THE EAST ANGLIAN SYSTEM 343 



the year, was a custom there in the twelfth as well as in the 

 thirteenth century.^ 



How, we may now ask, could a tenant's privilege of having 

 his own fold be realized ? Under a system of enclosures there 

 would have been no difficulty, but in the twelfth and thirteenth 

 centuries East Anghan fields were largely open. Assume now 

 that the arable of a township was divided into two or three (four 

 or six) compact divisions cultivated like those of the midlands. 

 There it was the practice for sheep and cattle to roam over the 

 entire field which lay fallow, the lord's acres (if in open field) 

 and the tenants' acres sharing ahke. If under such a system 

 tenant or lord were to have had " sua falda," he would have been 

 obliged to hedge about his parcels with wattles, thereby sacrific- 

 ing the prime advantage secured by the compact fallow field — 

 the freedom from attending much to the wandering sheep and 

 cattle. Since one aim of the midland system was to attain this 

 convenience, we do not hear about the use of wattles in midland 

 open fields or about any tenant having " sua falda." 



Apply again the privilege of " sua falda " to such a field sys- 

 tem as was practiced in Norfolk in the sixteenth century. There 

 the flock of each manor had in the township a definite area, apart 

 from unploughed pasture and waste, over which it had rights. 

 Beyond this area it did not pass, and within it some parcels were 

 fallow and some were sown each year. To protect the growing 

 corn wattles must have been necessary. Since the lord's flock had 

 to be kept from the cultivated acres and folded upon the parcels 

 of fallow until harvest time, the complexity would in no wise 

 have been increased if the tenant were to employ the same pro- 

 cedure relative to his acres. He, too, hke his lord, might well 

 have had some of his parcels under crops, and others fallow with 

 his sheep folded upon them. The villein's privilege of having 

 " sua falda," recorded in the Ely cartulary, thus accords en- 

 tirely with the Norfolk method of pasturing sheep, but not at 

 all with that of the midlands. That it is noted in the twelfth- 

 and thirteenth-century documents argues for the early existence 



^ Cartularium Monasterii de Rameseia (ed. W. H. Hart, Rolls Series, 3 vols., 

 1884-93), i. 423, iii. 261, 262, 264. 



