We feel our way with much greater security in another direction. The fields of the village contain many a nook or odd bit which cannot be squeezed into the virgate arrangement and into the system of work and duties connected with it. These '_subsecivae_,' as the Romans would have said, were always distributed for small rents in kind or in money[728]. The manorial administration may also exclude from the common arrangement entire areas of land which it is thought advantageous to give out for rent. Those who take it are mostly the same villagers who possess the regular holdings, but their title is different; in one case it is based on agreement, in the other on custom[729]. Plots of this kind are called _forlands_[730]. In close connexion with them we find the _essarts_ or _assarts_--land newly reclaimed from the waste, and therefore not mapped out according to the original plan of possession and service. The Surveys often mark the different epochs of cultivation--the old and the new essarts[731]. The documents show also that the spread of the area under cultivation was effected in different ways; sometimes by a single settler with help from the lord[732], and sometimes by the entire village, or at any rate by a large group of peasants who club together for the purpose[733]. In the first case there was no reason for bringing the reclaimed space under the sway of the compulsory rotation of crops or the other regulations of communal agriculture. In the second, the distribution of the acres and strips among the various tenants was proportioned to their holdings in the ancient lands of the village. The rents on essart land seem very low, and no wonder: everywhere in the world the advance of cultivation has been made the starting-point of privileged occupation and light taxation. The Roman Empire introduced the _emphyteusis_ as a contract in favour of the pioneers of cultivation, the French feudal law endowed the _hôtes_ (_hospites_) on newly reclaimed land with all kinds of advantages. English practice is not so explicit on this point, but it is not difficult to gather from the Surveys that it was not blind to the necessity of patronising agricultural progress and encouraging it by favourable terms.