The Project Gutenberg eBook, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, by Gilbert Slater

Transcriber’s Note

A detailed transcriber's note is at [the end of the book].

THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY AND THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS

THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY AND THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS

Studies in Economics and Political Science

Edited by H. J. Mackinder, M.A., Director of the
London School of Economics

No. 14.

THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY
AND THE
ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS

OPEN FIELDS AT EPWORTH, ISLE OF AXHOLME.

Frontispiece.

THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY
AND THE ENCLOSURE OF
COMMON FIELDS

BY
GILBERT SLATER, M.A., D.Sc.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
THE EARL OF CARRINGTON, K.G., G.C.M.G., Etc.
President of the Board of Agriculture

LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO. Ltd.
1907

BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS,
LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.

[AUTHOR’S PREFACE.]

The investigations embodied in this book were begun in 1894, on the suggestion of Mr. Graham Wallas, and at the request of Mr. J. A. Spender. They were continued in subsequent years, in conjunction with the London School of Economics, and the results were summarised in a thesis entitled “The Enclosure of Common Fields in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” which was submitted to the University of London in 1904, and approved as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Science in Economics. That thesis consisted in the first place of a series of maps, partially reproduced in this volume through the kind assistance of the Royal Geographical Society; and in the second place of manuscript matter which has been revised for publication in the form of this volume and under the present title. The original maps are in the custody of the London School of Economics, and can be seen by those who desire to examine them. They include a series of county maps, on which parishes in which common fields have been enclosed by Act of Parliament are coloured and marked according to the date of enclosure, and maps illustrating the process of Parliamentary enclosure, and the working of the common field system. Those who are interested in the enclosure history of any particular county may also be recommended to consult the Victoria County History.

It is my pleasant duty here to gratefully acknowledge my obligations to the two gentlemen above mentioned for the original impulse to study the process of the destruction and decay of English village communities; to the London School of Economics; and in particular to its first Director, Mr. W. A. S. Hewins, its present Director, Mr. H. J. Mackinder, and Mr. Hubert Hall, for assistance, encouragement, and advice; to many labourers, farmers, clergymen, and other rural residents, for information and personal kindness; to the Royal Geographical Society for defraying the cost of the production of the blocks of the illustrative maps herewith published; and to Earl Carrington, the President of the Board of Agriculture, for reading the book in proof, and recommending it to those who are willing to study rural history because they desire to improve rural conditions of life.

In writing this book I have deemed it a matter of conscience to preserve the attitude of mind of the student of history, pure and simple. I have felt, and feel, that historical investigation can only be rightly carried on when all motives except the simple desire to know the truth are excluded from the investigator’s mind. Yet the investigation undertaken having been thus far completed, and its results placed on record, I cannot refrain from attempting to read out of them some lessons for the present and the future.

My conclusions have been in large measure expressed for me by Lord Carrington’s Introduction. The policy of the legislature and of the Central Government, expressed in the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though it claimed, and on the whole rightly claimed, that it effected an immediate and great increase in the country’s output of agricultural produce, and an improvement in the breeds of sheep and cattle, was nevertheless essentially a policy directed towards the enhancement of agricultural rents, the building up of large and compact landed estates, the establishment of capitalist farming, the uprooting of peasant proprietors and of small holdings together with the communal use of land, and the multiplication of the class of landless agricultural labourers. There is need in the twentieth century for a new agricultural policy. As I read the economic signs of the time, industrial conditions are beginning to favour a great agricultural revival in the British Isles. A wise programme of rural reform is necessary both in order that the possible agricultural prosperity may be secured, and in order that the nation may reap in full its possible fruits of physical and moral well-being for the people.

In all times the fading memories and traditions of the past have contributed to form in men’s minds the ideals of a possible better future state of society which are the inspiration of progress. The memories and traditions of the English village community, together with its visible relics in the form of commons, commonable meadows, and (rarely) common fields, have had their influence on the formation of the ideals of the Labour and Democratic movement of our country from the time of Cobbett onwards. Through historical research the past may become more definitely suggestive.

The suggestions borne into my mind for the agricultural policy of the twentieth century may be summed up in the phrase, British agriculture must be democratised. By this I mean that the principle of collective ownership of the soil must be established or re-established; that agricultural co-operation must be revived in new forms suitable to modern conditions; that the ancient right of independent access to the soil for every tiller of it must be restored; that a career of industrial advance in agriculture must be made possible for the competent worker. On one important side of the life of the old English village community I have not touched at all in this book, viz., its social and recreative side. In this respect also the losses of the past will probably be recovered spontaneously if the nation aims in its agricultural policy at the three essentials of wholesome, hopeful, human work, as opposed to dehumanised toil, Freedom, Training and Mutual Aid.

GILBERT SLATER.

January 10th, 1907.

[CONTENTS.]

[ILLUSTRATIONS.]

[INTRODUCTION.]

THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY AND THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS.

The enclosure of common fields, and the passing away of the English Village Community to make room for the agricultural organisation prevailing to-day, is a subject not merely of historical interest, but one which touches very closely some of the most vital national problems of the twentieth century.

During the past five generations mechanical, industrial, and commercial progress, with the consequent creation of great towns and cities, has so occupied the national activities, and has made us to such an extent a nation of town-dwellers, that there has been a tendency to overlook rural life and rural industries. But in recent years social reformers have come to see that the solution of many of the problems of the town is to be found in the country, and increasing attention is being paid to the causes of the rural exodus and the best means by which it can be arrested. No industry can be in a healthy condition which does not provide an opportunity for the small man to improve his position; and consequently such questions as the provision of allotments and small holdings, agricultural co-operation, the preservation of the independence of spirit of the agricultural labourer, and the securing for him the prospect of a continually advancing career on the land are recognised as matters of urgent national importance.

In this book Dr. Slater shows that the movement for the enclosure of arable open and common fields has been a movement for the sweeping away of small holdings and small properties; that the “Village Community” which any Enclosure Act of this character abolished was essentially an organisation for agricultural co-operation. He shows that at least in certain parts of the country even in comparatively recent times enclosure has produced rural depopulation, and has converted the villager from “a peasant with a mediæval status to an agricultural labourer entirely dependent on a weekly wage.” He further makes us doubt whether these little village revolutions, while they temporarily stimulated agricultural progress by facilitating improved stock-breeding and the economy of labour, did not also to a certain extent destroy the opportunities of future progress by separating farmer from labourer by a gulf difficult to cross, and thus cutting off the supply of new recruits to the farming class.

At the same time, whatever reasons there may be for regretting the enclosure of our Common Fields, and for wishing that the interests of the humbler tillers of the soil had been more sedulously guarded on enclosure, in the main the process was inevitable. Common field Agriculture was a survival of customs and institutions which had grown up when each village lived its life to a great extent in isolation. It was necessary that the villager should almost forget that he was a Little Pedlingtonian to realise that he was an Englishman. Village patriotism had to die down temporarily to make way for national patriotism; and when the spirit died out of the Village Community its form could not be preserved.

Now and in the future there is need that local patriotism, pride in the local community, and willingness to serve it, whether it be village or city, should be kindled again to its old vigour. With the revival of the spirit will come a revival of some of the old forms of village common life, and a creation of new forms in place of those which will remain among the forgotten facts of the past. The Village Community is a hope of the future as well as a memory of the past, and therefore those who are interested in the movement for reviving British Agriculture on democratic lines and for improving the social and economic conditions of our villages have reason to welcome Dr. Slater’s attempt to describe existing and recent survivals of the English Village Community, and to ascertain the circumstances, causes, and consequences of its gradual extinction.

CARRINGTON.

28th November, 1906.

I. ENCLOSURE IN GENERAL.

THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY AND THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS.

CHAPTER I.
ENCLOSURE IN GENERAL.

The internal history of our villages is a more obscure, but not less important a part of English history, than the internal history of our towns. It is, indeed, more fundamental. A town is ordinarily by origin an overgrown village, which never loses the marks of its origin. And it was by agricultural and social changes in the villages that the way was prepared for the great industrial revolution, or more properly, evolution, which is the underlying fact of the history of English towns, especially during the last two centuries.

The central fact in the history of any English village since the Middle Ages, is expressed in the word “enclosure.” Primarily “enclosure” means surrounding a piece of land with hedges, ditches, or other barriers to the free passage of men and animals. Agriculturally, enclosure of arable land in the midst of unenclosed arable land is a preliminary step to its conversion into pasture, the hedge is erected to keep animals in; enclosure of land in the midst of open common pasture is a preliminary step to tillage, the hedge keeps animals out. But in either case the hedge is the mark and sign of exclusive ownership and occupation in the land which is hedged. Hence by enclosure collective use, usually accompanied by some degree of community of ownership, of the piece of land enclosed, is abolished, and superseded by individual ownership and separate occupation.

The form of enclosure which is familiar to our minds is the enclosure of land previously uncultivated; in the legal phrase, “enclosure of waste of a manor,” in the ordinary phrase, “enclosure of commons.” Enclosure in this sense has been, and is still, a matter of very vital interest to the urban population, a fact which might be brought vividly to our minds by a recital of the commons within London and its immediate neighbourhood which have been lost or preserved with difficulty. It is sufficient to refer to Epping Forest, Hadley Wood, Hampstead Heath, Wimbledon Common, Hayes and Keston Commons, Bostall Heath and Plumstead Common.

Far more important from a broad national point of view, is the enclosure of common fields—the enclosure, that is, of land previously cultivated according to a system which did not involve the separation of one holding from another by any tangible barrier. Enclosure of this sort, when suddenly effected, as by a Private Act of Enclosure, is rightly termed the extinction of a village community. In the following chapters it will be shown in detail from existing and recent survivals, what was the nature of the system of cultivation in open and common fields in different parts of England, up to the time of enclosure; the question when and how enclosure was brought about in different counties will be discussed; and light will be thrown upon the result of the transition from the medieval to the modern system of village life upon the material and moral condition of the villagers, the peasants, farmers or labourers, who underwent the change. In these chapters facts drawn directly from observations and inquiries in the villages themselves, from the observations of agricultural writers who speak from direct and intimate knowledge, and from the Enclosure Acts, will be left in the main to tell their own story. But a generalised statement will perhaps make that story clearer.

Here is a typical Enclosure Act of the type which encloses common fields, taken at random, and a good example of the 2565 Acts of its class enumerated in the [Appendix], by which about 3000 parishes were enclosed. It was passed in 1795 (c. 43) and begins:—“Whereas there are in the parish of Henlow, in the County of Bedford, divers Open and Common Fields, Meadows, Pastures, Waste Lands, and other Commonable Lands and Grounds, containing by estimation, Two Thousand Acres, or thereabouts.... And whereas the said Open and Common Fields, Lands, Grounds, Meadows and Pastures, lie intermixed, and are inconveniently situated, and are in their present state incapable of Improvement, and the several Proprietors thereof and Persons interested therein are desirous that the same may be divided and enclosed, and specific Shares thereof set out and allotted in Lieu and in Proportion to their several and respective Estates, Rights, and Interests therein; but such Division and Inclosure cannot be effected without the Aid and Authority of Parliament. May it therefore please your Majesty——.”

