58

These were the larger tenants; among the smaller several had no meadow
at all.

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