18 HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE [v. 



continued existence of certain common rights in 

 England up to recent times : the nature of these 

 rights being recorded in the " Report of the Select 

 Committee on Commons Inclosures appointed by the 

 House of Commons in 1844," and the descriptions of 

 Agriculture in the several counties of England 

 published by the then Board of Agriculture, under 

 the control of Sir John Sinclair, at the close of 

 the last and commencement of the present century. 



Thus he says at p. 3 of the translation made under 

 the auspices of the Cobden Club : 



" The professional experts who were examined 

 before the Committee in 1844 agreed in their in- 

 formation that, in many parts of the country, plots of 

 arable land in the same township lay intermixed and 

 uninclosed, so that the lands of a rural property 

 consisted of narrow parcels lying scattered in a dis- 

 connected manner all over the extent of the village 

 district (Dorfflur). These arable parcels were for 

 the separate use of individual possessors from seed- 

 time to harvest, after which they were open and 

 common to all for pasturage. They were designated 

 ' open commonable intermixed fields,' and also 

 ' lammas lands,' because ' lammas ' is the festival 

 ' Petri ad vincula' on the 1st of August or, accord- 

 ing to the old calendar by which the reckoning was 

 then taken, the 13th of August which was the 

 period at which the common rights of pasture 

 commenced." (Nasse on the Agricultural Com- 



