56 LITTLE HUCKLOW : ITS CUSTOMS AND OLD HOUSr.S. 



rij^ht i)f ladder-stcad — i.e., a right to put a ladder on the 

 adjoining owners land to do repairs. 



The intermixture of houses and other buildings, such as 

 barns, is not less remarkable than the scattered or intermixed 

 ownership in the open fields of an ancient English village, to 

 which Seebohm and other writers have drawn attention. No 

 feature of the mediaeval land system is so puzzling and 

 interesting as this, and various attempts have been made to 

 explain it. Why, for example, should a man's holding have 

 been composed, not of thirty acres in a ring fence, but of 

 sixty strips of half an acre each lying on all sides of the 

 township ? In endeavouring to answer such a question, we 

 ought not to separate the house from the land, but to consider 

 them together, for in both cases the intermixture may have 

 arisen from the division of property amongst heirs or children. 

 When we find, as we often do, that a man is described as the 

 owner of a single bay of a barn and a strip of land in the 

 fields held with it, we may be sure that we have to do with a 

 case of partition. 



In 1568 a man came into the lord's court at Ecclesfield 

 and obtained leave to inherit the sixth part of half a bovate 

 of arable land and the sixth part of a messuage and certain 

 arable lands in Ecclesfield.* Here we have a case of minute 

 partition, the bovate being sjjlit into fractions of one acre and 

 a rood each, and the house into six parts. To this day, parts 

 of houses in Little Hucklow belong to different owners ; you 

 find that an owner has bequeathed one part of a house to 

 one child, and another part to another child, or else that the 

 children have agreed to divide the house between them. To 

 such an extent has this practice been carried that it is difficult, 

 even yet, to get a complete house — you have to buy part of 

 a building and get the other part if you can. At Aston, four 

 miles off, a man has a barn in the middle of another mans 



* " Et flat domino iiijs pro licentia hereditandi sextam partem dimdias 

 bovatae terrae . . . ac sextam partem unius mesuagii ac cartas terras 

 in Ecclesfeld," etc. — Sheffield Court Rolls, in the custody of the Duke 

 of Norfolk. 



