aries, when the academics begin to lift up | curicus and minute information regarding their heads on high and to walk with a the rector's way of life, habits, social staproud look. This odd position of his he tus, and other matters, such as could only would take up with some vehemence at be gleaned from such a source as this. If times, but I noticed that, like many other we have now and then to read between dogmatists, he was wont to support it less the lines and draw our inferences from by evidence adduced than by unhesitating slight indications, this is only what we are assertion. Peace be with him! I intend always compelled to do in studying the to publish the cream of his note-book past. For the past must be studied, or it some day. When they appear the world can never be known. will know that there has been a prophet among them.

one; it was his duty because he was responsible for the little community over which he was, to some extent, a petty king, and to some extent morally a paterfamilias. A non-resident lord could indeed save himself a good deal of trouble by staying away and taking his rents and his dues, such as they were; but the non

So it was in the case of Mr. Gurnay's | portion of the year at each of them. It house. He had some substantial repairs was his interest because, by his presence to carry out this year upon his Harpley among his people he "kept things property, and chiefly upon a house which together," as we say, in more ways than I suspect had recently been burnt down, for the house is spoken of as "formerly the house of David Faber," and it looks as if this house had been rebuilt from the ground. I think, too, that the great barn or "grange" adjoining the manor house had been seriously injured by the fire, and the rectory house itself had not escaped unscathed. Therefore it became neces-resident was not only in the hands of his sary to provide timber and rafters and Scantlings and beams, and several hundred weight of nails and bolts and clamps and other iron "fixings," for the new work. But the expense did not end there. In the account there are entries for digging clay and for the cartage thereof, and inasmuch as water was scarce and it seems to have been very scarce-some expense was incurred in carting water for mixing with the clay, i.e., for making the clay lump of which the walls of the houses were in part built, while the barn seems to have been made exclusively of this material, and after it was finished the outside was daubed all over with pitch some time in the autumn.

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agent and bailiff, but he left the poor people too very much at the man's mercy to grind their faces and to extort from them all he could get by fair means or by foul.

In the year 1305-6, he spent twentyone weeks at Wooton, and thirty-one at Harpley.

The Rev. John had another good house at South Wooton. Wooton, as everybody knows, is the first station on the railroad from Lynn to Hunstanton. Sir John de Gurnay had been lord of the manor of Wooton, and thereby hangs a tale, which I am not going to tell, because I am not in funds upon that matter; but I have my suspicion that his son, the Rev. John, somehow recovered the ancestral manor of which his father had been deprived, and that here, too, at the manor house the Unfortunately, I have no means of esti-rector of Harpley spent almost half his mating even approximately the real cost time every year. of all this rebuilding and repairs, because the worthy bailiff tells us that the rector had himself paid for the timber (which he had bought at Lynn), and also it is clear that he had done the same in the case of the iron work, and that all that the bailiff had to do with the matter was to pay certain small amounts which were still due upon the articles delivered, and which were paid only when it should be found on examination that the quantities agreed with the invoice. The same is true of the cost of the labor. The rector had paid the heavier part of the outlay, leaving the bailiff to discharge a few smaller pay ments out of the "petty cash" left in his hands. As for the rectory house, it was covered with reed; one of the rooms appears to have been panelled with pitch pine, and it had a somewhat costly door studded with iron nails.

I incline to think that the rector did not live in the rectory house, but left it for the use of his curates or "chaplains." He himself, I infer, lived at the manor house, and lived there in some state, as a man of his means was entitled to do. If a gentleman in those days had two manor houses to go no further it was at once his interest and his duty to spend a

Before I proceed to treat of the way in which the Rev. John lived, I must needs say a word about the church. Harpley church as it now stands is quite the handsomest ecclesiastical edifice in this part of the country. The chancel is about half a century older than the nave, and its east window is said to be identical with one in the vestry of Merton College Chapel, Oxford, which is known to be of the date 1310. The inference is that this chancel was built about the same time, probably a few years later. I am not going to weary my readers with architectural details; it will be sufficient to refer them to a paper upon the church contributed by Mrs. Herbert Jones to the eighth volume of the "Norfolk and Norwich Archæologia."*

