LandmarJcs in British Farming. 
9 
This is the plan upon which the arable soil of England was 
mainly cultivated down to the middle of the eighteenth century, 
and which has only expired within the last few years. In 1764, 
out of 8,500 parishes 4,500 were still unenclosed, open-field 
farms, cultivated upon a co-operative system of agriculture 
which, as compared with the thirteenth century, either remained 
stationary or actually retrogi'aded. Take, for instance, the ex- 
ample of a common-field farm in Wiltshire at the beginning of 
this present century. Little change has taken place. The 
village farm is a self-sufficing whole, a common household, in 
which each member contributes to the general venture, gets his 
own living, and with that remains content. In shape, open- 
field farms in Wiltshire were generally a long narrow oblong, 
hemmed in between the foot of the downs and the river, 
stretching often for three miles in length. At one extreme end 
stands the cluster of mud-built, straw-thatched cottages, each 
with its yard, or small pasture, for horses, calves, or field oxen, 
fenced in by hedges that are dotted with trees which betray 
by their maturity the antiquity of the enclosures. Elsewhere 
the land is bare of farm-buildings, labourers’ houses, or even 
hedges. In the twelfth century most of the holdings were 
of equal size, value, and tenure ; in the nineteenth, they admit 
in every respect of infinite variety. All the partners in the 
village farm enjoy certain rights in common, and consequently 
all the land is still farmed by the whole community together, 
although one holding may be freehold, another copyhold, a third 
held on leases for lives, a fourth rack-rented. The average size 
of a single holding is eighteen acres of arable land and two acres 
of meadow, together with common rights, on the common field, 
meadows, and other commonable places, for forty sheep, and as 
many cattle as the holder can fodder in the winter months. 
But each holding is cut up into minute, scattered, and distant 
portions. Thus, in 1794, a farmer at Wendover in Buckingham- 
shire held eighteen acres of arable land, divided into thirty-one 
separate parcels. 
The land of the village farm consists of meadow, tillage, and 
pasture. Next to the houses and enclosures, and fringing the 
river bank, lie the meadows, which are allotted in separate owner- 
ship from Lady-day to hay harvest, when they revert to common. 
Beyond the meadows lie the three tillage fields, running up into 
the downs till the soil is too thin and steep for the plough. 
The arable parcels of which each holding consists are made 'up 
of separate intermixed ridges of the crooked, old-fashioned sort, 
gathered up high in the crown for the sake of drainage. They 
{ire held in separate ownership from the preparation for the 
