EARLY IRREGULAR FIELDS IN THE MIDLANDS I07 



meadow predominated. Since these townships lie not on the 

 fells, but in the valleys, and since their erstwhile three-field char- 

 acter is clear, we have here an interesting departure from the 

 normal system. It appears that in several places in Durham the 

 old open arable fields were in a state of decay. The tenants pre- 

 ferred meadow and had converted into meadow many of their 

 open-field strips. Pretty clearly the next step was to be consoli- 

 dation and enclosure. Under these circumstances there could be 

 no occasion for complaint about enclosure as preceding and in- 

 ducing conversion. The processes were reversed, and the change 

 thereby became more natural. 



The enclosure of many Durham townships seems to have oc- 

 curred not very long after these Jacobean surveys were made. 

 Miss Leonard has described the agreements, enrolled on the 

 register of the court of the bishopric, by which the open fields 

 of upwards of twenty townships were re-allotted between 1633 

 and 1700. The preambles, she says, often assign as reason 

 for the enclosure the fact that the land " is wasted and worn 

 with continual ploweing, and thereby made bare, barren and very 

 unfruitefuU." ^ Doubtless this was a motive with such town- 

 ships as still lay largely in arable, and we have seen them numer- 

 ous in the days of James I; but in those townships whose open 

 fields had become largely meadow the desire to complete a 

 process begun must have been operative. If so, we have ante- 

 cedent changes in the field system as one explanation of the 

 disappearance of open arable fields in Durham. 



Our somewhat prolonged progress through the two- and three- 

 field area should ere this have served at least one end. It should 

 have made clear that, even within a territory unmistakably char- 

 acterized by one type of open field, conditions were not uniform 

 at the end of the sixteenth century. A stretch of forest or of 

 wold might cause marked deviation; still more might a river 

 with its bordering meadows. In the heart of the two- and three- 

 field area departures from the norm were not frequent, but in 

 the outlying counties they occurred often enough to threaten the 

 integrity of the system. As a result, certain districts within the 



1 "Inclosure of Common Fields," p. 117. 