This, however, can admit of no doubt,

If people, when they stay at Hunstanton, with nothing to do, find their time hang somewhat heavily on their hands, I venture to advise them to spend a day in going to see Harpley, where the church will well repay them for their trouble; and if they can bring pressure to bear upon the rector and churchwardens to remove that organ from the south aisle, where it is flagrantly out of place, to the north aisle where it ought to be, they will do a good work.

six times the seed, and the yield per acre something over two quarters. But such calculations are very likely to mislead us; we really have not sufficient data to go upon, and I should not have ventured to touch upon this problem, if I were not strongly persuaded that the late Mr. Thorold Rogers very much underrated the yield of the arable land of the country in the Middle Ages. I do not for a moment suppose that the soil was adequately tilled, or that the maximum crop upon any farm was to be compared with that which was raised among us in the "roaring times," or is raised by good farmers now; but it is not conceivable that the cultivation of any land could have been carried on for a succession of years if the harvest yielded no more than three or four times the quantity of seed sown; the margin of profit would not have sufficed to maintain the laborers.

viz., that the present church is a very different building from that which existed in the year with which our bailiff's account is concerned. To begin with, the old church was covered with thatch or reed, and the bailiff enters on his debit side a payment for reed for the roof. But this is not all. It appears that the church, too, was built of clay lump or stud work. For, as in the case of the house, which we have seen was repaired and rebuilt this year, a certain expense was incurred in carting water for mixing with the clay, so also was it necessary to pay for cartage of water to the church for the same purpose; and there are two other charges, one for some iron work, possibly for the door, and another for two gates, which can only have been to protect the approaches to the churchyard. The rector can hardly have been yet in a position to build the beautiful chancel in which his body was laid some twenty-five years later, for he had The rector of Harpley, or his father only recently come into possession of the before him, was a man who was in advance family estates, and his first duty was to of his time; for whereas there were at the erect a handsome tomb to his father, beginning of the fourteenth century many which accordingly he did erect at Lynn, manors on which the personal servicesas we find from an entry for the expenses or enforced labor of the tenants were of a certain John de Chewyngton, who still exacted (the tenants being compelled appears to have been commissioned to to give so many days' labor in the year to look after the aforesaid tomb, and was sent the cultivation of the lord's domain, and to Lynn ad imaginem patris domini. Some years later the Rev. John undoubtedly did build the chancel of Harpley Church much as we have it now, and it is a noble monument of the good man's large-hearted liberality, and of his cultured taste, and of his zeal "for the houses of God in the land."

It appears that the rector farmed some eight hundred acres of land, including the pasture, the sheep walk, and meadows. The account shows that he sowed a total of 1831 acres, of which 43 acres were in wheat, 55 in barley, 21 in oats, and the rest in peas (22 acres), beans (11 acres), and the coarse grain known as siligo (20 acres). The peas, we find, were chiefly used for porridge, as some quarters of oats were, and the barley was chiefly used for beer. The beans, it seems, were given to the poor, except a single bushel which went to the stable. There had been two great barley stacks standing when the year began; one had yielded over ninetytwo quarters, and the other a little over nineteen quarters; the allowance for barley seed was three bushels an acre, and if we may assume that the same numbers of acres were laid down in barley in 1305 as were sown in 1306, we must conclude that the yield on the barley crop was more than

to assist with their cattle in ploughing, harrowing, and carting over the acres the lord kept in his hand), it appears by this account that these services had been compounded for by a money payment before this date. The tenants of the manor had been relieved of their most burdensome imposts.

Taking the manor as a little domain which comprehended a geographical area of limited extent, with so many acres under cultivation and so many more of waste, woodland, and heath, the greater portion in the hands of the tenants and scattered over the open fields, but the compact central farm, as it may be called, in the hands of the lord, and cultivated for his behoof - the most noticeable feature of the village community is its selfsupporting character. The corn grown upon the land was ground at the manorial mill; the wool was spun into thread, and the thread woven where it grew. The cattle were slaughtered where they were bred, when they had been used for a year or two to drag the plough or the cart. Then their hides were dried and prepared to be made into harness, and a large portion of their flesh was salted down for winter consumption.

