Consider for a moment how the estate upon which they lived was
organized. The lands of the Abbey of St Germain were divided into a
number of estates, called _fiscs_, each of a convenient size to be
administered by a steward. On each of these _fiscs_ the land was divided
into seigniorial and tributary lands; the first administered by the
monks through a steward or some other officer, and the second possessed
by various tenants, who received and held them from the abbey. These
tributary lands were divided into numbers of little farms, called
manses, each occupied by one or more families. If you had paid a visit
to the chief or seigniorial manse, which the monks kept in their own
hands, you would have found a little house, with three or four rooms,
probably built of stone, facing an inner court, and on one side of it
you would have seen a special group of houses hedged round, where the
women serfs belonging to the house lived and did their work; all round
you would also have seen little wooden houses, where the household serfs
lived, workrooms, a kitchen, a bakehouse, barns, stables, and other farm
buildings, and round the whole a hedge carefully planted with trees, so
as to make a kind of enclosure or court. Attached to this central manse
was a considerable amount of land--ploughland, meadows, vineyards,
orchards, and almost all the woods or forests on the estate. Clearly a
great deal of labour would be needed to cultivate all these lands. Some
of that labour was provided by servile workers who were attached to the
chief manse and lived in the court. But these household serfs were not
nearly enough to do all the work upon the monks' land, and far the
greater part of it had to be done by services paid by the other
landowners on the estate.

[Illustration: _January--Ploughing_]