13. The Manorial system

Fundamentally the Manorial system is where a leisured class is dependent upon the produce of agriculture carried out by others. It is the relationship between a Knight and his peasants. 

It is similar to where a patrician Roman living in luxury in a villa was supported by the local peasant farming community.

The way the system was made to work was either by force, or by the promise of protection against marauders, or enemies, or the fear of, exactly like the Roman system.

It is the essential element of feudal society, a basic organizing principle governing the rural economy. Farming continued using the open or strip field system, or as in the case with Harley, the three field system. 

In medieval times, much of England was still thickly wooded. Most of the trees we know today were familiar to our Saxon and Norman ancestry. Oak, though was far more common. There were tens thousands in places where today, there are a few hundred

England must have seemed one great forest before the fifteenth century; an unbroken sea of tree tops with thin blue spirals of smoke rising here and there at long intervals. Even after twenty generations of hacking away at the ‘waste’, the frontiers of cultivation were rarely away from the homesteads.   

Hoskins The making of the English Landscape.

Anglo Saxon hunting parks, were large tracts of natural woodland and open country, avoiding settled land which would have been surrounded by a fence or a bank or ditch and jealously guarded against poachers and trespassers.

Norman Kings were not content with this, their forest laws covered settled and cultivated land as well as natural forest, and their hunting parks covered the greater part of England. Sometimes the freedom this gave resulted in the destruction of villages. Royal forest covered as much as one third of the whole country.

 Until the recent law against fox hunting packs of hounds often roamed freely through Harley village crossing gardens at will, showing clearly how old customs and laws and attitudes in the countryside persist century after century.