The total area of the parish of Henlow is 2450 acres, and it has a large park. It appears, therefore, that when the Act was passed practically the whole of the arable, meadow, and pasture land in the parish lay entirely open, and was commonable. The more remote and least cultivable parts of the parish were, no doubt, common pastures; on these the villagers kept flocks and herds according to some recognised rule based on the sizes of their holdings in the arable fields. A drift would lead from the common to the village, passing through the arable fields, and fenced or hedged off from them. Immediately behind the cottages, clustering together to form the village, there would be small closes for gardens or paddocks; beyond these all round the village would stretch the open, common, arable fields, in area probably considerably more than half the parish. These were probably divided into three or four approximately equal portions, and cultivated according to a three or four year course, imposed rigidly on all occupiers by a mutual agreement sanctioned by custom. The holdings would be of various sizes, from three or four acres of arable land upwards, but all small; and a holding of, say, twenty acres of arable land would consist of about thirty separate strips of land of from half an acre to an acre each, scattered over all the three or four arable fields, but approximately equally divided between each field, so that each year the occupier would have, for example, about five acres under wheat, five under barley, five under pulse, and five fallow, provided that were the customary course of husbandry. Right through the year the fallow land would be used as common pasture, and the land under crops would become commonable after the crops were carried.

Along the streams flowing into the river Ivel would be the open commonable meadows. These would be divided into a number of plots, half-acres, quarter-acres, or even smaller, marked by pegs driven in the ground, or stones; and a certain number of these plots were assigned to each holding, in proportion to the amount of arable land. During the spring, while the cattle were on the common pasture, the meadow would be let grow for hay; when the time for hay harvest came, each peasant cut his own plots, and the meadow became commonable during the rest of the summer. Some of the peasant occupiers would be small freeholders, some probably copyholders, others legally annual tenants. All would meet together on certain occasions to settle questions of common interest.

We might say, though the expression must not be too rigidly interpreted, that under the common field system the parish, township, or hamlet formed one farm, occupied and cultivated by a group of partners holding varying numbers of shares. It may well be imagined what a village cataclysm took place when an Act for the enclosure of the parish was passed, and commissioners descended upon the village, valued every property and every common right, and carved out the whole parish into rectangles, instituting the modern system of separate exclusive ownership and individual cultivation. We shall see that ordinarily the holdings on enclosure became fewer and larger, that very many of the peasants were in consequence driven from the village, or became landless, pauperised agricultural labourers. We shall see also that the traditions of the common field system where they have perished as distinct memories, have survived in the form of aspirations for agricultural reform. In fact, the great rural question for the twentieth century to determine, is whether there were not beneath the inconvenient and uneconomical methods of the common field system, a vital principle essential to true rural prosperity, which has to be re-discovered and re-established in forms suitable to the present environment.

It is not intended in this book to go into the vexed question of the origin of the common field system, or of the English village community. It will be noticed that the researches upon which this book is based do not as a rule go further back than Leland’s Itinerary in 1536 and following years. From such materials only hypotheses can be obtained, which require to be tested by all the evidence from earlier records. A hypothesis, however, has a certain value as a mental thread by which the facts can be connected and more clearly conceived.

Judging entirely from eighteenth and nineteenth century evidence, one is in the first place driven to accept most unhesitatingly the prevailing theory that the English common field system was based on co-aration. But one is tempted to very summarily dismiss the theory of Roman origin. Rather one is inclined to say that as long as a considerable portion of the villagers of the parish were accustomed to yoke their oxen or harness their horses to a common plough, the system was a living one, capable of growth and modification according to the ideas of the people who worked it. It became, as it were, fossilised and dead, incapable of other than decaying change, when each occupier cultivated his own set of strips of land by his own plough or his own spade. One is therefore inclined to suppose that the introduction of each new element in the population of a village—Saxon, Angle, Dane, and in a less degree, Norman—profoundly modified earlier customs, and that in each part of Britain a local type of village community resulted from the blending of different racial traditions.

This hypothesis is directly suggested by the evidence of recent survivals. The most familiar type of village community is characteristic of the Midlands; I have termed it the Mercian type. It is most easily conceived as a compound of the pure Keltic system, known in the Highlands and Ireland as Run-rig or Rundale, and the North German system traditional among the Angles, in which the two elements in equal strength are very perfectly blended together. In the South of England we find a different type, here termed the Wessex type, in which the influence of Keltic tradition is more strongly seen. The village community in Norfolk and the adjoining part of Suffolk shows some remarkable special features, traces of which are found in adjoining counties, but which appear to be easily accounted for as the result of the later intrusion of Scandinavian traditions. Further, throughout the West of England, from Cumberland to Devon and Cornwall, we find evidence that the primitive type of village community approximated very closely to the Keltic Run-rig.

Enclosure of the common fields, meadows and pastures, of any particular village may have taken place in the following ways:—

(1) By Act of Parliament, viz., (a) by a private Act, (b) under the authority of the General Enclosure Acts of 1830 and 1836, (c) by the Enclosure Commissioners and their successors, the Board of Agriculture, under the General Enclosure Act of 1845 and its amending Acts.

(2) By common agreement of all the collective owners.

(3) By the purchase on the part of one owner of all conflicting rights.

(4) By special licence of the Tudor monarchs.

(5) By various forms of force and fraud.

Commonable waste may have been enclosed in any of the above ways, and also under the Statutes of Merton and Winchester (1235 and 1285), which give Lords of the Manor the right of enclosing commons provided proof is given that the tenants of the manor are left sufficient pasture.

Enquiry into the history of Enclosure naturally begins with an examination of the Enclosure Acts.

The first fact elicited by this examination is that there is a perfect legal similarity between Acts for enclosing commonable waste, which may be termed Acts for extending cultivation, and Acts such as that for Henlow, for enclosing all the open and common arable and other lands of a parish or parishes, which may be termed Acts for extinguishing village communities. About one-third of the Enclosure Acts belong to the former variety, about two-thirds to the latter. As from the economic and social points of view, the two classes of Enclosure Acts are as widely different as they are legally similar, no statistical summaries of the Acts can have much value until the two classes are sorted out. To do this involved a separate examination of all the Acts accessible.

[Appendix A] contains a statistical summary of the Acts for enclosing commonable waste passed between 1727 and 1845; [Appendix B] contains a list of Acts for enclosing common arable fields with or without other commonable lands passed between 1727 and 1900.

CHAPTER II.
THE MERCIAN TYPE OF VILLAGE COMMUNITY.

Laxton, an Open Field Parish.

Perhaps the best surviving example of an open field parish is that of Laxton, or Lexington, in Nottinghamshire, about ten miles from Newark and Southwell. It lies remote from railways and high roads, and is only to be reached by bye roads. From whatever quarter one approaches the village, one enters the parish through a gate. The village is in the centre of the parish, and is surrounded by enclosed fields. Other enclosures are to be found on the most remote parts of the parish, in some cases representing, apparently, old woodland which has been converted into tillage or pasture; in other cases portions of the arable fields. But nearly half the area of the parish remains in the form of two great arable fields, and two smaller ones which are treated as two parts of the third field. The different holdings, whether small freeholds or farms rented from the Lord of the Manor, who owns nearly all the parish, consist, in part, of strips of land scattered all over these fields, in a manner which can best be understood by reference to the [map]. Within these arable fields cultivation is not carried on according to the discretion of the individual farmer, but by strict rules of great antiquity. In each of the fields a three year course is rigidly adhered to.

First year, wheat.

Second year, spring corn (i.e. barley, oats, peas, beans, vetches, tares, &c.).

Third year, fallow.

If, therefore, Laxton be visited early in June, the following description of the appearance of the parish will be found correct. The traveller passes through the boundary gate. He finds his road leads him through the “Spring corn” field, which lies open on either side of the road. A phrase which is continually used by old farmers when attempting to describe common fields will probably occur to him in this field: “It is like allotments.” But it is like an allotment field with many differences.

All the great field is divided up into oblong patches, each patch growing its own crop, but with no more division or boundary between one crop and the next than a mere furrow.

If, then, the traveller looks again at a strip of land growing, say, beans, he will find that this strip consists of one, two, or more ridges, locally termed “lands.” A “land” in Laxton has a pretty uniform width of 5½ yards, and a normal length of one furlong; but by the necessity of the case the length varies considerably. Owing to this variation in length the various strips of land which make up the different holdings in the common fields, when their area is expressed in acres, roods, or poles, seem to have no common measure.

Because the soil of Laxton is a heavy clay it is customary to plough each “land” every year in the same manner, beginning at the edges, and turning the sod towards the centre of the “land.” Hence each “land” forms a long narrow ridge, heaped up in the middle, and the lie of the “lands” or ridges was at some unknown date so well contrived for the proper drainage of the land, that it is probable that if the whole of a field were let to a single farmer, he would still plough so as to maintain the old ridges.

The same ridges are to be found on the other two fields, one of which is a stretch of waving wheat; while the third, or fallow field, is being leisurely ploughed, a number of sheep getting a difficult living from the thistles and other weeds in the still unploughed portions, and on the “sicks,” i.e. certain grassy parts of the field which are defined by boundary marks, and are never allowed to be ploughed. In one extreme corner of the parish is Laxton Heath, a somewhat swampy common covered with coarse grass. Here, too, sheep are grazed in common, according to a “stint” somewhat recently determined upon. Before the stint was agreed to, every commoner had the right of turning out as many sheep as he could feed in winter, the result being that the common was overstocked, and the sheep nearly starved. The stint regulates the number of sheep each commoner may graze upon the common according to the number he can feed on his other land in the parish. It was not adopted without opposition on the part of those whose privileges it restricted.

This brings us to the question, Who are the commoners? There are two sorts of claim by which a man may be entitled to common rights, and to a voice in such deliberations as those by which a stint is agreed to. One is by a holding in the common open fields, the other is by the occupation of a “toft-head.” A “toft” is not very easy to define. One may say that it either is, or represents, an ancient house or cottage in the village; but that immediately suggests the question, How ancient? It is well known in the village which cottages are “tofts” and which are not. Those which are, command a rent about £2 a year higher in consequence. It is to be noted that if the house or cottage which is the visible sign of “toft-head” be pulled down, and a new one erected on the same spot, the new house has the same rights attached to it. One is naturally led to the hypothesis that up to a certain date[1] all cottages erected in Laxton carried common rights, but that after that date no new common rights could be created. There are, therefore, two classes of commoners: the farmers who hold land in the common fields, and the labourers who occupy the privileged cottages. A farmer may possess a number of common rights in respect of (1) his farmhouse, if it be a “toft,” (2) his arable holding, and (3) any toft cottages he may own or rent and sub-let to labourers, retaining their common rights. The labourer has but one common right. Each common right entitles the holder to one vote, and to one share in the division of the money revenues drawn from the commonable lands, besides the right of feeding an indefinite number of sheep on the fallow field, and the regulated number on the common. The money revenue that comes from the commonable fields is obtained as follows: The grass lands (“sicks”) in the two common fields which are under crops cannot be grazed upon conveniently, because any animals would be liable to stray into the crops. They are, therefore, mown for hay, and the right to mow them is sold by auction to one of the commoners, and the price realised is divided. Recently this has worked out at about 14s. per common right. Each commoner also has the right of pasturing animals upon the two fields that are under crops, directly the harvest has been carried.

