88 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



StiifTordshire seems to have been a county tending to show forest 

 irregularities in its open fields rather than the orderliness of the 

 two- and three-field system. 



Sufficient illustration has perhaps been given to indicate what 

 deviations from the normal field system were in the sixteenth 

 century to be met with in midland districts recently reclaimed 

 from the forest. It is time to turn to the irregularities which 

 might arise in the fields of the most favorably situated of the 

 old townships, those of the river valleys. Since no part of 

 England within the borders of the two- and three-field area is 

 more endowed with natural advantages than the valleys of the 

 southwest, the basin of the lower Severn and Avon constitutes 

 a suitable region with which to begin our study. To assist us, 

 sixteenth-century surveys of many monastic properties in 

 Gloucestershire are available.^ 



Simplest of the irregularities there visible is the four-field 

 arrangement which several townships had adopted. Since the 

 lower Avon and the slopes of the Cotswolds were in the thirteenth 

 century the home of two-field husbandry,^ it is not unlikely that 

 each of the old fields had been subdivided.^ Implying, as four 

 fields undoubtedly did in the sixteenth century, a four-course 

 rotation of crops, this method of tillage brought into annual 

 cultivation three-fourths instead of one-half or two-thirds of the 

 arable of the township. 



The surveys of Welford and Marston Sicca, villages lying not 

 far from the Avon, are illustrative, and have in part been sum- 

 marized in the Appendix. The division of the holdings among 

 four fields was remarkably exact, perhaps an indication that the 

 arrangement was recent. One of the fields of each township was 

 called West field, but the names of the other fields have a ring 

 far from ancient — Sholebreade, Stabroke, Middle Barrow, Natte 

 furlong, Nylls-and-hadland. The copyholds of Admington and 

 Stanton, townships not far away, were divided in the same 

 precise way among four fields, some of which bore more usual 



1 Particularly in Exch. K. R., M. B. 39, temp. Edw. VI. 

 * Cf . pp. 29- 30, and Appendix II. 



' For later evidence of this procedure, see below, pp. 125-127, where the plan of 

 a four-field township is also sketched. 



