n Estate of a Lord.*--The manor was profitable to the
lord in various ways. He received rents in money and kind. These
included the rents of assize from free and villain land tenants, rent
from the tenant of the mill, and frequently from other sources. Then
came the profits derived from the cultivation of the demesne land. In
this the lord of the manor was simply a large farmer, except that he
had a supply of labor bound to remain at hand and to give service
without wages almost up to his needs. Finally there were the profits
of the manor courts. As has been seen, these consisted of a great
variety of fees, fines, amerciaments, and collections made by the
steward or other official. Such varied payments and profits combined
to make up the total value of the manor to the landowner. Not only the
slender income of the country squire or knight whose estate consisted
of a single manor of some ten or twenty pounds yearly value, but the
vast wealth of the great noble or of the rich monastery or powerful
bishopric was principally made up of the sum of such payments from a
considerable number of manors. An appreciable part of the income of
the government even was derived from the manors still in the
possession of the crown.

The mediaeval manor was a little world in itself. The large number of
scattered acres which made up the demesne farm cultivated in the
interests of the lord of the manor, the small groups of scattered
strips held by free holders or villain tenants who furnished most of
the labor on the demesne farm, the little patches of ground held by
mere laborers whose living was mainly gained by hired service on the
land of the lord or of more prosperous tenants, the claims which all
had to the use of the common pasture for their sheep and cattle and of
the woods for their swine, all these together made up an agricultural
system which secured a revenue for the lord, provided food and the raw
material for primitive manufactures for the inhabitants of the vill,
and furnished some small surplus which could be sold.

[Illustration: Interior of Fourteenth Century Manor House, Great
Malvern, Worcestershire. (_Domestic Architecture in the Fourteenth
Century._)]

Life on the mediaeval manor was hard. The greater part of the
population was subject to the burdens of serfdom, and all, both free
and serf, shared in the arduousness of labor, coarseness and lack of
variety of food, unsanitary surroundings, and liability to the rigor