ture to ourselves the typical manor, we shall see a large
part of the lord's demesne forming a compact area within which stood
his house; this being in addition to the lord's strips in the open
fields intermixed with those of his tenants. The mansion house was
usually a very simple affair, built of wood and consisting chiefly of
a hall; which even as late as the seventeenth century in some cases
served as kitchen, dining room, parlour, and sleeping room for the
men; and one or two other rooms.[43] It is probable that in early
times the thegns possessed in most cases only one manor apiece,[44] so
that the manor house was then nearly always inhabited by the lord, but
after the Conquest, when manors were bestowed by scores and even
hundreds by William on his successful soldiers, many of them can only
have acted as the temporary lodging of the lord when he came to
collect his rent, or as the house of the bailiff. According to the
_Gerefa_, written about 1000--and there was very little alteration for
a long time afterwards--the mansion was adjacent to a court or yard
which the quadrangular homestead surrounded with its barns, horse and
cattle stalls, sheep pens and fowlhouse. Within this court were ovens,
kilns, salt-house, and malt-house, and perhaps the hayricks and wood
piles. Outside and surrounding the homestead were the enclosed arable
and grass fields of the portion of the demesne which may be called the
home farm, a kitchen garden, and probably a vineyard, then common in
England. The garden of the manor house would not have a large variety
of vegetables; some onions, leeks, mustard, peas, perhaps cabbage; and
apples, pears, cherries, probably damsons, plums,[45] strawberries,
peaches, quinces, and mulberries. Not far off was the village or town
of the tenants, the houses all clustering close together, each house
standing in a toft or yard with some buildings, and built of wood,
turf, clay, or wattles, with only one room which the tenant shared
with his live stock, as in parts of Ireland to-day. Indeed, in some
parts of Yorkshire at the beginning of the nineteenth century this
primitive simplicity still prevailed, live stock were still kept in
the house, the floors were of clay, and the family slept in boxes
round the solitary room. Examples of farmhouses clustered together at
some distance from their respective holdings still survive, though
generally built of stone. Next the village, though not always, for
they were