EARLY HISTORY OF TWO AND THREE FIELDS 73 



arrangement was as remunerative as a three-field one. Though 

 more of the soil was left fallow each year, did not the arable repay 

 its cultivators better for the more frequent periods of rest ? Were 

 not the crops grown on land fallowed every other year better than 

 those produced by land fallowed only once in three years ? Such 

 reasoning may at times have got empirical support from the 

 marked prosperity of certain two-field townships. But the gen- 

 eral practice told against it. The regions which adhered to two- 

 field husbandry were, on the whole, the bleak, chalky, unfertile 

 uplands; those, on the contrary, which were possessed of better 

 soil and better location came to be characterized by three fields. 

 This can only mean that, wherever natural advantages permitted, 

 men chose the three-field system by preference. The retention 

 of two fields was usually a tacit recognition that nature had 

 favored the township Httle. 



To change from two-field to three-field husbandry was there- 

 fore tantamount to making greater demands upon the arable — 

 to taking a step forward in agricultural progress. Some desire 

 for improvement was, of course, bound to come in time; but in 

 a great number of two-field townships it delayed long, becoming 

 operative only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sur- 

 veys, maps, and enclosure awards instruct us as to the character 

 of these late changes, and their teaching is summarized, so far as 

 certain typical regions are concerned, in the two following chap- 

 ters. In these are described certain townships, particularly in 

 Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, which during the sixteenth, 

 seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries abandoned the two-field 

 system. What they adopted was not a three-field arrangement, 

 but one of four fields or quarters, the outcome of a subdivision 

 of the old fields.^ Before the sixteenth century, however, there 

 is no example, within the midland area, of just this method of 

 improvement. If changes took place, the recasting seems to have 

 resulted in three fields. Evidence of such procedure is, therefore, 

 what must be sought, but unfortunately it is the very kind of 

 evidence which, in the nature of the case, must needs be scanty. 

 To chance upon an early and a later reference to the same town- 



1 Cf. pp. 88, 1 25 sq. 



