1920.] 



The Enclosure of Open-Field Farms. 



835 



common rights over pasture and waste were known and definite 

 individuals. They were, as has been said, the manorial lord 

 in virtue of his ownership, the partners in the village farm, 

 who in theory were limited in the number of stock which they 

 could turn out, by the size of their arable holdings, and the 

 occupiers of certain cottages to which the rights were attached. 

 To them the pastures were common, and to no one else. The 

 rest of the world were trespassers. 



Some of the partners in the village farm were freemen, some 

 were serfs; between the two ends of the scale were men who 

 socially, if not legally, held intermediate positions. Their 

 arable holdings were of different sizes, and were held by a 

 great variety of titles and tenures. A few were freeholders; 

 the great majority were copyholders for lives and, later, of 

 inheritance, leaseholders for lives or for terms of years, tenants 

 from year to year or at will. Equally varied were their rents. 

 Some were held by military service; others by team labour on 

 the lord's demesne; others by manual labour, more or less fixed 

 or uncertain; others paid fixed money rents; others produce 

 rents; others a combination of the two. But the great point 

 was that practically the whole of the inhabitants of the village 

 had some interest in the soil other than that of wages. Few, 

 if any, were landless. Even the serfs had some stake in the 

 community, though in the eye of the law they were property- 

 less. 



The open-field farm was, in many ways, well suited to the 

 times in which it flourished. In the early Middle Ages each 

 agricultural community, with its graduated degrees of 

 dependence and its collective responsibility, was organised, like 

 a trade guild, for mutual help and protection. The organisa- 

 tion supplemented the weakness of the law, w^hich was often 

 powerless to safeguard the rights of individuals. It was also 

 adapted to a disturbed and unsettled period. Communities 

 grouped in villages were safer from attack than if the individuals 

 were isolated in detached farm-houses. Their co-operative 

 principle enabled them to maintain, in spite of the frequent 

 absences of able-bodied men, some degree of continuity of 

 cultivation. Their rigid rules of management may have 

 hindered improvement; but they certainly, as long as the soil 

 remained productive, checked wholesale deterioration. 

 Economically they had not yet become detrimental to the 

 national interest. Towns were few and sparsely inhabited. 

 Except in their immediate neighbourhood, there was little or 



