One great field of thirty acres
would have sixty distinct strips, with a narrow margin of turf serving
in each case as the line of demarcation. To each servile holding in the
Confessor's time the landlord assigned a pair of oxen with which to work
it; and these may have been combined into a powerful team of eight or
twelve, similar to manorial teams, though plough-teams varying in
numerical strength are recorded, and the efficiency of some of them may
well be doubted.
If there were oxen, it is clear that provision must have been made for
their support; and this consisted in the hay from the meadow, in the
pasture of the common waste, and that of the fallow field and the other
fields in the interval between harvest and seed-time. The question
whether the tillers were bond or free probably made no difference to the
way in which agricultural operations were conducted.
The collapse of this system may be attributed to the scarcity of labour
brought about especially by the Black Death. When men could not be had
in sufficient number, the necessary consequences was the expansion of
pasture and the contraction of tillage; and this dual process was
assisted by the stampede of labourers to the towns and the policy of
enclosure to which landowners resorted as a remedy. Deprived of their
quit-rents, and not having resources for the payment of wages on an
adequate scale, supposing that labour was obtainable on reasonable
terms, the landholders fell back upon the only expedients that remained
to them.
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