SELF-SUFFICING- FAEMING 7 



its arable, meadow, and pasture land, prevailed at some 

 time or other throughout England except in the west, 

 and underlies the disturbances in Skye. The following 

 descrijDtion of the crofters' holdings in 1750 might have 

 been written, with but few alterations, of half the vil- 

 lagers in England in the eighteenth century :' — ' A cer- 

 tain number of tacksmen formed a copartnery and held a 

 tract of land, or township, for which they paid tribute to 

 the chief, and each member was jointly and severally 

 responsible. The grazing was in common. All the arable 

 laud was divided into ridges, assigned annually by lot 

 among the partners. Each might have a dozen or more 

 of these small ridges, and no two contiguous except by 

 accident ; the object being to give each partner a portion 

 of the better and inferior land. The copartner appears 

 to have had cotters under him, for whose work he paid.' 

 In 1879, at Stogoursey, near Bridgwater, a village com- 

 munity were still cultivating 600 acres of land on similar 

 principles. The prevalence of the system may still be 

 faintly traced in England. Turf balks and lynches record 

 the time when ' every rood of ground maintained its man.' 

 Irregular and regular fences, straight and crooked roads,, 

 respectively suggest the wholesale or piecemeal enclosure 

 of common fields. The age of the hedgerow timber some- 

 times tells the date of the change. The space devoted to 

 hedges by agricultural writers of the eighteenth century 

 denotes the abolition of open fields, and the minuteness of 

 their instructions proves that the art of making hedges 

 was still in its infancy. The scattered lands of ordinary 

 farms, compared with the compact ' court,' ' hall,' or 

 ' manor ' farm, recalls the fact that the lord's demesne was 

 once the only permanent enclosure. The crowding 

 ' Letter to the Times, April 3, 1883. 



