullen o'er the beam.'

Otherwise the changes have been slight. From early times, orchards and gardens, in which to grow fruit and such green vegetables as were then known, and mostly

beans, were essential to the health of a population living largely on meat and fish in salted form. Nor was it long before the open-field farmers had fenced in their topts and crofts-tiny yards for their ricks and stacks, as well as small enclosures of grass for rearing calves, or for the working oxen which could not endure to labour all daye and then to be put to the commons or before the herdsmen.'

East Hendred has not been associated with events of national importance. It has given birth to no one conspicuous in history. Yet it possesses one rare feature which, it may not be fanciful to think, intensifies the pervasive charm of its old-world atmosphere. The village has known no complete severance from the Church of the Middle Ages. A portion of the people always adhered to the older faith. The parish church is, of course, in Protestant hands. But, in a free chapel, attached to the ancient home of the Eystons, services of the Roman Catholic Church have been held with remarkable continuity. Built between 1253 and 1291, and dedicated, in a quaint order of dedication, to St Amand and St John the Baptist, it lost its endowments at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. But the chapel itself remained. In 1688 it was desecrated, probably rather from wantonness than by the order of any responsible authority. The story is told in a manuscript volume, addressed to his 'Deare Children,' by Charles Eyston (1667-1721), the 'great friend and acquaintance' of Thomas Hearne, and himself known in the family as the antiquary.' At Hungerford, in December 1688, the Prince of Orange had met the Commissioners of James II. His troops, on their way from that town to Oxford, passed over the Golden Mile, the turf road which runs along the eastern border of East Hendred.

'Some loose fellowes (whether by orders or not I cannot tell) came hyther, went into the Chappell, pretended to mock the priest by supping out of the Chalice, which they would have taken away had it been silver, as they themselves afterwards gave out; however, having torn down the JESUS MARIA from the Altar, which holy names were painted upon Pannells in the same Frames, where the JESUS MARIA are now wrought in Bugles, they retired, taking an old suite of Church stuffe with them to Oxford, where they dress Vol. 241.-No. 478.

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up a mawkin with it and set it up there on the Topp of a Bon-Fyre. This happened on Monday, December the 11th., 1688, and this is all the mischief they did, besides breaking the lamp and carrying away the Sanctus bell.'

In other respects East Hendred has not differed from other villages in the development of its social and economic life. Every medieval village was a small world to itself. Means of communication with neighbours were few, and rarely used. Each village produced almost all that it needed. It consumed the food that it grew. Except salt and iron, it bought little, and that little by barter. Coin seldom changed hands. But isolation had its dangers. Too weak to enforce the law, the central government was powerless to safeguard the enterprise, the property, or even the life of individuals. A small man could not stand alone; unprotected, he tempted violence. With less personal freedom and independence than the towns, rural communities were similarly organised for mutual protection and responsibility. Municipal charters, guilds merchant and trade guilds, stood between individual citizens and oppression. In a somewhat similar way the organisation of the Manor protected individual villagers. The lord might be, perhaps often was, a domestic tyrant; but at least he shielded his tenants from the rapacity of others. Nor did his powers, even over the unfree, long remain entirely arbitrary. The rights which he exercised, the services that he exacted, were gradually defined and regulated by customs of which the occupiers of the land, as judges, witnesses, or jurors of the Manorial Courts, were themselves the guardians.

Behind the door of the peasants few gleams of light penetrate. But of his economic life in the medieval village, the records of manorial administration supply many details. Few general statements can be made to which exceptions may not be found. Yet in the midst of endless variations the trend of development is uniform. In all the records, and the Court Rolls of the Manor of the Eystons at East Hendred here and there confirm the truth of the statement, may be traced a movement towards personal freedom and, up to a certain point, towards a firmer hold upon the land.

The group of persons who were gathered within the bounds of rural manors were, in the most literal sense of the word and to a peculiar degree, communities. Externally cut off from the outside world, their dwellings not scattered but huddled together, they were united in a singularly close relationship. Their farming, on which all depended for daily food, was their common enterprise. Each individual took the produce of his own holding, but the whole body of partners cultivated the plough-land collectively. Their arable lots lay in strips intermixed with those of their neighbours; they cooperated in their labours for the lord of the manor; they grazed the pastures in common; they shared the meadows, often annually by lot; when the hay and corn were cleared, their combined flocks and herds roamed over the land together. In the tithings, in which all were enrolled, the members were responsible for the behaviour of one another. In the Manor Courts the tenants gathered, many of them, when documentary evidence begins, still distinguished only by such local identifications as Richard atte Lane, John le Longe, Peter le Fraunk, Thomas atte Grene, Roger atte Wode, William atte Watere, meeting as judges, jurors, suitors, or witnesses, to assist in the regulation of their economic and social life. The degree of external isolation and of internal unity, interdependence, and mutual responsibility, in which they stood to one another, may have stunted enterprise and starved opportunity. But, for good as well as evil, it allowed no room for the exaggerated individualism and feverish competition of modern life.

Efficiency in so complex an organisation as a rural manor required careful account-keeping and frequent meetings of the Manor Courts for the discharge of their miscellaneous business. The receipts and payments for which the steward or bailiff accounts were extremely various. But here their interest lies mainly in the light that they throw on the advance of the unfree tenants towards practical freedom. The wages bill of the lord of a mediæval manor, whether his land still lay in intermixed strips in the open fields or was consolidated into a compact Home Farm, was extremely small. His bondtenants supplied the team-labour and most of the manual labour. At one period, they, their services, and

all that they possessed, had been, really as well as theoretically, at his will and mercy. They were bound to the land; their live-stock could be distrained to meet his debts; they rendered whatever services he demanded; they could neither buy nor sell freely; they were subject to his arbitrary taxation; they could neither marry their daughters nor apprentice their sons without his licence. In the eye of the law the position of the bondtenants might remain unaltered. But before the middle of the 13th century custom had modified the severity of legal theory. Rents in money, produce, or labour were no longer indeterminate; they had become fixed and certain. The men held land as customary tenants, and were on their way to become copyholders. It was in this position that they stood when, in 1276, the documentary evidence begins at Banstead. Subsequent stages in the advance from personal dependence on the lord to the financial relations of landlord and tenant were accelerated by the Black Death. The pestilence shook the manorial organisation to its foundations. Already the process of commuting personal liabilities and services into fixed annual payments had begun. The Survey of the Manor of Banstead in 1325, for instance, shows that the lord had surrendered his right of arbitrary taxation for a fixed yearly 'tallage' assessed on the acreage of the holding. After 1349 the process went on apace. Numbers of tenants had been swept away by the Plague; their empty tenements could not be re-let on the old terms. They either remained void, or they were let on lease and the labour services lost. Fifteen years after the Plague, the accounts show that seventeen holdings stood vacant at Banstead. To supplement the depleted staff, labour had to be hired and its wages paid in cash. Money was provided by commuting into coin a number of services, such as those of malting the lord's barley, carting his timber, hoeing his corn, or the Winter and Lenten ploughings. The form which the transaction takes illustrates the tenacity of the legal theory of serfdom. The labour of the men belongs to their lord; they buy, and he sells, the use of their muscles.

Wages, as the century advanced, continued to rise. The medieval system of farming the demesne had broken down. Without personal superintendence the new