264 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



le Downcs "; and occasionally this "communis pastura" changes 

 into " terra arabilis et pastura," from which it is only a step to 

 the " Downe close " with its holdings always arable. 



This description, joined with that of Braunton Great Field 

 and that of the landscores at Ilsington, seems ground for believ- 

 ing, not only that the common fields of Devon and Cornwall in 

 the sixteenth century were few, but that some of them were not 

 of ancient origin. About the antiquity of certain of the fields 

 at Carnanton, and of the still larger ones at Brixham and Wood- 

 huish, we know Httle. Nor have we information about the 

 distribution of parcels in these Devon and Cornish fields, save 

 that given by the nineteenth-century appearance of Braunton 

 Great Field. This had by no means a two- or three-field aspect, 

 the tenants' parcels being apparently distributed throughout 

 it with the same irregularity as prevailed in the counties of 

 the northwest. 



Turning to the earher Devon and Cornish evidence, we find 

 two local units much in evidence, the " ferling " and the Cornish 

 " acre." In general utiUty the ferling corresponded with the 

 midland \argate, replacing it as the fourth part of a larger unit. 

 The larger unit itself was sometimes called a virgate; in one 

 of the fines, from a total of six virgates at Dene there were sub- 

 tracted two ferhngs and two and one-half acres, ^ while near 

 Exeter we hear of the transfer of a half-virgate and a ferhng.^ 

 In Cornwall, according to an early fine which carefully states 

 that the sum of half an acre and two ferhngs equalled an acre, 

 the ferhng was the fourth pjirt of a Cornish acre.^ Its area of 

 course varied as did that of the unit of which it was the fourth 

 part. At Brixham, as we have seen, it contained 30 acres; ^ and 

 at the end of the sixteenth century this was its size at Wood- 

 brooke, at Allerton, and at Sherford.^ In a Devon fine of 22 

 Henrys III three ferhngs equalled 43 acres.^ In Cornwall, in 1337, 



1 Ped Fin., 40-9-164 (12 John). 



2 Cott. MSS., Vitel. D IX, f. 1686 (a fourteenth-century cartulary). 

 ' Ped. Fin., 31-2-20. 



* Cf. above, p. 259. 



* Rents, and Survs., Portf. 6/61; Add. MS. 21605, ff. 19, 24. 

 ^ Ped. Fin., 40-12-226. 



