A Short History of English Agriculture | Page 9

containing villages by the
score and hundreds of dependent holdings.[51] The ordinary size,
however, of the Domesday manor was from four to ten hides of 120
acres each, or say from 500 to 1,200 acres,[52] and the Manor of
Segenehou in Bedfordshire may be regarded as typical. Held by Walter
brother of Seiher it had as much land as ten ploughs could work, four
plough lands belonging to the demesne and six to the villeins, of whom
there were twenty-four, with four bordarii and three serfs; thus the
villeins had 30 acres each, the normal holding. The manorial system
was in fact a combination of large farming by the lords, and small

farming by the tenants. Nor must we compare it to an ordinary estate;
for it was a dominion 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