The nature of agriculture and peasant life

• Peasants lived and worked on manorial estates made up of one or several villages surrounding a manor house where the lord or bailiff (caretaker of the land) lived
• Work on land was supervised by a reeve (foreman)
• Villeins worked two or three days on their lord’s lands where freemen worked occasionally as they paid rent
• Village farming was divided into two or three large open fields
• One field was usually left fallow (unfarmed) to allow the soil to recover while the others were farmed
• Fields were divided into strips that were shared into equal amounts of best and worst soils
• By the 13th century, the most profitable agricultural product was wool with England’s wealth being built of the wool trade
• Peasants kept animals and lived in small houses with thatched roofs called cruck houses
• Peasant women were domestic, grew food, made simple medicines and would help bring in crops in harvest
• Children of peasants did not go to school and occasionally helped in the fields clearing birds and stones
• If a villein ran away from a village and lived in a town for a year and a day without being caught, he became a freeman