41 6 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



maintained a closer agrarian tie with Roman Britain than per- 

 sisted elsewhere in the island. 



The field arrangements of the other southeastern counties are 

 more dilhcult to inteqiret, and in attempting to discover their 

 origin we advance farther into the realm of conjecture. To ex- 

 plain the formation of East Anglian eriungs and tenementa an 

 h\']>othesis has been sketched which in brief is as follows. The 

 peculiar pasturage arrangements of Norfolk and Suffolk, arising 

 from the possession by individuals and small manors of the privi- 

 lege of independent foldagc, is suggestive of a connection between 

 the formation of these manors and the development of the field 

 system of the region. Inasmuch as the manors antedate Domes- 

 day Book, the foldage privileges may be looked upon as corre- 

 spondingly early. A more decisive feature in the East Anglian 

 system, however, is the aspect assumed by its unit of villein 

 tenure when we first get descriptions of it in the thirteenth 

 century. Its compactness in some instances and the segregation 

 of its parcels in others reveal its similarity to the Kentish iugum; 

 but it was usually less like the intact Kentish unit than like a 

 Kentish holding after the iuga had for some generations been sub- 

 divided and a tenant had come to hold parcels in several neigh- 

 boring iuga. This feature of the East Anglian tenementum is 

 perhaps best explained by the supposition that a pre-Norman 

 organization of petty manors in East Anglia arrested for a mo- 

 ment the disintegration of ancient iuga which were once charac- 

 teristic of the region, and established as new units the holdings 

 that we find. Such a reorganization of the agrarian situation 

 we have tentatively attributed to the Danish invasion, since to 

 that intrusion was due the greatest social upheaval of Anglo- 

 Saxon days. In this way the East Anglian and Kentish field 

 systems, originally similar, may have come to be unlike each other. 

 Should these inferences be correct, the area within which Roman 

 influence persisted after the invasions of the fifth century is en- 

 larged to include, along with Kent, two other counties of the 

 southeast. 



Essex, situated as it is between Kent and East Anglia, could 

 with difficulty have escaped falling within the same sphere of 



