LATER HISTORY OF THE MIDLAND SYSTEM 1 55 



enclosure history of Oxfordshire and Herefordshire. The latter 

 county has shown itself particularly notable for the extent to 

 which piecemeal enclosure went quietly on within its borders, a 

 procedure which seems to have been facilitated by its numerous 

 and small fields. In Oxfordshire it was different. More than 

 one-half of the county, to be sure, became enclosed before 

 1750, but the causes of this seem to have been the fertility and 

 residential desirabihty of certain townships. In other townships 

 a greater or less amount of open arable field survived, the total 

 constituting more than one-third of the county's area. This sur- 

 viving open-field arable had in part undergone certain changes, 

 particularly the substitution of four fields for two; and the 

 extent of such transformation in Oxfordshire, indeed, suggests 

 that it constituted the most important step in systematic agricult- 

 ural advance made by the midland system since the fourteenth 

 century. In conjunction with certain refinements upon itself, it 

 was the last endeavor of open-field husbandry to till the soil in the 

 most remunerative manner possible. In this attempt it failed, 

 being unable to equal the advantages offered by enclosure and 

 convertible husbandry. 



Thereupon set in an epoch of parliamentary enclosure which, 

 continuing from the middle of the eighteenth century for rather 

 more than a hundred years, left England a country substantially 

 devoid of open arable fields. The progress of this late enclosure 

 in Oxfordshire and Herefordshire has been followed in order to 

 make clear what material is available for an extended study of the 

 subject, and to emphasize the distinction between those coun- 

 ties in which the two- and three-field system was firmly en- 

 trenched and those in which it yielded easily to formal or informal 

 enclosure. The first group comprised the counties of the eastern, 

 central, and southern midlands; the second included counties or 

 parts of counties lying to the north and west in a belt of territory 

 which stretched from Durham to Somerset. In the latter group 

 piecemeal enclosure went on more rapidly than it did in the former, 

 a circumstance that constitutes the most striking differentiation 

 within the entire two- and three-field area. Next to it in sug- 

 gestiveness is perhaps the readiness manifested by four-field and 



