154 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



At this point it will be necessary to conclude our study of the 

 two- and three-field system. This method of tillage has been 

 followed from Anglo-Saxon days to the latter part of the nine- 

 teenth century. The area throughout which it prevailed has 

 been defined as the northern and southern midlands — the terri- 

 tory from Durham to the Channel and from the Welsh marches 

 to the fens. In its primitive Anglo-Saxon form the system seems 

 to have been one of two fields. As soon, to be sure, as we get 

 full evidence from the beginning of the thirteenth century, three- 

 field townships are apparent. The discovery, however, that two- 

 field arrangements sometimes gave place to three-field ones has 

 encouraged the belief that such transformation was perhaps 

 responsible for the existence of the three-field system. The 

 period to be credited with this first step in agricultural advance 

 is the thirteenth century and the early fourteenth. From that 

 time on, all the more fertile townships of the midlands, especially 

 of the northern and western portions, were in three fields. 



So they remained, it seems, for about two centuries. When 

 the curtain next rises upon midland fields as they appear in the 

 surveys of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, another 

 transformation has begun. Although most townships still re- 

 main in two or three fields, more complex arrangements appear 

 here and there, especially in forest areas and in river valleys. 

 Sometimes strips of meadow have substituted themselves for 

 strips of arable in the otherwise normal fields. Sometimes the 

 division of tenants' acres among fields is incomprehensible, even 

 though the fields are few. Sometimes the fields have become 

 numerous and admit of no grouping which adjusts them to the 

 traditional system. Sometimes much piecemeal enclosure has 

 taken place and the open-field arable is visibly in a state of 

 decay. Very often, finally, a new regular system, one of 

 four fields, has replaced the two-field arrangement, and so has 

 brought into annual tillage an additional quarter of the town- 

 ship's arable. 



These changes, it is ob\dous, were evidences at once of the decay 

 of the old system and of an advance in agricultural technique. 

 To study them at closer range we have given attention to the 



