136 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



acres are apportioned in such manner as to indicate that a two- 

 or three-field arrangement was no longer satisfactory.' Where 

 there are four quarters or fields, the names of these are curious 

 and local, obviously of recent origin. At Somerton in 1634 pre- 

 cise designations had not yet been adopted, it being necessary 

 to call the fields second, third, fourth, and to locate them with 

 reference to highways; - but at least it is clear that four-field 

 arrangements were known to Oxfordshire early in the seventeenth 

 centur}\ 



This fact, taken with the testimony of the preceding chapter, 

 seems to warrant the generahzation that a four-field system, mak- 

 ing its appearance in the English midlands during the sixteenth 

 century and the early seventeenth, was employed more and 

 more in the course of the latter century and in the early eight- 

 eenth. This transformation marks the second important stage in 

 the development of open-field husbandry in the midlands. The 

 first occurred when, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 

 three fields were substituted for two in many regions, among 

 others in eastern Oxfordshire. Elsewhere, as in northwestern 

 Oxfordshire, no change then took place, the primitive two-field 

 system remaining intact. These two-field regions, however, were 

 those which, in this second period of development, ceased to be 

 dormant.^ No longer did they allow one-half of the arable to 

 lie fallow each year, but they reduced the fraction to one-fourth. 

 Not content with this, they sometimes went farther, introducing 

 an elaborate rotation of crops and a complicated field system 

 in natural approach to the still more scientific principles em- 



* Steeple Barton 1685, Charlbury 1635 (cf. the enclosure of 1715, above, p. 117), 

 Churchill 1722, Comwell 1614, Heyford ad Pontem 1679, Kidlington 1634, Swer- 

 ford 1614, Wood Eaton 1685. 



2 So early as 1622 there is evidence in the indenture that records the partition of 

 the open fields of Bletchingdon (Cf. above, p. 118) of four small quarters beside a 

 much larger West field. 



' Other two-field regions underwent the same transformation as northwestern 

 Oxfordshire. The surveys of Welford, Gloucestershire, and Owston, Lincolnshire, 

 have already been described to illustrate four-field townships. Similarly in four 

 fields at the time of their enclosure were, for example, East Hanney, Berkshire (C. P. 

 Recov. Ro., 49 Geo. Ill, Hil.), Massingham, Lincolnshire (ibid., 45 Geo. Ill, Mich.), 

 Green's Norton, Northamptonshire (ibid., 47 Geo. Ill, Trin.). 



