EARLY IRREGULAR FIELDS IN THE MIDLANDS 97 



Danyell's.^ Among them was half a messuage accompanying 

 half of a virgate of customary sokeland lying in the township 

 of Verne. The half- virgate comprised, besides garden, orchard, 

 and two- acre curtilage, 



" Clausam pasture do novo inclusam extra communem cam- 

 pum vocatum Lawfeild continentem per estimationem i 

 acram dimidiam 

 Aliam parcellam pasture de novo inclusam in Senacre feild 

 Terram arabilem iacentem in communibus campis de Mawar- 

 den cuius quantitatem juratores ignorant." 



This tenant had, it appears, enclosed the part of his virgate which 

 lay in two of the open common fields. The procedure is what 

 might have been expected and permitted when the vitality of the 

 old system had been sapped. Although, as it happens, much of the 

 manor of Harden remained open for two centuries longer,^ Here- 

 fordshire townships in general became enclosed, and the nature 

 of the open fields as displayed in the foregoing illustrations must 

 have been one of the causes contributory to enclosure. Multi- 

 plicity of fields and disintegration of the old tenements were 

 transitional phases in the passage from the old system to the 

 new, and the motive prompting the change was probably the same 

 as that effective in Gloucestershire — a desire to cultivate the 

 soil more advantageously than the three-field system permitted. 

 A region which in situation and soil was well adapted to im- 

 prove upon a primitive system of agriculture was eastern Somer- 

 set. In early days a two-field system had there prevailed, and 

 nearly all townships which appear in Appendix II utiHzed it for 

 the cultivation of their arable in the thirteenth century. From 

 the southeastern part of the county the Tudor survey of Mar- 

 tock, with its members Hurst and Bower Henton, has been cited 

 in a preceding chapter to illustrate symmetrical three-field ar- 

 rangements.3 None the less, Tudor and Jacobean surveys from 

 Somerset which disclose the two or three old fields still intact are 

 exceptional. To show how most records of this date picture 



1 Land Rev., M. B. 217, f. 224. ^ Cf. p. 32, above. 



2 Cf. p. 140, below. 



