a HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



In attributing ownership of lands to communities we must 

 be careful not to confound communities with corporations. 

 Maitland thinks the early land-owning communities blended 

 the character of corporations and of co-owners, and co-owner- 

 ship is ownership by individuals.^ The vjlls or villages 

 founded on their arrival in Britain by our English forefathers 

 resembled those they left at home, and even there the strips 

 into which the arable fields were divided were owned in 

 severalty by the householders of the village. There was 

 co-operation in working the fields but no communistic division 

 of the crops, and the individual's hold upon his strips developed 

 rapidly into an inheritable and partible ownership. *At the 

 opening of Anglo-Saxon history absolute ownership of land 

 in severalty was established and becoming the rule.' ^ 



In the management of the meadow land communal features 

 were much more clearly brought out ; the arable was not 

 reallotted,^ but the meadow was, annually ; while the woods and 

 pastures, the right of using which belonged to the house- 

 holders of the village, were owned by the village ' community *. 

 There may have been at the time of the English conquest 

 Roman ' villas ' with slaves and coloni cultivating the owners ' 

 demesnes, which passed bodily to the new masters ; but the 

 former theory seems true of the greater part of the country. 



At first ' extensive ' cultivation was practised ; that is, every 

 year a fresh arable field was broken up and the one cultivated 

 last year abandoned, for a time at all events ; but gradually 

 ' intensive ' culture superseded this, probably not till after the 

 English had conquered the land, and the same field was 

 cultivated year after year.* After the various families or 

 households had finished cutting the grass in their allotted 

 portions of meadow, and the corn on their strips of tillage, 



^ Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 341 et seq. 

 ''■ Stubbs, Constitutional History, § 36. 



^ VinogradofF, English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 282, says, ' As 

 a rule it was not subject to redivision.' 

 * Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i. 42. 



