When one reads the careful notices in the cartularies as to the number of days and the particular occasions when work has to be performed for the lord, a simple question is suggested by the minuteness of detail. What happened when this very definite arrangement came into collision with some other equally exacting order? One of the three days of week-work might, for instance, fall on a great feast; or else the weather might be too bad for out-of-doors work. Who was to suffer or to gain by such casualties? The question is not a useless one. The manorial records raise it occasionally, and their ways of settling it are not always the same. We find that in some cases the lord tried to get rid of the inconveniences occasioned by such events, or at least to throw one part of the burden back on the dependent population; in Barling, for instance, a manor of St. Paul's, London[654], of two feasts occurring in one week and even in two consecutive weeks, one profits to the villains and the other to the lord; that is to say, the labourer escapes one day's work altogether. But the general course seems to have been to liberate the peasants from work both on occasion of a festival and if the weather was exceptionally inclement[655]. Both facts are not without importance: it must be remembered that the number of Church festivals was a very considerable one in those days. Again, although the stewards were not likely to be very sentimental as to bad weather, the usual test of cold in case of ploughing seems to have been the hardness of the soil--a certain percentage of free days must have occurred during the winter at least. And what is even more to be considered--when the men were very strictly kept to their week-work under unfavourable circumstances, the landlord must have gained very little although the working people suffered much. The reader may easily fancy the effects of what must have been a very common occurrence, when the village householders sent out their ploughs on heavy clay in torrents of rain. The system of customary work on certain days was especially clumsy in such respects, and it is worth notice that in harvest-time the landlords rely chiefly on boon-days. These were not irrevocably fixed, and could be shifted according to the state of the weather. Still the week-work was so important an item in the general arrangement of labour-services that the inconveniences described must have acted powerfully in favour of commutation. [Relation between the customary system and the arbitrary authority of the lord.]