One of these symptoms may be found in the fact observed in the later evidence, that the number of irregular holdings increased as time went on. In the 'Liber Niger,' with the exception of the peculiar and local class of 'sochmanni' found in some of the manors, these irregular holdings seldom occur--a fact in itself very significant. Another symptom may be noticed in the circumstance mentioned in the Boldon Book, and also in other cartularies, of the land in demesne being as a whole sometimes let or farmed out to the villani. Another was the fact, so apparent in the Hundred Rolls and cartularies, of the substitution of money payments for the services. There is no mention in the 'Liber Niger' of either of these practices. All these are symptoms that the system was not a system recently introduced, but an old system gradually breaking up, relaxing its rules, and becoming in some points inconsistent with itself. [p076] XII. SUMMARY OF THE POST-DOMESDAY EVIDENCE. «Manors everywhere.» «Land in demesne and in villenage.» «Open field system.» To sum up the evidence already examined, and reaching to within forty years of the date of the Domesday Survey, it is clear that England was covered with manors. And these manors were in fact, in their simplest form, estates of manorial lords, each with its village community in villenage upon it. The land of the lord's demesne--the home farm belonging to the manor-house--was cultivated chiefly by the services of the _villata_, _i.e._ of the village community, or tenants in villenage. The land of this village community, _i.e._ the land in villenage, lay round the village in open fields. In the village were the messuages or homesteads of the tenants in villenage, and their holdings were composed of bundles of scattered strips in the open fields, with rights of pasture over the latter for their cattle after the crops were gathered, as well as on the green commons of the manor or township. The tenants in villenage were divided into two distinct classes. «Villani with yard-lands, &c.» First, there were the villani proper, whose now familiar holdings, the hides, half-hides, virgates, and bovates, were connected with the number of oxen allotted to them or contributed by them to the manorial plough team of 8 oxen, the normal holding, the virgate or yard-land, including about 30 acres in scattered acre or half-acre strips.