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always abreast of the progress of research and we have thought it possible to furnish them, although in a very modest measure, with the means of acquiring supplementary information . .

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I have specially written for this publication dozen studies and additional notes. Some of these lay claim to no originality, and their only purpose is to summarize celebrated controversies or to call attention to recent discoveries. In others a study of English history of some duration has allowed me to express a personal opinion on certain questions. The problems most discussed by the scholars who are now investigating the Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Angevin periods have thus been restated with a bibliography which may be useful . . .

M. Bémont, the Frenchman who has the best knowledge of mediæval England, has been good enough to read the proofs of the additional studies.

CH. PETIT-DUTAILLIS.

3. M. Petit-Dutaillis proceeds to state that he has added to Stubbs' notes references to works and editions by French scholars "which he was unacquainted with, or at least treated as non-existent," and has referred the reader to better editions of English Chronicles and other sources where Stubbs was content to use inferior ones, or where critical editions have appeared since his death.

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THE EVOLUTION OF THE RURAL CLASSES
IN ENGLAND AND THE ORIGIN OF THE
MANOR.

The manor at

At the end of the Middle Ages, rural England was divided into estates, which were known by the Norman name of manors.1 The manor, a purely the end of the private division,2 a unit in the eyes of its Middle Ages. lord, did not necessarily coincide with the township or village, a legal division of the hundred and a unit in the eyes of the king; but, except in certain counties,3 the two areas were normally identical. In each of his manors, the lord of the manor retained some lands in demesne, which he cultivated with the aid of labour services, and he let the remainder in return for fixed dues, to the tenants, free or villein, who formed the village community. Agriculture and cattle-rearing

1. The term is not absolutely general. At the end of the 12th century it is not used in the Boldon Book, the land-book of the Bishop of Durham; the rural unit, in this document, is the villa, though in reality the manorial organisation existed. (Lapsley, in Victoria History of the Counties of England, Durham, i, 1905, pp. 262, 268.)

2. Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, 1889, i, p. xxxix.

3. In the counties of Cambridge, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln, Nottingham and Derby, and in some parts of Yorkshire, the village was frequently divided between three or four Norman lords, at least at the date of Domesday Book (Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 1897, pp. 22-23). The co-existence of several manors in the territory of one village sometimes brought about the partition of the village; or on the other hand it persisted, and was the cause of frequent disputes; see on this subject Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, 1905, pp. 304 sqq. ; Villainage in England, 1892, pp. 393 sqq.; Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 129 sqq.

4. See the description of the manorial organisation in Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 307 sqq., and Villainage, pp. 223 sqq. [Cf. also his English Society in the Eleventh Century, 1908, pp. 353 sqq.] Mr. Maitland has published an excellent monograph on the Manor of Wilburton in the English Historical Review, 1894, pp. 417 sqq. Numerous monographs of this kind would be very useful.

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were carried on according to the system of the unenclosed field, the open field. In the manor The Open Field. there were several fields alternatively left fallow or sown with different crops.2 Each of these fields, instead of belonging as a whole to a single tenant, was divided, by means of balks of turf, into narrow strips of land, whose length represented the traditional length of furrow made by the plough before it was turned round. The normal holding of a peasant was made up of strips of arable land scattered in the different fields, customary rights in the common lands, and a part of the fodder produced by the meadows of the village. Once the harvest had been reaped in the fields and the hay got in in the meadows, the beasts were sent there for common pasture. Every one had to conform to the same rules, to the same method of rotation of crops; even the lord of the manor, who often had a part of his private demesne situated in the open field.

Whatever progress individualism had made in the 13th century, the inhabitant of a village was a member The Village of a community whose rights and interests Community. restricted his own, and which, in its relation to the lord of the manor, still remained powerful.3 Common business was discussed periodically in the hall of the manor, and the villeins, the English term for the serfs, attended the halimot just as much as the free tenants; although the villeins were in a majority, the free tenants were amenable to this court in which we see the members of

the peasants themselves " presenting

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1. The English open-field system has been often studied. The starting point is Nasse's essay Zur Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Feldgemeinschaft in England, 1869. F. Seebohm revived the subject in his celebrated book, to which we shall have to refer again: The English Village Community, 1883, pp. 1 sqq. See ibid., pp. 2 and 4, the map and sketch made from nature-for there still exist some relics of these methods of cultivation. Cf. Mr. Vinogradoff's chapter on the Open-field System, in The Growth of the Manor, pp. 165 sqq.; Stubbs, i, pp. 52 sqq., 89 sqq. 2. For example: corn-barley or oats,-fallow.

3. See Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 318 sqq., 361 sqq. and passim; Villainage, pp. 354 sqq.

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