102 THE ISLE OF AXHOLME 



manner of land-holding of our remotest forefathers. 

 In these parishes there are no hedges, the land lies in 

 one open field, and is divided into series after series 

 of parallel strips, each a rod wide and half an acre in 

 area, though here and there two may have been put 

 together, and gores and odd-sized pieces exist of much 

 smaller dimensions. Nearly all the strips are curved, 

 sometimes with a single sweep, sometimes with a 

 double bend like an elongated S ; at one end they are 

 bounded by the hard road, at the other they butt 

 generally at right angles on to another group of strips. 

 There are no boundaries except the last plough furrow ; 

 each strip is called a selion, a word which is connected 

 with the French sillon, a ridge, both being derived 

 from an old Scandinavian word sela = to divide (land). 

 Each group of selions is called a furlong, and the 

 furlongs are named, so that we saw advertisements of 

 the sale of two selions of land in the furlong of - . 

 The headlands on which the ploughs have to turn are 

 now the high roads ; probably all the English roads 

 with their apparently purposeless wanderings as they 

 near a village, were once nothing more than the linked 

 headlands in the common field. The strips were 

 carrying various crops without any attempt at order ; 

 turnips might be next to oats, or wheat, or barley ; 

 mangolds would alternate with clover or potatoes ; 

 hence the extraordinarily diversified aspect of the 

 countryside corduroy farming, as it is locally called. 

 The diversity is caused by the fact that adjacent strips 

 belong to separate owners ; each of the inhabitants, 

 indeed, possesses a number of selions, but scattered 

 about the different furlongs, so that one comparatively 

 large holder we met told us he owned about 40 acres 

 in something like 100 plots in various parts of the 

 parish. This system is, indeed, a survival, the only 



