We can scarcely realize the difficulties of agriculture in an age when each countryside was constrained to live almost exclusively upon its own resources. The roads were so few, so bad, and so unsafe, that rarely any product, however unnecessary in its immediate district, and however urgently needed a hundred miles away, could be conveyed to the best market. Thus, while more than half of Normandy was under forest, the monks on the marshes of the Norman Cotentin had to cook their meals and warm their chill refectories in winter-time by a brief blaze of straw and cow-dung. Corn, it is true, when thrashed and ground, was sent from place to place; but bulkier crops, such as fodder, hay, and wood, were rarely carried any distance. When the hay harvest was ended, the farmer would calculate how many head of cattle he could provide for through the winter months, and at Martinmas he killed for salting as many as exceeded his means of sustenance. There was, moreover, a certain amount of carrying indispensable on every great estate: such as the transport of manure and marl and lime, for dressing the soil; the carrying of the master’s corn and wine to and from the winepress and the mill; and especially the carting from the forest of the wood necessary for fuel and repairs. For this first and typical _corvée_, the yeoman gave a draught-horse, the tenant lent his team and cart, the cottar furnished the strength of his thews and sinews. But this, like every other form of _corvée_, might always be transmuted into a sum of money. For the _corvée_, as we have said already, was merely one of the forms of rent. With the service of transport, the yeoman’s duties usually ended. Yet he sometimes, and the tenant-farmer always, was responsible for the tilling of a certain specified number of his master’s acres. The full _corvée_, exacted of rustics and cottars, comprised not only the service of carrying and ploughing, but the duties of cleaning out the manorial stables and outhouses, of digging for marl and lime, of gathering manure for the fields, of cutting thatch for the roof, besides thrashing the corn, making the hay, cleaning the moat, washing and shearing the sheep, and helping in the vintage. It must be remembered that, although men on _corvée_ received no pay, they were very amply fed throughout the term of their labours. We may therefore look upon the cottar--the man who gave no money, but so many days a week in all seasons to his master--as having signed a contract to work a certain portion of his landlord’s estate in return for the usage of a smaller portion of that same estate. He received as payment for his service, and in addition to his plot of ground, a house to cover him, tools to work with, and his full keep for every day spent about his master’s business. Despite all abuses, the Normandy of the fourteenth century was, after all, a place in which a humble honest man might earn his bread, lay by thriftily, watch the