4 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



century agriculture remained the chief source of the national 

 wealth of England, and no account of the fortunes of her people 

 that neglects the topic is adequate. No improvements in the 

 arts before the introduction of the factory system affected so 

 large a proportion of the population as did improvements 

 in tillage; and if disastrous changes occurred the men who 

 sutTered were the bone and sinew of the nation. What the 

 following chapters have to tell relates to only a single phase of 

 agricultural progress; but, since that phase is the manner in 

 which more and more of the soil was brought under improved 

 cultivation, it has an immediate bearing upon national wealth 

 and individual well-being. 



The agriculture and settlement of primitive peoples have been 

 studied with less diligence by English than by German scholars — 

 perhaps a natural outcome of the perception in Germany that 

 an intimate relation existed between the early history of the 

 Germans and the agrarian side of their life. No passages in 

 the writings of classical historians are discussed more frequently 

 than the brief descriptions of these matters found in Caesar and 

 Tacitus. Inherent tendencies toward democracy or toward 

 aristocracy, it is thought, are there to be discerned. Attention, 

 too, has been focused upon the agriculture of the Germans as 

 practiced somewhat later, when they invaded the Roman empire 

 and in their laws gave testimony to their methods of tiUing the 

 soil. 



Since all such documentary references to early agrarian custom 

 are brief, it has been usual to interpret them in the light of later 

 usages, descriptions of which have an added value in constituting, 

 as they do, records of the age to which they belong. To two of 

 her scholars is Germany particularly indebted for interpretations 

 and descriptions of this kind. During the second quarter of 

 the nineteenth century Georg Hanssen, stimulated perhaps by 

 the pioneer activity of the Danish Oluffsen, set forth in a series 

 of papers the various field systems or types of agriculture existent 

 at one time or another in Germanic territories.^ In continuation 

 of Hanssen's studies, August Meitzen published in 1895 a more 



^ Agrarhistorische Abkandlungen, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1880-84. 



