41 8 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



their first fields after midland or after Kentish models is a question 

 that must be left undetermined. Since the region forms a border- 

 land between these two spheres of influence, some settlers may 

 have come from the midlands and others from the southeast. 

 The only thing that is clear is the development of arable fields 

 through the assarting of the waste in such manner that the ten- 

 ants' holdings came to comprise a certain amount of unenclosed 

 land lying in scattered parcels. 



The foregoing explanation of the field systems of southeastern 

 England, hypothetical as it is in part, does at least leave us with 

 a generalization which, if true, is important. It implies that 

 throughout five counties of the southeast the influence of Roman 

 Britain in agrarian afifairs persisted after the Germanic conquest 

 of the fifth century. Either the conquerors showed extraordi- 

 nary flexibility in adopting a field system with which they must 

 have been unfamiliar, or they spared a part of the native popu- 

 lation who, as serfs, continued to employ their own agricultural 

 methods. Since the latter supposition is the more credible, we 

 are led to posit a greater survival of the Romano-Celtic popula- 

 tion in southeastern Britain than in the midlands. 



Anglo-Saxon England is thus, so far as field systems are indic- 

 ative of settlement, divisible into three parts. The large central 

 area, stretching from Durham to the Channel and from Cam- 

 bridgeshire to Wales, was the region throughout which Germanic 

 usage prevailed, presumably because of the thoroughgoing nature 

 of the fifth-century subjugation; the southeast was characterized 

 by the persistence of Roman influence, a circumstance which 

 implies that the conquest was less destructive there than to the 

 north and west; the counties of the southwest, the northwest, 

 and the north retained Celtic agrarian usages in one form or 

 another, a retention that is readily comprehensible in view of 

 the difficulty with which, as we know, these districts were 

 slowly overpowered by the invaders. This subdivision of Anglo- 

 Saxon England, together with the evidence upon which it is 

 based, constitutes the contribution which the study of field sys- 

 tems is able to make to the history of pre-Norman conquest and 

 settlement. 



