192 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



essential. This I have not been able to make. If a parliamentary 

 report of 1896 may be trusted, the amount of land then in farms 

 of from I to 300 acres, tilled by their owners, was only 8.37 per 

 cent of the county's area. If, however, farms of 300 to 500 acres 

 be included, the per cent rises to 12.9 almost exactly what it was 

 in 1832. At best, occupying owners seem not to have extended 

 their holdings during three-fourths of the nineteenth century, and 

 may have decreased them during that period. 



Turning now to the period before 1785, we face a problem of 

 tendencies. The evidence is by no means so complete as one 

 could wish, yet something we have. In the second half of the 

 sixteenth century and during the opening years of the seventeenth 

 it became the fashion to make surveys or field books of manors 

 and parishes. In their most complete form these surveys locate 

 all open-field strips and all enclosures within the parish, indicating 

 the tenure by which each is held and its tenant, not neglecting a 

 description of the demesne and sometimes including the customs 

 of the manor. Though often abridged, summarized, or incomplete, 

 they are of great value for an intimate acquaintance with sixteenth- 

 century agrarian conditions. For our immediate purpose they fur- 

 nish the number and holdings of freeholders and copyholders in 

 twenty-six Oxfordshire townships. 



In about half of these cases the areas are in acres, in the other 

 half in virgates, the virgate varying in Oxfordshire from 20 to 48 

 acres. The chief difficulty in the comparison with eighteenth- 

 century data is that the sixteenth-century surveys do not dis- 

 criminate between occupying and non-occupying owners. The 

 implication seems to be that at least nearly all copyholders are 

 occupiers. In the table on page 193 only such freeholders and 

 copyholders are included as have messuages and are not distin- 

 guished by the term "gentleman." All holdings of less than two 

 acres are excluded, as was necessarily done in the returns of 1785. 

 A few non-resident owners may have crept into this computation, 

 but the number cannot be large enough to vitiate seriously the 

 following comparison with the later data. 



Both the number of yeoman farmers in the parishes in question 

 and the area of their holdings seem to have decreased by about 



