of his treatise, admitting however that he cannot be very precise about their services, as they varied in details from place to place. Their holdings, described as gesettesland, that is, land "set to gafol" as contrasted with the inland retained by the lord for his own use, were known as "yardlands" or gyrde. Each of these comprised a farm-stedding or toft with some thirty acres of arable, scattered in acre and half-acre strips in different parts of the village fields, together with a share in the hay meadows and pastures. In return for their yardlands the services of the geburas to the lord were far heavier than those of the cotsetlas, being three days' work a week on the inland from Candlemas (2 February) to Easter, three days' work a week in harvest-time and two days' work a week at other seasons. Moreover, as a part of this week-work (wieweore) they had specially to assist the lord with their own oxen and labour in ploughing his inland. They had also to pay divers gafols or rents, some in money and some in kind. For example, they might have to feed the lord's hounds, or find bread for his swineherds, while some provided hens and lambs and some paid "honeygafol" and some "ale-gafol." Their beasts also had to lie at the lord's fold from Martinmas to Easter. When first admitted, or set to their holdings, they received an outfit of live-stock and seed from the lord, which had to be returned at their death, a custom which has survived together with the yardland in a modified form even to modern times[1] under the name of the heriot. Highest in the scale above the geburas came the geneatas. They were altogether freer men who, though they had to pay landgafol and other dues and had to reap and mow for the lord at harvest time, had no fixed week-work to do. The essential feature in fact about their tenure was that their services were occasional and not fixed to definite days. Their main duties were to ride on the lord's errands far and near, to carry loads and do carting when called upon, to reap and mow at harvest time, to act as the lord's bodyguard, to escort travellers coming to the lord, and to maintain the walls and fences round the lord's "burg" or dwelling-house. Exceptional types of rent-paying ceorls are next described, such as the beo-ceorl in charge of the lord's hives, and the gafol-swan in charge of his pigs; and then to complete the picture we have the various sorts of praedial slaves, the theowan or servi and theowan-wifmen or ancillae. Of these unfree hinds
- ↑ In 1920 considerable heriots were paid to King's College, Cambridge, as lords of the Manor of Ogbourne in Wiltshire, in respect of the transfer of some customary freeholds reckoned to contain 7½ yardlands.
words formed from gebur in the laws and land-books. In Edward the Elder's dooms, for example, geburscipe is the term used to express the village community generally in which a man has his home: cf. Liebermann, Gesetze, p. 138, "on ðam geburscipe þe he om hamfæst wære." Similarly an Abingdon charter, dating from 956 or 957, speaks of the three villages adjoining Oxford, called Hinksey, Seacourt and Wytham, as geburlandes: cf. Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 1002. We know too that in Hertfordshire there were many geburs in the district round Hatfield. Cf. Thorpe, Diplomatarium, pp. 649-651.
