THE TWO- AND THREE-FIELD SYSTEM 35 



demesne, whereas Brook field had only one demesne furlong and 

 Wood field not any. Such concentration of the arable demesne in 

 furlongs, and these furlongs in one field, is unusual; but even this 

 can hardly have affected seriously the three-field character of the 

 township. 



A very detailed survey of the township of Welford, North- 

 amptonshire, made in 1602, is preserved in an eighteenth-century 

 copy in the Bodleian. The township comprised two manors, that 

 of William Saunders and that of the " late dissolved monastery of 

 Sulby," then the queen's. The first manor consisted of the 

 demesne and the holdings of several "tenants at will"; the 

 second was in the hands of " ancient freeholders," " new free- 

 holders," and " the Queen's patentees," the last probably repre- 

 senting the copyholders under the monastery. In Appendix I 

 several holdings of three kinds have been summarized in order to 

 show how various tenures fitted into the same field framework. 

 The tenements were rated in virgates. There were no closes 

 except the homestalls, each tenant's holding lying in the open 

 fields, where were also his strips of meadow or " lay ground." 

 Among the three fields, named Hemplow, Middle, and Abbey, the 

 acres of the virgates were, except in a few instances, divided with- 

 out prejudice. In most respects this survey is a model one, since 

 it gives the names of all furlongs, with the area and location of 

 each open-field strip. 



Selected holdings from four northern surveys will complete our 

 three-field itinerary. A Jacobean account of Lutterworth, Lei- 

 cestershire, illustrates a feature characteristic of many midland 

 and northern field-books, the distribution of several parcels of 

 meadow or " leys " among the arable fields. Here the tenants' 

 strips of meadow, instead of being segregated near a stream, were 

 disposed here and there throughout the arable area. Just as at 

 Welford, certain furlongs which began with arable strips ended 

 with strips of " ley " ; and the meadow in each field amounted to 

 as much as one-third of the arable there. In other respects the 

 survey is of the normal three-field type. 



Rolleston, a township of eastern Staffordshire, presents the 

 novelty of six fields instead of three. In the Elizabethan survey 



