Were the manors as isolated as some writers have asserted?  Generally speaking, we may say the means of communication were bad and many an estate cut off almost completely from the outside world, yet the manors must often have been connected by waterways, and sometimes by good roads, with other manors and with the towns.  Rivers in the Middle Ages were far more used as means of communication than to-day, and many streams now silted up and shallow were navigable according to Domesday.  Water carriage was, as always, much cheaper than land carriage, and corn could be carried from Henley to London for 2d. or 3d. a quarter.  The roads left by the Romans, owing to the excellence of their construction, remained in use during the Middle Ages, and must have been a great advantage to those living near them; but the other roads can have been little better than mud tracks, except in the immediate vicinity of the few large towns.  The keeping of the roads in repair, one part of the trinoda necessitas was imposed on all lands; but the results often seem to have been very indifferent, and they appear largely to have depended on chance, or the goodwill or devotion of neighbouring landowners.[61] Perhaps they would, except in the case of the Roman roads, have been impassable but for the fact that the great lords and abbots were constantly visiting their scattered estates, and therefore were interested in keeping such roads in order.  But in those days people were contented with very little, and though Edward I enforced the general improvement of roads in 1285, in the fourteenth century they were decaying.  Parliament adjourned thrice between 1331 and 1380 because the state of the roads kept many of the members away.  In 1353 the high road running from Temple Bar, then the western limit of London, to Westminster was ’so full of holes and bogs’ that the traffic was dangerous for men and carriages; and a little later all the roads near London were so bad, that carriers ’are oftentimes In peril of losing what they bring.’  What must remote country roads have been like when these important highways were in this state?  If members of Parliament, rich men riding good horses, could not get to London, how did the clumsy wagons and carts of the day fare?  The Church might well pity the traveller, and class him with the sick ’and the captive among the unfortunates whom she recommended to the daily prayers of pious souls.’[62] Rivers were mainly crossed by ford or ferry, though there were some excellent bridges, a few of which still remain, maintained by the trinoda necessitas, by gilds, by ‘indulgences’ promised to benefactors, and by toll, the right to levy which, called pontage, was often spent otherwise than on the repair of the bridge.

A few of the old open fields still exist, and the best surviving example of an open-field parish is that of Laxton in Nottinghamshire.[63] Nearly half the area of the parish remains in the form of two great arable fields, and two smaller ones which are treated as two parts of the third field.  The different holdings, freehold and leasehold, consist in part of strips of land scattered all over these fields.  The three-course system is rigidly adhered to, first year wheat, second year spring corn, third year fallow.