70 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



With this assurance that the boundary of the two- and three- 

 field system bent westward to include Herefordshire and Shrop- 

 shire, we may at length return to the entire area comprised within 

 that boundary and attempt to make a discrimination. How 

 much of this extensive territory was, during the Middle Ages, 

 claimed by two-field and how much by three-field husbandry ? 

 Hitherto these methods of tillage have been treated as one. A 

 glance at Appendix H, in which an effort has been made to col- 

 lect early rather than late instances of the occurrence of both, 

 will show that the list of two-field townships is not short. It is, 

 indeed, probably longer than the three-field list, but the number 

 of citations imports little when the finding of them is so hazard- 

 ous. What signifies is the area over which each method of tillage 

 was extended. As it happens, neither system always dominated 

 large and compact stretches of territory; nearly every county 

 within the boundary above drawn had both two- and three-field 

 townships. Nevertheless, there were preponderances. The 

 southwestern counties were very largely devoted to two-field 

 tillage. Most of eastern Somerset, all the Cotswold area which 

 stretches through Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and Gloucester- 

 shire, all the down lands of Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset, 

 were in the thirteenth century in two fields. Even Hampshire, 

 Buckinghamshire, and Bedfordshire may have been at least half 

 given over to this simpler agriculture, while such was certainly 

 the case with Northamptonshire. Lincolnshire, apart from the 

 fen country, was a two-field county. 



A slightly smaller area was characterized by the three-field 

 system at an early time. One finds it prevalent in northeastern 

 Hampshire, in Cambridgeshire, in Huntingdonshire, and especi- 

 ally in the valleys of the Trent and the Yorkshire Ouse. Here it 

 prospered, till its domain came to be the eastern midlands, the 

 north, and the west. In northern Northamptonshire, in Leicester- 

 shire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Durham, in Staffordshire, 

 Herefordshire, and Shropshire, it was easily supreme. Broadly 

 speaking, the line of Watling Street forms an approximate bound- 

 ary between the two large areas characterized respectively by the 

 preponderance of two and three fields. Yet we must hasten to 



