At times, the tenants had to spread composts in the lord's field. They also collected stubble out of the corn-fields, and reeds out of the marsh; reeds and straw were strewn in apartments, and used for thatching or fuel. In many places they were required to gather nuts in the woods for the lord; the nuts were for making oil, and a quarter of nuts answered to a gallon of oil. Nutting was rather a pastime, or holiday task, than a service. The nutting expeditions at Wickham, in Essex, were to be made on three feast days, which are not named, but Holyrood Day, the 14th of September, may have been one of them: "This day, they say, is called Holy-Rood Day, And all the youth are now a nutting gone." _Grim, the Collier of Croydon._ To make malt for the lord was usually the chief service of the poorer tenants in the immediate neighbourhood of a monastery, as at Darent and other places near Rochester, and at Battle; tenants at a distance, instead of making malt, in some places paid a tax called _malt-silver_. The cottagers carried their lord's malt to the flour mill to be crushed, for they were not allowed to keep hand-mills or mortars, which might be used in grinding corn. The malt might be dried at home, for kilns were common in old houses; but in some manors the lord had a public kiln, which the tenants were bound to make use of. OLDEN HARVEST. A _bedrip_, _reaping boon_, or _autumnal precation_, was a more pompous festival than an _arable precation_. In old times, as in our own, the Harvest was made a season of merriment, if not of thanksgiving: "In tyme of harvest mery it is ynough; The hayward bloweth mery his horn, In eueryche felde ripe is corn." _Romance of King Alexander._ In the illustrations of an old Saxon Calendar, in the Cotton Library, the hayward is shown standing on a hillock, cheering the reapers with his horn. Slumbering reapers were roused by the sound of a horn in Tusser's time; and the custom of blowing horns at harvest-time endured until the end of the last century, for it is noticed by John Scott, of Amwell. In the thirteenth century, when the rentals were mostly compiled, the lord was aided in harvest, as in seed-time, by tenants of all ranks. A superior tenant rarely sent more than two men to the bedrip, or two men and an _overman_, that is a foreman. The kindly services rendered to the lord in seed-time and harvest were otherwise called precations, gifel-works, and love-boons. The days on which they were rendered used to be called boon-days, and occasionally love-days: a love-day more commonly meant a law-day, a day set apart for a leet or manorial court, a day of final concord and reconciliation; as we read in the _Coventry Mysteries_: "Now is the love-day mad of us foure fynially Now may we leve in pes as we were wonte." Love-boons are described by the Law authorities as "the voluntary labour of the inhabitants of the neighbouring townships."