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

CHAPTER I. THE ENGLISH OPEN FIELD SYSTEM EXAMINED IN ITS MODERN REMAINS.

I. THE DISTINCTIVE MARKS OF THE OPEN FIELD SYSTEM.

The distinctive marks of the open or common field system once prevalent in England will be most easily learned by the study of an example.

Open fields of Hitchin Manor.

The township of Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, will answer the purpose. From the time of Edward the Confessor—and probably from much earlier times—with intervals of private ownership, it has been a royal manor.[1] And the Queen being still the lady of the manor, the remains of its open fields have never been swept away by the ruthless broom of an Enclosure Act.

Annexed is a reduced tracing of a map of the [p002] township without the hamlets, made about the year 1816, and showing all the divisions into which its fields wore then cut up.

It will be seen at once that it presents almost the features of a spiders web. A great part of the township at that date, probably nearly the whole of it in earlier times, was divided up into little narrow strips.

Divided into strips or seliones, i.e. acres, by balks.

Form of the acre.