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To-morrow this kingdom will belong to the workers who are bold enough to take it, each carving for himself a domain as large as his strength of toil can dream of; not an estate of acres, but leagues and leagues of ploughland wavy with eternal crops.... And what breadth of atmosphere there is in that immensity!
Mounted men and a few women were climbing the slope, the scarlet coats shining in a gleam of light, carriages and motors were drawn up in the shelter of a beech wood, and from the summit there fell a faint blast of a horn. It was a raw day, with a nipping wind and blinks of sunshine that swept across grass and ploughland and faded again.
Every aggravation of feudal wrong was inflicted on this harassed population. When a le Poer or a Butler married a daughter he exacted a sheep from every flock, and a cow from every village. When one of his sons went to England, a special tribute was levied on every village and ploughland to bear the young gentleman's travelling expenses.
The actual revenue that the king derived from it is a matter of some doubt, but the machinery of its assessment is described in detail by a contemporary and is of special interest. The unit of the new assessment was to be the carucate, or ploughland, instead of the hide, and consequently a new survey of the land was necessary to take the place of the old Domesday record.
Yet again there are other moments, when sights and sounds have an overpowering and awful significance; when the gleams of some tremendous secret seemed flashed upon my mind, at the sight of the mist-hung valley with its leafless woods and level water-meadows; the flaring pomp of sunset hung low in the west over the bare ploughland or the wide-watered plain; the wailing of the wind round the firelit house; the faint twitter of awakening birds in the ivy; the voice and smile of my children; the music breaking the silence of the house at evening.
The green of the upland pasture and the brown of the ploughland beyond were veiled by a shimmering twilight haze, in which the varied tints of the sky harmoniously blended, till the umber and indigo shadows of night loomed over the hills, and the daffodil flame flickered and vanished over the last red ember of the afterglow. Thus the first calm day of early spring drew to its close.
At last he climbed a fence, thinking to drop into the road, and found himself staggering, instead, among the iron furrows of a ploughland, endless, it seemed, as a whole county.
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.
Their numbers, and those of every similar colony in the neighbourhood, increased in such a fashion that, before the following autumn, both the pasture and the near ploughland were barren wastes completely honeycombed with their dwellings.
The slow decay of such timber in the woods, it may be remarked, furnishes another proof of the uniformity of temperature and humidity in the forest, for the trunk of a tree lying on grass or ploughland, and of course exposed to all the alternations of climate, hardly resists complete decomposition for a generation. The forests of Europe exhibit similar facts.