• [1] The following extract from a sixteenth century writer throws some light upon this point:
• “Another disorder of oppression
• aduerte this wone wiche is muche odyous,
• A lord geauyn to private affection
• lettinge the pooareman an olde rotten howse,
• which hathe (to the same) profyttes commodious
• its Cloase, and Common, with Lande in the feelde
• but noate well heere howe the pooareman is peelde.
• “The howse shall hee haue and A gardeyne plott,
• but stonde he must to the reperation:
• Close, Comon or Londe fallithe none to his lott;
• that beste might helpe to his sustentation.
• the whoale Rente payethe hee for his habitation,
• as though hee dyd thappertenauncis possesse
• Such soare oppression neadethe speadye redresse.”
• “The Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practise” (1548)
  William Forrest, Chapter III., 21 & 22
  E.E.T.S. Extra Series, XXXII.
• We have here the practice of divorcing the cottage from its common right described as a novelty. The Act of 31 Elizabeth, c. 7, by prohibiting the letting of cottages without 4 acres of land, in effect prohibited the letting of a cottage without a common right, as the 4 acres would not be the highly valued Close, and could not, unless the rights of other villagers were infringed, be waste or common pasture. Four acres in the common arable field was implied, and this of course carried a right of common.

The exercise of this right, which appears to be most keenly valued, as it is found to persist in many parishes after all other traces of the common field system have died away, obviously opens the door to quarrels. It is not to be expected that all farmers should finish carrying their crops on the same day; and the position of the man who is behind all his neighbours, and so is standing between the commoners and their right of pasture, is not an enviable one. But a constitutional system of government exists for the purpose of dealing with these and other difficulties. A “Foreman of the Fields” and a “Field Jury” are elected: the field jury settles all disputes between individuals, while the duties of the foreman include that of issuing notices to declare when the fields are open for pasturing; on which day all the gates, by which, as I have previously mentioned, the parish is entered, must be closed, while all the gates of the farmyards are thrown open, and a varied crowd of animals winds along the drifts and spreads over the fields.

It will be noticed that the commonable lands of Laxton include only arable fields and common pasture. The commonable meadows which the parish once had, have been partitioned and enclosed at a date beyond the recollection of the oldest inhabitant. The neighbouring parish of Eakring still has commonable meadows. In this respect Eakring is a more perfect example of the open field parish than Laxton, though its common arable fields have been much more encroached upon; and have, in fact, been reduced to scattered fragments, so that the rector was unable to tell me whether there were five, six, or more of them. The villagers, however, say simply “Three: the wheat field, the bean field, and the fallow field.” The commonable meadows are, like the common fields, held in scattered strips intermingled; and are commonable after hay harvest. The rule in Eakring is that if one man only has any hay left on the meadows, the other commoners can turn in their cattle and relieve him of it; but if he can get a neighbour to leave but one haycock also, he is protected.

The constitution of Eakring differs somewhat from that of Laxton. There are regularly four toft meetings every year, presided over by the steward of the lord of the manor, at which all questions relating to the commonable lands are settled. Further, all toft holders have an equal right to feed an indefinite number of sheep on the fallow field, and the other fields when available, but the exercise of the right is regulated by a species of auction. The number of sheep that can be pastured with advantage is agreed upon, and since the total number of sheep which the assembled toft holders desire to put on is sure to exceed that number, a price to be charged per sheep is by degrees fixed by mutual bargaining, till the numbers of sheep for which their owners are willing to pay is reduced to the number that the pasture can bear. The cottager and toft holder, therefore, who though not holding an acre of land in the parish, has yet enterprise enough to bid for the right of keeping a flock of sixty sheep on the common fields, is therefore heartily welcomed by that section of the toft holders who have no desire to bid against him, because he forces up the value of their rights.

A Recent Enclosure—Castor and Ailesworth.

Up till 1898 an even better example of an open-field parish could be seen in Northamptonshire. In that year was completed the enclosure of Castor and Ailesworth, two hamlets forming part of the parish of Castor, situated three miles from Peterborough on the road to Northampton. In 1892, when application was made to the Board of Agriculture, which now represents the Enclosure Commissioners of the General Enclosure Act of 1845, there were in the two hamlets, out of a total area of 4976 acres, 2,425 acres of common arable fields, 815 acres of common pastures and meadows, and 370 acres of commonable waste, and only about 1300 acres enclosed. In Laxton the commonable land is less than half the area of the parish. The greater amount of old enclosure in Laxton has had its effect on the distribution of the population. There are some, though very few, outlying farmhouses. In Castor and Ailesworth all the habitations and buildings, except a watermill and a railway station, are clustered together in the two hamlets, which form one continuous village. At present very nearly all the land of Laxton and Eakring is in the ownership of the respective lords of the two manors; in Castor and Ailesworth the Ecclesiastical Commissioners are the largest landowners; but nearly as much land is the property of Earl Fitzwilliam, and there are besides a number of small landowners. Before enclosure all these properties were intermixed all over the area of the two hamlets, the two chief properties coming very frequently in alternate strips.

Though the area of commonable land in Castor was so much greater than in Laxton, those customs of village communal life which we have described had retained much less vigour; and to the decay of the power of harmonious self-government the recent enclosure was mainly attributable. The customary method of cultivation in Castor and Ailesworth was a three-field system, but a different three-field system to that described above. The succession of crops was:—First year, wheat; second year, barley; third year, a “fallow crop,” or as locally pronounced, “follow crop.” Each year in the spring the farmers and toft-holders of Castor, and similarly of Ailesworth, would meet to decide the crop to be sown on the fallow field. One farmer, who held the position—though not the title—of “Foreman of the Fields,” kept a “stint book,” a list of all the villagers owning common rights, and the number of rights belonging to each. The number of votes that could be cast by each villager depended upon the number of his common rights. The fallow crop might be pulse or turnips or other roots or anything else that seemed advisable; but it was essential to the farmers’ interests that they should agree upon some crop. For a tradition existed in the village that unless the farmers were agreed as to the crop to be sown on the fallow field, that field could be treated as though it really were fallow. It could be pastured on all the year by all the toft-holders, and any crop which any farmer might sow would be at the mercy of his neighbours’ cattle and sheep. I could not find that this had ever happened. On the other hand, the farmers being agreed about the crop, they could also determine the date when the fallow field should become commonable.[2] The wheat-field and barley-field became commonable after harvest; the meadows and pastures were commonable between August 12th and February 14th.

• [2] This is good law. By 13 Geo. III. c. 81 these agreements could be made by “a three-fourths majority in number and value.” See [Chapter IX.]

The reason why the medieval three-field system was retained in Laxton, but was altered in Castor to an improved three-field system, is to be found in the nature of the soil. That of Laxton is a heavy clay, growing wheat of noted quality; that of the Northamptonshire parish is lighter, in parts very shallow and stony. Another result of the difference of soil was a different system of ploughing. The Castor method was that technically known as “Gathering and Splitting,” viz., alternately to plough each strip from the margin inwards, turning the sod inwards, and the reverse way, turning the sod outwards, so that the general level of the field was not broken into a series of ridges. In Castor, as in Laxton, no grassy “balk” divided one man’s “land” from his neighbour’s, the furrow only had to serve as boundary, and sometimes the boundary was bitterly disputed. Before the enclosure there was one spot in the common fields where two neighbours kept a plough each continually, and as fast as one ploughed certain furrows into his land, the other ploughed them back into his.

Another difficulty occasionally arose when high winds prevailed at harvest time. The great extent of the open fields, and the slightness of any opposition to the sweep of the wind, at such times allowed the corn to be blown from one man’s land, and scattered over his neighbours’. Indeed it recently happened that one year when peas had been chosen as the fallow crop, that a storm carried the whole crop to the hedge bordering the field, and so mixed together in inextricable confusion the produce belonging to thirty or forty different farmers.

Another source of dispute was one that has been a prolific cause of trouble in common fields for centuries. Where the extremities of a series of adjoining “lands” abut on a land belonging to another series at a right angle, the land so abutted on is termed a “head-land,” and the occupiers of the lands that abut on it have the right of turning their ploughs on the headland, and taking the plough from one strip to another along it. The occupier of the headland therefore has to defer ploughing it till all his neighbours have finished, and often chafes at the delay. Recently a farmer in the unenclosed parish of Elmstone Hardwick, near Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, attempted to find a remedy for this inconvenience. He ploughed his headland at the time that suited his convenience, and then sued his neighbours for trespass when they turned their ploughs in his land. Needless to say he lost more by his action than by the trespass.

In Castor quarrelsome farmers were wise enough to avoid the law courts. Instead, they wrote appealing against their neighbours to their respective landlords, but the landowners were unable to restore harmony. The death of a farmer who had won the highest respect of his neighbours, and who had continually used his great influence to allay ill-feeling and promote harmony, brought on a state of tension that gradually became unbearable; and the appointment by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of a new agent, who could not understand and had no patience with the peculiarities of common-field farming, led to steps being taken for enclosure.

The first step necessary was to obtain the agreement of the great majority of the people interested. The agent in question, assisted energetically by the leading farmer in Ailesworth, succeeded in doing this without much difficulty. In 1892, application was made for an order to the Board of Agriculture, whose inspector reported warmly commending the project. The simple statement of the farmers with regard to their farms, e.g., “I hold 175 acres in 192 separate parcels,” would convince him that a change was necessary. The figures for holdings are not given by the enclosure award, but a summary of the facts with regard to some of the smaller properties gives the following:—

The glebe consisted of—

making a total of 165 outlying parcels of land, scattered far and wide over a parish of five thousand acres in extent, and yet amounting, with some small closes near the village, only to 118 acres in area. Further—

Parliamentary enclosure, however, is not to be obtained without conditions. That reckless disregard of the wider public interests both of the locality and of the nation at large in the land to be enclosed of which the administration of the General Enclosure Act from 1845 to 1874 has been accused, has been dispelled by the vigorous and ably-conducted agitation to which we owe the preservation of Epping Forest, Hampstead Heath, and many other priceless commons. In the enclosure of Castor and Ailesworth, in the first place, Ailesworth Heath, which occupies the highest and most remote corner of the parish, was excluded from the operation of the Enclosure Act. It is a wild little common which, beyond feeding a few sheep and furnishing a quarry, seems to be fit for nothing but picnics and blackberrying. Situated at the distance of about five miles from Peterborough, which again stands on the margin of the fen country, it will probably come to be valued by the townsmen for its unprofitable wildness.

Next, the parish boasts its antiquities, the remains of a part of the ancient Roman road from London to York, and certain blocks of stone, locally known as Robin Hood and Little John. The Enclosure Act provides for the preservation of these.

