“Brecks” are asserted by William Marshall (“Rural Economy of Norfolk,” Vol. I., p. 376) to be “large new-made enclosures,” but as is seen from the wording of the Acts quoted, they are enclosures still “subject to certain rights of shackage, sheep-walk, and common.”[31] Lastly, what are “whole-year lands”?

Since half-year lands are lands which for half the year are common, and for half the year are in individual ownership and use, one would argue that whole-year lands must be lands which are in individual ownership and use the whole year; for if they were common the whole year they would be termed simply “commons.” We get further light by comparing the preambles of other Norfolk Acts. Some instead of whole-year lands mention every-year lands, others speak of “whole-year or every-year lands,” while finally Icklingham in Suffolk (1813, c. 29) gives us “every year lands or Infields.”

Now “infields” is a familiar expression in Scottish agriculture. Even in the Lothians, up to the middle of the eighteenth century the cultivated land was divided into infield and outfield. The outfield, like the outfield on the Yorkshire Wolds, only bore occasional crops, and was never manured, all the manure being reserved for the infield, which was made to bear a crop every year. In Haddington the customary course was: (1) pease; (2) wheat; (3) barley; (4) oats; and then the land was dunged and planted with pease again; and leases stipulated for “the preservation and regular dunging of the mucked land shotts.”[32] Such lands might obviously be described as every-year lands, and since this method of cultivation implies that immediately one crop is carried preparation must be made for the next, and therefore is not easily consistent with common rights, so these lands are also “whole-year lands.” It may be noted that the Norfolk preambles (as in the Sedgeford example, [quoted above]), while stating that the “whole-year lands,” as well as the brecks, common fields and half-year lands are inconveniently situated, i.e., are intermixed, by implication give us to understand that they are not subject to rights of shackage, sheep-walk, and common.

It is the more curious to find that Norfolk and the adjoining part of Suffolk followed a traditional method of cultivation in this respect similar to that of the East of Scotland, because there are so few traces of anything similar in the intervening counties. I find infields mentioned twice in Northumberland, once in Lincoln, whole-year lands once in Huntingdon. There is also mention of half-year lands in Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire. The Wessex custom of “hitching the fields,” or “cropping the homeward or bettermost part of the common fields every year” is not the same thing, because there, as we saw in the case of Stratton and Grimstone, the extra crop was raised for common, not for individual, benefit. Battersea common fields were worked as every-year lands, and so are the Axholme fields to-day; but in these cases the custom was locally derived from some other form of cultivation; whereas in Norfolk and Suffolk the peculiar customs must have been indigenous and ancient.

One is also tempted to ask whether it is a coincidence that Norfolk farmers in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and Lothian farmers in the nineteenth, enjoyed and deserved an extremely high reputation for scientific, enterprising, and skilful agriculture. The ancient custom of raising crops every year from the same land must have necessitated the gradual accumulation of knowledge on the best ways of preventing exhaustion of the soil, by marling, manuring, deep ploughing, and various rotations of crops. When turnip culture was introduced into England, it was to Norfolk that the new idea was brought. There was no obstacle to growing turnips on the Norfolk whole-year lands, such as would have arisen if toft holders had the right to turn horses, cattle and sheep on to the lands at Lammas; and the intervention of a new crop which gave an opportunity for getting the land clean of weeds, and increased its fertility for grain crops, was a far more obvious boon there than on lands subject to a periodic fallow.

But to return to the typical Norfolk Enclosure Act preamble. We have only half explained the problem suggested by the four different names, each evidently with a distinct meaning, but all meaning arable land in which ownership is intermixed as in an ordinary common field, viz., whole-year lands, half-year lands or shack lands, brecks and common fields. The rest of the explanation is, I think, to be looked for in the direction suggested by the prominence given to the statement, “They are subject to rights of sheep-walk.” Elsewhere one finds a close connection between sheep and common fields. Thus we have seen that at Eakring certain common right owners make a speciality of pasturing sheep on the common fields. The Swedish traveller Kaln, whose account of his visit to England has recently been translated into English, observed the same thing on the open field parishes of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire in the year 1748 (p. 302). But in 1793 where there were open chalky downs in open field parishes the right of pasturing sheep on the downs and of having the combined flock of the village folded over the arable in the common field was valued too highly by every occupier to be ceded to an individual speculator (Davies, “Wiltshire,” pp. 8, 15, 61, 80). In these cases right of common for sheep has been democratically shared.

But this is not universal. The Enclosure Commissioners, in their thirty-eighth report (1883), record the application for an Enclosure Act for Hildersham, Cambridgeshire. In this parish the two manor farms had the right of turning their sheep every sixth year on to the stubbles of the other farms. Similarly, I am told by Major Barnard, of Cheltenham, that in the Cambridgeshire parish of Bartlow, where he was born, which was enclosed with Shudy Camps and Castle Camps in 1863, that the right of feeding sheep on the common fields belonged to the lord of the manor only. These Cambridgeshire parishes are close to the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk, and the following passage from Tusser’s “Champion and Several” (date 1573) suggests the same rule as applying to Norfolk and the “champion” (i.e., open field) part of Suffolk:—