l6o ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



and is sown with oats in the spring. It produces a poor crop 

 and three or four succeeding crops still poorer and poorer; till at 

 last they are forced to abandon it by the plough after it will 

 scarcely return the seed. It is deplorable to think that . . . 

 such a barbarous system . . . should have been, from local 

 circumstances, continued for several centuries." 



From every part of Scotland come similar accounts of the 

 division between infield and outfield. The variations in detail 

 are slight, having reference largely to the rotation of crops and 

 to the proportions existing between the various sorts of land. 

 No other report makes a distinction between folds and faughs, 

 the entire outfield being usually described as Anderson describes 

 the folds. In East Lothian the outfield was divided into five, six, 

 or seven brakes (instead of ten folds and ten faughs), the number 

 depending upon the quahty of the soil.^ In Ayrshire " no dung 

 was ever spread upon any part of it. The starved cattle kept 

 on the farm were suffered to poach the fields from the end of 

 Harvest till the ensuing seedtime." ^ Contrasted with the out- 

 field was the infield, which in Dumbarton comprised about one- 

 fourth of the farm.^ Sometimes the rotation of crops upon the 

 infield extended over four years instead of three. In Ayrshire a 

 year of ley intervened between the crop of barley and the two 

 crops of oats.* In the Carse of Gowrie and in East Lothian 

 one-fourth of the infield " was dunged for pease [and] . . . the 

 second crop was wheat, the third barley, the fourth oats." In 

 southern Perthshire, along with the usual rotation, a crop of peas 

 or beans might be introduced between the oats and the barley, or 

 barley and oats might alternate in two-course rotation.^ The 

 reporter for Annandale explains what part of a farm the system 

 brought under annual cultivation. The quantity of infield land, 

 he says, " was proportioned to the number of cattle wintered and 

 housed on the farm. An acre of land might be dunged for each 

 five or six cattle. ... A farm that could fold five acres of 

 Outfield land [from which three crops of oats were then taken], and 



' East Lothian, p. 48. ' Dumbarton, p. 44. 



2 Ayr, p. 9. 4 Ayr, p. 9. 



* Southern Perth, p.22. The introduction of the peas or beans was deemed an 

 improvement. 