A bathing place in the River Nen, which bounds the parish on the south, selected at the most convenient spot, and three recreation grounds of 6 acres each, and one of 14 acres, are handed over to the safe keeping of the parish councils of Castor and Ailesworth, besides four pieces of land, making 42 acres in all, for allotments and field gardens. The farmers mournfully point out that these 76 acres thus reserved for the common use and benefit of the villagers are some of the best land and the most conveniently situated. The recreation grounds in particular they scorn as foolishness. Possibly, however, because the village prides itself on its prowess in the football field, the indignation against this supposed fad of the central government is mild compared with that expressed by some of the thrifty people of Upton St. Leonards, near Gloucester, which was being enclosed at the same time. Here the recreation ground was dubbed by some the “ruination ground,” enticing as it did the young lads from digging in their fathers’ allotments to cricket and football, and so subverting the very foundation of good morals.

Subject to these deductions, the whole of the open commonable lands and many of the old enclosures, after being surveyed and valued, and after roads, where necessary, had been diverted or newly set out, were redistributed among the old proprietors so as to give each his proportional share, as far as possible in the most convenient manner. This was both a lengthy and a delicate task, but it was finally completed in 1898, six years after the matter first came before the Board of Agriculture. Each several proprietor was then required to fence his allotment in the manner prescribed by the commissioners who make the survey and award. The cost of the survey and allotment usually works out at about £1 per acre; the cost of fencing may be a great deal more. Though the Parliamentary expenses are now trifling, the total cost of abolishing the “system of mingle-mangle,” as Carew called it in 1600, in any parish where it still exists, is not to be lightly faced in times of agricultural depression.

CHAPTER III.
THE WESSEX TYPE OF VILLAGE COMMUNITY.

Two Dorset Manors—Stratton and Grimstone.

Dorchester is bounded on the south by Fordington Field. The parish of Fordington, up to the year 1875, was unenclosed; it lay almost entirely open, and was divided into about eighty copyholds, intermixed and intercommonable, the manor belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall. But in 1875 the Duchy authorities bought out the copyholders, and the old system disappeared.

About three or four miles from Dorchester, along the road to Maiden Newton and Yeovil, are the two adjoining villages of Stratton and Grimstone, forming together the Prebend of Stratton, belonging till recently to the See of Sarum, which have only been enclosed since 1900. The enclosure was effected without any Parliamentary sanction; it was brought about, I am told by the present lord of the two manors, by the refusal of the copyholders, who held by a tenure of lives, to “re-life.” In consequence, all the copyholds, except a few cottages, have fallen into the hands of the lord of the manor; all Grimstone has been let to a single farmer, and Stratton divided into three or four farms.

Besides the very late survival of the common field system in these two manors, there are two other features which make them specially notable. In the first place they are, agriculturally, thoroughly characteristic of the Wessex type of open field village, the type that prevailed over Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. In the second place, the manorial system of village government survived with equal vigour; the proceedings of the manorial courts and the customs of tillage and pasturage forming manifestly only two aspects of one and the same organisation. It is fortunate that the court-rolls for the last two hundred years have been preserved, and that they are in the safe custody of the present lord of the manor.

On the south-west the lands of Stratton and Grimstone are bounded by a stream, the River Frome, flowing towards Dorchester, from which Stratton Mill has the right of taking a defined amount of water. Between the stream and the villages are the commonable meadows; on the north-east of the villages the arable fields, tapering somewhat, stretch up the hill slope to Stratton and Grimstone Downs. The whole arrangement is shown very clearly in the tithe commutation map, dated 1839. The two manor farms were separate and enclosed, and lay side by side along the boundary between the two manors, in each case comprising about one-third of the cultivated land. The remaining arable land in each manor formed, so far as fences were concerned, one open field, divided into three oblong strips, known respectively in Stratton as the East, Middle, and West Field; in Grimstone as Brewer’s Ash Field, Rick Field, and Langford Field. The rotation of crops was: (1), wheat; (2), barley; (3), fallow. The lower part of the fallow field was sown with clover, and was known as the “hatching ground”—a term we find elsewhere in the forms “hitch-land” and “hook-land”—the upper part was a bare fallow. More recently an improved method of cultivation was adopted. The barley crop every third year was maintained, but after it was carried Italian rye grass was sown in the upper part of the barley field (instead of a bare fallow). This was fed off with sheep in the spring, and then put into turnips; the following year barley was sown again. The lower part, however, continued to be sown with clover in the fallow year, this was fed off with sheep, and wheat followed.

The arable fields consisted of “lands” or “lawns,”[3] each supposed to be 40 “yards” (i.e. poles) long, and one, two or four “yards” broad—hence supposed to be quarter acres, half acres, or acres. Half acres were the more common; but whatever the area in theory it was somewhat less in actual fact.

• [3] Mr. A. N. Palmer notes the terms “loons,” “lawnds” and “lownts” in N. Wales and Cheshire (“The Town, Fields and Folk of Wrexham,” p. 2).

The West Field in Stratton was somewhat smaller than the other two in consequence of the extreme portion—that next the down and farthest from the village—being enclosed. These enclosures in shape and arrangement exactly resemble the lands in the open field; they are about one acre each. They are called “The Doles.” Further there are a series of small square enclosures taken out of the down, called “The New Closes.” All the Doles and New Closes were in grass.

A remarkable fact is that all the “lands” were scrupulously separated from one another by meres or balks of turf, which, however, were not known by these names. Among the people they were, and are, known as “walls,” but in the court-rolls one finds the term “lanchetts,” which one connects with “lynches,” and “land-shares,” which seems to explain the term “launchers” which I have found in Devonshire. In the level parts of the fields the “walls” were mere strips of turf about a foot wide; but in the sloping parts they formed steep banks, sometimes several feet high, and the successive “lands” formed terraces one above the other.

All the cultivators, except the tenants of the two manor farms, were copyholders, holding for a tenancy of three lives, the widow of the holder having the right to continue the holding during the period of her widowhood. By the custom of the manor the lessee of the manor had at any time (even though his lease had but a day to run) the right to grant a copyholder two lives, i.e., to accept a fine and substitute two new names for those of dead or dying persons on the “copy.”

The copyholds, when not “cotes” or simply cottages with common rights, were either “half-livings,” “livings,” or, in one or two cases, other fractions of a living. A half-living consisted of four or five nominal acres in each of the common fields, and common rights upon the meadow, common fields and common down, in Stratton, for one horse, two cows, and forty sheep. A whole living consisted of a share about twice as large in the field and meadow, and a common right for two horses, four cows, and eighty sheep. But each copyhold, whether a whole or half-living, included one dole and one new close. There were three whole livings and twelve half-livings in Stratton, and five “cotes,” i.e., cottages with one or two strips of land in the arable fields attached to them. In Grimstone there were four whole livings, six half-livings, one three-quarters living, and one whole and a-quarter living. In either manor, therefore, if we reckon two half-livings as equal to one whole, there were nine whole livings in all; those of Stratton being normally held by fifteen copyholders, those of Grimstone by twelve, though the number might happen in practice to be less. Thus at the time of the tithe commutation (1838) there was in each manor one copyholder who had two half-livings. In all formal documents a “living” is termed a “place,” and a half-living a “half-place.” The common rights attached to a living in Grimstone were slightly different from those in Stratton. They are further explained below.

Once a year, at about Christmas, the tenants of each manor met, the steward presiding; the elected officials submitted their accounts, and resigned their offices, and their successors were re-elected. The most important of these were two “viewers of the fields and tellers of the cattle,” commonly known simply as the “viewers.” There was also a “hayward,” and two “chimney peepers” (described in the Court-rolls as “inspectors of chimnies”). The inspectors of chimneys do not appear in the rolls of the eighteenth century; instead are the more important officials the “constabul” (sic) and “tythingman,” who ceased to be appointed presumably after the establishment of the county police and the commutation of the tithes.

The duty of the “chimney peepers” was, as their name implies, to see that chimneys were kept properly swept so as not to endanger a neighbour’s thatched roof. The hayward was in charge of the pound; he was entitled to charge 4d. a head for all stray beasts impounded if they belonged to the manor, and 8d. a head for outsiders.

The “viewers” had more varied duties. In the first place they had to appoint one villager as “Lacy’s Bridge man.” “Lacy’s Bridge” is a structure of loose stones at a place where the stream, which for the most part bounds Stratton meadow, crosses it; and the duty of the bridge man is to keep it in sufficient repair to enable sheep to cross. The viewers used to appoint the cottagers in turn, going down one side of the road to the end of the village and up the other side.

Next the viewers provided the manor bull. They bought the bull, they charged a fee for his services, and made all necessary regulations. The breed favoured varied from year to year, and the viewers were never known to please everybody with their choice.

Then the viewers appointed the common shepherd, in whose charge were the sheep of the whole manor almost all through the year. And in general they had to enforce all the decisions of the court with regard to the times when sheep or cows should be allowed in the meadow, when the sheep should come into the “hatching ground,” how and where horses should be tethered, and particularly to see that each tenant sowed his clover properly. And when the hay in the meadow was ripe, they marked out to each tenant the plots which fell to his share that year. It was usual to re-elect one of the viewers, so that though there was an annual election, each viewer held office for two years, being for the first year the junior viewer, for the second the senior.

There is much that is interesting in the management of the sheep flock. From April 6th to September 18th the sheep fed by day on the down, and were folded by night on the fallow field. The fold began at the top of the field, and gradually worked downwards, covering about half-an-acre every night, and so manuring the whole. There being no other water supply on the downs, all the tenants had to take turns to carry up water to fill the water-troughs, and the viewers saw that they did so. On September 18th the sheep came into the “hatching ground,” on which, as we have seen, clover had been sown; and it is noticeable that this crop, sown individually by each copyholder on his own lands, was fed off by the common flock under the supervision of the common shepherd. In winter the sheep belonging to each tenant had to be folded separately; and the doles and new closes were used for wintering the sheep. Some made it a practice to sell off their flock when feed became scanty, and to buy again the next spring; but the traditional custom was to keep the sheep till they were four or five years old, at which age they became fat, perhaps by superior cunning; meanwhile, of course, they had been yielding wool and manure. In later years, though every half living was entitled to forty sheep, by a common agreement the number was limited to twenty-five in spring, and later in the year to thirty-five, when the lambs reached the age at which they were counted as sheep in the calculation of common rights.

Perhaps the most curious feature in the local system of agriculture was the management of the common meadow. Sheep were allowed in it from March 1st to April 6th (it would only bear ten or eleven), then they had to come out and join the common flock, and the grass was let grow to hay. At hay time the viewers went out and by the help of some almost imperceptible ridges in the soil, and certain pegs driven into the river banks, they marked out to each tenant the plots on which he was allowed to cut and gather the hay. There were forty-seven of these little plots; twenty-seven of them were definite parts of particular copyholds, but nineteen were “changeable allotments,” each of which belonged one year to one holding, the next year to another, according to certain rules; while the remaining allotment, a little three-cornered plot in the middle called “100 Acres,” amounting perhaps to five perches in area, was divided among the holders of the adjacent “Long lands.” On July 6th, the hay having been carried, the cows came in, and grazed in the meadow till November 23rd, and then the meadow was watered.

I have before me the [map] of the meadow, now somewhat tattered, being drawn upon a half sheet of thin foolscap, and a little notebook recording particulars of the different plots in the meadow, and in the case of the changeable allotments, who were entitled to them each year from 1882 to about 1905, which the viewers used in partitioning the meadow. The [map] I reproduce. The notebook reads[4]:—

Stratton Common Meadow.

