A Short History of English Agriculture. W. H. R. Curtler
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within which the lord had authority over subjects of various ranks; he was not only a proprietor but a prince with courts of his own, the arbiter of his tenants' rights as well as owner of the land.
One of the most striking features of the Domesday survey is the large quantity of arable land and the small quantity of meadow, which usually was the only land whence they obtained their hay, for the common pasture cannot often have been mown.[53] Indeed, it is difficult to understand how they fed their stock in hard winters.
According to the returns, in many counties more acres were ploughed in 1086 than to-day; in some twice as much. In Somerset in 1086 there were 577,000 acres of arable; in 1907, 178,967. In Gloucestershire, in 1086, 589,000 acres; in 1907, 238,456.[54] These are extreme instances; but the preponderance of arable is startling, even if we allow for the recent conversion of arable to pasture on account of the low price of corn. Between the eleventh century and the sixteenth, the laying down of land to grass must have proceeded on a gigantic scale, for Harrison tells us that in his day England was mainly a grazing country. No wonder Harrison's contemporaries complained of the decay of tillage.
Mediaeval prices and statistics are, it is well known, to be taken with great caution; but we may assume that the normal annual value of land under cultivation in 1086 was about 2d. an acre.[55] Land indeed, apart from the stock upon it, was worth very little: in the tenth and eleventh centuries it appears that the hide, normally of 120 acres, was only worth £5 to buy, apparently with the stock upon it. In the time of Athelstan a horse was worth 120d., an ox 30d., a cow 20d., a sheep 5d., a hog 8d., a slave £1—so that a slave was worth 8 oxen[56]; and these prices do not seem to have advanced by the Domesday period.
According to the Pipe Roll of 1156, wheat was 1s. 6d. a quarter; but prices then depended entirely on seasons, and we do not know whether that was good or bad. However, many years later, in 1243 it was only 2s. a quarter at Hawsted.[57] In dear years, nearly always the result of wet seasons, it went up enormously; in 1024 the English Chronicle tells us the acre seed of wheat, that is about 2 bushels, sold for 4s.,[58] 3 bushels of barley for 6s. and 4 bushels of oats for 4s. In 1190 Holinshed says that, owing to a great dearth, the quarter of wheat was 18s. 8d. The average price, however, in the twelfth century was probably about 4s. a quarter.
In 1194 Roger of Hoveden[59] says an ox, a cow, and a plough horse were the same price, 4s.; a sheep with fine wool 10d., with coarse wool 6d.; a sow 12d., a boar 12d.
Sometimes prices were kept down by imports; 1258 was a bad and dear year, 'most part of the corn rotted on the ground,' and was not all got in till after November 1, so excessive was the wet and rain. And upon the dearth a sore death and mortality followed for want of necessary food to sustain the pining bodies of the poor people, who died so thick that there were great pits made in churchyards to lay the dead bodies in. And corn had been dearer if great store had not come out of Almaine, but there came fifty great ships with wheat and barley, meal and bread out of Dutchland, which greatly relieved the poor.[60]
Were the manors as isolated as some writers have asserted? Generally speaking, we may say the means of communication were bad and many an estate cut off almost completely from the outside world, yet the manors must often have been connected by waterways, and sometimes by good roads, with other manors and with the towns. Rivers in the Middle Ages were far more used as means of communication than to-day, and many streams now silted up and shallow were navigable according to Domesday. Water carriage was, as always, much cheaper than land carriage, and corn could be carried from Henley to London for 2d. or 3d. a quarter. The roads left by the Romans, owing to the excellence of their construction, remained in use during the Middle Ages, and must have been a great advantage to those living near them; but the other roads can have been little better than mud tracks, except in the immediate vicinity of the few large towns. The keeping of the roads in repair, one part of the trinoda necessitas was imposed on all lands; but the results often seem to have been very indifferent, and they appear largely to have depended on chance, or the goodwill or devotion of neighbouring landowners.[61] Perhaps they would, except in the case of the Roman roads, have been impassable but for the fact that the great lords and abbots were constantly visiting their scattered estates, and therefore were interested in keeping such roads in order. But in those days people were contented with very little, and though Edward I enforced the general improvement of roads in 1285, in the fourteenth century they were decaying. Parliament adjourned thrice between 1331 and 1380 because the state of the roads kept many of the members away. In 1353 the high road running from Temple Bar, then the western limit of London, to Westminster was 'so full of holes and bogs' that the traffic was dangerous for men and carriages; and a little later all the roads near London were so bad, that carriers 'are oftentimes In peril of losing what they bring.' What must remote country roads have been like when these important highways were in this state? If members of Parliament, rich men riding good horses, could not get to London, how did the clumsy wagons and carts of the day fare? The Church might well pity the traveller, and class him with the sick 'and the captive among the unfortunates whom she recommended to the daily prayers of pious souls.'[62] Rivers were mainly crossed by ford or ferry, though there were some excellent bridges, a few of which still remain, maintained by the trinoda necessitas, by gilds, by 'indulgences' promised to benefactors, and by toll, the right to levy which, called pontage, was often spent otherwise than on the repair of the bridge.
A few of the old open fields still exist, and the best surviving example of an open-field parish is that of Laxton in Nottinghamshire.[63] Nearly half the area of the parish remains in the form of two great arable fields, and two smaller ones which are treated as two parts of the third field. The different holdings, freehold and leasehold, consist in part of strips of land scattered all over these fields. The three-course system is rigidly adhered to, first year wheat, second year spring corn, third year fallow.
In a corner of the parish is Laxton Heath, a common covered with coarse grass where the sheep are grazed according to a 'stint' recently determined upon, for when it was unstinted the common was overstocked. The commonable meadows which the parish once had were enclosed at a date beyond anyone's recollection, though the neighbouring parish of Eakring still has some. There are other enclosures in the remote parts of the parish which apparently represent the old woodland. The inconvenience of the common-field system was extreme. South Luffenham in Rutland, not enclosed till 1879, consisted of 1,074 acres divided among twenty-two owners into 1,238 pieces. In some places furrows served to divide the lands instead of turf balks, which were of course always being altered. Another difficulty arose from there being no check to high winds, which would sometimes sweep the whole of the crops belonging to different farmers in an inextricable heap against the nearest obstruction.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, p. 18; Medley, Constitutional History, p. 15.
[2] Vinogradoff,