The inventories published in the _Accounts of Bonis_ show us that, on a small farm, at any rate, a pair of oxen, one horse, one ass, two pigs and a sow, a good deal of poultry, and a swarm of bees were usually kept. (In my chapter on Touraine, you will see that this is about the stock of a similar holding to-day.) We cannot estimate the price of these animals at less than twenty livres; so that few small landowners could hope to stock their farm out of their savings. Therefore, in districts where the hire-and-purchase system did not obtain, it was customary for the large farmer to let out his beasts to the poorer one; the oxen at a rate of from five to six sols per year, the sheep at about one sol per annum and per head; the milk and the young belonging to the tenant. IV As a rule, then as now, the person who made the largest profit on his land was the very small landowner. Many circumstances combined to favour him in the end of the Middle Ages. The cost of labour was high; he with his family could run the farm without paid assistance. The raising of cattle is nearly always more profitable than the growing of crops, and the man with little land might yet possess considerable herds. A very slight tax, paid either in labour or in kind to the lord of the manor, secured him the right to pasture his cattle on the wide grassy borders of the lanes and in the interminable forests that still covered half of France; the sheep were driven to pasture in the salt-marshes, one in every flock being yielded, as a sort of tithe or rent, to the owner of the land; while in winter-time the right of pasture in stubble or aftermath was common to all the cattle of a commune. The tenant who owned all these flocks of swine and sheep, which fattened on the acorns and grasses of the manor, had probably round his humble cabin nothing more than a few acres of harvest-land for his own use. He possessed neither draught oxen nor horses for ploughing, but paid one of his wealthier neighbours to perform this service. Over and over again we find the records of similar transactions; the price given varying naturally according to the extent and quality of the fields to be furrowed.[17] At harvest-time, then as now, the peasant farmer could engage a man by the day to help him in the stress of work; the labourer usually received his meals and about one sol per day,[18]--say five francs--which is much what he would receive at the present time.