those parts of the work which needed their professional skill. But every village of any size found employment for such trades as those of the smith and the carpenter, and the frequency with which "Smiths Ham appears among field names suggests the value which the inhabitants attached to the forge and the anvil. Meanwhile the women plaited straw or reeds for neck-collars, stitched and stuffed sheepskin bags for cart-saddles, peeled rushes for wicks and made candles. Thread was often made from nettles. Spinning-wheels, distaffs, and needles were never idle. Homemade cloth and linen supplied all wants. Flaxen linen for boardcloths, sheets, shirts or smocks, and towels, as the napkins were called, on which, before the introduction of forks, the hands were wiped, was only found in wealthy houses and on special occasions. Hemp, in ordinary households, supplied the same necessary articles, and others, such as candle-wicks, in coarser form. Shoethread, halters, stirrup-thongs, girths, bridles, and ropes were woven from the "carle " hemp; the finer kind, or "fimble " hemp, supplied the coarse linen for domestic use, and "hempen homespun "1 passed into a proverb for a countryman. Nettles were also extensively used in the manufacture of linen; sheets and tablecloths made from nettles were to be found in many homes at the end of the eighteenth century. The formation of words like spinster, webster, lyster, shepster, maltster, brewster, and baxter indicated that the occupations were feminine, and show that women spun, wove, dyed, and cut out the cloth, as well as malted the barley, brewed the ale, and baked the bread for the family.

1 Midsummer-Night's Dream, Act iii. Sc. 1.

FEUDAL BARONS AT CORN-MARKETS

31

CHAPTER II.

THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR. 1300-1485.

Great landlords as farmers: horrors of winter scarcity: gradual decay of the manorial system and the increased struggle for life: aspects of the change: common rights over cultivated and uncultivated land: tendency towards separate occupation: substitution of labour-rents for moneyrents; the Black Death; Labour legislation, and its effect; Manor of Castle Combe and Berkeley Estates; new relations of landlords and tenants substituted for old relations of feudal lords and dependents; tenantfarmers and free labourers; leases and larger farms; increase of separate occupations: William Paston and Hugh Latimer; wage-earning labourers; voluntary surrender of holdings; freedom of movement and of contract.

CHANGES in farming practices are always slow; without ocular demonstration of their superiority, and without experience of increased profits, new methods are rarely adopted. In the Middle Ages agriculture was a self-supporting industry rather than a profit-making business. The immediate neighbourhood of large towns created markets for the surplus produce that remained after satisfying the needs of the cultivators of the soil. But remoter villages contained neither buyers of produce nor pioneers of improvements. Edward I. was a gardener, and Edward II. a farmer, horse-breeder, and thatcher. These royal tastes may have set the fashion. Here and there great lay landowners, as well as great ecclesiastics, actively interested themselves in farming progress. Thomas, first Lord Berkeley, who held the family estates from 1281 to 1321, encouraged his tenants to improve their land by marling, or by taking earth from the green highways of the manors. Another famous farmer was his grandson, the third Lord (1326-61). Feudal barons are rarely represented as fumbling in the recesses of their armour for samples of corn. But few or noe great faires or marketts were in those parts, whereat this lord was not himself, as at Wells, Gloucester, Winchcomb, Tetbury, and others; where also hee new bought or changed the severall grains that sowed his

arrable lands." 1 These mediaeval prototypes of "Farmer George," Turnip " Townshend, or of Coke of Norfolk were rare.

of "

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Few of the baronial aristocracy verified the truth of the maxim that "the master's foot fats the soil." The strenuous idleness or the military ardour of youthful lords was generally absorbed in field sports and martial exercises-in tilting at the ring, in hawking, hunting the buck, or lying out for nights together to net the fox. Grown to man's estate, they congregated for a month at a time at tylts, turnaments, or other hastiludes," or exchanged the mimicry of war for its realities in France, or on the borders of Scotland and Wales. Most of the lay barons rebelled against the minute and continuous labour of farming, and this contempt for bucolic life may be illustrated from heraldry. Its emblems are drawn from sport, war, mythology, or religion. Products and implements of husbandry are despised, unless, like the "garb" or sheaf of the Washbournes, the scythe of the Sneyds, or the hay-wains of the Hays, they had been ennobled by martial use.

