All these things were exacted and collected by the steward, whom they called Villicus, or Major (Mayor).  He was a very hard-worked man, and when one reads the seventy separate and particular injunctions which Charlemagne addressed to his stewards one cannot help feeling sorry for him.  He had to get all the right services out of the tenants, and tell them what to do each week and see that they did it; he had to be careful that they brought the right number of eggs and pigs up to the house, and did not foist off warped or badly planed planks upon him.  He had to look after the household serfs too, and set them to work.  He had to see about storing, or selling, or sending off to the monastery the produce of the estate and of the tenants’ rents; and every year he had to present a full and detailed account of his stewardship to the abbot.  He had a manse of his own, with services and rents due from it, and Charlemagne exhorted his stewards to be prompt in their payments, so as to set a good example.  Probably his official duties left him very little time to work on his own farm, and he would have to put in a man to work it for him, as Charlemagne bade his stewards do.  Often, however, he had subordinate officials called deans under him, and sometimes the work of receiving and looking after the stores in the big house was done by a special cellarer.

That, in a few words, is the way in which the monks of St Germain and the other Frankish landowners of the time of Charlemagne managed their estates.  Let us try, now, to look at those estates from a more human point of view and see what life was like to a farmer who lived upon them.  The abbey possessed a little estate called Villaris, near Paris, in the place now occupied by the park of Saint Cloud.  When we turn up the pages in the estate book dealing with Villaris, we find that there was a man called Bodo living there.[1] He had a wife called Ermentrude and three children called Wido and Gerbert and Hildegard; and he owned a little farm of arable and meadow land, with a few vines.  And we know very nearly as much about Bodo’s work as we know about that of a smallholder in France today.  Let us try and imagine a day in his life.  On a fine spring morning towards the end of Charlemagne’s reign Bodo gets up early, because it is his day to go and work on the monks’ farm, and he does not dare to be late, for fear of the steward.  To be sure, he has probably given the steward a present of eggs and vegetables the week before, to keep him in a good temper; but the monks will not allow their stewards to take big bribes (as is sometimes done on other estates), and Bodo knows that he will not be allowed to go late to work.  It is his day to plough, so he takes his big ox with him and little Wido to run by its side with a goad, and he joins his friends from some of the farms near by, who are going to work at the big house too.  They all assemble, some with horses and oxen, some with mattocks and hoes and spades and