ix bushels an
acre was necessary to pay the costs of tillage, land which returned
less than six bushels could not be kept under the plow. The six bushel
crop which seems to be normal in the fourteenth century is not the
average yield of all of that land which had been under cultivation at
an earlier time, but only of the better grades of land. Plots which
had formerly yielded their five or six bushels an acre had become too
barren to produce the bare minimum which made tillage profitable, and
their produce no longer appeared in the average. Even with the
elimination of the worst grades of land the average yield fell,
because the better land, too, was becoming less fertile. At Witney
(Table V) the area planted with wheat fell from about 180 acres in
1277 to less than 140 acres in 1340; but, in spite of this reduction
in the amount of land cultivated, the average annual yield after 1340
was less than 6-1/2 bushels, while it had been about 8-1/2 bushels per
acre in the period 1277-1285. This withdrawal of land from cultivation
took place without the occurrence of any such calamity as the Black
Death, which is ordinarily mentioned as the cause of the reduction of
arable land to pasture in so far as this took place before 1400. It
affords an indirect proof of the fact that much land was becoming
barren.

These statistical indications of declining productivity of the soil
are supported by the overwhelming evidence of the poverty of the
fourteenth century peasantry--poverty which can be explained only by
the barrenness of their land. Many of the features of the agrarian
changes of this period are familiar--the substitution of money
payments for villain services, the frequency of desertion, the
amalgamation and leasing of bond-holdings, the subdividing and
leasing of the demesne. A point which has not been dwelt upon is the
favorable pecuniary terms upon which the villains commuted their
services. Where customary relations were replaced by a new bargain,
the bargain was always in favor of the tenant. What was the source of
this strategic advantage of the villain? The great number of holdings
made vacant by the Black Death and the scarcity of eligible holders
placed the landowner at a disadvantage, but this situation was
temporary. How can the difficulty of filling vacant tenements before
the Black Death be accounted for, and why were villains still able to
secure reductions in their rents a generation after its effects had
ce