54 THE MANOR
would, of course, escape mention in any document. Yet the "Forest
Rolls and Rentals "of the period afford abundant evidence of assarting,
-new ploughing and enclosing in many parts of the county and especially
in Wirral.1
Mr Hewitt goes on to show with a great deal of detail " how in
all parts of the county the work of enlarging the cultivated area
was making gradual progress ". Again, the more recent work of
Mr T. A. M. Bishop shows with beautiful clarity how parts of
Yorkshire were brought into cultivation, and turned from waste
into useful and integral parts of the near-by villages.2
While on the King's forest and in some places progress was
comparatively slow, since it proceeded in defiance of the lord's
rights, on many manors the lord was willing to allow assarting,
and something like a considered scheme of development was
possible. Miss Neilson, in her introduction to the Bilsington
Cartulary? has shown this in detail for the manors of the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury and other ecclesiastical bodies which lay in
Romney Marsh. Sometimes the tenant had to win back and
protect the land he was assarting from the sea; sometimes the
lord had already built a sea-wall, in which case heavier rents or
services were demanded of the incoming tenant. But in either
case there seems to have been a definite policy: "land grants
permitting the inning [assarting] of land were made in gavelkind;
the holds were often of yniform size in a given marsh, and were
burdened with the defence of walls and waterways, according to
the law and custom of the marsh. The tenements so gained were
subject sometimes to strict regulations with regard to improve-
ment, the tenant being required to build on them, unless he
already had a house in the vill to which the marsh belonged."4
Further research may show that other lords had similar schemes
for developing their lands. We constantly hear, for example, of
permission being given by the King to lords to include con-
siderable areas within their domains. These, however, were not
necessarily part of the manor since they formed part of the great
empty wastes that lay between one village and another, but
before we turn to them we must look nearer home at the peasant's
other lands—the meadows and commons.
1 Mediaeval Cheshire, 10.
a E.H.R. XLIX, 386, and the Econ. Hist. Rev. vi, 10.
* Op. cit. passim. * Op. cit. 53 if.