In all the cost of repairs and buildings came to £8. 3s. 7d. out of a total expenditure of £72. 6s. 4¾d.
(4) Expenses of the home farm. The home farm was an essential feature of manorial economy and particularly so when the lord of the manor was a community. The nuns expected to draw the greater part of their food from the farm; livestock, grain and dairy all had to be superintended. A student of these account rolls may see unrolled before him all the different operations of the year, the autumn ploughing and sowing, the spring ploughing and sowing, the hay crop mown in June and the strenuous labours of the harvest. He may, if he will, know how many sheep the shepherd led to pasture and how many oxen the oxherd drove home in the evening, for the inventory on the back of an account roll enumerates minutely all the stock. There is something homely and familiar in lists such as the tale of cattle owned by the nuns of Sheppey at the Dissolution:
v contre oxen and iij western oxen fatt, ... xviij leane contre oxen workers, xij leane contre sterys of ij or iij yere age, xxviij yeryngs, xxxviii kene and heifors ... xxvi cattle of thys yere, an horse, j olde baye, a dunne, a whyte and an amblelyng grey, vj geldings and horse for the plow and harowe, with v mares, xliij hogges of dyvers sorts, in wethers and lammys ccccxxx, ... and in beryng ewes vijc, ... in twelvemonthyngs, ewes and wethers vicxxxv ... in lambys at this present daye vclx[349].
How these lean country oxen, the “one old bay, a dun, a white and an ambling grey,” bring the quiet English landscape before the reader’s eyes. Time is as nothing; and the ploughman trudging over the brown furrows, the slow, warm beasts, breathing heavily in the darkness of their byre, are little changed from what they were five hundred years ago—save that our beasts to-day are larger and fatter, thanks to turnips and Mr Bakewell. Kingdoms rise and fall, but the seasons never alter, and the farm servant, conning these old accounts, would find nothing in them but the life he knew:
This is the year’s round he must go
To make and then to win the seed:
In winter to sow and in March to hoe
Michaelmas plowing, Epiphany sheep;
Come June there is the grass to mow,
At Lammas all the vill must reap.
From dawn till dusk, from Easter till Lent
Here are the laws that he must keep:
Out and home goes he, back-bent,
Heavy, patient, slow as of old
Father, granfer, ancestor went
O’er Sussex weald and Yorkshire wold.
O what see you from your gray hill?
The sun is low, the air all gold,
Warm lies the slumbrous land and still.
I see the river with deep and shallow,
I see the ford, I hear the mill;
I see the cattle upon the fallow;
And there the manor half in trees,
And there the church and the acre hallow
Where lie your dead in their feretories....
I see the yews and the thatch between
The smoke that tells of cottage and hearth,
And all as it has ever been
From the beginning of this old earth[350].
The farm labourer to-day would well understand all these items of expenditure, which the monastic treasuress laboriously enters in her account. He would understand that heavy section headed “Repair of Carts and Ploughs.” He would understand the purchases of grain for seed, or for the food of livestock, of a cow here, a couple of oxen there, of whip-cord and horse-collars, traces and sack-cloth and bran for a sick horse. Farm expenses are always the same. The items which throw light on sheep-farming are very interesting, in view of the good income which monastic houses in pastoral districts made by the sale of their wool. The Prioress of Catesby’s account for 1414-5 notes:
In expences about washing and shearing of sheep v s vj d. In ale bought for caudles ij s. In pitchers viij d. In ale about the carriage of peas to the sheepcote iv d ob. In a tressel bought for new milk viij d. In nails for a door there iv d ob. In thatching the sheepcote viij d. In amending walls about the sheepcote ix d;
and in her inventory of stock she accounts for
118 sheep received of stock, whereof there was delivered to the kitchen after shearing by tally 14, in murrain before shearing 12, and there remains 101; and for 5 wethers of stock and 2 purchased, whereof in murrain before shearing 3, and there remains 4; and for 144 lambs of issues of all ewes, whereof in murrain 23; and there remains 121[351].
The nuns of Gracedieu in the same spring had a flock of 103 ewes and 52 lambs; and there is mention in their accounts of the sale of 30 stone of wool to a neighbour[351]; and the nuns of Sheppey, as the inventory quoted above bears witness, had a very large flock indeed.