Clare Island Survey — Agriculture and its History. 5 1 1 



with the other villagers ; but eventually they built themselves castles 

 and keeps outside the village and laid hold upon the unoccupied land 

 around them. Still the villagers worked their land for them and brought 

 them some part of the produce of their own fields ; but gradually the 

 lords gathered additional labourers around them, chiefly captives in war 

 and their descendants, and with these they worked their lands. 



Originally the lords or landowners as they came to be called worked 

 their tillage land like the villagers, in three fields ' — a wheat-field, a beau- 

 field, and a fallow-field — but, later on, when more tillage produce was 

 required, a piece of land was broken up, cropped for five or six or even 

 more years in succession till it was exhausted, and then left alone to nature 

 to be clothed again gradually in weeds and pasture. When one piece was 

 exhausted another took its place. 



Even before the Norman conquest, and much more afterwards, the religious 

 houses became landowners and worked their land like other land-owners. 



With the rise of commerce in the Middle Ages and the consequent 

 discovery that gold was more powerful than men, the landowners took in 

 more and more of the waste land round their demesnes and either cultivated 

 it themselves or let it to farmers, who worked it on the system of cropping it 

 till it was exhausted and leaving it alone to recover in pasture. Ways of 

 improving its fertility were discovered, such as marling, sanding, and enclosing 

 sheep and cattle upon it, by which the period of cropping could be prolonged 

 and the pasture hastened forward. 



Disputes with the villagers as to infringement of their rights and 

 boundaries, and frequent trespass by village and other stock, led to the land 

 reclaimed and worked in this way being fenced in, or, as it was called, 

 " inclosed," in contradistinction to the village lands which were still unfenced 

 and were called " open." 



Thus, at the beginning of the Stuart period, there were two main systems 

 of agriculture in England : the village with its " open " fields and its three- 

 field system of tillage, and the landowners and farmers with their " inclosed " 

 fields and their smaller crops, perhaps, but less awkward and therefore 

 less wasteful system of farming. If improvements were possible at all, 

 there was more chance of their being adopted by the landowners and 

 farmers than by the villagers : hence the great demand for " inclosing/"' 

 which began at latest in the seventeenth century and was carried by law 

 early in the eighteenth. 



1 Land round the homestead was worked in this way in Aberdeenshire, in the eighteenth century. 

 It was called the "infield," the rest being called the "outfield." See Keith's Agriculture of 

 Aberdeenshire. 



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