Lear Croft Changeable Allotment next the Yard but one to Sparks.[5]

Water Gates Changeable Allotment No. 1.

Hole Rush—Changeable No. 1.

Hole Rush No. 2.

Hole Rush No. 3, or All Rush.

Hole Rush near the Parish, No. 5.

Hole Rush No. 4.

Hole Rush No 6, near the Parish.

Long Lands No. 2.

Long Lands No. 3.

Long Lands No. 1.

Long Lands No. 5.

Long Lands No. 4.

The first part of the Three Patches in the Great Horse Shoe is the “Mill Bars Patch,” containing about 26 perches.

The second part is the narrow strip next to Mr. Channen’s—17 perches.

The third part is the lower patch adjoining Mr. Channen’s—1 rood 10 perches.

Total, 2 roods 13 perches.

Changeable Allotments in the Great Horse Shoe.

The Three Patches are one part.
Three Patches.

The Square Patch is joining the patch by the Mill Bars, may be called the fourth part of the “Great Horse Shoe,” it contains about 2 roods and 4 perches.

The Stake Weir is one part of the “Little Horse Shoe,” about 1 rood and 9 perches changeable.

The “Little Horse Shoe” changeable. The narrow strip and the strip round the corner next to Stake Weir patch is one part.

Narrow strip, 16 perches.
Patch round the corner, 1 rood 22 perches.

The small strip of land called “Hundred Acres” is a part of the Long Lands and is divided amongst the half-acres.

The nine Cantons under the Parks Hedge are about 10 perches each.

• [4] I give only four years, or a complete cycle, which is usually one of two years, but sometimes of four, and in two cases of eight years.
• [5] “Parks” in map.

About the agricultural merits of the whole system of managing common fields, down and meadow, there is naturally a difference of opinion. An old labourer says that before the old customs began to decay “they made the most of everything,” that the crops are not so good now, and “you can’t get the butter or the cheese” which used to be produced. The butter nowadays goes rancid immediately, and the cheese has no taste. On the other hand, the enterprising young farmer who now holds the manor farm at Stratton, who has himself been a “viewer,” says: “They always had two crops,” i.e., the corn crops had to struggle with couch grass, which partly for want of sufficient ploughing, and partly because it had a secure foothold in the “walls,” was never properly got rid of.

That the life of the old system was gradually dying out before it was ended by the extinction of the copyholds appears from two circumstances: the old habit of mutual help in ploughing, one tenant lending his horse to another, had died out; and the viewers had difficulty in getting their expenses refunded. The wonder is that its vitality was so persistent.

The history of the manors can be pretty fully traced by means of the Court rolls, from 1649, when a Parliamentary survey was held, to the present day. In 1649 Stratton had one copyhold tenant holding a place and a-half, four holding one place each, and ten holding half a place each, making 10½ “places” or “livings” altogether. There were, besides, 12 copyholders who each held a “customary cottage with thappurtenances.” During the next two hundred years (from 1649 to 1838) the number of “livings” diminished from 10½ to 9; the actual number of holders of livings or half-livings diminished only from 15 to 14; but the twelve “customary cottages with thappurtenances,” which included one or two acres of arable land and corresponding common rights, diminished to five “cotes.” The other cottagers, however, retained the right of cutting as much furze on certain “sleights” on the down, at any one time, as they could carry home on their head and shoulders; and the total number of cottagers was just two less in 1838 than in 1649.

The Court rolls contain, besides declarations of rights of the manor to water from the stream, and to the allegiance of certain residents outside, and a record of the changes in the tenantry, the names of the officers elected, and regulations agreed upon for the management of the land. Thus, there is usually some regulation as to the length of the rope by which a horse may be tethered in the common fields; mares are continually being prohibited from being kept in common or common field; pigs must not be allowed to stray; cow dung must not be removed from the meadow, nor certain thorny bushes in the meadow be cut, nor may ducks or geese be fed in it. The penalty for each of these offences is a fine of 5s. or 10s. The neglect to carry water up to the down for the sheep is another punishable offence. In 1748 it was found that the sheep pond needed to be mended; the viewers accordingly had to see to its repair, and penalties were agreed upon for refusing to pay the proper share of the cost.

Previous to 1765 the dates for, e.g., turning cows into the meadow or sheep into the “hatching ground” varied from year to year; but the settlement then arrived at was maintained for a succession of years. The jury

“Present that the Common Meadow be broke with horses on November 22nd,[6] that it be laid up on January 5th and continue unfed till February 5th, then be broke and fed with sheep.

“That the Hatching Ground be laid up on January 5th, and not be fed again till September 19th.

“That the Cow leaze must not be fed with sheep in time of sheep shearing, nor with horses or mares at winnowing time.”

• [6] At this time the Court met in October.

The year 1789 was a comparatively important date in the agricultural history of Stratton during the eighteenth century. At the Court held on October 9th, it was agreed that “the tenants shall meet in the West Field on the 14th inst. between 9 and 10 in the morning, to bound out the several lands, and afterwards each shall leave a lanchett of a furrow between his and the adjoining land under penalty of a fine of 20s. And no tenant shall turn his plough on his neighbour’s land after the 21st of November.” It would appear that the scrupulous observance of the “walls” dividing one man’s land from another, which was such an exceptional feature of Stratton and Grimstone Common Fields, dates from this meeting.

Fordington parish, until the extinction of the copyholds, had many features which compare curiously with those of Stratton and Grimstone. It is very much larger; for whereas Stratton and Grimstone together have an area of only about 1200 acres, the area of Fordington is 2749 acres, of which, up to 1876, nearly 1800 acres was common field and common meadow, and 618 acres commons adjoining the common field. Fordington is also peculiarly divided into three portions: the arable field and common pastures lying immediately south of Dorchester, the meadows forming a detached area by the side of the River Frome, and the village itself a third detached area.

The copyholds in Fordington were known, some as “whole-places,” “half-places,” as in Stratton and Grimstone, but others as “farthing holds.” One cannot help asking what were the original meanings of these terms, and how they are related to the “virgates” of Domesday, and to the “yardlands” of the Midlands, and the “broad” and “narrow oxgangs” of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Concerning these terms it appears to be established that a “yardland” or “virgate” was originally one quarter of a “carucate,” or ploughland, i.e., the amount of arable land (about 120 acres in average soil) which a plough team of eight oxen could plough in a year, together with its due share of meadow and common pasture. A broad oxgang was about 24 acres of arable land, and therefore apparently the northern representative of a yardland or virgate; and a narrow oxgang was about 12 acres of arable, or half a broad oxgang.

In Stratton, as we have seen, every “whole place” or “whole living” had common rights for two horses, four cows, and eighty sheep; every half-place common rights for one horse, two cows, and forty sheep. The areas of land attached to the three whole places were respectively 18 a. 3 r. 35 p., 19 a. 2 r. 3 p., 22 a. 0 r. 11 p., averaging just 20 acres; the half-places varied from 9 a. 0 r. 19 p. to 13 a. 2 r. 25 p., the smaller half-places having an advantage in quality of soil, and the average being almost exactly 11 acres.

In Grimstone the common rights as well as the area of land belonging to particular whole or half-places varied somewhat. The half-places consisted respectively of—

The “whole and a-quarter place” had 26 a. 0 r. 13 p. of land and rights for three horses, five cows, and 120 sheep, and the “three-quarter place” 16 a. 1 r. 2 p., with rights for one horse, five cows, and eighty sheep. If these be added together and divided by two we arrive at two whole places of 21 a. 0 r. 27 p., with the common rights for two horses, five cows, and 100 sheep. This may be taken as the typical whole place, and the half-place is just a little more than the mathematical half of a whole place. The fact that the common rights attached to a given unit were more extensive in Grimstone than in Stratton is the natural consequence of the fact that Grimstone had 244 acres of down and 35 acres of cow-common, Stratton only 190 acres of down and 26 acres of cow-common.

But when we compare these with the whole places, half-places, and farthing holds of Fordington, we find rather a puzzling discrepancy. In the latter parish the fourteen whole places each had, in 1841, the date of the Tithe Commutation, rights for four horses, three cows, and 120 sheep, except one, which had no common rights at all, but, apparently by compensation, had 66 acres of arable land, eleven more than any of the others. The smallest of the others had 42 a. 3 r., the largest 55 a. 0 r. 22 p., the average being about 48 acres; in other words, in Fordington a whole place had more than twice as much arable land as in Stratton or Grimstone, and carried a common right for four horses instead of for two.

Each of the twenty-one half-places in Fordington had common rights for three horses, two cows, and sixty-six sheep—which more closely approximates to three-quarters than to a half of the rights of a whole place. The area of land attached to a half-place is, however, on the average somewhat less than half that attached to a whole place, the largest having 25 a. 1 r. 6 p., the smallest 15 a. 1 r. 36 p., the average being just under 21 acres. It happens curiously that the largest “farthing holds” had more land than the smallest half-places, as their areas range from 11 a. 1 r. 7 p. to 17 a. 3 r. 35 p. There were nineteen of them, and their average area was 14½ acres. Each had a common right for two horses, two cows, and forty sheep.

The following tentative hypothesis may be suggested as an explanation. It is based on the presumption that the names represent a more ancient set of circumstances than the actual facts recorded in the tithe apportionment.

I think it, on the whole, more probable that these units of holdings are based upon ploughing by horses than upon ploughing by oxen. In other words, I think that the system of co-aration persisted unimpaired in these particular villages after horses had superseded oxen for ploughing purposes, which might have happened at a very early date. This seems plainly indicated by the fact that during the 190 years from 1649 to 1839 the majority of the copyholders in Stratton and Grimstone had only one horse apiece, therefore they must have combined to work even a two-horse plough; and, as I have said above, the practice of helping one another with horses for ploughing only died out in very recent years.

I think further, that in all three manors, a “whole place” or “whole living” meant the land cultivated by one plough, but that in Stratton and Grimstone the plough was a light and shallow one drawn by two horses only, and in Fordington a heavier plough drawn by four horses. The soil in Stratton and Grimstone is very thin and stony, and would not bear deep ploughing; that of Fordington is much deeper and heavier. Further, Stratton and Grimstone fields lie on the steep slopes descending from the downs; Fordington field is gently undulating. Therefore, a four-horse plough in Fordington would plough more than twice as much land as a two-horse plough in the other villages. A whole place then in Fordington naturally would have common rights for four horses; in Stratton and Grimstone for two horses only.

A half-place in Stratton and Grimstone was, therefore, the holding allotted to the tenant who had one horse, and it carried a common right for one horse. Though a half-place in Fordington carried in 1841 a common right for three horses, I am inclined to believe that it originally was the holding of a tenant who had two horses, i.e., half a plough team, and originally had a common right for two horses only; and, similarly, though a farthing hold in 1841 had a common right for two horses, I am inclined to think it originally was the share of the man who had one horse only, and only carried a common right for one horse. That is to say, I think the names here a better guide than the nineteenth century common rights. If one were to adopt the opposite view on this point, one would infer that a “half-place” was a misnomer for a “three-quarter place,” and was the allotment of the man who had three horses, and that a “farthing hold” should properly be called a half-place. But on this assumption it would be hard to explain the fact that the arable land attached to a half-place is, on the average, a little less than half that attached to a whole place, and that attached to a farthing hold only a little more than one quarter.

