There were small services, such as threshing, thatching, delving, building, and enclosing. A tenant made two perches, or eleven yards, of dyke. A tenant at Darent, near Rochester, in the thirteenth century, did two perches of enclosure around the court, and seven perches of Racheie around the lord's corn. Then there was the service of enclosing the hall-garth or courtyard. The tenants are still obliged to keep up a stone wall round the site of the manor-house at Brotherton, in Norfolk; the mansion itself disappeared long ago. The fencing of a park was in some places distributed among a number of townships, each undertaking to maintain so many rods of paling; this was the custom at Pilton, in Somerset, where there was a deer-park belonging to the Abbot of Glastonbury. The churchyard at Bradley, in Staffordshire, is said to be still enclosed by the parishioners associated in this manner,--that is, each person is bound to finish a certain portion of paling. The tenants also made or maintained the lord's sheepfold. Each hyde at Thorpe in Essex had to make a certain number of rods for the fold out of the lord's wood.
At times, the tenants had to spread composts in the lord's field. They also collected stubble out of the corn-fields, and reeds out of the marsh; reeds and straw were strewn in apartments, and used for thatching or fuel. In many places they were required to gather nuts in the woods for the lord; the nuts were for making oil, and a quarter of nuts answered to a gallon of oil. Nutting was rather a pastime, or holiday task, than a service. The nutting expeditions at Wickham, in Essex, were to be made on three feast days, which are not named, but Holyrood Day, the 14th of September, may have been one of them:
"This day, they say, is called Holy-Rood Day, And all the youth are now a nutting gone."
To make malt for the lord was usually the chief service of the poorer tenants in the immediate neighbourhood of a monastery, as at Darent and other places near Rochester, and at Battle; tenants at a distance, instead of making malt, in some places paid a tax called _malt-silver_. The cottagers carried their lord's malt to the flour mill to be crushed, for they were not allowed to keep hand-mills or mortars, which might be used in grinding corn. The malt might be dried at home, for kilns were common in old houses; but in some manors the lord had a public kiln, which the tenants were bound to make use of.