no RENTS AND SERVICES
masses of retainers, required the produce of many manors in the
course of a year.
Even within the manor, as we have seen, a good deal of carrying
service was exacted from the serfs. Anything the lord needed at
the manor house was carried by them; building materials, wood
for firing, corn, hay—all imposed a fairly heavy burden. Some
details concerning the carriage of wood may serve as an example.
At Amberley, in Sussex, the large holder had to link his team
with that of one of his fellows, and their four oxen had to fetch
five wainloads from the forest and bring them to the ferry. He
had also to cart to the ferry the stakes and hurdles which had
been made in the forest; and furthermore, with one of his
fellows, he had to cart timber from the wood to the lord's barn
whenever all his fellows were ordered so to do.1 On the same
manor the smaller holders had only to carry wood when the
lord's pinfold required repair, or a new pigsty had to be built.2
Similarly on other manors: men were required to go to the wood
and haul out the timber and cart it to the lord's manor house; or,
if the services were not performed, to pay a wood-penny or
wood-silver.3
But even these constant exactions did not wholly meet the
needs of the lord, and at harvest time he generally exacted more
service from the peasants.4 The getting in of the crops was the
crucial operation of the year, and everything had to give way to
this—even the peasants' own crops! Not content with this extra
work during the harvest months of August and September, the
lord usually claimed extra or "boon" services (precariae) at this
period, and during the hay-making. These services were theo-
retically given freely by the tenants for love of the lord (and are
sometimes called "love-boons"), but the freedom was more
theoretical than real. Often these "boons" required the pre-
sence of the whole population of the manor—only the housewife
and sometimes the marriageable daughters were excused.5 A
multiplicity of variations may be noted in the severity of the
x Sussex Rec. Soc. xxxi, 61; cf. Ramsey Cart, n, 37, 43.
2 Op. cit. 59.
8 D,S.P. 26, 62, 82, 85, etc.; cf. Neilson, Rents, 51, 53, 63.
4 Neilson, Ramsey, 39 ff.
6 Vinogradoff, Villainage, 174, 175; Ramsey Cart. I, 394; Battle Oust. 59,
89.