150 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



cleared of their respective crops of grain and hay." Since these 

 rights were estimated by the award as equivalent to one-fourth 

 of the yearly value of the 379 acres, the claimants were allotted 

 about one-fourth of this area. Obviously we are here deaUng 

 with common arable and meadow lands which had been enclosed 

 at some time before 1779 without the extinction of common rights. 

 Agreement there doubtless had been between the lord and the 

 tenants, but no separation of interests. 



One other parliamentary act relative to a Herefordshire town- 

 ship, said to be the earhest of its kind/ provides for the enclosure 

 of lands at Marden in 1608.^ The reason assigned to justify its 

 passage is that there may be " better provision of meadow and 

 pasture, for necessary maintenance of husbandry and tillage " — 

 the same reason which many sixteenth-century surveys from 

 Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, and Somerset might have ad- 

 vanced to explain the considerable departures from normal open- 

 field tillage which they manifest. This act recognizes and 

 legalizes what was apparently a usual procedure in this region. 



These two parliamentary sanctions given to enclosure by pri- 

 vate agreement in Herefordshire, standing as they do a century 

 apart, are significant, since they suggest that the process of which 

 many traces can be seen in the later plans had been of long dura- 

 tion. The process was one of piecemeal enclosure by private 

 agreement, and it remains to inquire whether much open-field 

 arable disappeared before it. On this point some Hght is thrown 

 by the condition, in the time of Henry VIII, of certain hamlets 

 formerly in the possession of Wigmore monastery. For each of 

 them there is a brief survey telling the number of tenants and the 

 areas of their holdings. Nearly always the holdings were largely 

 in open field, the situation, briefly stated, being as follows: ^ — 



1 Leonard, " Inclosure of Common Fields," p. 108. Miss Leonard states that 

 the act enabled the commoners to enclose a third of their lands. 



2 " An Act for the better Provision of Meadow and Pasture, for necessary Main- 

 tenance of Husbandly- and Tillage, in the JManors, Lordships, and Parishes of Mar- 

 den, alias Mawarden, Bodenham, Wellington, Sutton St. Michaell, Sutton St. 

 Nicholas, Murton upon Lugg, and the Parish of Pipe, and every of them, in the 

 county of Hereford " {Journal of the House of Lords, 12 May, 5 Jas. I). 



^ Land Rev., M. B. 183, ff. 2-24. The account of the demesnes, which were 

 seldom large, is not transcribed. 



