half as much bacon and cheese has to be given as usual, and the deficiency is to be made up by a money payment. Some of the manors of the abbey have to send a whole farm, some others only one half, that is one week's farm, but all are assessed to pay sixteen pence for every acre to be used as alms for the poor[666]. This description may be taken as a standard one, and it would be easy to supplement it in many particulars from the records of other monastic institutions. The records of St. Paul's, London, supply information as to a distribution of the farms at the close of the eleventh century, which covered fifty-two weeks, six days, and five-sixths of a day[667]. The firmae of St. Alban's were reckoned to provide for the fifty-two weeks of the year, and one in advance[668]. The practice of arranging the produce-rents according to farms was by no means restricted to ecclesiastical management; it occurs also on the estates of the Crown, and was probably in use on those of lay lords generally. Every person a little conversant with Domesday knows the _firmae unius noctis_, at which some of the royal manors were assessed[669]. In the period properly called feudal, that is in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the food-revenue had very often become only the starting-point for a reckoning of money-rents. The St. Alban's farms, for example, are no longer delivered in kind; their equivalent in money has taken their place. But the previous state of things has left a clear trace in the division by weeks. Altogether it seems impossible to doubt that the original idea was to provide really the food necessary for consumption. One cannot help thinking that such practice must have come from the very earliest times when a Saxon or a Celtic chieftain got his income from the territory under his sway by moving from one place to another with his retinue and feeding on the people for a certain period. This very primitive mode of raising income and consuming it at the same time may occasionally strike our eye even in the middle of the thirteenth century. The tenants of the Abbot of Osulveston in Donington and Byker are bound to receive their lord during one night and one day when he comes to hold his court in their place. They find the necessary food and beverage for him and for his men, provender for his horses, and so forth. If the abbot does not come in person, the homage may settle about a commutation of the duties with the steward or the sergeant sent for the purpose. If he refuses to take money, they must bring everything in kind[670]. [Decay of the farm-system.]