The oppressions of tenants that were perpetrated under the feudal system, when ignorant lords of manors impeded production by every species of extortion, may be estimated by one or two circumstances. There can be no doubt that the prosperity of a tenant is the best security for the landlord's due share of the produce of the land. Without manure, in some form or other, the land cannot be fertilized: the landlords knew this, but they required to have a monopoly of the fertility. Their tenants kept a few sheep, but the landlords reserved to themselves the exclusive privilege of having a sheepfold; so that the little tenants could not fold their own sheep on their own lands, but were obliged to let them be folded with those of their lord, or pay a fine.[17] The flour-mill was the exclusive property of the manorial lord, whether lay or ecclesiastical; and whatever the distance, or however bad the road, the tenant could grind nowhere but at the lord's mill. No doubt the rent of land was exceedingly low, and the lord was obliged to maintain himself and his dependents by adding something considerable to his means by many forms of legalized extortion. The rent of land was so low because the produce was inconsiderable, to an extent which will be scarcely comprehended by modern husbandmen. In the law-commentary called 'Fleta,' written about the end of the thirteenth century, the author says the farmer will be a loser unless corn be dear, if he obtains from an acre of wheat only three times the seed sown. He calculated the low produce at six bushels an acre: the average produce was perhaps little higher; we have distinct records of its being no higher a century afterwards. In 1390, at Hawsted, near Bury, the produce of the manor-farm was forty-two quarters of wheat, or three hundred and thirty-six bushels, from fifty-seven acres; and upon an average of three years sixty-one acres produced only seventy quarters, or five hundred and sixty bushels. Sir John Cullum, who collected these details from the records of his own property, says, "no particular dearness of corn followed, so that, probably, those very scanty crops were the usual and ordinary effects of the imperfect husbandry then practised." The husbandry was so imperfect that an unfavourable season for corn-crops, which in our days would have been compensated by a greater production of green crops, was followed by famine. When the ground was too hard, the seed could not be sown for want of the sufficient machine-power of plough and harrow. The chief instrument used was as weak and imperfect as the plough which we see depicted in Egyptian monuments, and which is still found in parts of Syria. The Oriental ploughman was with such an instrument obliged to bend over his plough, and load it with all the weight of his body, to prevent it merely scratching the ground instead of turning it up. His labour was great and his care incessant, as we may