The structure of the ordinary manor is always the same. Under the headship of the lord we find two layers of population--the villains and the freeholders; and the territory occupied divides itself accordingly into demesne land[450] and 'tributary land' (if I may use that phrase) of two different classes. The cultivation of the demesne depends to a certain extent on the work supplied by the tenants of the tributary land. Rents are collected, labour supervised, and all kinds of administrative business transacted, by a set of manorial officers or servants. The entire population is grouped into a village community which centres round the manorial court or halimote, which is both council and tribunal. My investigation will necessarily conform to this typical arrangement. The _holding of the peasant_ is the natural starting-point: it will give us the clue to the whole agrarian system. Next may come that part of the territory which is not occupied _in severalty_ but used _in common_. The _agrarian obligations_ with regard to the lord and the _cultivation of the demesne land_ may be taken up afterwards. The position of _privileged people_, either servants or freeholders, must be discussed by itself, as an exceptional case. And, lastly, the question will have to be put--to what extent were all these elements welded together in the _village community_, and under the sway of the _manorial court_? [Field systems.] The chief features of the field-system which was in operation in England during the middle ages have been sufficiently cleared up by modern scholars, especially by Nasse, Thorold Rogers, and Seebohm, and there is no need for dwelling at length on the subject. Everybody knows that the arable of an English village was commonly cultivated under a three years rotation of crops[451]; a two-field system is also found very often[452]; there are some instances of more complex arrangements[453], but they are very rare, and appear late--not earlier than the fourteenth century. Walter of Henley's treatise on farming, which appears to belong to the first half of the thirteenth, mentions only the first two systems, and its estimate of the plough-land is based on them. In the case of a three-field rotation a hundred and eighty acres are reckoned to the plough; a hundred and sixty in a system of two courses[454]. We find the same estimate in the chapters on husbandry and management of an estate which are inserted in the law-book known as Fleta[455]. The strips in the fields belonging to the several tenants were divided by narrow balks of turf, and when the field lay fallow, or after the harvest had been removed, the entire field was turned into a common pasture for the use of the village cattle. The whole area was protected by an inclosure while it was under crop. [Inhoke.]