The English Village Community / Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

The whole arable area of an uninclosed township was usually divided up by turf balks into as many thousands of these strips as its limits would contain, and the tithing maps of many parishes besides Hitchin, dating sixty or eighty years ago, show remains of [p004] them still existing, although the process of ploughing up the balks and throwing many strips together had gradually been going on for centuries.

Shots or furlongs, or quarentenæ.

Next, it will be seen that the strips on the map lie side by side in groups, forming larger divisions of the field. These larger divisions are called 'shots,' or 'furlongs,' and in Latin documents 'quarentenæ,' being always a furrow-long in width. Throughout their whole length the furrows in the ploughing run parallel from end to end; the balks which divide them into strips being, as the word implies, simply two or three furrows left unploughed between them.[3]

The shots or furlongs are divided from one another by broader balks, generally overgrown with bushes.

Headlands.

This grouping of the strips in furlongs or shots is a further invariable feature of the English open field system. And it involves another little feature which is also universally met with, viz. the headland.

It will be seen on the map that mostly a common field-way gives access to the strips; i.e. it runs along the side of the furlong and the ends of the strips. But this is not always the case; and when it is not, then there is a strip running along the length of the furlong inside its boundaries and across the ends of the strips composing it.[4] This is the headland. Sometimes when the strips of the one furlong run at right angles to the strips of its neighbour, the first strip in the one furlong does [p005] duty as the headland giving access to the strips in the other. In either case all the owners of the strips in a furlong have the right to turn their plough upon the headland, and thus the owner of the headland must wait until all the other strips are ploughed before he can plough his own. The Latin term for the headland is 'forera;' the Welsh, 'pen tir;' the Scotch, 'headrig;' and the German (from the turning of the plough upon it), 'anwende.'

'Linches' in the Open Fields of Clothall, Herts.

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