"BY HOOK OR BY CROOK" 231
lords, although, as Miss Neilson tells us, "the conditions under
which he could take wood from the woodland of the manor had
to be carefully defined. To cut wood without permission, within
the forest or without it, was a very serious offence, included in
the Ramsey customal with theft and bloodshed as offences not
to be compounded for by fulstingpound"'.* Other lords, less
harsh, fined culprits who took wood without leave.2 Other manors
again had curious customs, such as obtained on the royal de-
mesne of Pickering in Yorkshire, where the tenants could take
all dry wood lying on the ground, as well as any wood they could
knockdown with hooks (by hook or by crook).3 This custom is also
found as late as the sixteenth century on the lands of William,
first Earl of Pembroke, whose tenants had also the privilege on
Holy Thursday of felling and carrying away on a cart drawn by
men, a load of young oak trees, wherewith they decorated the
village church and their own dwellings.4 Such accounts as these
are sufficient to indicate the strict control the lord usually kept
over timber rights on the manor, and the Court Rolls constantly
show us men being fined because they have cut down trees
without leave.
This same survey, late though it is, may be used to emphasise
what has been said above, for the scribe has not only given a
detailed account of the various holdings and villages, but has
added delightful bird's-eye drawings of two of them—Wilton
and Paignton. Here we may see the thatched, single-story mud
and wattle houses with their small windows and comparatively
few chimneys. Each house stands in its own little curtilage (or
enclosed piece of ground) and this is laid out by the villager as
his own private garden where he can cultivate what he pleases
quite apart from his strips in the common fields where he was
only able to act in concert with his fellows.5
What he could cultivate was not very much according to
our modern notions, but was perhaps more than is commonly
1 Cust. Rents, p. 52.
2 Abbots Langley, f. 36 v.; Tatenhill, n, p. 21 ff.; Wilts. Arch. Mag. v, 76;
and for surviving rights in the seventeenth century see XLI, 174.
3 CaL Inquis. Misc. I, p. 40. Cf. p. 41 where they are free to take whatever
they can get without tools of any kind.
4 Pembroke Survey, Ixx.
6 Op. cit. i, 182, Plate vn; n, 388, Plate ix.