GETTING AND SPENDING 89
151 bushels gave such a peasant much more than was sufficient
for his needs.
Not all his corn was used for bread: indeed it is doubtful
whether the peasant was so extravagant as to eat wheaten bread
at all, save if and when it was provided for him by his lord.1 We
may well imagine that whenever possible he sold his wheat to
give him a little ready money for such things as he could not
make or get by exchange from a neighbour. Rogers gives the
average price of a quarter of wheat between 1261 and 1400 as
5$. io|^., so that if we suppose that the peasant sold the whole
of his 48 bushels, he would have got 35$. ^\d. in cash. The barley
and oats he would be more likely to keep for domestic needs.
Much of the barley doubtless went in the' production of his
home-brewed ale; while the remainder, and part of the oats, were
used for bread-making, and the rest of the oatmeal provided the
basis of that most common of the peasant's daily dishes—the
pottage.
Thus we see that, taking a very favourable view of what the
servile holder could produce on his 20 acres, and assuming a
good year, it is clear that he could grow enough for his needs,
and a good deal to spare for sale or exchange. But, of course, we
must remember that all land would not yield anything like an
average of nj bushels per acre, and that every year would not
be a good year. And further, we are here deling with the village
aristocracy—the virgaters with their 30 acres of strips. When we
remember that they were a minority on the manors, and that
tens of thousands of men had something less than a quarter of
this as their main source of livelihood, it becomes evident that
life for them was always a struggle—a struggle in which they
were bound to lose unless the seasons were propitious to them.2
But the resources of the peasant were not limited to his sacks
of grain. He had other means of livelihood, and of these the
most important was his stock of animals. These, as we have seen,
were limited in number, both by manorial custom or by-law,
which determined how many of each kind should feed on the
commons or fallows, and further by the fact that the peasant
1 See below, pp. in, 235.
2 In Germany in 1871, on lands where conditions were still medieval, it
was officially stated that 20 acres in some parts (Land Tenure Reports, Part II,
131) and 10 acres in others were necessary to support a family of five or six.