1811, c. ccxix. Great Waddingfield c. Chilton and Great Coniard, Suffolk, “divers open fields called Whole Year lands and Half Year lands.”
1813, c. 29. Icklingham, Suffolk. “Open and Common fields, Infields or Every Year lands, Common Meadows, Heaths, Commons and Wastes.”
1819, c. 18. Yelling, Huntingdon, “Whole year lands.”
Further, Arthur Young (“Agriculture of Suffolk,” appendix, p. 217) tells us that the parish of Burnham, near Euston, in Suffolk, contained in 1764—
| Infield arable, inclosed | 381 | acres, |
| Outfield arable | 2626 | ″ |
| Meadow and Pasture | 559 | ″ |
| Heath or Sheep-walk | 1735 | ″ |
| Total | 5302 |
And William Marshall (“General View of the Agriculture of the Central Highlands of Scotland,” 1794, p. 38) remarks: “The every year lands as they are called, of Gloucester, may be said to be clean compared with those of Breadalbane.” Now, William Marshall knew the agriculture of Gloucestershire well; and he was an extremely accurate observer, and more interested in the local variations of common field cultivation than other agricultural writers of his time; his authority may therefore be considered good enough to establish the existence of lands known as every year lands in Gloucestershire.
It is also to be noticed that Acts of Enclosure for Gloucester and Oxford frequently specify, not “open and common fields” but “an open and common field,” perhaps of between two and three thousand acres; and further, as we have previously noted, the Board of Agriculture reporter for Oxfordshire says: “In divers uninclosed parishes the same rotation prevails over the whole of the open fields; but in others, the more homeward or bettermost land is oftener cropped, or sometimes cropped every year.” Of Gloucestershire, William Marshall says: “In the neighbourhood of Gloucester are some extensive Common fields which have been cropped, year after year, during a century, or perhaps centuries, without the intervening of a whole year’s fallow. Hence they are called Every Year’s land. Cheltenham, Deerhurst, and some few other townships, have also their Every Year’s lands.” On these lands no regular succession of crops is observed, except that “a brown and a white crop—pulse and corn—are cultivated in alternacy” (“Rural Economy of Gloucestershire,” Vol. I., p. 65).
It may be suggested, further, that a four-year course, such as we have seen was customary in many places, might possibly have originated from the custom of cropping the land every year. The difficulties of maintaining the fertility of the land, and of keeping it clean, under perennial crops, might very well have been found insuperable before the introduction of turnip culture, and the natural remedy, suggested by the two-or three-year course in neighbouring parishes, would be a periodic fallow. It is, however, so far as any evidence that can be supplied from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries goes, equally possible that the four-year course was a modification of the three-year course, or that the two-, three-and four-years systems are all equally ancient; and that the varying customs, not only of systems of tillage, but also of occupation of meadow land and regulation of common of pasture, as found in different parts of the country, have grown up in each district as the result of the inter-action of Keltic, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse tradition.
If we take this view, which appears to me antecedently probable, we can see in the Midland or Mercian system a complete blend of Anglo-Saxon and Keltic custom, in which the specific features of both of the original strains are lost, and an intermediate, but perfectly distinct, type of village community resulted. The Wessex system, both in its feature of lot or rotation meadow, and in the customs of individual cultivation of land for common benefit, as in the sowing of clover by each occupier to be fed on by the village flock, compared with the Mercian system, shows a much closer affinity with Keltic run-rig; while the Norfolk customs are quite easily accounted for as the result of a fresh infusion of Teutonic tradition, re-introducing the original one-field system into villages where that system had previously been blended with Keltic custom.