Adjoining the manor house was a gar

den in which vegetables were grown, and some garden seeds were distributed to the poor, gratis. There are few subjects over which so much obscurity still hangs as the subject of medieval horticulture; and in the account with which we are dealing, the only vegetable named is the leek, which our forefathers appear to have loved extremely and to have cultivated universally. The gardeners' rolls of the priory at Norwich form, perhaps, the most important series of such rolls during the fifteenth century which could anywhere be found in England, and they deserve to be printed for the benefit of students; but we must wait for better times before we can hope for their publication. The bailiff at Harpley includes all his vegetables under the single designation of "Olera." Besides the garden there was an orchard, and the crop this year was a large one; for, after using all that were needed in the house, many bushels of apples were sold by the bailiff. The late Mr. Thorold Rogers, though he had frequently met with mention of hemp as cultivated in England, said that he had "never seen any entry of payment for such kind of labor" as the manufacture of ropes (Hist. of Prices, i. 28). It is plain that at Harpley, as in many other places, there was a hempland, and this year the bailiff brings I have said that when a cow or bullock into his account two payments for the was slaughtered the hide was turned into manufacture of hemp into traces, head-leather, if leather was needed, for the harstalls, and ropes.

came dry the owner took her back and the calf was his; the hirer took all the milk and made his profit by it if he could. This practice still survives extensively in Dorsetshire, and the payment for the hire of the cows is very high-so high that it is said to amount to as much as two-thirds the market value of the animal for the mere annual hire. The rector of Harpley in 1306 let out his herd by the year in this way, reserving three cows, however, for the requirements of the household, and his dairymaid's name was Emma. The three cows reserved were apparently not more than enough to supply the milk for the porridge; the servants were very liberally supplied with oatmeal; also, they had rations of cheese, which, however, was not made in the dairy, but was bought perhaps from the hirer of the other cows. Goats are very rarely met with in our Norfolk records; but the Rev. John had a flock of goats at Wooton, which he let out in the same way as he did his herd of cows. I rather suspect he did not like a bevy of women about him and his household; and milking and butter-making he therefore would have nothing to do with. Let others milk the cows and the goats, and make their profit of the dairy business if they could that should be their affair.

ness room or other purposes. Sixty years ago I am told by old men who can look back so far in every considerable village in Norfolk there was a tan vat, where the farmers took their hides to be cured. It appears to have been a very long and a very nauseous process; but, of course, the laudatores temporis acti assure me that there is no such leather now as they used to have when they were boys.

There are indications that the rector of Harpley was rather a "high farmer." His implements, such as they were, had a good deal spent upon them, and whereas at this time wheeled carts were in Norfolk by no means universally used, Mr. Gurnay's carts appear to have been all not only furnished with wheels, but the wheels had iron tyres, or the next best substitute for tyres, to wit, thick iron plates, called "That was more juicy like! There was strakes, attached to the fellies by long more suppleness and heart to the old spikes which were riveted on the inner leather. Why, Lor' bless you, I never surface of the woodwork. The sheep-remember my father with more than one fold, too, was apparently constructed with pair o' leather breeches all his life. You exceptional care, and afforded much more couldn't wear that leather out. My father 'd protection and warmth for the lambs than think nothing of riding fifty miles in they was customary in Norfolk, even fifty years breeches, and going to church in 'em o' ago, among any but the leading sheep Sunday!" breeders of the county.

At the beginning of this century it was not uncommon for the Norfolk farmers and resident gentry to let out their herds of cows at so much a head for the "season." The owner had to feed the cattle and house them, and if a cow chanced to die, he had to supply her place with another of equal value. When a cow be

In the account we are dealing with, I find a payment entered for making tallow into dip candles. Here again I have met with some curious explanation of this entry in the reminiscences of our reverend seniors. Sixty years ago, on a substantial farm, the dip candles were almost always bought of the tallow chandlers, by whom they were made on a large scale; but the