82 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



without some two-field townships, and much of the three-field 

 evidence is of a date later than the thirteenth century. Hence 

 it is not improbable that the predominantly three-field counties 

 became such during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. If 

 so, the system was a derived one, and midland England at the 

 time of the Conquest was a region dominated by two fields. 



The questions with which this chapter opened have at length 

 received such answers ais accessible data admit of. There is dis- 

 cernible in Anglo-Saxon England an open-field system, which 

 first at the end of the twelfth century reveals itself as one of two 

 or three fields; the territory throughout which this system 

 prevailed was the extensive region known as the northern and 

 southern midlands; the co-existence of two-field and three-field 

 townships within this area as early as 1200 is apparent, but 

 the preponderance of one group or the other in certain parts of it 

 before the sixteenth century is no less obvious; finally, it is cer- 

 tain that to some extent transition from two-field to three-field 

 arrangements occurred during the thirteenth and early fourteenth 

 centuries, and it is not improbable that the three-field system 

 may have been altogether a derived one, arising from an im- 

 provement in agricultural method. As the sixteenth century 

 saw both forms of tillage employed, and as further changes had 

 by that time set in, we are naturally led to inquire into the later 

 history of what may henceforth be called the midland system. 



