These questions ask you to identify parts of a manor, explain farming practices and connect village duties with the right institution. Picture the estate as a working landscape rather than as one large house.
Map the estate before following the season
| Part or practice | Function |
|---|---|
| Demesne | Land cultivated for the lord's benefit, using household workers and labour owed by tenants. |
| Peasant strips | Narrow pieces scattered through large open fields, giving households access to different qualities of soil. |
| Common and woodland | Shared resources for grazing animals and collecting fuel or building wood. |
| Three-field rotation | Autumn crop, spring crop and fallow occupied different fields and changed places in the following cycle. |
Fallow was an active part of cultivation: resting soil recovered, while grazing animals returned nutrients through manure. On the heavy wet soils of northern Europe, a wheeled plough needed a team of oxen, so several households often combined animals. Seasonal urgency shaped labour. Tenants worked the demesne regularly and supplied extra effort when ploughing or harvest could not wait. Peasant women joined field and harvest work as well as caring for animals, gardens, food and household production.
Keep payments and institutions separate. A tithe was normally one tenth of produce given to the Church. Milling was a lordly monopoly: tenants used the lord's mill and paid for grinding. Everyday questions about holdings, boundaries, dues and local custom belonged to the manor court.
Avoid these village-life traps
- Do not reduce a manor to a castle or a town. It was an estate that could include several kinds of land and a settlement, whether or not it had major fortifications.
- Do not swap demesne, common and glebe. Ask who benefited directly: the lord, the village community or the parish church.
- Do not picture each household inside one hedged farm. Open-field holdings were distributed strips, while compact enclosed farms belong mainly to later reorganisation.
- Do not confuse labour, tithe and military service. Peasant work on the lord's land, a share for the Church and a knight's armed duty came from different relationships.
- Do not assume home grinding was unrestricted or church-run. The chargeable mill belonged to the lord's control of estate services.
Try it
How were the fields used in a village that followed the three-field system?
- One field sown and one left fallow each year, with the two exchanging their roles the following year
- All three fields sown every single year, with none of them rested
- One field sown each year while the other two were kept permanently out of use
- One field sown in autumn, one sown in spring and one left fallow, changing round each year
The heavy, wet soils of northern Europe were hard to work. What did villages there plough them with, and how was it usually managed?
- A light scratch plough pulled by one ox owned by each household
- A heavy wheeled plough pulled by an ox team, often shared among several households
- A heavy wheeled plough pulled by a single horse that each household owned outright
- Hand digging with spades, since no plough could work such ground at all
In a manor village the working year followed the farming seasons. When two villagers quarrelled at harvest time over the boundary between their strips, where was the dispute settled?
- In the king's own royal court
- In a church court sitting under the bishop
- In the court held for the manor by its lord
- In the council chamber of the nearest chartered town