Arable, in all fields, 510 acres, the acre being assessed at 6d. all round.
Each plough may easily till one acre a day, if four horses and two oxen are put to it.
Two meadows, one containing eight acres, of which every single acre yields 4s. a year; the other meadow contains seven acres of similar value.
Pasture in severalty—30 acres, at 12d. an acre.
Of these, 16 acres are set apart for oxen and horses, and 14 for cows.
Some small particles of pasture leased out to the tenants, 4s.
The prior and the convent are lords of the common pasture in Bockyng, and may send 100 sheep to these commons, and to the fields when not under crop. Value 20s.
As important an item in the cultivation of the home farm as the soil itself is afforded by the plough-teams. The treatises on husbandry give very minute observations on their composition and management. And almost always we find the manorial teams supplemented by the consuetudines villae, that is by the customary work performed on different days by the peasantry[684]. As to this point the close connexion between demesne and tributary land is especially clear; but after all that has been said in the preceding chapter it is hardly necessary to add that it was not only the ploughing-work that was carried on by the lord with the help of his subjects.
The demesne and the village.
As a matter of fact, villages without a manorial demesne or without some dependence from it are found only exceptionally and in those parts of England where the free population had best kept its hold on the land, and where the power of the lord was more a political than an economical one (Norfolk and Suffolk, Lincoln, Northumberland, Westmoreland, etc.[685]). And there are hardly any cases at all of the contrary, that is of demesne land spreading over the whole of a manor. Tillingham, a manor of St. Paul's, London, comes very near it[686]: it contains 300 acres as home farm, and only 30 acres of villain land. But as a set-off, a considerable part of the demesne is distributed to small leaseholders.