e and was managed by the entire village.
Even the lord[68] had to conform to the customs of the community. Any
other system than this, which must have been galling to the more
enterprising, was impossible, for as the various holdings lay in
unfenced strips all over the great common fields, individual
initiative was out of the question. As may be imagined, the great
number of strips all mixed together often led to great confusion,
sometimes 2 or 3 acres could not be found at all, and disputes owing
to careless measurement were frequent.

It is not surprising that the services by which the villeins paid rent
for their holdings to the lord very early began to be commuted for
money; it was much more convenient to both parties; and with this
change from a 'natural economy' to a 'money economy' the destruction
of the manorial system commenced, though it was to take centuries to
effect it.

The first money payments apparently date from as early as 900,[69]
but must then have been very few, and services were the rule in the
thirteenth and earlier centuries, though at the beginning of the
twelfth we find a great number of rent-paying tenants.[70] In the
fourteenth century money began to be more generally available, and the
process of commutation grew steadily; a process greatly accelerated by
the destruction of large numbers of tenants who paid rent in services
by the Black Death of 1348-9, which forced lords of manors to let
their lands for money or work them themselves with hired labour.
Before that visitation, however, it appears that commutation of labour
services for fixed annual payments had made very little progress.[71]

When these services were commuted for money in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries they were put at 1d. a day in winter, and 2d. a
day in summer, and rather more in harvest[72]; and we may put the
ordinary agricultural labourers' wages from 1250-1350 all the year
round at 2d. a day, and from 1350-1400 at 3d., but few were paid in
this way. Many were paid by the year, with allowances of food besides
and sometimes clothes, and many were in harvest at all events paid by
the piece. At Crondal in Hampshire in 1248 a carter by the year
received 4s., a herdsman 2s. 3d., a day a or dairymaid, 2s.[73] The
change to money payments was beneficial to both parties; it stopped
many of the dishonest practices of the lord's bailiff, apart from the
fact that farming by officials was an expensive method. It meant,