INTRODUCTION 7 



Vinogradoff's summary dismissal of the subject.^ It reduces, in 

 brief, to a familiarity with the three-field system as practiced in 

 nineteenth-century Hitchin, projected back by the testimony of 

 two thirteenth-century writers and by some twenty references 

 to two- or three-field villages dating mainly from the same 

 century. Yet since VinogradofT wrote no one has dissented 

 from his pronouncement or taken a further interest in the 

 subject. 



One of the problems upon which, as has been intimated, the 

 study of field systems promises to throw light is the development 

 of English agriculture. With this development, so far as it 

 resulted from the innovations of the eighteenth century which 

 had to do with the rotation of crops and the introduction of 

 convertible husbandry, we are not unfamiliar.^ It chances, 

 however, that these improvements were contemporary with the 

 transformation of England from an agricultural into a manu- 

 facturing country, and that for this reason the benefits conferred 

 by the experiments of Thomas Coke and others reached a far 

 smaller proportion of the population than would have been 

 affected had the change occurred earher. In days when the 

 annual return from tillage and sheep-raising determined the 

 prosperity of the people to a greater degree than when these 

 pursuits were supplemented by the work of the factories, farming 

 assumed more importance. It is with the improvements of the 

 earlier period that the following chapters are more immediately 

 concerned. 



In English agriculture interest has always fluctuated between 

 corn-growing and pasture-farming. During the Middle Ages a 



^ " The chief features of the field-system which was in operation in England 

 during the middle ages have been sufficiently cleared up by modern scholars, 

 especially by Nasse, Thorold Rogers, and Seebohm. . . . Everybody knows that 

 the arable of an English village was commonly cultivated under a three years' 

 rotation of crops; a two-field system is also found very often; there are some 

 instances of more complex arrangements, but they are very rare, and appear late — 

 not earlier than the fourteenth century " (ibid., 224). The complex arrangement 

 at Littleton, Gloucestershire, that Vinogradoff proceeds to discuss refers to demesne 

 lands, which possibly did not lie in open field. 



2 A good sketch of it is given by W. H. R. Curtler, A Short History of English 

 Agriculture (Oxford, 1909), pp. 111-228. 



