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

[128.] Ibid. p. 514.

[129.] The arable acreage in these counties in 1879 was about twelve million acres.

[p105]

CHAPTER IV. THE OPEN FIELD SYSTEM TRACED IN SAXON TIMES—THE SCATTERING OF THE STRIPS ORIGINATED IN THE METHODS OF CO-ARATION.

I. THE VILLAGE FIELDS UNDER SAXON RULE WERE OPEN FIELDS.

Traces of the open field in Saxon times.

We have learned from a long line of evidence, leading backwards to the date of the Domesday Survey, that the community in villenage fitted into the open field system as a snail fits into a shell. Let us now, following the same method, and beginning again with the shell, inquire whether its distinctive features can be traced on English fields in early Saxon times from the date of the Domesday Survey, and of Edward the Confessor, backwards.

And first it will be convenient to find out whether traces can be found of the 'strips,' and the 'furlongs,' 'headlands,' 'linches,' 'gored acres,' 'butts,' and odds and ends of 'no-man's-land,' the remains of which are still to be seen wherever the open fields are unenclosed.

It will be remembered that the strips upon examination were found to be acres laid out for ploughing [p106] on the open fields. They were, in fact, the original actual divisions, from the general dimensions of which the statute acre, with its four roods, was derived.