COMMUNISTIC FARMING 3 



both grass and stubble became common land and were thrown 

 open for the whole community to turn their stock upon. 



The size of the strips of land in the arable fields varied, but 

 was generally an acre, in most places a furlong (furrow long) or 

 220 yards in length, and 22 yards broad ; or in other words, 

 40 rods of 5^ yards in length and 4 in breadth. There was, 

 however, little uniformity in measurement before the Norman 

 Conquest, the rod by which the furlongs and acres were 

 measured varying in length from 1 2 to 24 feet, so that one acre 

 might be four times as large as another. 1 The acre was, 

 roughly speaking, the amount that a team could plough in a 

 day, and seems to have been from early times the unit of 

 measuring the area of land. 2 Of necessity the real acre and 

 the ideal acre were also different, for the reason that the former 

 had to contend with the inequalities of the earth's surface and 

 varied much when no scientific measurement was possible. 

 As late as 1820 the acre was of many different sizes in England. 

 In Bedfordshire it was 2 roods, in Dorset 134 perches instead 

 of 1 60, in Lincolnshire 5 roods, in Staffordshire 2| acres. To- 

 day the Cheshire acre is 10,240 square yards. As, however, 

 an acre was and is a day's ploughing for a team, we may assume 

 that the most usual acre was the same area then as now. 

 There were also half-acre strips, but whatever the size the 

 strips were divided one from another by narrow grass paths 

 generally called ' balks ', and at the end of a group of these 

 strips was the ' headland ' where the plough turned, the name 

 being common to-day. Many of these common fields re- 

 mained until well on in the nineteenth century; in 1815 half 

 the county of Huntingdon was in this condition, and a few still 

 exist. 3 Cultivating the same field year after year naturally 

 exhausted the soil, so that the two-field system came in, under 



1 Maitland, op. cit, p. 368. 



z Anonymous Treatise on Husbandry, Royal Historical Society, pp. xli. 

 and 68. About 1230, Smyth, in his Lives of the Berkeley s, i. 113, says, 

 ' At this time lay all lands in common fields, in one acre or ridge, one 

 man's intermixt with another.' 8 See p. 22. 



B 2 



