+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+ | Total Acreage of | | | | | | | Customary Holdings|Arable.|Pasture.|Meadow.|Closes.|Indeterminate. | | on Sixteen Manors.| | | | | | +-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+ | Acres. | Acres.| Acres. | Acres.| Acres.| Acres. | | 7786 | 6841 | 555 | 390 | ... | ... | | |(87.7%)| (7.1%) | (5.1%)| | | +-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+
[415] _Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History_, vol. i. pp. 171-173.
The figures in this table do not pretend to complete accuracy, but their classification of the distribution of land between different uses is not far wrong. Of the customary tenants' land about 87 per cent. is arable, and 12 per cent. meadow and pasture. Of the farmers' land about 49 per cent. is arable, 36 per cent. pasture, 9 per cent. meadow. The proportion of pasture to arable is somewhat higher in the southern and midland counties than it is in East Anglia; but the cases examined are too few to allow of any conclusion being drawn from this fact. Without pushing the figures in either table further than they will go, one may suggest that they seem to imply, in the first place, that the large farmer was by no means always a grazier, and that the writers of the period who spoke as though all large-scale farming meant the conversion of arable to pasture were guilty of some exaggeration. In a good many cases the methods of cultivation pursued by the farmer of the demesne differed from those of the customary tenants only in the fact that his holding was larger; as a matter of fact the customary tenants on some manors deserve the name of grazier better than the farmer of the demesne upon others.
But they suggest, in the second place, that these cases were exceptional, and that, on the whole, arable farming played a much more important part on the holdings of the customary tenants than it did on those of the farmers. The former subsisted mainly on the tillage of the land in the open fields. The latter, though they had often much arable, sometimes had none, or next to none at all, and relied to a far greater extent on the opportunities for stock-breeding offered by pasture and meadow land. These figures, however, include some derived from manors where tillage was virtually the only sort of farming carried on, and they do not give any idea of the arrangements prevailing on an estate where pasture-farming had been pushed far. Taking from the fifty manors dealt with above, the twelve which are most typical of the new régime, one gets a very different picture--