Each of the dependent manses was held either by one family or by two or three families which clubbed together to do the work; it consisted of a house or houses, and farm buildings, like those of the chief manse, only poorer and made of wood, with ploughland and a meadow and perhaps a little piece of vineyard attached to it.

In return for these holdings the owner or joint owners of every manse had to do work on the land of the chief manse for about three days in the week.

The steward's chief business was to see that they did their work properly, and from every one he had the right to demand two kinds of labour.

The first was _field work_: every year each man was bound to do a fixed amount of ploughing on the domain land (as it was called later on), and also to give what was called a _corvee_, that is to say, an unfixed amount of ploughing, which the steward could demand every week when it was needed; the distinction corresponds to the distinction between _week work_ and _boon work_ in the later Middle Ages.

The second kind of labour which every owner of a farm had to do on the monks' land was called handwork, that is to say, he had to help repair buildings, or cut down trees, or gather fruit, or make ale, or carry loads--anything, in fact, which wanted doing and which the steward told him to do.