1 68 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



There were, then, settlements larger than the farm of one 

 plough, settlements consisting of six or eight ploughs and of 

 twenty or thirty tenants and cottagers. Strictly speaking, these 

 were the townships, although the term was doubtless applied to 

 the farm. Indeed, there can have been no sharp line of demarca- 

 tion between farm and township. It may have been simple 

 enough to call a settlement of one plough-gate a farm and one of 

 six plough-gates a township; yet which term was to be applied 

 to a group of tenants who maintained three or four ploughs ? 

 Sharp distinctions must have faded away, till the terms farm and 

 township tended to become confused. 



One thing, however, seems clear enough: Scottish units of 

 settlement inclined to be small. Usually they comprised not 

 more than a half-dozen tenants tilling together less than loo acres 

 of land. Such in all strictness was the farm. If the number 

 of ploughs multiplied and the tenants, apart from crofters, in- 

 creased to a dozen, the arable might expand to 300 or 400 acres. 

 In general, however, we shall not be wrong in calling the group 

 of tenants' houses a hamlet and the unit of settlement a hamlet- 

 farm. 



All this is in contrast with the method of settlement usual in 

 the English midlands. There the township often contained a 

 thousand acres or more and the tenants numbered from twenty to 

 one hundred.^ The ratio of one to four may not very inaccu- 

 rately r^resent the relation between Scottish and English units 

 of settlement in point of size. In other words, the fields of the 

 smaller Scottish hamlet-farms were perhaps only about one- 

 fourth as large as the fields of the smaller English townships, and 

 the same was true of the fields of larger townships in both countries. 

 It happened, of course, that the largest Scottish township-fields 

 were as considerable as the smallest ones of the English mid- 

 lands. Furthermore, the ratio did not hold good for all parts of 

 England where the midland system prevailed. In Herefordshire, 

 for example, the townships frequently had no greater area than 

 those of Scotland, and yet a three-field system was employed 

 there. None the less, the contrast is for the most part valid and 



1 Cf. the areas of the townships of Oxfordshire given in Appendix IV. 



