408 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



Ages and the period in question. Large parts of some townships 

 and all of others had succumbed to it. Conducive thereto were 

 certain of the causes operative in Herefordshire — situation in 

 a river valley or in a forest area; contributory, too, was the 

 cherished passion for country estates manifested by the new 

 gentry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The salient 

 feature of agricultural development in Oxfordshire before 1760, 

 however, and presumably the one characteristic of many counties 

 of the eastern midlands, was not the enclosure of open fields but 

 the improvement of them as they lay unenclosed. The redland 

 district of northern Oxfordshire is typical. Once characterized 

 by two-field townships, it began from the end of the sixteenth 

 century to subdivide the two fields into four and to get thereby 

 an annual return from three-fourths of the acres rather than from 

 one-half of them. In the eighteenth century still more of the 

 arable was annually tilled and the rotation of crops became as 

 complex as upon enclosed lands. 



Improvement in the tillage of unenclosed fields was not con- 

 fined to Oxfordshire. We have testimony to the early appear- 

 ance of four fields in southwestern and northeastern England, in 

 the valleys of the Severn and Trent. Irregular fields, too, of 

 which we have found many throughout the midlands as early as 

 the sixteenth century, probably reflected other forms of improved 

 cultivation, the nature of which is not always discernible from 

 the surveys. In so far as these irregularities did not correspond 

 with a changing tillage of arable, they imply that the arable 

 strips were transformed to meadow, a phase of development pe- 

 culiarly suited to river valleys. As it happens, we have given 

 most attention to such transformation in Durham open fields 

 during the seventeenth century; but hints from other regions 

 indicate that it was far from unknown throughout the northern 

 midlands. 



In whatever way, therefore, open arable fields underwent 

 change before the middle of the eighteenth century, whether they 

 submitted to a process of piecemeal enclosure with some conver- 

 sion to meadow and pasture, or whether on the other hand they 

 attained to a higher standard of tillage, remaining arable the 



