agricultural labourer; it may be said that the lord received a labour
rent for the villein's holding, or that the villein received his
holding as wages for the services done for the lord,[41] and part of
the return due to the lord was for the use of the oxen with which he
had stocked the villein's holding.

Though in 1066 there were many free villages, yet by the time of
Domesday they were fast disappearing and there were manors everywhere,
usually coinciding with the village which we may picture to ourselves
as self-sufficing estates, often isolated by stretches of dense
woodland and moor from one another, and making each veritably a little
world in itself. At the same time it is evident from the extent of
arable land described in Domesday that many manors were not greatly
isolated, and pasture ground was often common to two or more
villages.[42]

If we picture to ourselves the typical manor, we shall see a large
part of the lord's demesne forming a compact area within which stood
his house; this being in addition to the lord's strips in the open
fields intermixed with those of his tenants. The mansion house was
usually a very simple affair, built of wood and consisting chiefly of
a hall; which even as late as the seventeenth century in some cases
served as kitchen, dining room, parlour, and sleeping room for the
men; and one or two other rooms.[43] It is probable that in early
times the thegns possessed in most cases only one manor apiece,[44] so
that the manor house was then nearly always inhabited by the lord, but
after the Conquest, when manors were bestowed by scores and even
hundreds by William on his successful soldiers, many of them can only
have acted as the temporary lodging of the lord when he came to
collect his rent, or as the house of the bailiff. According to the