It seems quite probable that when in the course of the gradual improvement of horses and ploughs in Fordington, the stage was reached at which three horses were sufficient for a plough, the holders of half-places already possessing two horses each endeavoured to emancipate themselves from the necessity of joint-ploughing, by obtaining an additional horse; and that when they had generally succeeded in this they obtained the right of pasturing three horses each on the commons and common-field; and when a two-horse plough had come into general use, the holders of farthing holds would naturally take similar steps, and so acquire common rights for two horses each.

There is one other noteworthy fact with regard to Fordington revealed by the Tithe Apportionment. Certain lands scattered over the fields of a total area of 4 a. 2 r. 20 p. were the property of the parish constable for the time being; the churchwardens similarly held 1 r. 7 p., the parish hayward 1 a. 3 r. 18 p., and the parish reeve 3 a. 0 r. 17 p. These ancient village offices were therefore in Fordington not entirely unremunerated.[7]

• [7] The Boldon Book shows that in the Bishopric of Durham in the twelfth century, the pounder, carpenter and smith generally occupied holdings of about 12 acres in virtue of their callings, to remunerate their services to the manor and to the common ploughs of the manor.

In its main features the common-field system of Stratton and Grimstone appears to be typical of that prevailing before enclosure in the counties of Dorset, Wilts, Hants, Berks, Oxfordshire, and Gloucestershire.

The report of the Select Committee on Commons Enclosure gives a map of a “rotation meadow,” in which each strip was held in rotation by different occupiers, in Shilton, Berkshire; and one of a “lot meadow,” in which the rotation was not by rule, but by lot, in Bestmoor, Oxfordshire.

CHAPTER IV.
EXTENT OF EXISTING COMMON FIELDS.

A “Return of the Acreage of Waste Lands subject to Rights of Common and of Common Field Lands in each Parish of England and Wales, in which the Tithes have been commuted under the Tithe Commutation Acts, so far as the same can be ascertained from the Maps, Agreements, Awards, and Apportionments relating to the Commutation of Tithes in the custody of the Tithe Commissioners for England and Wales, deducting any lands inclosed under the General Enclosure Acts since the Commutation; also the estimated Total Acreage of such lands in the remaining Parishes of each county,” dated 27th November, 1873, ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, April 13th, 1874, gives us the following results:—

Totals.

We have therefore the assurance of the Copyhold, Inclosure and Tithe Commission that in the year 1873 common fields existed in 905 parishes of England and Wales, of a total area of 166,953 acres, and that there was reasonable ground for inferring the existence of 97,354 acres of common field land, scattered presumably over some four or five hundred more parishes; in other words, that about one parish in every ten in England and Wales presented an example of the medieval system of land holding and cultivation similar, though as a rule on a smaller scale, to the survivals described above.

The statement is amazing, and would be received with incredulity by anyone familiar with the rural districts of any county of England, so far as it relates to that county. The Commission invites our suspicion of its statistics. The main purpose of the return was to give the acreage of surviving commons; these are estimated at 2,368,465 acres. As late as 1871, however, the Commission had declared, on the basis of an estimate made in 1843, that 8,000,000 acres of commons still existed, and 1,000,000 acres of common field or meadow. A little scrutiny of some details confirms one’s suspicions.

Thus, to take a single county, Kent has from the early days of the enclosure controversy been famous as a well enclosed county. The author of the “Discourse of the Common weal of this Realm of England” mentions “those countries that be most inclosed, as essex, kent, devenshire” (1549). Skipping two and a-half centuries, we find the reporter of the Board of Agriculture in 1793 declaring that such a thing as a common field did not exist in Kent.[8] We are confirmed in our acceptance of this statement by finding that there have been no enclosures in Kent of common fields by Act of Parliament, either before 1793 or since. Yet the return gives Kent twenty-one parishes having common fields of an ascertained area of about 4183 acres. It therefore is necessary to criticise the methods by which the figures in the return were arrived at.

• [8] Boys’ “Kent,” 2nd edition, 8vo. (1786), p. 53.

They are based on the tithe maps, the Commissioners remarking that “the common field lands are generally distinguishable by the particular manner in which they are marked on the Tithe maps, and their area has been estimated from those maps.” The Tithe Commission was appointed in 1836 (6 & 7 Will. IV. c. 71), and the tithe maps and apportionments were made mostly before 1850; we are told “the total area embraced by the Tithe Documents is 28,195,903 acres. The total area of the remaining parishes is 8,961,270 acres.”

In order, therefore, for the Commission to have obtained a correct result, it was necessary—

(a) that the common field lands should have been rightly distinguished from other lands;

(b) that their area should have been rightly estimated;

(c) that due allowance should have been made for enclosures between the date of the tithe apportionment and the date of the return;

(d) that the area of common field in the parishes for which there are no tithe maps should have been estimated on correct principles.

Not one of these conditions was satisfied.

(d) Taking these in reverse order, it is assumed in calculating the area of common fields in parishes that have no tithe maps, that they have the same ratio of common field to other land as those which have tithe maps. This principle is entirely wrong for two reasons: (1) because Private Enclosure Acts usually arranged for tithe commutation, so that parishes enclosed by such Acts before 1830 are ordinarily among those without tithe maps—and equally among those without common fields; and (2) the existence of unenclosed common fields would be a reason for demanding a commutation of tithe. The importance of this may be shown by taking Bedfordshire as a test case. For sixty-eight Bedfordshire parishes there are no tithe maps, and the Commission estimates that these sixty-eight parishes have 12,925 acres of common fields. But sixty-six out of these sixty-eight parishes were enclosed by Private Acts, leaving two parishes only, of a combined area of 3578 acres, in which a survival of common field might reasonably be deemed possible, though even in these extremely improbable. Instead of 12,925 acres of common field for this part of the county, the only reasonable estimate would be 0.

Similar statements might be made with regard to any other county which was mainly enclosed by Act of Parliament, as Northampton, to which 13,446 acres of common field are attributed to the non-tithe map parishes; Lincoln, to which 10,823 acres are similarly attributed; Berkshire, with 2705 acres; Buckingham, with 2365 acres; Cambridge, with 2678 acres; Huntingdon, with 2336 acres; Nottingham, with 6617 acres; Oxford, with 4839 acres; Rutland, with 5726 acres, and the East Riding of Yorkshire, with 7359 acres. For this cause alone by far the greater part of the 97,354 acres added on to the total estimated from tithe maps must be rejected, and of course any error of over-statement that we find with regard to parishes which have tithe maps will still further reduce the remainder.

(c) Due allowance has not been made for enclosure between the date of the tithe apportionment and the date of the return. It is of course very difficult to say how this could have been done without an elaborate and expensive local enquiry, so far as relates to enclosure without Parliamentary authority. As a matter of fact, no allowance at all has been made for this sort of enclosure. This is justifiable; but at least a general statement should have been made to the effect that a very large deduction had to be made on this account in order to obtain a correct idea of the position. Further, great carelessness was shown even in allowing for Parliamentary enclosures subsequent to the tithe apportionment. Thus, to take one glaring instance, 1500 acres of common field are credited to Beddington and Wallington, near Croydon, in Surrey. These common fields were enclosed by an Act dated 1850, and the award, dated 1853, was at the time of the return deposited with the Copyhold, Inclosure, and Tithe Commission.

(a) and (b) But it is in distinguishing the common fields and in estimating their area from the tithe maps that the worst mistakes have been made. The Commission says that “the common fields are generally distinguishable by the particular manner in which they are marked on the tithe maps.” From a comparison of a good many tithe maps with the figures given in the return, I infer that those to whom the duty of distinguishing the common fields was entrusted, were told that areas divided into sub-divisions on the maps by means of dotted lines were common fields. These dotted lines indicate a division of ownership marked by some slight boundary and not by a hedge. They might indicate allotments, for example, or a number of other local circumstances, besides common fields. The statements that 4183 acres of common field were to be found in Kent, and 13,439 acres in Wales, being specially in direct contradiction of all other evidence that I had collected, I tested these by two instances. In Kent 1400 acres were assigned to the parish of Northbourne. By a close examination of the tithe map I could find nothing indicating any common field at all; the only excuse for the statement was a few dotted lines, which by a reference to the Award were proved to indicate only that some fields were inadequately hedged. For Wales, I got out the map and award for Llanerlyl, in Montgomery, credited with 1675 acres of common field. Here there was something to be found on the map looking exactly like common field, but the Award showed that these dotted strips of land were “turbaries.”

We have seen that the open field parish in its perfection, as Castor and Ailesworth before enclosure, possessed common arable fields, common meadows, common pasture, and frequently commonable waste, like Ailesworth Heath. Where the parish as a whole becomes enclosed without an Act of Parliament, particularly if the enclosure is gradual, the waste frequently remains common. Thus we have the numerous commons of Kent, Surrey, and other counties. Less frequently, but still in a considerable number of cases, the common meadows remain open commonable and unenclosed. Port Meadow at Oxford is a familiar instance. These common meadows are included in the return under consideration among the common fields. Thus, for instance, the surprise with which one receives the information that Tottenham, in 1873, had 300 acres of common fields, disappears when it is perceived that the marshes along the River Lea are meant.

It will also be noticed later on that in parishes where the common field system has disappeared for generations, there are frequently still remaining in the midst of enclosed fields strips of land of different ownership from the rest of the field, but let to the same farmer, and without any visible demarcation. Such fields in Wales and the north-west of England are called “quilleted fields.” The tithe map records, with its dotted lines, the area and position of the “quillets.” Such fields are included under “common fields” in this return.

In at least the great majority of cases where the supposed common fields are small, it is probable that nothing more notable than quilleted fields existed at the time the tithe map was made; and even this survival would, in most cases, have disappeared since. Out of the 905 alleged cases of common fields, in 670 cases the areas given are under 100 acres.

In fine, this return of commons and common fields, which gives such a fair promise of numerous surviving common fields, in reality gives little assistance, because there is but the remotest probability in any particular case that those common fields exist. The probability is sufficient in some cases to encourage one to make local enquiries, but these enquiries nearly always end in disappointment. The following cases in which common arable fields theoretically survive, are chiefly interesting as illustrating the phenomena of the decay of the common field system in villages where it has not died a sudden death through enclosure. I omit the case of Hitchin, made famous by Mr. F. Seebohm.

Clothall (Herts).

Clothall is a parish lying on the north slope of the chalk hills of Hertfordshire, just off the Great North Road, which passes through the adjoining parish of Baldock. Approaching it from the south, one gradually ascends the long slope from Hertford, and suddenly at the summit has before one a far-stretching view over the flat country of Bedfordshire and adjoining counties. The road descends steeply and passes through the Clothall common fields. At the time of my visit the harvest (of barley) was being gathered in; the arrangement of the field was clearly visible. The long, narrow strips of stubble, never quite straight, and never quite of uniform width, were divided by “balks” of grass, grown tall and gone to seed. Each balk was reduced to as narrow dimensions as it could be, without endangering its continued existence, for the sake of separating one strip from another. A view of this field is shown in Mr. Seebohm’s “English Village Community.”

