We must not forget that the grazing of the tillage fields after the crops were off was of great assistance to those who kept stock; for there was plenty to eat on the stubbles.  The wheat was cut high, the straw often apparently left standing 18 inches or 2 feet high; weeds of all kinds abounded, for the land was badly cleaned; and often only the upper part of the high ridges, into which the land was thrown for purposes of drainage, was cultivated, the lower parts being left to natural grass.[79]

The greatest authority for the farming of the thirteenth century is Walter of Henley, who wrote, about the middle of it, a work which held the field as an agricultural textbook until Fitzherbert wrote in the sixteenth century, and much of his advice is valuable to-day.  There was from his time until the days of William Marshall, who wrote five centuries afterwards, a controversy as to the respective merits of horses and oxen as draught animals, and it is a curious fact that the later writer agreed with the earlier as to the superiority of oxen.  ’A plough of oxen’, says Walter, ’will go as far in the year as a plough of horses, because the malice of the ploughman will not allow the plough of horses to go beyond their pace, no more than the plough of oxen.  Further, in very hard ground where the plough of horses will stop, the plough of oxen will pass.  And the horse costs more than the ox, for he is obliged to have the sixth part of a bushel of oats every night, worth a halfpenny at least, and twelve pennyworth of grass in the summer.  Besides, each week he costs more or less a penny a week in shoeing, if he must be shod on all four feet;’ which was not the universal custom.

’But the ox has only to have 3-1/2 sheaves of oats per week (ten sheaves yielding a bushel of oats), worth a penny, and the same amount of grass as the horse.[80] And when the horse is old and worn out there is nothing but his skin, but when the ox is old with ten pennyworth of grass he shall be fit for the larder.’[81]

The labourer of the Middle Ages could not complain of lack of holidays; Walter of Henley tells us that, besides Sundays, eight weeks were lost in the year from holidays and other hindrances.[82]

He advises the sowing of spring seed on clay or on stony land early, because if it is dry in March the ground will harden too much and the stony ground become dry and open; therefore fore sow early that corn may be nourished by winter moisture.  Chalky and sandy ground need not be sown early.  At sowing, moreover, do not plough large furrows, but little and well laid together, that the seed may fall evenly.  Let your land be cleaned and weeded after S. John’s Day, June 24, for before that is not a good time; and if thistles are cut before S. John’s Day ‘for every one will come two or three.’  Do not sell your straw; if you take away the least you lose much; words which many a landlord to-day doubtless wishes were fixed in the minds of his tenants.