Consider for a moment how the estate upon which they lived was organized.  The lands of the Abbey of St Germain were divided into a number of estates, called fiscs, each of a convenient size to be administered by a steward.  On each of these fiscs the land was divided into seigniorial and tributary lands; the first administered by the monks through a steward or some other officer, and the second possessed by various tenants, who received and held them from the abbey.  These tributary lands were divided into numbers of little farms, called manses, each occupied by one or more families.  If you had paid a visit to the chief or seigniorial manse, which the monks kept in their own hands, you would have found a little house, with three or four rooms, probably built of stone, facing an inner court, and on one side of it you would have seen a special group of houses hedged round, where the women serfs belonging to the house lived and did their work; all round you would also have seen little wooden houses, where the household serfs lived, workrooms, a kitchen, a bakehouse, barns, stables, and other farm buildings, and round the whole a hedge carefully planted with trees, so as to make a kind of enclosure or court.  Attached to this central manse was a considerable amount of land—­ploughland, meadows, vineyards, orchards, and almost all the woods or forests on the estate.  Clearly a great deal of labour would be needed to cultivate all these lands.  Some of that labour was provided by servile workers who were attached to the chief manse and lived in the court.  But these household serfs were not nearly enough to do all the work upon the monks’ land, and far the greater part of it had to be done by services paid by the other landowners on the estate.

[Illustration:  January—­Ploughing]

[Illustration:  March—­Breaking Clods]

[Illustration:  August—­Reaping]

[Illustration:  December—­Threshing and Winnowing]

1.  BODO AT HIS WORK

[Illustration:  II.  EMBARKATION OF THE POLOS AT VENICE]

Beside the seigniorial manse, there were a number of little dependent manses.  These belonged to men and women who were in various stages of freedom, except for the fact that all had to do work on the land of the chief manse.  There is no need to trouble with the different classes, for in practice there was very little difference between them, and in a couple of centuries they were all merged into one common class of medieval villeins.  The most important people were those called coloni, who were personally free (that is to say, counted as free men by the law), but bound to the soil, so that they could never leave their farms and were sold with the estate, if it were sold.  Each of the dependent manses was held either by one family or by two or three families which clubbed together to do the work; it consisted of a house or houses, and farm buildings,