4 SELF-SUFFICING FARMING 



two and three, or rarely four in number. If the former, 

 one field lay fallow, the other under tillage for corn, or 

 beans, or peas. The dual system was, when Fleta wrote, 

 generally superseded by the three-field or trinity arrange- 

 ment ; yet it prevailed near Gloucester in the present cen- 

 tury, and existed at Stogoursey in Somersetshire in 1879. 

 From the reign of Henry III. to that of George III. the 

 trinity fields received the unvarying triennial succession of 

 wheat or rye, spring crops such as barley, oats, beans, or 

 peas, and fallow. During this period a more scientific 

 rotation was in some districts adopted. Thus at Aston 

 Boges, in Oxfordshire, a fourth course was interposed. But, 

 speaking generally, common field husbandry rather retro- 

 graded than advanced. For the strict supervision of the 

 bailiff and the reeve, or the minute observance of com- 

 mon rules, was exchanged an anarchy which made the 

 land, like that cf Tully Veolan, resemble in the ' unprofit- 

 able variety of its surface a tailor's book of patterns.' 



Each of the three arable fields was subdivided into 

 shots, furlongs, or flats, separated from one another by 

 unploughed, bush-grown turf balks. These flats were in 

 turn cut up into parallel strips of about an acre apiece, 

 coinciding with the arrangement of a ploughed field in 

 ridges and furrows. Theoretically each flat was a square 

 of forty poles, containing ten acres ; in practice every 

 variety of shape and admeasurement was found. But, 

 though the pole from which the acre was raised varied 

 from the thirteen and a half feet of Hampshire to the 

 twenty-four feet of Cheshire, two sides of the flats always 

 ran parallel. Thus each of the three arable fields re- 

 sembled several sheets of paper, ruled with margins and 

 lines. The separate sheets are the flats ; the margins are 

 the headlands running down the flats at right angles to, 



