This is especially true as to the arable, which generally forms the most important part of the whole demesne land. There is no exit for a corn trade, and therefore everybody raises corn for his own use, and possibly for a very restricted local market.
Even great monastic houses hold only 300 or 400 acres in the home farm; very rarely the number rises to 600, and a thousand acres of arable in one manor is a thing almost unheard of.(3*)Husbandry on a large scale appears only now and then in places where sheep-farming prevails, in Wiltshire for instance.
Exceptional value is set on the demesne when fisheries are connected with it or salt found on it.(4*)The following description of Bockyng in Essex,(5*) a manor belonging to the Chapter of Christ Church, Canterbury, may serve as an example of the distribution and relative value of demesne soil. The cartulary from which it is drawn was compiled in 1309.
The manorial house and close cover five acres. The grass within its precincts which may serve as food for cattle is valued at 8d. a year. Corn is also sold there to the value of 12d. a year, sometimes more and sometimes less, according to the quantity sown. The orchard provides fruit and vegetables worth 13s. 4d. a year; the duty levied from the swine gives 6d.
The pigeon-house is worth 4d.
Two mills, 7l. Is. 8d A fishery, 12d.
A wood called Brekyng Park, containing 480 acres, and the brushwood there is worth 40s.
Grass in the wood 12d., because it grows only in a few places.
Pannage duty from the swine, 10s.
Another wood called Le Flox contains 10 acres, and the brushwood is worth 6d.
Pannage from the swine, 6d.
Grass, 6d.
Arable, in all fields, 510 acres, the acre being assessed at 6d. all round.
Each plough may easily till one acre a day, if four horses and two oxen are put to it.
Two meadows, one containing eight acres, of which every single acre yields 4s. a year; the other meadow contains seven acres of similar value.
Pasture in severalty -- 30 acres, at 12d. an acre.
Of these, 16 acres are set apart for oxen and horses, and 14for cows.
Some small particles of pasture leased out to the tenants, 4s.
The prior and the convent are lords of the common pasture in Bockyng, and may send 100 sheep to these commons, and to the fields when not under crop. Value 20s.
As important an item in the cultivation of the home farm as the soil itself is afforded by the plough-teams. The treatises on husbandry give very minute observations on their composition and management. And almost always we find the manorial teams supplemented by the consuetudines villae, that is by the customary work performed on different days by the peasantry.(6*)As to this point the close connexion between demesne and tributary land is especially clear; but after all that has been said in the preceding chapter it is hardly necessary to add that it was not only the ploughing-work that was carried on by the lord with the help of his subjects.
As a matter of fact, villages without a manorial demesne or without some dependence from it are found only exceptionally and in those parts of England where the free population had best kept its hold on the land, and where the power of the lord was more a political than an economical one (Norfolk and Suffolk, Lincoln, Northumberland, Westmoreland, etc.(7*)). And there are hardly any cases at all of the contrary, that is of demesne land spreading over the whole of a manor. Tillingham, a manor of St. Paul's, London, comes very near it:(8*) it contains 300 acres as home farm, and only 30 acres of villain land. But as a set-off, a considerable part of the demesne is distributed to small leaseholders.
It must be noted that, as a general rule, the demesne arable of the manor did not lie in one patch apart from the rest, but consisted of strips intermixed with those of the community.(9*)This fact would show by itself that the original system, according to which property and husbandry were arranged in manorial groups, was based on a close connexion between the domanial and the tributary land. We might even go further and point out that the mere facilities of intercourse and joint work are not sufficient to account for this intermixture of the strips of the lord and of the homage. The demesne land appears in fact as a share in the association of the village, a large share but still one commensurate with the other holdings. In two respects this subjection to a higher unit must necessarily follow from the intermixture of strips: inasmuch as the demesne consists of plots scattered in the furlongs of the township, it does not appropriate the best soil or the best situation, but has to gather its component parts in all the varied combinations in which the common holdings have to take theirs. And besides this, the demesne strips were evidently meant to follow the same course of husbandry as the land immediately adjoining them, and to lapse into undivided use with such land when the 'defence' season was over. Separate or private patches exempted from the general arrangement are to be found on many occasions, but the usual treatment of demesne land in the thirteenth century is certainly more in conformity with the notion that the lord's land is only one of the shares in the higher group of the village community.