Few landowners, except the wealthiest, had as yet built permanent residences on their distant estates. Content with temporary accommodation, they travelled with their households and retinues from manor to manor, and from farmhouse to farmhouse, in order to consume on the spot the produce of their fields and live-stock. It was the practice of the first Lord Berkeley to go "in progress from one of his Manor and farmehouses to an other scarce two miles a sunder, making his stay at each of them. . . and soe backe to his standinge houses where his wife and family remayned. . . sometymes at Berkeley Castle, at Wotton, at Bradley, at Awre, at Portbury, And usually in Lent at Wike by Arlingham, for his better and neerer provision of Fish." His example was followed by his successors. But in the frequent absences of manorial lords on military service at home or abroad, their wives played important parts in rural life. Joan, wife of the first Lord Berkeley, “at no tyme of her 42 yeares mariage ever travelled ten miles from the mansion houses of her husband in the Countyes of Gloucester and Somersett, much lesse humered herselfe with the vaine delights of London and other Cities." She spent much of her time in supervising her "dairy affairs," passing from farmhouse to farmhouse, taking account of the smallest details. The family tradition

1 The Lives of the Berkeleys, by John Smyth of Nibley, ed. Maclean (1883), vol. i. p. 300.

lingered long. The same housewifely courses were followed by the widowed Lady Berkeley, who administered the estates during her son's minority in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and died in 1564. At all her country houses she "would betimes in Winter and Somer mornings make her walkes to visit her stable, barnes, dayhouse, pultry, swinetroughs, and the like." Her daughter-in-law's tastes were different. She was a sportswoman, delighting in buck-hunting, skilled with the cross-bow, an expert archer, devoted to hawking, commonly keeping "a cast or two of merlins, which sometimes she mewed in her own chamber, which falconry cost her husband each yeare one or two gownes and kirtles spoiled by their mutings." Well might the elder lady "sweare, by God's blessed sacrament, this gay girle will begger my son Henry!" ✓ Great ecclesiastics made their progresses from manor to manor like the lay barons, and for the same reason. But in many instances monks were resident landowners, and by them were initiated most of the improvements which were made in the practices of mediaeval farming. They studied agriculture in the light of the writings of Cato, Varro, and Columella: the quaintly rhymed English version of Palladius was probably the work of an inmate of a religious house at Colchester; the Rules for the management of a landed estate are reputed to be the work of one of the greatest of thirteenth century churchmen, Robert Grosteste, Bishop of Lincoln; Walter of Henley is said to have been a Dominican, and manuscripts of his work, either in the original Norman French or translated into English or Latin, found a place in many monastic libraries. Throughout the Middle Ages, both in England and France, it was mainly the influence of the monks which built roads and bridges, improved live-stock, drained marshes, cleared forests, reclaimed wastes, and brought barren land into cultivation.

Large improvements in the mediaeval methods of arable farming were impossible until farmers commanded the increased resources of more modern times. There was little to mitigate, either for men or beasts, the horrors of winter scarcity. Nothing is more characteristic of the infancy of farming than the violence of its alternations. On land On land which was inadequately manured, and on which neither field-turnips nor clovers were known till centuries later, there could be no middle course between the exhaustion of continuous cropping and the rest-cure of barrenness. The fallow was un véritable Dimanche accordé à la terre. As with the land, so

C

with its products. Famine trod hard on the heels of feasting. It was not only that prices rose and fell with extraordinary rapidity; but both for men and beasts the absolute scarcity of winter always succeeded the relative plenty of autumn. Except in monastic granges no great quantities of grain were stored, and mediaeval legislators eyed corn-dealers with the same hostility with which modern engineers of wheat corners are regarded by their victims. The husbandman's golden rule must have been often forgottenthat at Candlemas half the fodder and all the corn must be untouched. Even the most prudent housekeepers found it difficult always to remember the proverbial wisdom of eating within the tether, or sparing at the brink instead of the bottom. Many, like Panurge, eat their corn in the blade. Equally violent were the alternations in the employment afforded by mediaeval farming. Weeks of feverish activity passed suddenly into months of comparative indolence. Winter was in fact a season to be dreaded alike by the husbandman and his cattle, and it is not without good cause that the joyousness of spring is the key-note of early English poetry.

Under the conditions which prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, little advance in farming practices could be expected. During the greater part of the period, therefore, the history of agriculture centres round those economic, social, and political changes which shaped its future progress. Under the pressure of these influences the structure of feudal society was undermined. The social mould, in which the mediaeval world had been cast, crumbled to powder under a series of transformations, which, though they worked without combination or regularity, proved to be, from the latter half of the fourteenth century onwards, collectively and uniformly irresistible. From within, as well as from without, the manor as an organisation for regulating rural labour and administering local affairs was breaking up. As money grew more plentiful, it became more and more universally the basis on which services were regulated. Commerce, as it expanded, created new markets for the sale of the produce of the soil. Parliament assumed new duties; the Royal Courts of Justice extended their jurisdiction; and, as a consequence, manorial courts lost some of their importance in matters of local self-government. Land was beginning to be regarded as a source of income, not of military power. As landowning became a business and farming a trade,