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century. Lay
subsidies levied by Edward I in 1297 reveal that a consequence of land
shortage was that there were few
cattle in the villages. Baronial estates and monasteries may have had
substantial numbers of cattle and sheep in vaccaries and bercaries, but
subsitence farmers had typically only one or two cows, together with a few
oxen to plough the fields. With land in short supply, priority had to be
given to the production of grain for human consumption, rather than the
growing of hay to over-winter cattle.
Although no Lay subsidy records survive for Long Preston, those for Burton in Lonsdale show
that the crofts behind the village centre farms would have been just
sufficient to provide the hay needed to over-winter the village cattle listed
in the Lay subsidy. We can assume that the same was true in other Craven
villages, and that the Long Preston village crofts at the time of the Tithe
Survey of 1841 (see figure 2) are crofts which will originally have been
associated with the estimated two dozen subsistence farmers at Domesday.
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