axes and scythes, and go off in gangs to work upon the fields and meadows and woods of the seigniorial manse, according as the steward orders them.  The manse next door to Bodo is held by a group of families:  Frambert and Ermoin and Ragenold, with their wives and children.  Bodo bids them good morning as he passes.  Frambert is going to make a fence round the wood, to prevent the rabbits from coming out and eating the young crops; Ermoin has been told off to cart a great load of firewood up to the house; and Ragenold is mending a hole in the roof of a barn.  Bodo goes whistling off in the cold with his oxen and his little boy; and it is no use to follow him farther, because he ploughs all day and eats his meal under a tree with the other ploughmen, and it is very monotonous.

Let us go back and see what Bodo’s wife, Ermentrude, is doing.  She is busy too; it is the day on which the chicken-rent is due—­a fat pullet and five eggs in all.  She leaves her second son, aged nine, to look after the baby Hildegard and calls on one of her neighbours, who has to go up to the big house too.  The neighbour is a serf and she has to take the steward a piece of woollen cloth, which will be sent away to St Germain to make a habit for a monk.  Her husband is working all day in the lord’s vineyards, for on this estate the serfs generally tend the vines, while the freemen do most of the ploughing.  Ermentrude and the serf’s wife go together up to the house.  There all is busy.  In the men’s workshop are several clever workmen—­a shoemaker, a carpenter, a blacksmith, and two silversmiths; there are not more, because the best artisans on the estates of St Germain live by the walls of the abbey, so that they can work for the monks on the spot and save the labour of carriage.  But there were always some craftsmen on every estate, either attached as serfs to the big house, or living on manses of their own, and good landowners tried to have as many clever craftsmen as possible.  Charlemagne ordered his stewards each to have in his district ’good workmen, namely, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, shoemakers, turners, carpenters, swordmakers, fishermen, foilers, soapmakers, men who know how to make beer, cider, perry, and all other kinds of beverages, bakers to make pasty for our table, netmakers who know how to make nets for hunting, fishing, and fowling, and others too many to be named’.[2] And some of these workmen are to be found working for the monks in the estate of Villaris.

But Ermentrude does not stop at the men’s workshop.  She finds the steward, bobs her curtsy to him, and gives up her fowl and eggs, and then she hurries off to the women’s part of the house, to gossip with the serfs there.  The Franks used at this time to keep the women of their household in a separate quarter, where they did the work which was considered suitable for women, very much as the Greeks of antiquity used to do.  If a Frankish noble had lived at the big house, his wife would have looked after their