[169] _Ib._ p. 18. [170] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, _Hist. Norm. Scriptt._), p. 816. Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. iv. c. 314 (Hardy, p. 498). [171] Will. Malm. as above, and l. v. c. 407 (p. 636). [172] We see this long cloak in a story of Robert of Bellême (Hen. Hunt. _De Contemptu Mundi_, ed. Arnold, p. 310), and in that of Henry “Curt-Mantel” (Gir. Cambr. _De Instr. Princ._, dist. iii. c. 28., ed. Angl. Christ. Soc., p. 157). The life of the English country folk had changed since the first days of the Norman settlement almost as little as their dress. The final transformation, now everywhere complete, of the ancient township into the feudal manor was but the last step in a process which had begun at least as far back as the time of Eadgar. The castle or manor-house of the baron or lord, into which the thegn’s hall had now developed, was the centre of rural life. Around it lay the home-farm, the lord’s demesne land, cultivated partly by free tenants, partly by the customary labour due from the villeins whose cottages clustered on its border, and whose holdings, with a tract of common pasture and common woodland, made up the remainder of the estate. In the portion thus held in villenage, the arable land was distributed in large open fields in strips of an acre or half an acre in extent, each man holding a certain number of strips scattered one in one field and one in another; while in proportion to the total amount of land which he thus held he contributed one ox or more to the team that drew the heavy plough wherewith each whole field was ploughed in common. On the estates of the great abbey of Peterborough the holdings were mostly of virgates or half-virgates--that is, land to the extent of some thirty or fifteen acres, and furnishing in the former case two oxen, in the latter one ox, to the common plough team, which usually consisted of four; those belonging to the demesne were usually of six or eight. Each tenant had, besides his land, a right to his share of the common pasture and the common hay-meadow, as well as of the common woodland where he fed his pigs on the oak-mast, and cut turf and brushwood for fuel and other household uses. Some of the lesser tenants had no land, but were merely “cottiers,” occupying their little cottage with or without a garden. Whatever the extent and character of their holding, they held it in consideration of certain services due to the lord, discharged partly by labour upon his demesne land, partly by customary payments in money or in kind, partly in work for specified purposes on particular occasions, known as “boon” or “bene-work.”[173] The superintendence of all these matters was in the hands of the reeve or bailiff of the manor, who was charged with the regulation of its labour, the maintenance of its farming-stock, the ingathering of its dues, the letting of its unoccupied land, and the general account of its revenues.