How, then, are we to describe the domestic life of the various sections of rural society at this time? Unfortunately, very little material exists on which to draw for the account of the household arrangements of the serfs. They have naturally left no account-books; they enter rarely into the literature of the period; there are no remains of their houses or clothing, and it is, in fact, far from easy to decide how they did live. But it seems probable that a rude and dirty plenty, procured by long hours of toilsome open-air labour, was the prevailing characteristic of the serf household. The house would be of clay or wattles or wood, probably without windows--and those certainly unglazed--and with a hole in the middle of the roof to let out the smoke, the fire being placed in the centre of the floor. The furniture must have been rough but solid, its most valuable items being the brass or iron cooking-pots. On the other hand, I do not believe that, in the more prosperous villein households at all events, the level of domestic comfort was so low as has sometimes been represented. Rough cloth was probably woven or sometimes bought. There is one case on record where, in return for a small piece of land, one family undertook to do the weaving for another, and Gasquet mentions[28] that to the common Christmas feast on one of the Glastonbury manors some of the tenants brought their own napkins, "if he wanted to eat off a cloth." I see no reason to doubt that some at least of the villein households were provided with coarse coverings for bed and table. On the other hand, it seems doubtful whether any form of artificial light was commonly used in the poorer households. The food, too, would show what to us would seem strange contrasts of plenty and of poverty. It would include neither tea nor coffee, neither sugar nor spices, nor yet potatoes. On the other hand, there was probably, save at times of famine, a sufficiency of bread,[29] and eggs and dairy produce would be used in quantities now quite beyond the reach of the ordinary working-man. The butter, it is true, was not of a high standard, for it was usually liquid, but the children must have had milk to drink and cheese and eggs to eat. Even the poorest serfs apparently kept a few fowls, since their dues are so often payable in eggs, and some of the eggs and the chickens would be available for family consumption. But their meat must have been much poorer than ours. Fresh mutton and beef were rarely eaten, except in the case of animals who had died a natural death. The others were much too valuable for draught purposes, for milk or for wool. Among the maxims of an old agriculturist of the thirteenth century we find the following remark: "If a sheep die suddenly, they put the flesh in water for so many hours as are between midday and three o'clock, and then hang it up, and when the water is drained off they salt it and then dry it. But I do not wish you to do this."[31] In the autumn, animals which it