EARLY IRREGULAR FIELDS IN THE MIDLANDS 9 1 



no holding in the sixteenth century was divided among the three 

 with any semblance of equahty, and for this reason we must 

 look upon the township as one alien to the midland system. 



Adjacent to Yate on the south is Frampton Cotterell. Here 

 the process, well under way at Yate, was early completed, for in 

 the survey of i Edward VI no open-field arable whatever is 

 perceptible.^ There had been a " Westfeld," to which is assigned 

 a solitary seven-acre parcel together with a two-acre close. Quite 

 possibly a common meadow was still existent, for twice there is 

 mention of such, and some 50 acres of meadow in various hold- 

 ings are not said to have been enclosed. The remainder of the 

 township's lands, nearly 575 acres, are minutely described as 

 closes. Only about 90 acres were closes of arable, the rest being 

 pasture. Thus completely had the twenty-three substantial 

 copyholders of the township, each possessed of a messuage and 

 upwards of 15 acres of land,^ gone over to pasture farming. 

 And this had happened, without any evidence of high-handed 

 procedure, in a well-peopled township ten miles distant from 

 Bristol. 



To explain what system of tillage was employed on the open 

 irregular fields of the valley townships of Gloucestershire is not 

 easy. William Marshall, who wrote two centuries later but who 

 knew Gloucestershire well, makes suggestive comment. He first 

 notes with scorn the intermixture of the parcels of the several 

 owners. Although this was a feature likely to be seen wherever a 

 common-field system prevailed, Marshall apparently thought the 

 Gloucestershire arrangement more arbitrary than that existing 

 elsewhere. In the fields, he says, the property is not intermixed 

 " with a view to general conveniency or an equitable distribu- 

 tion of the lands to the several messuages of the townships they 

 lie in, as in other places they appear to have been; but here the 

 property of two men, perhaps neighbours in the same hamlet, 

 will be mixed land-for-land alternately; though the soil and the 

 distance from the messuages be nearly the same." Later he gives 

 valuable information about the tillage of the fields. " In the 



1 Rents, and Survs., Portf. 2/46, ff. 139 sq. 



^ Except three, who had 4^, 8, and 9 acres respectively. 



