EARLY IRREGULAR FIELDS IN THE MIDLANDS lOI 



would indicate a two-field system still effective; and the proba- 

 bility that it was so is shght, since five-sixths of the leasehold 

 and two- thirds of the copyhold lay enclosed. Many Somerset 

 townships must at the end of the seventeenth century have been 

 like Bruton, a fact which would account for the comparatively 

 small amount of arable within the county affected by act of 

 parliament.^ 



A Wiltshire township, situated, like most of those above de- 

 scribed, in a district favorable for improved or for pasture farm- 

 ing, shows by the Glastonbury survey of lo Henry VIII that it 

 was already avaiHng itself of its natural advantages. Christian 

 Malford is in the valley of the Wiltshire Avon, where the downs 

 do not yet close in as they do at Bath. Low-lying lands abound. 

 In consequence about one-half of each virgate (and the virgates 

 were large) consisted of closes, but whether these were pasture 

 we do not learn. Altogether the copyholders had 753 acres of 

 enclosed land, in comparison with 68 acres of common meadow 

 and 941 acres in the open arable fields. For a township in the 

 heart of the two-field area these fields were numerous. There 

 was, to be sure, a North field and a West field, though few of the 

 virgate holdings had acres in both of them and some had acres in 

 neither. Other fields were often favored — Little field, Bene- 

 hul field, Middel field, Wode furlong — and in the most arbitrary 

 manner. A virgater sometimes had more arable acres in one field 

 than he had in all the others, while the dominant field at times 

 varied from virgate to virgate. North field, which in many 

 holdings was not mentioned, contained nearly all the acres of 

 four distinct virgates. Neither uniformity of distribution nor 

 equality of apportionment among fields is anywhere perceptible 

 in the survey. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Chris- 

 tian Malford was as far removed from the appearance of two- 



1 For the entire county S\a.tei' {English Peasantry, p. 298) cites only forty-one 

 acts relative to open arable field. Of these aU except six estimate the areas to be en- 

 closed. Nine thousand acres are said to have been arable, eleven thousand more 

 partly arable, partly pasture. Since the county contains 1,043,409 acres, the 

 open-field arable enclosed by act of parliament was only between one and two per 

 cent of the area of the county. In Oxfordshire, as the following chapter will show, 

 it was about thirty-seven per cent of the county's area. 



