the ports of London and Bristol for the markets of the south.  The artisans depended wholly upon their lord, being often serfs, or else churls holding on service-tenure.  The mass of England consisted of such manors, still largely interspersed with woodland, each with the wooden hall of its lord occupying the centre of the homestead, and with the huts of the churls and serfs among the hays and valleys of the outskirts.  The butter and cheese, bread and bacon, were made at home; the corn was ground in the quern; the beer was brewed and the honey collected by the family.  The spinner and weaver, the shoemaker, smith, and carpenter, were all parts of the household.  Thus every manor was wholly self-sufficing and self-sustaining, and towns were rendered almost unnecessary.

Forests and heaths still also covered about half the surface.  These were now the hunting-grounds of the kings and nobles, while in the leys, hursts, and dens, small groups of huts gave shelter to the swineherds and woodwards who had charge of their lord’s property in the woodlands.  The great tree-covered region of Selwood still divided Wessex into two halves; the forest of the Chilterns still spread close to the walls of London; the Peakland was still overgrown by an inaccessible thicket; and the long central ridge between Yorkshire and Scotland was still shadowed by primaeval oaks, pinewoods, and beeches.  Agriculture continued to be confined to the alluvial bottoms, and had nowhere as yet invaded the uplands, or even the stiffer and drier lowland regions, such as the Weald of Kent or the forests of Arden and Elmet.

Only two elements broke the monotony of these self-sufficing agricultural communities.  Those elements were the monasteries and the towns.

A large part of the soil of England was owned by the monks.  They now possessed considerable buildings, with stone churches of some pretensions, in which service was conducted with pomp and impressiveness.  The tiny chapel of St. Lawrence, at Bradford-on-Avon, forms the best example of this primitive Romanesque architecture now surviving in England.  Around the monasteries stretched their well-tilled lands, mostly reclaimed from fen or forest, and probably more scientifically cultivated than those of the neighbouring manors.  Most of the monks were skilled in civilised handicrafts, introduced from the more cultivated continent.  They were excellent ecclesiastical metalworkers; many of them were architects, who built in rude imitation of Romanesque models; and others were designers or illuminators of manuscripts.  The books and charters of this age are delicately and minutely wrought out, though not with all the artistic elaboration of later mediaeval work.  The art of painting (almost always in miniature) was considerably advanced, the figures being well drawn, in rather stiff but not unlifelike attitudes, though perspective is very imperfectly understood, and hardly ever attempted.  Later Anglo-Saxon