2 70 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



those of Lancashire and Cumberland, regions in which open 

 fields survived longer and are more fully described. 



If we turn to these two northern counties, in neither do we 

 find such a grouping of scattered parcels as the two- or three-field 

 system imposed. In them the strips of the holdings lay, to be 

 sure, dispersed throughout the arable area, but the arrangement 

 can properly be called nothing more than runrig, since nowhere 

 is there any grouping by fields, whether two or four, three or six. 

 In Cumberland it is even possible that the strips of a holding 

 were at times segregated within one part of the township's 

 arable. Whatever may have been the usual juxtaposition of a 

 tenant's arable strips in all these western counties (and about 

 this there is still considerable doubt), the absence of the midland 

 alignment is a characteristic common to the field arrangements of 

 Cumberland and Lancashire, to those of Cornwall, Devon, and 

 Cheshire, and to those of Scotland. Ireland, and Wales. Further 

 emphasis is put upon this characteristic by the absence in terriers 

 and surveys of any intimation that the villagers desired to have 

 a continuous stretch of their intermixed arable lying fallow at 

 one time, as was the practice under the midland system. Al- 

 though one hears much about rights of pasture over common, 

 moor, and fell, such rights are never specified relative to a fallow 

 field. Thus pasturage arrangements in the counties under con- 

 sideration do not point to midland usages any more than do the 

 relative positions assumed by the strips of the customary holdings. 



If in both these respects the counties of the northwest and the 

 southwest show Celtic rather than midland fields, of a final 

 characteristic of Scottish agriculture — namely, the temporary 

 tillage of parcels of the waste or outfield during a series of 

 years, followed by an abandonment of the same parcels for a 

 corresponding period of time — they furnish little evidence. To 

 find unmistakable traces of such a custom in England it is 

 necessary to turn to Northumberland, where its existence is 

 established by two or three brief descriptions. Without much 

 doubt the same practice prevailed in Cumberland, since sixteenth- 

 centurv' surveys record there the subdivision among tenants of 

 areas newly improved from the waste. It seems likely, further- 



