4IO ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



a rural estate not unlike the later mediaeval manor. In taking 

 over the cultivators of the soil they might also have adopted the 

 methods of tillage already practiced by the sitting tenants. As 

 a result, the ancient tenant-holding and its relation to the town- 

 ship's arable would have persisted after the Germanic conquest. 

 On the assumption, therefore, that the Romano-Celtic population 

 was to some extent assimilated rather than exterminated, we 

 should expect to find in Anglo-Saxon England a sub-stratum of 

 sers^le dependents whose holdings had Roman or possibly Celtic 

 characteristics. What should appear in the extant evidence as 

 testimony to the existence of a conquered and depressed group 

 are Roman or Celtic agrarian usages and early traces of serf- 

 dom. This was Seebohm's thesis, and to a limited extent it is 

 Turner's. 



The subject discussed in the preceding pages is one that touches 

 the histor>^ of settlement at just this point. The nature of field 

 systems depends primarily upon the relation of the unit of villein 

 tenure to the arable fields. For this reason it is pertinent to 

 inquire in what measure the systems that have been described 

 are Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, or Roman. So far as this point can be 

 ascertained, additional matter will be at hand for solving a 

 troublesome problem of Enghsh social history. 



One Hmitation of our evidence touching field systems which 

 seriously impairs its appHcability to the problem above described 

 is its relatively late character. Little of it antedates the thir- 

 teenth century, a period itself seven hundred years removed 

 from the Germanic invasion. Although Domesday Book and 

 certain twelfth-century documents refer to the unit of villein 

 tenure, they disclose scarcely more than the names it bore, giv- 

 ing no descriptions that relate it to the arable fields in which it 

 lay. More informing are the Anglo-Saxon charters, which in a 

 few instances testify to the existence of intermixed parcels and 

 by phrases in the boundaries hint at open-field usages. Even 

 the assurance, however, that some form of open field existed in 

 midland England in the tenth century is not very valuable for 

 our purpose, partly because the information is still four centuries 

 later than the coming of the Germans, but still more because, 



