EVERYDAY LIFE
such arrangements were not uncommon. Sometimes a father
makes over his holding to his son,1 or a brother to a brother,2 or
more rarely an old man makes an arrangement with the lord.3
Sometimes elderly people make arrangements which they hope
will make their declining years easier, and hand over half their
tenement at once, and the whole upon their death, on condition
that the recipients serve them as long as they live.4 All this is
peculiar to the manor of Hales, only in so far as it is more fully
stated there than in most other places. The Durham Halmote
Rolls, for instance, meant much the same as is fully expressed in
the arrangement between Agnes and Thomas Brid, when they
said that William takes his father John's holding and promises to
sustain him "honorifice pro posse suo".5 On another Durham
manor the father is to be lodged and given 3 rods of land, i.e.
one in each field, for his own,6 and Dr F. M. Page has shown how
a similar practice obtained on the Cambridgeshire manors of the
monks of Crowland. There she finds that
the share varied in amount and detail, but preserved the same
essential characteristics. There was a " camera" or " receptaculum "
(defined in 1345 as one-third of a messuage) and usually a curtilage,
a toft or garden, and one strip of land "in croft" went with it. In
addition, a number of strips in the common-field were given—varying
from one to six, but the allowance was nearly always divided between
the three fields.7
Widows then, like the old and feeble, were not uncared for
under the manorial regime, and the death of the head of the
family saw the rule pass into the hands of his widow and not into
those of one of his sons. So long as she remained unmarried
and chaste her rights remained intact. Thus, at High Bickling-
ton, in Devon, a widow is stated to have retained a life-interest
in the whole of the lands held by her husband (unless she had
1 Hales Rolls, 152, m, 53; cf. Bed. Hist. Rec. Soc. x, 471.
2 Op. cit. 316.
8 Op. cit. 336; cf. Bed. Hist. Rec. Soc. xni, 338ft, where a widow surrenders
a tenement to the Abbot of Warden who gives her "in regard of charity" a
messuage and two pair of shoes at Christmas.
* Op. cit. 111,38 ;cf. m, 55, 93.
s Durham Halmote Rolls, 9; cf. Manor of Many down (Hants Rec. Soc.),
130, where the son promises to sustain his father bene et competenter.
* Op. cit. io;cf. 85, 115.
7 Comb. Hist. Journ. m, 130; and cf. Crowland Estates, 109 ff.