[119] McPherson, Annals of Commerce, i. 543, says that as the plague diminished the number of employers as well as labourers, the demand for labour could not have been much greater than before, and would have had little effect on the rate of if Edward III had not debased the coinage.  But if the owners did decrease the lands would only accumulate in fewer hands, and would still require cultivation.

[120] Page, End of Villeinage, pp. 59 et seq.

[121] Ibid. p. 44.

[122] Transactions, Royal Historical Society, New Series, xiv. 123.

[123] This had been done before, but was now much more frequent.  Hasbach, op. cit. p. 17.

[124] ’After the Black Death the flight of villeins was extremely common.’—­Page, op. cit., p. 40.

[125] Nasse, Agricultural Community of the Middle Ages, p. 1.

[126] Cunningham, Industry and Commerce, i. 137.

CHAPTER IV

HOW THE CLASSES CONNECTED WITH THE LAND LIVED IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The castles of the great landowners have been so often described that there is no need to do this again.  The popular idea of a baron of the Middle Ages is of a man who when he was not fighting was jousting or hunting.  Such were, no doubt, his chief recreations; so fond was he of hunting, indeed, that his own broad lands were not enough, and he was a frequent trespasser on those of others; the records of the time are full of cases which show that poaching was quite a fashionable amusement among the upper classes.  But among the barons were many men who, like their successors to-day, did their duty as landlords.  Of one of the Lords of Berkeley in the fourteenth century, it was said he was ’sometyme in husbandry at home, sometyme at sport in the field, sometyme in the campe, sometyme in the Court and Council of State, with that promptness and celerity that his body might have bene believed to be ubiquitary’.  Many of them were farmers on a very large scale, though they might not have so much time to devote to it as those excellent landlords the monks.

Thomas Lord Berkeley, who held the Berkeley estates from 1326 to 1361, farmed the demesnes of a quantity of manors, as was the custom, and kept thereon great flocks of sheep, ranging from 300 to 1,500 on each manor.[127] The stock of the Bishop of Winchester, by an inquisition taken at his death in 1367, amounted to 127 draught horses, 1,556 head of black cattle, and 12,104 sheep and lambs.  Almost every manor had one or two pigeon houses, and the number of pigeons reared is astonishing; from one manor Lord Berkeley obtained 2,151 pigeons in a single year.  No one but the lord was allowed to keep them, and they were one of the chief grievances of the villeins, who saw their seed devoured by these pests without redress.  Their dung, too, was one of the most valued manures.