Life in the castle was chiefly for the rich and their retainers. The vast majority of people lived in mud huts or timber huts clustered together for safety and surrounded by the large open fields which they farmed. The manor was very much the same as it had been in Saxon times and the scenes you see on the opposite page, taken from the Bayeux Tapestry, did not alter very much during the next 400 years.
The peasants of the village owed service to their lord. This was because they could not own the land. They rented it and paid their rent in labour. This labour service sometimes included duties such as chopping wood, carting hay, or work in the manor house or castle, but usually it meant work in the fields. Work in the fields was normally calculated as so many days l
abour a week, but at special times of the year there were 'boon works' to perform and on these occasions all the villagers were required to help in the tasks which required many hands such as sheepshearing or the harvest. At harvest time there were usually special meals for the workers.
Free bread, meat, fish and ale were welcomed by the peasants at these special times, but they often got free meals when they worked for the lord of the manor on the days when it was their turn to 'pay the rent'. These day services did not necessarily mean a full day's work. A peasant might have been able to do the work for the lord of the manor before breakfast, leaving the rest of the day clear to work on his own strips of land.
The efficient running of the manor and its farms was in the hands of the steward, bailiff and the reeve. It was their duty to see that services were performed at appropriate times and that the manor ran smoothly. The reeve was really a farm manager. A medieval poet called Chaucer described a reeve as a man who knew farming very well indeed and who was astute enough to be able to forecast how much corn and hay would be harvested from the amount of rainfall falling during the growing months. The reeve organised the planning of the year's work, managed the sheep and cattle on the manor, and supervised the ploughing, harrowing, seeding and harvesting in the fields.
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Great Britain History : Life on the Manor written by Monique Barb for FamousWhy.com
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