_Gerefa_, written about 1000--and there was very little alteration for
a long time afterwards--the mansion was adjacent to a court or yard
which the quadrangular homestead surrounded with its barns, horse and
cattle stalls, sheep pens and fowlhouse. Within this court were ovens,
kilns, salt-house, and malt-house, and perhaps the hayricks and wood
piles. Outside and surrounding the homestead were the enclosed arable
and grass fields of the portion of the demesne which may be called the
home farm, a kitchen garden, and probably a vineyard, then common in
England. The garden of the manor house would not have a large variety
of vegetables; some onions, leeks, mustard, peas, perhaps cabbage; and
apples, pears, cherries, probably damsons, plums,[45] strawberries,
peaches, quinces, and mulberries. Not far off was the village or town
of the tenants, the houses all clustering close together, each house
standing in a toft or yard with some buildings, and built of wood,
turf, clay, or wattles, with only one room which the tenant shared
with his live stock, as in parts of Ireland to-day. Indeed, in some
parts of Yorkshire at the beginning of the nineteenth century this
primitive simplicity still prevailed, live stock were still kept in
the house, the floors were of clay, and the family slept in boxes
round the solitary room. Examples of farmhouses clustered together at
some distance from their respective holdings still survive, though
generally built of stone. Next the village, though not always, for
they were sometimes at a distance by the banks of a stream, were the
meadows, and right round stretched the three open arable fields,
beyond which was the common pasture and wood,[46] and, encircling all,
heath, forest, and swamp, often cutting off the manor from the rest of
the world.

The basis of the whole scheme of measurement in Domesday was the hide,
usually of 120 acres, the amount of land that could be ploughed by a