But there is in Clothall the husk only, and no surviving kernel of the English village community. The whole of the field, estimated at about 600 acres, is let to a single farmer, who cultivates it on modern principles, but who is bound to preserve the balks. There are but three owners of land in the field. Fifty-six acres are glebe, the remainder belongs in alternate strips to the lord of the manor (the Marquis of Salisbury) and to a gentleman to whom possession passed by marriage, from a family which had been engaged in brewing. The land is famous for barley, and the owner of a local brewery in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century gradually bought up nearly all the land in the common field that did not belong to the lord of the manor. Application was made in 1885 to the Board of Agriculture for enclosure, the manorial authorities and the vicar both desiring it, but the other owner objected.

It is interesting to find that the villagers still hold to the tradition that they have rights of common upon the balks, a tradition which is probably well founded. But they dare not attempt to exercise those rights. An enclosure here, accompanied by the provision of ground for allotments and recreation, would be a boon for the villagers; and it would probably pay the landowners to get rid of those balks, which are as great a nuisance agriculturally as they are interesting from an antiquarian point of view.

The counties of Hertford and Bedford have been, in recent years, particularly rich in survivals of common field, for the enclosure of Totternhoe ([p. 63]) was only completed in 1891; Yelden had a common field of about 600 acres up till about the year 1881, when the chief proprietor, by buying out or compensating all the other proprietors or owners of common rights, obtained exclusive ownership of the unenclosed land; and at Studham and Renhold similar voluntary enclosures were carried out under the pressure of the chief landowners within the memory of old inhabitants. Fragments of commonable pasture in three different parts of Renhold parish, and a common of about 60 acres in Studham, remain as memorials.

Bygrave and Wallington.

Beneath the long sloping hillside of Clothall lies the little town of Baldock, adjoining Letchworth and the “Garden City”; and on the other side of Baldock is the parish of Bygrave; which is, like Clothall, still unenclosed, and for the same reason; the Marquis of Salisbury being here again the lord of the manor, and the other Clothall proprietor the next largest landowner. But in Bygrave the farms, as well as the properties, are very much intermixed. Here and there there are grassy balks between adjacent properties; and in places the growth of bushes on these has almost made them into hedges, but as a rule there is no boundary between strips belonging to different holdings and different properties. A road through the open fields at one point cuts off the end of a strip of land belonging to Lord Salisbury from the rest of that strip; it forms a triangular plot too small to repay the trouble of bringing the plough across the road to plough it; and the men who hold the adjoining land revere the rights of property too much to touch it; it therefore remains a refuge for all manner of weeds.

As in Clothall, no common rights are exercised over the common fields of Bygrave by the poor of the parish, nor could I hear of any tradition of rights belonging to the poor or to cottagers. But the different occupiers of land in the common fields have, and exercise, the right of shackage, i.e., of grazing cattle after harvest, over one another’s holdings. And the lord of the manor has a special right of “sheep-walk” over the whole, for a month, from the first week in May and October. This right is let with one of the farms. It is not actually exercised, because the other occupiers of lands in the open field buy exemption.

The hamlet of Luffenhall, also near Clothall, has “shack lands” held under similar conditions.

The next parish to Clothall on the east, Wallington, is also unenclosed. It has a small common on which cottagers have the right to keep a cow and a calf, but so far as the rest of the parish is concerned, the only surviving feature of the externals of the common field system is the wide, breezy stretch of open land, under wheat, roots and grass; and of the spirit of the “village community” there is nothing. There are but two farms; the wages paid are only 10s. to 12s. per week. Such wages, so near London, naturally fail to keep the labourers in the village; and the population is now (1903) less than 100, though the church has seats for 260. As the men go, more and more land is laid down in grass, and machinery is more and more used; the absence of hedges of course facilitates the use of certain kinds of agricultural machinery. The unenclosed parish of Wallington, in fact, represents in an extreme degree the triumph of all those tendencies against which the opponents of enclosure waged war—great farms, absolute dependence of the labourer, low wages, rural depopulation.

Sutton (Northamptonshire).

The parish of Castor, or Caister, includes, besides the hamlets of Castor and Ailesworth, the enclosure of which has been described, the townships of Sutton and Upton. Sutton had not at the time of the enclosure of Castor and Ailesworth been legally enclosed, and the parish is described from the tithe map as consisting of 450 acres of common field and 150 acres of common, out of a total of 888 acres. The vicar, who had bought nearly all the land in the parish, and also the manorial rights, in 1899 applied for an Act of Enclosure, which he obtained in 1901. There were in Sutton certain lands belonging to the township, intermixed with those in private ownership. The rents of these were paid with the poor rates. Up till 1880 the two farmers who between them occupied nearly the whole of the cultivated land, used to confer every year and agree upon their course of tillage. They were then persuaded by the vicar to disentangle their farms, and cultivate them in the ordinary way. At that time there ceased to be in Sutton any visible sign of any exceptional features in the system of landownership. The lands belonging to the township are recorded in the tithe map, and their measurement in the tithe award, but no balks to mark them are preserved.

I am indebted to the vicar of Sutton for the following illustration of the possible evils of the common field system. It occurred in a parish where he had formerly been resident, which he did not name.

In this parish two adjacent strips of land were occupied respectively by a farmer and a shoemaker. The farmer, who was a careful and diligent cultivator, having well manured and laboured his strip, sowed it with wheat, and as harvest approached saw the prospect of an exceptionally good crop. The shoemaker left his strip entirely untouched. But when the farmer was about to begin to reap, the shoemaker intervened, and claimed that the strip which was cultivated was his, and the untilled strip belonged to the farmer. The field jury was summoned, and the extreme positiveness and assurance of the shoemaker carried the day, and the shoemaker reaped the wheat. The farmer then begged his successful adversary for some compensation for his lost labour and expense, but was told that he might consider himself lucky not to be prosecuted for trespass. The farmer then proceeded to make the best of his bad bargain, and set to work to plough up the weeds and thistles that covered the strip of land awarded him. But as he ploughed he continually turned up pieces of leather, corners wasted in cutting out “uppers,” and other refuse of a shoemaker’s workshop. These he collected and brought before the field jury. The previous decision was then reversed and the shoemaker was compelled to make restitution to the man he had wronged.

Elmstone Hardwicke (Gloucester).

Elmstone Hardwicke is an extremely interesting example of the common field system in a state of natural decay. Very nearly the whole parish belongs to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, but the holdings are intermixed and in small parcels, over a large part, perhaps 1000 acres, of the parish, the farms having been granted on leases of three lives. The farmers would be glad to consolidate their holdings and enclose, but the Ecclesiastical Commissioners effectually discourage this, as I was told, by exorbitant demands for increase of rent. On the other hand, I was informed that the Commissioners themselves desired to enclose, but did not care for the expense of proceeding by Act of Parliament, and they were endeavouring to obtain their object by refusing to “re-life,” in order that the leases might fall in, and be converted into leases for short terms that might be made to terminate simultaneously. Thus an old farmer who had a lease of 60 acres in 100 different parcels scattered over the common fields, informed me of the negotiations that had been entered into with him. He was by no means disposed to readily part with his lease, as he had two good lives remaining, both being his nephews, one aged 40 and the other 50. “They’ll both mak’ ’ighty,” he said, that being his own age, though he looked a score of years younger.

This one farmer still (in 1899) followed what had been the customary course of cultivation for the parish—a four years course of wheat, beans, wheat, fallow; this being a modification of a still earlier course of wheat, beans, barley, fallow, the soil being more suitable to wheat than to barley. The other farmers followed no fixed rule, each one cultivating his farm as he chose, subject, however, to the right that was still recognised and exercised, that each occupier could turn horses, cattle and sheep on to the common fields after harvest until the first of November. In consequence of the abandonment of the traditional course of cultivation the common use of the fallow-field has been dropped by general consent, for the last forty or fifty years. The institution of the field jury has also disappeared; though the above-mentioned old farmer still posts the notices declaring the fields open or closed, and so may be said to fill the post of “foreman of the fields,” he does so by right of inheritance rather than of election, in succession to his father.

Various controversies have arisen recently in Elmstone Hardwicke with regard to the rights of various persons interested. I have referred above to the case of the farmer who, in the spring of 1899, occupying a “headland” in the common fields on which various strips belonging to his neighbours abutted, instead of following the customary practice and waiting to plough till the last, ploughed his headland before the abutting lands were ploughed, and then sued for damages when his neighbours turned their ploughs on his land.

Another farmer who occupied a very small holding in Elmstone Hardwicke, and a much larger holding in an adjoining parish, made a practice of turning great numbers of sheep on the Elmstone Hardwicke common fields in the open time, which he was able to keep in the close time on his other land. The question arose whether this unfair procedure was lawful. The coming into force of the Parish Councils Act of 1894 also had the effect of suggesting enquiries into the claims of labourers to share in common-right privileges.

The vicar, the Rev. George Bayfield Roberts, accordingly obtained the opinion of Sir Walter Phillimore on the subject. It was as follows:—

“As far as I can gather from the facts laid before me, I think that every freeholder and copyholder has a right to turn cattle upon every part of the common field, and that the right is not confined to the particular field or part of the common field in which he holds land.

“This right passes to the tenant or occupier under each freeholder or copyholder. The tenant, or occupier, has it, not in his own right but merely as claiming under his landlord.

“I know of no rule of law which would give this right to farmers as such, and deny it to cottagers as such, if the latter have holdings on which they can keep their beasts during close time. But the right to turn on to Lammas lands (as this common field is) can only be exercised in respect of beasts used in the cultivation or manuring of the holding in respect of which the claim is made (Baylis v. Tyssen-Amhurst, Law Reports 6 Ch. D. p. 500).

“As the cottagers are said to be tenants of the farmers, the latter can make it clear in all future lettings that they do not let with the cottages the right to pasture in the common field.

“(2) The tenant of the Barn farm should keep his land unenclosed during open time, and anyone who has a right to turn on cattle can sue him if he obstructs (Stoneham v. London and Brighton Railway Co., Law Reports 7 Q. B. p. 1), or can pull down the fencing (Arlett v. Ellis, 7 B. & C. p. 346).

“(2a). I do not think it would be wise to pull down a whole fence, or sue for the damage caused by the fence, if substantial and easy openings were made during open time. But there is some authority for saying that the whole fence must be removed (Arlett v. Ellis, [cited above]).

“(3) The only locus standi for the Parish Meeting is, if it has been given by the County Council all the powers of a Parish Council under section 19, sub-section 10, of the Local Government Act, 1894 (56 & 57 Vict. c. 73), to apply to the Board of Agriculture under section 9 of the Commons Act, 1876 (39 & 40 Vict. c. 56).

“This power is given to Parish Councils by section 8, sub-section c, of the Local Government Act, 1894.

