from it in the way of rents, but actually gets its labour from this village community and thereby builds up its husbandry.
The most important of these services is the week work performed by the peasantry. Every virgater or holder of a bovate has to send a labourer to do work on the lord's farm for about half the number of days in the week. Three days is indeed the most common standard for service of this kind, though four or even five occur sometimes, as well as two. It must be borne in mind in the case of heavy charges, such as four or five days' week work, that only one labourer from the whole holding is meant, while generally there were several men living on every holding; otherwise the service of five days would be impossible to perform. In the course of these three days, or whatever the number was, many requirements of the demesne had to be met. The principal of these was ploughing the fields belonging to the lord, and for such ploughing the peasant had not only to appear personally as a labourer, but to bring his oxen and plough or rather to join with his oxen and plough in the work imposed on the village: the heavy plough with a team of eight oxen had usually to be made up by several peasants contributing their beasts and implements towards its composition. In the same way the villagers had to go through the work of harrowing with their harrows, and of carrying the harvest in their wains and carts. Carrying duties, in carts and on horseback, were also apportioned according to the time they took as a part of the week work. Then came innumerable varieties of manual work for the erection and keeping up of hedges, the preservation of dykes, canals, and ditches, the threshing and garnering of corn, the tending and shearing of sheep and so forth. All this hand-work was reckoned according to customary standards as day work and week work. But alongside of all these services into which the regular week work of the peasantry was distributed stood some additional duties. The ploughing for the lord, for instance, was not only imposed in the shape of a certain number of days in the week, but also took the shape of a certain number of acres which the village had to plough and to sow for the lord irrespective of the amount of time it took to do so. This was sometimes termed gafolearth. Then again exceedingly burdensome services were required, in the seasons when farming processes are, as it were, at their height, at times of mowing and reaping when every day is of special value and the working power of the farm-hands is strained to the utmost. At that time it was the custom to call up the whole able-bodied population of the manor, with the exception of the housewives, for two, three or more days of mowing and reaping on the lord's fields. To these boonworks the peasantry was asked or invited by special summons, and their value was so far appreciated that the villagers were usually treated to meals in cases where they were again and again called off from their own fields to the demesne. The liberality of the lord actually went so far in exceptionally
