8o, AGRICUT/rCRAL WRITERS. 



at home below the price ot 24.V. per quarter. And so popular w^s the 

 innovation that the price soon rose to \^s. per quarter. At the same 

 time a duty of ^s. \d. per quarter was laid upon imported wheat, and 

 this duty was advanced in 1670 to \^s., a figure which in effect amounted 

 to a prohibition. These prudent measures gave great satisfaction. The 

 average price of wheat, according to Rogers, was 4i.s\ \\\d . per quarter 

 from 1660 to 1700. 



With the issue of these improved works on agriculture, the cultivation 

 of the soil began now to interest persons of education, and the art was 

 no longer treated as a mere mechanical one, and as many of our present 

 systems found their beginning between the years 1640 and 1670, the era 

 is a remarkable one in the progress of agricultural science. At the time 

 of these authors the greater part of the land was in open fields, some 

 few of them separated only by a baulk and having one common road 

 leading to them. 



It will be seen how difficult it was to keep stock in such unrestricted 

 areas, or even to move them about without injuring the crops, and it was 

 the evil arising from this " entanglement " of land, as one writer calls it, 

 that brought about a general inclosure Act later on. It is very interesting 

 at this moment to look into the origin of fields and commons, and the 

 measures that have become law at various times regarding the 

 inclosure of land. The subject has been discoursed upon by many of 

 these old writers, and comes quite within the scope of our deliberations. 



The original holding of lands was by tribes or clans — a collective 

 holding with no personal proprietorship. Personal ownership was 

 probably introduced during the partial and temporary occupation by the 

 Romans, but reverted to the former method on their withdrawal. In the 

 later Saxon period there is no doubt private ownership became more 

 extended, and was much increased after the Norman Conquest, when 

 William I. claimed immense tracts, confiscated from the so-called rebels, 

 and granted them to his followers as lordships, and when law began to 

 form a system, the early Norman lawyers laid this as their basis. These 

 lords took small care of the outlying, uncultivated, and waste lands, 

 which still were used as common lands. 



From the Conquest the townships or villages and hamlets had round 

 them great ploughed fields, usually three in number, that were tilled on a 

 system of rotation of crops, each field in turn lying fallow for a year, 

 during which it was open or common to all the holders of land in the 

 fields, while the two fields under cultivation were open from the time of 

 harvest till the corn was sown again. These fields were under a system 

 of common ploughing, each holder of land supplying so many oxen, two 

 being the contribution of each holder of a virgate = thirty acres, eight 

 being the normal number to a plough. 



The normal measures of land were : A hide= 120 acres ; carucate = 

 120 acres, from caruca, Lann = plough or plough team (or land of a 



