CELTIC SYSTEM IN ENGLAND 225 



the pasture lands are stinted in the proportion of 20 stints to 

 each farm." * Although by the nineteenth century the bound- 

 aries between arable, meadow, and pasture may have become 

 more flexible than they were at an earlier time, there can be Httle 

 doubt that the method of allotment here described was a survival 

 of the principle that all land newly taken under cultivation should 

 be equitably apportioned among the husbandlands. 



If it be impossible to look upon Northumberland tillage as 

 identical with that of the midlands, there is, on the other hand, 

 no difficulty in seeing how it could transform itself into the latter 

 with ease. Were the cultivation of the arable in any township 

 to become more intensive, the period of years during which a 

 furlong could be allowed to revert to waste would have to be 

 decreased. The ratio might become two years of productivity 

 to one of fallow; ^ with such a rotation once adopted, only the 

 laying together of the fallow furlongs would be wanting to make 

 the system one of three compact fields. If it may be assumed that 

 this step was at times taken before or during the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, some of the questionable indications of a three-field system 

 which have been cited in this chapter are perhaps entirely authen- 

 tic. At least there is opportunity, if any one thinks the evidence 

 sufiicient, for attributing to Harley and Seaton Delaval the 

 practice of three-field agriculture.^ 



Viewed in all its relations, Northumberland thus becomes a 

 transitional county, having affiliations on the one hand with 

 Scotland, on the other with the midlands. Despite the nominal 

 division of the arable of its townships into fields, a division some- 

 times apparent in maps and terriers, the absence of an equal 

 apportionment of the acres of the holdings among these fields 

 has led us to doubt the midland character of the latter. Apart 



^ Archaeologia Aeliana, new series, 1894, xvi. 138. 



^ Seebohm, in his latest book, remarks that the co-aration of the waste described 

 in the Welsh laws of the tenth century " is an embryo form of the more advanced 

 open field system of the settled agricultural village community. It is only 

 necessary," he continues, " to extend the com crop over a wider area and to subject 

 the strips to a permanent rotation of crops, and the result would be holdings with 

 scattered and intermixed strips and the vaine pdture over the stubble " {Customary 

 Acres and their Historical Importance, London, 19 14, p. 6). 



' Cf. above, pp. 220-221. 



