5o THE MANOR
brought about by the consolidation of holdings. If a man could
reduce his strips from sixty to thirty he had obviously saved
Jiimself considerable time and labour in getting from one place
to another. This is what Maurice II, Lord Berkeley, attempted
to bring about by exchanging strips whenever he could so as to
consolidate his holdings, and to get them all closer to his manor
houses. His biographer writes, "also other husbandry was
laboured by this prudent lord, whereby he drew much profit to
his tenants and increase of rents, etc., to himself, which was by
making and procuring to be made exchange of lands mutually
with one another, thereby casting convenient parcels together ".1
But we cannot fail to note that the whole tenour of this passage is
to emphasise the unusual nature of Lord Berkeley's prudence;
and indeed, far from consolidation of holdings becoming at all
common, we have evidence to show that the contrary was often
true, at least in the east of England, and that in the course of
time, division and subdivision took place to an amazing extent.
For instance, an inquisition of Edward Fs time shows that there
were no less than 35 joint tenures among the villani of Ashfield
Magna, consisting of groups of from two to seven holders.2
This was, no doubt, the result of division among the peasant's
children and relatives that went on continuously, and the results
of such a process on one manor have been worked out in great
detail by Mr William Hudson, who showed that on the Norfolk
manor of Martham the 08 tenants of Domesday time had in-
creased by 1291 to 107—a not unnatural growth—but, quite
unexpectedly, subdivision had progressed so enormously that
the land formerly held by the 68 had been split up into no less
than 935 holdings in some 2000 separate strips. A further
extremely interesting piece of detective work on his part has en-
abled him to show how one six-acre block—once two tofts—
had been split up among ten tenants, so that several of them had
only a few perches which they could call their own, and there
could have been " but one way of distribution. The total number
of sheaves of (say) barley would be divided proportionally
according to the size of each tenant's holding and the due number
1 Smyth, Lives of the Berkeley*, i, 141, 160. Cf. Ramsey Cart. I, 344;
Levett, op. dt. 52.
a Powell, Suffolk Hundred in 1283, 76.