It is obvious that formal centuriation in straight lines and rectangular divisions, by the Agrimensores, produced something entirely different from the open field system as we have found it in England. But Siculus Flaccus records that in some cases, when vacant districts were occupied by settlers without this formal centuriation, as 'agri occupatorii'—the settlers taking such tracts of land as they had the means or expectation of cultivating—the boundaries were irregular, and followed no rules but those of common sense and the custom of the country.[395] And he gives as an instance of such a common-sense rule the custom about 'supercilia,' or linches, the sloping surface of which, where they formed boundaries between the land of two owners, should be kept the same number of feet in width, the slope always belonging to the upper owner, because otherwise it would be in the power of the lower owner, by ploughing into the slope, to jeopardise the upper owner's land.[396] This, he says, is the reason of the rule that the land of the owner of the upper terrace generally descends to the bottom of the slope.[397]
The holdings sometimes composed of scattered pieces.
Here, in this mention of linches and irregular boundaries, traces seem to turn up of an open-field husbandry; and a few pages further on the same writer makes another observation which shows clearly that frequently the holding, like the yard-land, was [p278] composed of scattered pieces in open fields, and that this scattered ownership, as in England, was the result of an original joint occupation, and probably of a system of co-operative ploughing.
He says[398] that in many districts were to be found possessores whose lands were not contiguous, but made up of little pieces scattered in different places, and intermixed with those of the others, the several owners having common rights of way over one another's land to their scattered pieces, and also to the common woods, in which the vicini only have common rights of cutting timber and feeding stock.
This reference to the common woods and rights of way belonging only to the 'vicini' seems to show that the scattering of the pieces in the holdings had arisen as in the later open-field system, from an original co-operation of ploughing or other cultivation.
The result of joint occupation.
Connecting these statements with the previous one, that sometimes land was assigned to a number of settlers jointly, and that sometimes settlers took possession, without centuriation, of so much land as they could cultivate, and transferring these same methods from Italy, where Flaccus observed them, to transalpine provinces, where larger teams were [p279] needful for ploughing, it would seem that we may rightly picture bodies of free settlers on the 'ager publicus' as frequently joining their yokes of oxen together to plough their allotments on the open-field system. And if this was done by retired veterans on public land, they were probably only following the common method adopted by the coloni on the villas of the richer Roman landowners in the provinces. If they did so, they probably simply adopted the custom of the country in which they settled, and followed a method common not only to Gaul and Germany, but also to Europe and Asia.[399]
The method of centuriation.
Even in the case of the regular centuriation, there was an opportunity, apparently, for joint occupation, and probably often a necessity for joint ploughing.
Hyginus, describing the mode of centuriation, speaks first of the two broad roads running north and south and east and west; and then he says the 'sortes' were divided, and the names recorded in tens (per decurias, i.e. per homines denos), the subdivision among the ten being left till afterwards.[400] It does not follow, perhaps, that the subdivision was always made in regular squares. There may sometimes have been a common occupation and joint ploughing; but of this we know nothing.