The returns of the live stock which they possessed would give the Conqueror very useful information as to the amount of taxation his subjects could bear, and he could hardly expect to get many trust-worthy returns on this head. In the accounts of many of the manors they are omitted entirely. In the accounts of others the return of live stock is very small in proportion to the size of the estate. It is probable that the stock owned by the tenants is omitted altogether. Pigs must have been the animals on which the lower class of tenants principally relied for their meat, but the pigs in most of the returns are very few, only eight on the King’s estate in Lowestoft.
In the account of a large manor at Mutford—to which 40 tenants belonged—the return of live stock mentions 7 geese, 30 pigs, 30 goats, and two hives of bees.
Some of the estates appear to have been very well stocked. On the farm of 40 acres belonging to the parish priest of Somerleyton, there was 1 horse, 4 cows, 5 pigs, and 33 sheep—besides the plough cattle. On the King’s farm in Lound, which was not half the size of his Lowestoft estate, there were 50 pigs.
On a farm of 40 acres in Belton there was 1 horse, 2 geese, 7 pigs, 30 sheep, and 3 goats.
In addition to these animals the owners of these estates had draught oxen for ploughing.
It would appear that the produce of the arable land was nearly all required for feeding its human occupants, and that the geese and the pigs and other animals would be limited to such numbers as could find food for themselves in the woods and wild land which was common to the lords and tenants of each manor.
These returns of live stock, although they would have been very valuable to the Conqueror and ourselves, if they were complete and trustworthy, are so manifestly defective and irregularly made in most cases, that they furnish very unsatisfactory materials for forming an idea of the general condition of the peasantry. But as we know that all the tenants of a manor—even the lowest class of bondmen—occupied some land for the maintenance of themselves and their families, with rights of pasturage on the common lands, probably most had some cattle and pigs of their own, and were well provided with the necessaries of life.
The country must have been in a stationary condition for hundreds of years in the Saxon period owing to the entire absence of trade, and the almost entire absence of money. The silver penny was the only coin in circulation, and indeed for some two centuries after.
With little or no opportunities for selling the produce of their estates, the landowners had little reason to improve them, nor could they increase their land under tillage without interfering with the rights of their tenants on the waste land. The system of serfdom, moreover, whilst it secured a living to a large number of people, bound them and their children to the estates on which they held their land, and must have tended to deprive a large part of the population of the country of any stimulus to enterprise or self improvement.