I have said above that it is reasonable to infer from the evidence that enclosure was practically complete in Devon and Cornwall by the end of the sixteenth century. It is not, however, absolutely complete to the present day; for Braunton Great Field remains uninclosed. Braunton is a little town of about two thousand inhabitants, situated between Ilfracombe and Barnstaple, near the sea coast. Braunton Field is said to have “as many acres as there are days in the year,” each nominal acre being a strip of land of about an acre in area. Properties and holdings are very much intermixed, many of the holdings are very small and cultivated by their owners. Each “acre” is separated from the rest on each side by a balk of untilled land, growing grass, yarrow, hawkweed, etc., just a foot wide. They are locally known as “launchers,” which one associates with the Dorset name “lawns” for the strips of ploughed land, and the name “landshare,” in the Stratton Court rolls for the unploughed balks.
There is also always a path, or a broader balk, called an “edge,” separating the different sets of acres, which elsewhere would be called “Shots” or “Furlongs,” from one another.
No common rights exist at present, or have existed in living memory over either the unploughed balks, or the tillage lands themselves. But old villagers remember that long ago one half of the field was kept for wheat, and the other half for potatoes, clover, etc., in other words, that there use to be a common rule for the cultivation of the field and this common rule was similar to that prevailing in the Gloucestershire every year lands. At present each occupant cultivates his strips just as he pleases. It is of course possible that this obsolete common rule is itself a survival from an older one, and that originally this field was cultivated on the two-field system so prevalent in Lincolnshire; half under wheat, half fallow, the fallow being commonable all the year, and the wheat after harvest. But on the other hand, the custom of getting a crop every year may have been the original one, and Braunton Great Field may be ancient “Every Year land” or “Infield.”
The dotted lines represent bulks separating adjacent strips in the open field; the continuous lines represent hedges. It is easy to see how the enclosures on the edge of the field were made out of two or three strips thrown together.
Braunton Field is noteworthy in that it shows that however the primitive village community of West Wales may have differed from that of Wessex, it must have had certain characteristics in common with it, by which open arable fields of intermixed occupation were created in the neighbourhood of villages. Braunton cannot have been from the beginning an isolated example. The process of enclosure by the method Marshall describes went on around and outside these ancient tilled open fields.
Another interesting fact is revealed by the study of the twenty-five inch Ordnance map for Braunton. Braunton Field has been much reduced in area; one can easily see that the adjoining lands were once part of the open field, for the hedges in the lands are so placed as to form a continuation of the spider-web lines of the “launchers” within the field. The average size of the enclosed fields outside the Great Field is indeed a little greater than of the separate lands within it, but there is an imperceptible gradation, beginning with the smallest “lands” in the Great Field which are nearest the village, on through those more remote, the nearer enclosed fields, and then the more remote of them. Enclosure has been effected by simply enclosing the strips of arable land in the open field as they are. The fact that no common rights existed over the Field, supposing this always to have been the case, would have made such enclosure almost a matter of indifference to the other occupiers; and the motive, no doubt, would be the desire to lay the strip down in pasture. The whole field is known to the villagers as “the tillage land.”
The Welsh Border.
The enclosure history of the counties along the Welsh border is somewhat similar to that of Devonshire. It took place early, partly in consequence of the predominance of pasture over arable, and partly under the influence of a custom of temporarily enclosing the waste and common pasture, similar to that in Devon and Cornwall.
The percentages of area of these counties enclosed by Acts for enclosure of common field arable are respectively: