The old 'Statistical Account of Scotland,' obtained eighty years ago by inquiry in every parish, shows that at its date, under the name of 'run-rig,' a simpler form of the open field system still lingered on here and there more or less all over Scotland. Traces of it still exist in the Highlands, and there are well-known remains of its strips and balks also in Wales. The run-rig system is still prevalent in some parts of Ireland. But at present we confine our attention to the form which the system assumed in England, and for this purpose the Hitchin example may fairly be taken as typical.
Uneconomical;
Now, judged from a modern point of view, it will readily be understood that the open field system, and especially its peculiarity of straggling or scattered ownership, regarded from a modern agricultural point of view, was absurdly uneconomical. The waste of time in getting about from one part of a farm to another; the uselessness of one owner attempting to clean his own land when it could be sown with thistles from the seed blown from the neighbouring strips of a less careful and thrifty owner; the quarrelling about headlands and rights of way, or [p016] paths made without right; the constant encroachments of unscrupulous or overbearing holders upon the balks—all this made the system so inconvenient, that Arthur Young, coming across it in France, could hardly keep his temper as he described with what perverse ingenuity it seemed to be contrived as though purposely to make agriculture as awkward and uneconomical as possible.
but must have had meaning once.
But these now inconvenient traits of the open field system must once have had a meaning, a use, and even a convenience which were the cause of their original arrangement. Like the apparently meaningless sentinel described by Prince Bismarck uselessly pacing up and down the middle of a lawn in the garden of the Russian palace, there must have been an originally sufficient reason to account for the beginning of what is now useless and absurd. And just as in that case, search in the military archives disclosed that once upon a time, in the days of Catherine the Great, a solitary snowdrop had appeared on the lawn, to guard which a sentinel was posted by an order which had never been revoked; so a similar search will doubtless disclose an ancient original reason for even the (at first sight) most unreasonable features of the open field system.
Go to:
[Contents.]
[Next Chapter].
CHAPTER I. FOOTNOTES.
[ 1.] The lesser manors included in it are clearly only sub-manors, and for the present purpose do not destroy its original unity.
[ 2.] Statutes, Record Com. Ed. i. p. 206.
[ 3.] Balc is a Welsh word; and when the plough is accidentally turned aside, and leaves a sod of grass unturned between the furrows, the plough is said by the Welsh ploughman speaking Welsh, to 'balc' (balco).