EARLY IRREGULAR FIELDS IN THE MIDLANDS 93 



harvest. If all the 174 acres were treated alike, each one, instead 

 of being fallowed every third year, was fallowed twice during a 

 period of nine years. Although this instance refers to demesne 

 lands which seem not to have lain in the common arable fields, 

 the other case cited by Vinogradoff makes note of the tenants' 

 interest in the lands which are to be subject to " inhoc," an 

 intimation that these were open arable field. ^ 



A usage of this sort would not, of course, immediately affect 

 the integrity of a field system. The old bipartite or tripartite 

 division might still be kept and a survey give no indication of the 

 new custom. But in time the innovation was bound to tell upon 

 field divisions; for these would gradually be shifted so as to reflect 

 the superior tillage, until by the sixteenth century the fields 

 may have become as abnormal as we have just seen them. If 

 these conjectures are correct, the irregularities of the surveys 

 represent an intermediate step between the already improving 

 agriculture of the thirteenth century and the " every-year " 

 lands which Marshall knew. 



To the west of Gloucestershire the valleys of the Wye and Lug 

 constitute the largest and most fertile part of Herefordshire. 

 Relative to this county testimony from the sixteenth century 

 and from an earher period has already been advanced to show 

 that the three-field system was once existent there .^ It must 

 now be pointed out that alongside three-field townships there 

 appeared in due course others which differed from them. Several 

 Jacobean surveys from Herefordshire manifest characteristics in- 

 dicative of a departure from normal arrangements. Most striking 

 of these irregularities are the large number of small fields and 

 the break-up of the old tenements. 



One of the townships of the manor of Stockton, a manor which 

 has already testified to the existence of the three-field system in 

 the county, betrays in the sixteenth century a tendency toward 

 multiplicity of fields. This is Middleton, about one-fourth of 

 whose area was then enclosed meadow or pasture. The arable, 



' Regislrum Malmesburiense (ed. J. S. Brewer, Rolls Series, 2 vols., 1879-80), ii. 

 186. The " campi " in question were those of Brokenborough, a township on 

 the upper Avon in Wiltshire, but very near Gloucestershire. 



^ Cf. pp. 37, 64-66, above. 



