Our Legal Heritage: The First Thousand Years: 600 - 1600: King Aethelbert - Queen ElizabethReilly, S. A.
History
Our Legal Heritage: The First Thousand Years: 600 - 1600: King Aethelbert - Queen Elizabeth
Reilly, S. A.
Law -- England -- History
The cold, indoors as well as outdoors, necessitated that people
wear ample and warm garments. Men and women of position dressed
in long full cloaks reaching to their feet, sometimes having
short full sleeves. The cloak generally had a hood and was
fastened at the neck with a brooch. Underneath the cloak was a
simple gown with sleeves tight at the wrist but full at the
arm-hole, as if cut from the same piece of cloth. A girdle or
belt was worn at the waist. When the men were hunting or
working, they wore gown and cloak of knee length. Humble folk
also wore knee-length garments, with a band about the waist.
There was woodland, common pasture land, arable land, meadow
land, and wasteland on the manor. The arable land was allotted
to the villeins in strips to equalize the best and worst land
and their distance from the village where the villeins lived.
There was three-way rotation of wheat or rye, oats or barley, and
fallow land. Cows, pigs, sheep, and fowl were kept. The meadow
was allocated for hay for the lord's household and each
villein's. The villeins held land of their lord for various
services such as agricultural labor or raising domestic animals.
The villeins, who worked the farm land as their ancestor ceorls
had, now were so bound to the land that they could not leave or
marry or sell an ox without their lord's consent. If the manor
was sold, the villein was sold as a part of the manor. The
villeins worked about half of their time on their lord's fields
[his demesne land], which was about a third of the farmland. This
work was primarily to gather the harvest and to plough with
oxen, using a yoke over their shoulders, and to sow in autumn
and Lent. They threshed grain on barn floors with flails cut
from holly or thorn, and removed the kernels from the shafts by
hand. Work lasted from sunrise to sunset and included women and
children. Life expectancy was probably below thirty-five.
The villeins of a manor elected a reeve to communicate their
interests to their lord, usually through a bailiff, who directed
the labor. Sometimes there was a steward in charge of several of
a lord's manors, who also held the manorial court for the lord.
The steward held his land of the lord by serjeanty, which was a
specific service to the lord. Other serjeanty services were
helping in the lord's hunting expeditions and looking after his
hounds. The Woodward preserved the timber. The Messer supervised
the harvesting. The Hayward removed any fences from the fields
after harvest to allow grazing by cattle and sheep. The Coward,
Bullard, and Calvert tended the cows, bulls, and calves; the
Shepherd, the sheep; and the Swineherds the pigs. The Ponder
impounded stray stock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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