meadows, and right round stretched the three open arable fields, beyond which was the common pasture and wood,[46] and, encircling all, heath, forest, and swamp, often cutting off the manor from the rest of the world.

The basis of the whole scheme of measurement in Domesday was the hide, usually of 120 acres, the amount of land that could be ploughed by a team of 8 oxen in a year; a quarter of this was the virgate, an eighth the bovate, which would therefore supply one ox to the common team. These teams, however, varied; on the manors of S. Paul's Cathedral in 1222 they were sometimes composed of horses and oxen, or of 6 horses only, sometimes 10 oxen.[47]

The farming year began at Michaelmas when, in addition to the sowing of wheat and rye, the cattle were carefully stalled and fed only on hay and straw, for roots were in the distant future, and the corn was threshed with the flail and winnowed by hand. In the spring, after the ploughing of the second arable field, the vineyard, where there was one, was set out, and the open ditches, apparently the only drainage then known, cleansed. In May it was time to set up the temporary fences round the meadows and arable fields, and to begin fallowing the third field.

A valuable document, describing the duties of a reeve, gives many interesting details of eleventh-century farming:—