INTRODUCTION 9 



plough/ whereas even a team of four beasts, which was still used 

 in places until the end of the eighteenth century ,2 was beyond 

 the reach of any except the more prosperous tenants. Communal 

 ploughing thus became inevitable, and it was only natural that 

 strips should be ploughed successively for each contributor to 

 the plough team. In this way an antiquated technique of tillage 

 long prevented the consolidation of the scattered strips of the 

 holdings. Added to this difficulty was the social one. Communal 

 husbandry had in its favor the authority of long tradition, 

 a potent force with a timorous and conservative peasantry. In 

 the event of readjustment — the peasant asked himself — would 

 not the strong profit, the poor suffer ? Hence there grew up a 

 popular prejudice against the enclosure and improvement of the 

 common fields. 



It should not, however, be assumed, as is often done, that 

 agricultural improvement could take place only through en- 

 closure. Certain open-field systems were superior to others, 

 and a substitution of the better for the poorer meant definite 

 progress. While a two-field arrangement, for example, permitted 

 the annual tillage of only one-half of the arable, a three-field one 

 utilized two-thirds of it and a four-field one three-fourths. 

 Moreover, a transition from one to the other of these systems, 

 or to an irregular arrangement of fields, involved no abandon- 

 ment of intermixed holdings or of cooperative ploughing; and, 

 inasmuch as no tenant had anything to lose by such a change 

 but each was likely to gain by it, friction did not arise. Of the 

 substitution of one system for the other little record is left in 

 complaints before royal courts, in petitions for parliamentary 

 redress, or in the jeremiads of social reformers. Evidence re- 

 garding it has to be sought in the records of manorial courts, and 

 especially in terriers and surveys that picture the subdivisions 

 of the arable fields. It was the slow pacific change which most 



^ P. Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century (Oxford, 1908), 



P- 154- 



2 " Four horses are generally put to a plow, even if the work is a second or third 

 tilth; and on land that has lain a few years the strength is often increased to six 

 horses " (VV. Pearce, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Berkshire, 

 London, 1794, p. 24). 



