Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/516

Rh and exploited for the sake of the lord and managed at discretion by his will and the will of his servants. On the contrary, one of the best established facts in the economie life of the manor was its double mechanism, if one may say so. It consisted, as a rule, of a village community with wide though peculiar self-government and of a manorial administration superimposed on it, influencing and modifying the life of the community but not creating it. This double aim and double mechanism of the manor must be noticed at the outset as a very characteristic feature; it places the manor in a sharp contrast both to the plantations of slaves of the ancient world and to the commercial husbandry of a modern estate struggling for profit as best it may.

Manorial husbandry was all along striving towards two intimately connected aims, providing the villagers with means of existence and providing the lord with profits. Henee a dual machinery to attain these aims, both a village community and the lord's demesne.

The village community lay at the basis of the whole. It gave rise to a very peculiar system of holding and using land, not to be confused either with the case of the tribal community in which rights are graduated according to the pedigree of a person, or with that of the communalism of the Russian mir or of some Hindu settlements, in which land is allotted and redivided according to the requirements and the economic strength of the settlers. The peculiar bent of the Englislı rural community would perhaps be best indicated by the expression "shareholding arrange- ment" or "community of shareholders." Each of the households settled in the village had a fixed and constant share, or maybe half a share, or a quarter, or the eighth part of a share assigned to it. It stood in scot and in lot with the village as a hide or two virgates or one virgate or a bovate, according to the size of the share. By the standard of this hereditary share all rights and duties were apportioned. By the side of the shareholders there generally lived in the village smaller tenants (cottagers, crofters) but they were merely an adjunct to the main body of the tenantry and may be left out of reckoning in our general survey.

The system of communal shareholding was very strikingly illustrated by the treatment of waste and pasture in the medieval village. It was not divided among the tenants, and, though later in legal theory it belonged to the lord, it was everywhere considered by custom as a "comnion" for the use of the villagers. In most cases it had to be stinted to some extent: rules were formulated as to the species and number of beasts to be sent to pasture, as to seasons, and as to precautions against abuses: and these rules ean generally be traced to the main principle, that every household has to use the common according to the size of its