8 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



combination of the two was usually effected through the annual 

 communal tillage of a part of the improved arable, and the 

 pasturing of sheep and cattle upon the waste and upon that por- 

 tion of the arable which during the year in question lay fallow. 

 Of enclosed land held in severalty and available either for tillage or 

 for pasturage there was little. Such as existed was in general to 

 be found among the demesne lands of the lord or in the home closes 

 of the tenants. Whenever, none the less, our records appraise 

 enclosed land they give it a higher valuation than they assign 

 to the open-field arable, an indication that from an early period 

 separable land available for both pasture and tillage was recog- 

 nized as more remunerative than common arable field. ^ 



A corollary of this estimate is that agricultural progress was 

 bound to take one of two directions. It was necessary either 

 that the unenclosed arable of a township should be brought under 

 better tillage while continuing to lie open, or that it should be 

 enclosed and given over to convertible husbandry.^ From an 

 agricultural point of view the latter procedure was, of course, the 

 wiser and has ultimately been adopted. But there stood in the 

 way of such a transformation serious technical and social diffi- 

 culties. The enclosure of the old fields implied, as we shall see, 

 a consolidation of the scattered parcels of each holding and a 

 cessation of communal tillage. For a long time the latter step 

 was actually impossible of accompHshment. Mediaeval plough- 

 ing demanded a team of eight oxen or horses yoked to a heavy 



1 At Haversham, Bucks, for example, the demesne comprised " c acre terre 

 arabilis iacentes in separali que valent per annum xxx s. iiii d. . . . et centum acre 

 terre que iacent in communi et valent per annum si sunt seminate xvi s. viii d. ; 

 et si non sunt seminate nihil valent quia pastura communis est " (C. Inq. p. Mort., 

 Edw. Ill, F. 45 (20), 9 Edw. III). 



- The term " convertible husbandry " is used in the following chapters to desig- 

 nate the continuous annual tillage of improved lands under a succession of grain 

 and grass crops. The equivalent German terra is " neuere Feldgraswirtschaft " 

 (Hanssen, Agrarhistorische Abhandlungen, i. 216 sq.). Although, when once in 

 grass, land thus tilled was usually left so for more than one year, this feature should 

 not be insisted upon in a definition, as is done by W. Roscher {System der Volks- 

 uirlhschaft, 2. Bd., N ationaldkonomik des Ackerbaues tnid der verwandlen Urproduc- 

 tionen, 12th edition, Stuttgart, 1888, p. 89). Some of Hanssen's illustrations show 

 no series of grass years (cf. pp. 227, 231). Convertible husbandry was sometimes 

 practiced upon open-field lands (cf. below, p. 129, 158). 