“Section 9 of the Commons Act, 1876, enables the Inclosure Commissioners (whose place is now taken by the Board of Agriculture) to give information and direction ‘upon application’ in order to bring about ‘the regulation of Commons’; and for this purpose Lammas lands are included as Commons, as they also came under the Inclosure Acts.

“By section 3 a Provisional Order made by the Board for ‘regulation’ may provide for the ‘adjustment of rights,’ and section 4 shows how much can be done upon such an adjustment.”

This opinion was given in March, 1897. The very significant passage which pointed out that since the cottagers held their cottages from the farmers, they could not effectively claim any rights which the farmers did not choose to grant them, threw cold water on the agitation.

Elmstone Hardwicke is apparently another case in which something would be gained and nothing lost by an Act of Enclosure.

Ewelme (Oxfordshire).

Rather more than half this parish, near Wallingford, is legally in the condition of open common fields, and there is besides a very extensive “cow-common” on which is a golf course. The neighbouring parishes of Bensington[9] and Berwick Salome had until 1852 common fields which were in part intermixed with those of Ewelme, and there were commons commonable to all three parishes. In 1852 an Act was passed which was carried into effect in 1863 for the enclosure of Bensington and Berwick Salome, and the parts of Ewelme which were intermixed with these. Ewelme is owned by a number of small proprietors who chiefly farm their own land. These made a voluntary division,[10] but they still enjoy certain rights of common and of shooting over one another’s land. No labourers enjoy rights of common.

• [9] The Vicar of Bensington has the custody of a remarkable eighteenth century map of the three intermixed parishes.
• [10] Exchanges of land in common fields so as to enable proprietors to consolidate their properties are authorised by 4 & 5 Will. IV. c. 30.

There are two significant facts about this parish.

In the first place, one particular farm enjoys a special right of pasturing sheep on the cow-common, not shared by other farms. This is significant when taken into consideration with the facts for Cambridgeshire and elsewhere related below.

Secondly, this gives a typical instance of the effect of enclosure of commonable waste on the poor. One of the commons enclosed was known as the “Furze Common,” and it supplied the poor of the neighbourhood with their fuel, for every inhabitant had the right of cutting furze on it. After enclosure the Furze Common was allotted to one man, who allowed no trespass on it, and the owners of cottages were awarded allotments of land in consideration of rights which the cottagers had exercised. The lands so allotted became part of ordinary farms, and the poor simply lost their supply of fuel without any compensation whatever. This was done under the sanction, not of an Enclosure Act rushed through Parliament before 1845, but of the Enclosure Commissioners, appointed expressly to prevent any injury to the class least able to guard its own interests, as well as to facilitate enclosure.

CHAPTER V.
THE ISLE OF AXHOLME.

To catch the spirit of the common field system, to see that system no mere historical survival, but developing in harmony with modern needs, one must go to the Isle of Axholme. Starting from Doncaster eastwards, through somewhat devious roads, one descends gradually to a wide belt of reclaimed fen. Between this fen on the west, and the river Trent with more fen on the east, is a ridge of low hills, comprising the four large parishes of Haxey, Epworth, Belton and Owston. These constitute the Isle of Axholme—an island, indeed, up to the time of the great drainage operations of Vermuyden in the reign of James I. It was, no doubt, a very ancient home of fishermen and fowlers, who gradually brought the island itself into cultivation, using the plough as a subsidiary means of subsistence. The strenuous opposition offered by the people of Axholme to the work of the Dutch engineer is well known. Even after they were beaten, and the greatest drainage scheme of the seventeenth century was carried through, the four Axholme parishes retained extensive fens, used as common pastures.

When in the eighteenth century the great trade of driving Scotch cattle to the London market, in which Sir Walter Scott’s grandfather was a pioneer, sprang up, the route followed diverged from the great north road in Yorkshire, in order to avoid turnpikes, and the cattle, grazing as they slowly plodded southwards, and fattening on the roadsides, came through Selby, Snaith and the Isle of Axholme. To protect their fields the islanders hedged them along the roadsides, leaving only narrow thoroughfares; then, to make these thoroughfares passable for themselves, they laid down for footpath a stone pavement which still exists for twenty miles. But the old hedges have in many places disappeared, so that the fields lie open to the road; and in particular, the gates which then guarded every entrance to the fields are now generally represented by gaps.

At the end of the eighteenth century by far the greater part of the island proper was in the condition of open arable fields, with properties and holdings intermixed, as in the open fields of Laxton; though near each village there were enclosed gardens, and closes of pasture. It would appear that the original system of cultivation was a four-year course of husbandry, so that one-fourth of the arable land was at any time fallow, and used as common pasture, and common rights were exercised on two of the other three-fourths after harvest; one-fourth probably being under turnips. On the margin of the hill there were perhaps commonable meadows, though I cannot trace them. Beyond, the common fens and marshes, used mainly for grazing horned cattle, extended over an area of about 14,000 acres.

Arthur Young visited the island at this time, and thus describes it:

“In respect of property, I know nothing more singular respecting it (the County of Lincoln), than its great division in the Isle of Axholm. In most of the towns there, for it is not quite general, there is much resemblance of some rich parts of France and Flanders. The inhabitants are collected in villages and hamlets; and almost every house you see, except very poor cottages on the borders of commons, is inhabited by a farmer, the proprietor of his farm, of from four or five, and even fewer, to 20, 40, and more acres, scattered about the open fields, and cultivated with all that minutiae of care and anxiety, by the hands of the family, which are found abroad, in the countries mentioned. They are very poor respecting money, but very happy respecting their mode of existence. Contrivance, mutual assistance, by barter and hire, enable them to manage these little farms, though they break all rules of rural proportion. A man will keep a pair of horses that has but 3 or 4 acres by means of vast commons and working for hire.

“The enclosure of these commons will lessen their numbers and vastly increase the quantity of products at market. Their cultivated land being of uncommon fertility, a farm of 20 acres supports a family very well, as they have, generally speaking, no fallows, but an endless succession of corn, potatoes, flax, beans, etc. They do nearly all their work themselves, and are passionately fond of buying a bit of land. Though I have said they are happy, yet I should note that it was remarked to me, that the little proprietors work like Negroes, and do not live so well as the inhabitants of the poor-house; but all is made amends for by possessing land.”[11]

• [11] “Agricultural Survey of Lincolnshire,” p. 17.

In 1795 the chief landowners took steps to obtain an Act for enclosing all four parishes. There were stronger reasons for enclosing than in the majority of the East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire parishes all around, in which Parliamentary enclosure was being pushed furiously on, for the fens were capable of enormous improvement. But in the Isle of Axholme it was not possible for the chief landowners to overbear the opposition of the villagers. One peculiar feature of the locality was that every cottage had a common right, and there were no rights attached to land apart from cottages. This fact, and the peculiarly wide distribution of property, caused the decision to rest with the peasantry. They raised no objection to the division and drainage of the marshes, perceiving that their allotments would be far more valuable after drainage than their common rights before; so this part of the scheme was generally agreed to. But on the question of the enclosure of the arable fields they were not complacent. They saw that the expense of hedging a small allotment would be heavy, and the injury done by the hedge to a small plot, of say 1 or 2 acres, by shading the land and sheltering it from the wind would more than counterbalance the advantage of having that holding in one piece instead of in two or three, to say nothing of the loss of the space given up to hedges. They also probably feared that the arable land, if enclosed, would largely be laid down to grass, and so the benefit of an increased demand for labour and higher wages promised by the enclosure of the marshes would be lost, at least in some degree, through the enclosure of the fields. Accordingly the necessary consent of a “three-fourths majority in number and value” of the owners was not obtained, and the proposal to enclose was defeated. It would appear that all the educated, intelligent, and influential people did their best to overcome this “ignorant prejudice.” But on the other hand there were the votes of all those cottagers who did not as yet possess strips in the common fields, but who hoped to be able to purchase them. They saw that while thousands of acres of land lay immediately round the villages in acre, half-acre, and rood strips, there was a chance of buying one, and so taking the first upward step from the rank of the landless labourer. On enclosure those strips would give place to closes of at least several acres each, and the closes would be quite out of their reach. Blind, obstinate, wilful, and prejudiced as the villagers seemed to their betters, the event shows that they were entirely accurate in their view of the situation.

Arthur Young’s account of these proceedings is as follows: “In the Isle of Axholm there is an immense inclosure on the point of beginning, the Act and survey having been passed of no less than 12,000 acres of commons in the four parishes of Haxey, Hepworth, Belton, and Owston. I passed these commons in various quarters, and rode purposely to view some parts; they are in a wretched and unprofitable state, but valued, if inclosed, in the ideas of the islanders at 10s. or 11s. an acre.

“Cottage rights are claims, but lands without a cottage have none. It was a barbarous omission that when the Act was procured they resisted a clause to divide the open arable fields subject to rights of common. But they have here, by a custom, a right of inclosure which is singular; every man that pleases may enclose his own open field land notwithstanding the rights of common upon it while open; and accordingly many do it when, by purchase, they get five or six acres together, of which I saw many examples.” (“Agricultural Survey of Lincolnshire,” p. 79.)

Somewhat later a second attempt was made in the parish of Owston to obtain an enclosure with partial success. Three of the four fields were divided and enclosed: but the same motives which prevented the enclosure of the four parishes at the previous attempt were strong enough to secure that one field should remain open. It was in 1811, I was locally informed, that the Owston Enclosure took place. I can find no record of the Act.

As we saw above, the old system (probably a four-field course) of cultivation had dropped into disuse even before the beginning of the nineteenth century, but still, up to about the year 1850, the custom remained that on one of the four fields, that under wheat, after the crops had been carried, the “Pindar” gave notice that “the fields are to be broken,” and over that field common rights of pasture were exercised for about a month, from some day in October to Martinmas (November 23rd). Then the Pindar kept watch over the grazing animals night and day, and by night built up enormous bonfires, with all the boys of the village clustering round and roasting potatoes.

But about 1850 even this custom disappeared, and now every holder of lands in the open fields cultivates them as he chooses, but they must be under some form of tillage as long as they remain open. But the tendency, observed by Arthur Young, for the larger owners of lands in the common fields to buy, sell and exchange strips with other owners with the object of getting some half-dozen acres in one continuous piece and then enclosing them, has continued up to the present day. Such enclosures are laid down in grass, and in this way the area of the open fields has gradually been reduced.

The strips of land in the open fields are known as “selions,” the auctioneers’ notices of a sale reading, “All that selion piece of land,” etc. They are also known as “acres,” “half-acres,” “roods,” etc., but these terms must not be taken as exactly defining their area. A nominal acre varies in area from a minimum of about half an acre to a maximum of an acre and a half. As the half-acres and roods similarly vary, it follows that the largest “half-acres” are bigger than the smallest “acres.”

The general aspect of the fields is well shown in the photograph taken for me by Mr. Newbit, of Epworth. I asked in a bar-parlour in Haxey, “Are these allotments both sides of the road?” A labourer answered, “Yes, but there are seven miles of these allotments.” But the publican corrected him. “Well, it’s not allotments exactly, it’s a very old system, that’s what it is.” Further conversation with one man and another gave me a strong impression that the people of Axholme are proud of their “very old system.” That they have some reason to be proud of it Mr. Rider Haggard bears witness: