Norfolk was remarkable for the extent to which actual hedging and ditching preceded legal enclosure. The Board of Agriculture reporter says, “for notwithstanding common rights for great cattle exist in all of them,[33] and even sheep-walk privileges in many, yet the natural industry of the people is such, that wherever a person can get four or five acres together, he plants a white-thorn hedge round it, and sets an oak at every rod distance, which is consented to by a kind of general courtesy from one neighbour to another.”[34]
Two Acts incidentally show to what an extent such hedges enclosed lands belonging to two or more proprietors. One Norfolk Act has the provision, “All enclosures where two or more proprietors are connected and where the property is not separated by a hedge or ditch shall be deemed to be Common Field.” The same clause differently expressed occurs in the Act for Ormesby and Scratby (1842, c. 9): “All old enclosures within the said parishes in which there are lands belonging to different proprietors, shall be deemed to be open Fields.”
A brief account of a surviving Norfolk open field parish is given in [Appendix E., p. 331].
CHAPTER IX.
13 GEO. III. C. 81.
One of the most striking and interesting features of the open field village life is the existence of a self-governing constitution for the settlement of disputes, and the most profitable use of the village lands—the annual meetings of farmers and common-right owners; the institution of field reeves and field juries; the division among commoners of the profits of the common property. One cannot but look upon this as the survival of an ancient village communal life, which must have been much stronger and more vigorous in earlier days, when each village was more of a self-contained and isolated economic unit; and particularly while the co-operative ploughing persisted, from which the intermixture of lands in common field arable is admitted to have originated. Even in its degenerate state, when co-operative ploughing has been extinct for generations, the open field parish involves a certain partnership among the cultivators, necessitating some recognised rules, mutual consultation, and organised combination: how much more binding the necessity must have been in the Middle Ages? Hence from the very necessity of the case, there must have been a bond between the village workers, such as is conveyed by the words “village community,” which probably preceded, and underlay as a foundation, the better known manorial and parochial institutions, the manorial organisation arising from the contact between the village community and the Central Government, or outside enemies, the parochial from its contact with the Church.
But while these features of common-field management in general are survivals of “the village community,” it is possible in any particular village that such institutions and customs were the creation of the legislature since the latter part of the eighteenth century. For in the year 1773 a noteworthy Act was passed for the better regulation of the culture of common arable fields. It enacts that “where there are open or common field lands, all the Tillage or Arable lands lying in the said open or Common Fields, shall be ordered, fenced, cultivated or improved, in such manner as three-fourths in number and value of the occupiers shall agree, with consent of the owner and tithe-owner.”
Such agreements were to be binding for six years, or two rounds, “according to the ancient and established course of each parish or place”; i.e., presumably, in a parish where the ancient customary course had been one crop and a fallow, the agreement was binding for four years; where it had been three crops and a fallow, for eight years. Further, every year between the 21st and 24th of May a field reeve or field reeves were to be elected. These field reeves, acting under the instructions of a three-fourths majority in number and value, might delay the opening of the common fields, might give permission for any balks, slades or meers (those words are synonyms) to be ploughed up, an equivalent piece of land being laid down in common, and boundary stones being put down instead. Since this Act was designed in the interest of better cultivation, and for the advantage of the proprietors and large occupiers, special provision is made that if the cottagers owning common rights feel themselves prejudiced, they may claim to have a separate piece of land set out as a common for them.