Much of the
farming, even of the weaving, buying, and selling, was done just as it
had been done centuries before; and the great changes that were to
revolutionize the life and work of the people were as yet hardly
dreamed of. In fact, there was so much in common between the sixteenth
and eighteenth centuries, that the reader who has already made himself
familiar with the manor and the gild, as described in Chapter II, will
find himself quite at home in the "old regime," as the order of things
in the eighteenth century is now termed.
One might still see the countless little agricultural villages and
manor houses nestling among the hills or dotting the plains, surrounded
by green fields and fringed with forest or wasteland. The simple
villagers still cultivated their strips in the common fields in the
time-honored way, working hard for meager returns. A third of the land
stood idle every year; it often took a whole day merely to scratch the
surface of a single acre with the rude wooden plow then in use; cattle
were killed off in the autumn for want of good hay; fertilizers were
only crudely applied, if at all; many a humble peasant was content if
his bushel of seed brought him three bushels of grain, and was proud if
his fatted ox weighed over four hundred pounds, though a modern farmer
would grumble at results three or four times as good.
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