1920.] 



The Enclosure of Open-Field Farms. 



833 



team service; the lowest were the manual workers, and the 

 more certain and determinate their labour, the greater their 

 degree of freedom. Of the demesne land nothing further 

 need be said, except that the frequent recurrence of such farm 

 names as Court Farm, Hall Farm, ]Manor Farm, or Grange 

 Farm, illustrates at once the antiquity and prevalence of such 

 a division of the land. 



Isolated farmhouses and buildings • were so rare that they 

 may be said not to have existed except on the demesne. Above 

 the tufts of trees which marked the sites of settlements rose the 

 church, the mill, and, at a little -distance, the manor house. 

 Gathered in an irregular street were the homes of the villagers 

 who occupied and cultivated the land of the open-field farm. 

 Nearest to the village, if possible along the banks of a stream, 

 lay the meadows. Beyond stretched the open, hedgeless, 

 unenclosed expanse of arable land. Beyond this again ran the 

 common pastures with their fringe of fern or heather, or gorse- 

 clad, bushgrown waste. Xo part of this area — meadow, plough- 

 land, pasture or waste — was held in individual occupation; all 

 was used in common under regulations as to management by 

 which the whole village community were strictly bound. 



The meadowland was annually cut up into lots, and put up 

 for hay. From St. Gregory's Day to Midsummer Day the lots 

 were in this way fenced ojff for the separate use of individuals. 

 After the hay had been mown and carried, the fences were 

 removed, and the grass became the common pasturage of the 

 live stock of the community until the middle of the following 

 March, when the same process was renewed. Sometimes the 

 meadow lots were attached to the arable holdings, so that the 

 same occupier received the same allotment of grass every year. 

 But the more frequent practice seems to have been to distribute 

 them by an annual ballot among the occupiers of the arable 

 land. 



Beyond the meadows lay the arable land of the village, 

 divided into three great fields. Each of the three fields was 

 subdivided into a number of flats or furlongs, separated from 

 each other by unploughed bushgrown balks of varying widths. 

 These flats were in turn cut up into a number of parallel acre, 

 half-acre, or quarter-acre strips, divided from one another by 

 similar, but narrower balks, and coinciding with the arrange- 

 ment of a ploughed field into ridges and furrows. Year after 

 year, in unvarying succession, the three fields were cropped in 

 a compulsory rotation. One field was under wheat or rye; the 



