i8a MANORIAL ADMINISTRATION
many other questions must await a much fuller knowledge of
manorial conditions. We may say with confidence, however, that
it was not considered so onerous or responsible a task as that of
reeve, and we often find men liable for the office who were
excluded from the reeveship by the smallness of their holdings.1
Besides serving in any of the above offices the peasant could
be called on to fill posts such as that of woodward—an officer
appointed to safeguard the lord's woods and plantations,2 or to
become a forester and watch over the lord's deer and his rights
of chase.3 Special conditions, again, required special legislation,
as in the Fen country, where certain officers were elected to
inspect and to report on the protecting dykes. The conditions of
election, service and emoluments of all these officers need not
detain us, as they are similar, mutatis mutandis, to those of their
fellow villein officials.
All these men we have been discussing carried out their duties
while still keeping their own strips in the common fields in active
cultivation, and they were often drawn from the larger holders of
villein-tenements. We have seen, however, that there were many
men on the manor whose holdings were too small to support
them without some other means of livelihood. Some were
absorbed by their more prosperous neighbours who were able
to offer them work from time to time, but the main source of
constant employment was to be found as one of the manorial
servants. The lord cultivated a considerable portion of the manor
(as we have seen) very largely by the aid he exacted from his villeins,
but it is doubtful whether this intermittent aid was ever sufficient
in itself. The lord probably always required the help of some of
the peasantry to look after his stock, and to perform innumerable
daily operations incident to fanning, and Sir W. Ashley has
conjectured that "some of these, such as the shepherds and ox-
herds, were probably descended from the slaves of the demesne"
of Domesday times.4 Whether this were so or not, some per-
1 Oust. Rents, 101, 102.
* See Political Songs (Camden Soc.), 149, for mention of "the wodeward
waiteth us wo that looketh under rys ". Also see Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxxii, 322;
KCJ?. Middlesex, n, 69, for hereditary woodward; Eynsham Cart. II, xiii,
xlv. Rys=boughs.
* D.SJP. 75, 98; Norf. Arch, xiv, 40.
4 Econ. Hist. I, i, 32, 61.