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The work of an author who is only known through this book, and two anonymous treatises, have been placed alongside the maxims which were laid down by the great Bishop of Lincoln, for they deal, and deal at greater length, with the management of estates.Public attention has been called to the treatise of Walter of Henley by Professor Thorold Eogers, who has made frequent reference to it in the earlier volumes of his great work on Agriculture and Prices, and it is most desirable that the first-hand evidence on this important side of the life of our forefathers should be rendered gene- rally accessible to students of English History.This is more especially the case, as the various treatises, in so far as they have been printed already, have been curiously mangled ; it has been an interesting task to try and disen- tangle the confusion into which they have been thrown, and present them as nearly as possible in their original form, while at the same time the whole of the interpolated matter has also been retained.The student has now access to Vlll fully specified, but who had all the rest of his time to himself, and whose chief maintenance came from his own holding.The villan was not paid wages like the modern labourer, but in an ordinary way he worked three days a week on the domain land, he gave besides extra days in autumn, and performed other incidental duties, and he had in return his meals on some of the working days, and a holding (virgata) of about thirty acres, which his lord stocked with a yoke of oxen and half-a-dozen sheep when the villan first entered on his tenancy.By a process which has many parallels in feudal times, the obligations which originally attached to the villans per- sonally came to be connected with the holdings they enjoyed.We thus get the whole of the villan's virgates spoken of as servile land, and the obligations of work on 1 There were, of course, an extra- tenants (and the redditus assises, ordinary number of social grades, cf.p. 60), as their relations to the whose status differed for legal pur- manorial lord appear to have been poses ; the statement above has fiscal, and they lay outside the mere reference to an economic ordinary processes of agriculture as grouping.It also ignores the free he was concerned in directing them.variations in the value (not merely in the rating) of the 1 See, however, Thorold Rogers, Agriculture and Prices, 1. 19, and in the Glossary,' s.v.asseuer.ferences in the degree in which their respective managers ventured to have recourse to trade ; some might be able to sell half the produce or more in ordinary years, while others would be forced to retain almost the whole crop to meet the requirements of the villans and the household.It is hardly conceivable that there could be regular their services, could be stated with precision.In every Domesday entry in turn we find an estimate of the worth of the estate, which was, of course, mainly dependent on the villans' obligations, and this is stated in terms of money. 1 Domesday Book, I. 314, a. 2. Hotun in Yorkshire.4 Growth of Eiiglish Industry 2 Vinogradov in The English during the Early and Middle Ages, Historical Review, I. 734.p. 513, for the case at Barrington 3 Hundred Bolls, II.636. in Cambridgeshire.successful working of the home farmunder the superin- tendence of a bailiff, and by means of the services of the villans, with the assistance of hired labourerswas the chief element of success.They deal primarily with bailiff farm- a details of rural life had a lasting importance ; it continued to be in frequent use and in wide circulation ; additional matter was incorporated in it as the changed circumstances of agriculture demanded ; it was thought worthy of re-issue from an English printing-press for the guidance of practical men, more than two hundred years after it was written.1 At length it lost its position as the best book on the subject, 1 See below, p. xxxix.XX11 altogether impossible to arrange the MSS. in groups, and to indicate briefly the relations of these various groups to 1 Agriculture and Prices, I. 460.
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