So ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



perhaps most unmistakably seen in two other groups of charters. 

 At Stewkley, Buckinghamshire, in 7 Richard I, 80 acres of arable 

 demesne in many furlongs lay in campo de Suheli, and 80 more 

 in campo del Est. In a charter copied into an early fourteenth- 

 centur\- cartulary, however, 18^ acres of arable at the same place 

 are described as consisting of 6 in the northern part of the field, 



6 in the eastern part, and 6 in the southern part.' The precision 

 of the first division is paralleled by that of the second, and is 

 explicable only by assuming a change from two-field to three-field 

 arrangements. At Culworth, Northamptonshire, it seems pos- 

 sible to fix still more definitely the date of a similar change. A 

 long charter of 24 Edward I enumerates 62 acres in many parcels 

 divided between North field and South field. Another grant of 



7 Edward III is brief, but none the less apportions to North field 

 one acre, to South field three roods, and to West field one rood.^ 

 It was apparently during the reign of Edward II that West field 

 first made its appearance. 



Finally, we have express statements that three fields were sub- 

 stituted for two. The first relates to South Stoke, Oxfordshire, 

 where in 1366, as an extent notes, two of the three fields were 

 sown annually and the third lay fallow.^ Somewhat more than 

 a century before this, however, the fields had niunbered but two. 

 A plea roll of 25 Henry III records, in a jurors' report relative to a 

 complaint about pasture rights, that " predictus Abbas [John of 

 Eynsham, predecessor of Abbot Nicholas, the defendant] parti- 

 tus fuit terras suas in tres partes, que antea partite fuerunt in 

 duas partes. " * The only doubt attaching to this account 

 is the possibility that the lands referred to may have been 

 demesne. Free from any such uncertainty is the record of what 

 happened at Piddletown, Dorset. The township was once in 

 two fields, as we learn from a charter copied into a cartulary of 

 Christchurch priory.^ In 20 Edward I, however, as the same 

 cartulary narrates, the priory's lands were formally re-divided into 

 three parts.^ The nature of the field names, the statement that 



» Appendix II, pp. 455, 456. « jbij^ pp ^jj^ ^gj. 3 i^id.^ p. 490. 



* Assize Ro. 696, m. 14a; cited in Victoria History of Oxfordshire, ii. 171. 



* Appendix II, p. 462. 



* Cott. MS., Tib. D VI, f. 200. " Divisio terre domini Prioris et conventus 



