CHAPTER II
THE MANOR AND ITS CULTIVATION
•% -TEDIEVAL ENGLAND was almost exclusively rural Eng-
jV /I land, and rural England congregated in small groups of
JL V JL people, here fifty, here a hundred, and (much less often)
here several hundreds, living in rude houses which clustered
together in some places, while in others they straggled endlessly
down the village street. Agriculture and its allied occupations
engaged the energies of everyone as they strove to win a living
from the soil. These small groups, on closer examination, are
often found to be sharing certain rights and privileges and to be
discharging certain duties, under the protection and control of a
lord. There were many thousands of these little groups through-
out England, and they formed the manorial society which existed
for some hundreds of years after the Conquest. The origin of
the manor, however, and how, and to what extent, the country-
side had become manorialised are not discussed here: it is not the
origination of the manor, but how men lived and what happened
to them under the manorial system that is the main concern of
this study. At the same time much of it will also necessarily be
concerned with those peasants who were not directly controlled
by manorial organisations, but who won a living with their hands
as best they could, for both they and the villanus, or serf of the
manorial system, were primarily agriculturists.
Even when we confine ourselves to those men who were under
manorial control we do not necessarily find them living under
identical conditions because they are living in the same area.
The manor and the village were by no means interchangeable
terms. Sometimes, it is true, everybody in the village was the
tenant of a single lord, but frequently one village was divided up
among two or more manors. This is admirably shown, for ex-
ample, by Professor Kosminsky's study of the Hundred Rolls,
where he finds that" out of 650 vills described and investigated,
336 are not identical with manors"; and, he adds, "In North-
umbria, the Danelegh and East Anglia the co-incidence is (we