A Short History of English Agriculture. W. H. R. Curtler
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First Agricultural Holdings Act.
1879–80. Excessive rainfall, sheep-rot, and general distress.
CHAPTER I
COMMUNISTIC FARMING.—GROWTH OF THE MANOR.—EARLY PRICES.—THE ORGANIZATION AND AGRICULTURE OF THE MANOR
When the early bands of English invaders came over to take Britain from its Celtic owners, it is almost certain that the soil was held by groups and not by individuals, and as this was the practice of the conquerors also they readily fell in with the system they found. [1] These English, unlike their descendants of to day, were a race of countrymen and farmers and detested the towns, preferring the lands of the Britons to the towns of the Romans. Co-operation in agriculture was necessary because to each household were allotted separate strips of land, nearly equal in size, in each field set apart for tillage, and a share in the meadow and waste land. The strips of arable were unfenced and ploughed by common teams, to which each family would contribute.
Apparently, as the land was cleared and broken up it was dealt out acre by acre to each cultivator; and supposing each group consisted of ten families, the typical holding of 120 acres was assigned to each family in acre strips, and these strips were not all contiguous but mixed up with those of other families. The reason for this mixture of strips is obvious to any one who knows how land even in the same field varies in quality; it was to give each family its share of both good and bad land, for the householders were all equal and the principle on which the original distribution of the land depended was that of equalizing the shares of the different members of the community.[2]
In attributing ownership of lands to communities we must be careful not to confound communities with corporations. Maitland thinks the early land-owning communities blended the character of corporations and of co-owners, and co-ownership is ownership by individuals.[3] The vills or villages founded on their arrival in Britain by our English forefathers resembled those they left at home, and even there the strips into which the arable fields were divided were owned in severalty by the householders of the village. There was co-operation in working the fields but no communistic division of the crops, and the individual's hold upon his strips developed rapidly into an inheritable and partible ownership. 'At the opening of Anglo-Saxon history absolute ownership of land in severalty was established and becoming the rule.'[4]
In the management of the meadow land communal features were much more clearly brought out; the arable was not reallotted,[5] but the meadow was, annually; while the woods and pastures, the right of using which belonged to the householders of the village, were owned by the village 'community'. There may have been at the time of the English conquest Roman 'villas' with slaves and coloni cultivating the owners' demesnes, which passed bodily to the new masters; but the former theory seems true of the greater part of the country.
At first 'extensive' cultivation was practised; that is, every year a fresh arable field was broken up and the one cultivated last year abandoned, for a time at all events; but gradually 'intensive' culture superseded this, probably not till after the English had conquered the land, and the same field was cultivated year after year.[6] After the various families or households had finished cutting the grass in their allotted portions of meadow, and the corn on their strips of tillage, both grass and stubble became common land and were thrown open for the whole community to turn their stock upon.
The size of the strips of land in the arable fields varied, but was generally an acre, in most places a furlong (furrow long) or 220 yards in length, and 22 yards broad; or in other words, 40 rods of 51/2 yards in length and 4 in breadth. There was, however, little uniformity in measurement before the Norman Conquest, the rod by which the furlongs and acres were measured varying in length from 12 to 24 feet, so that one acre might be four times as large as another.[7] The acre was, roughly speaking, the amount that a team could plough in a day, and seems to have been from early times the unit of measuring the area of land.[8] Of necessity the real acre and the ideal acre were also different, for the reason that the former had to contend with the inequalities of the earth's surface and varied much when no scientific measurement was possible. As late as 1820 the acre was of many different sizes in England. In Bedfordshire it was 2 roods, in Dorset 134 perches instead of 160, in Lincolnshire 5 roods, in Staffordshire 21/4 acres. To-day the Cheshire acre is 10,240 square yards. As, however, an acre was and is a day's ploughing for a team, we may assume that the most usual acre was the same area then as now. There were also half-acre strips, but whatever the size the strips were divided one from another by narrow grass paths generally called 'balks', and at the end of a group of these strips was the 'headland' where the plough turned, the name being common to-day. Many of these common fields remained until well on in the nineteenth century; in 1815 half the county of Huntingdon was in this condition, and a few still exist.[9] Cultivating the same field year after year naturally exhausted the soil, so that the two-field system came in, under which one was cultivated and the other left fallow; and this was followed by the three-field system, by which two were cropped in any one year and one lay fallow, the last-named becoming general as it yielded better results, though the former continued, especially in the North. Under the three-field plan the husbandman early in the autumn would plough the field that had been lying fallow during summer, and sow wheat or rye; in the spring he broke up the stubble of the field on which the last wheat crop had been grown and sowed barley or oats; in June he ploughed up the stubble of the last spring crop and fallowed the field.[10] As soon as the crops began to grow in the arable fields and the grass in the meadows to spring, they were carefully fenced to prevent trespass of man and beast; and, as soon as the crops came off, the fields became common for all the village to turn their stock upon, the arable fields being usually common from Lammas (August 1) to Candlemas (February 2) and the meadows from July 6, old Midsummer Day, to Candlemas[11]; but as in this climate the season both of hay and corn harvest varies considerably, these dates cannot have been fixed.
The stock, therefore, besides the common pasture, had after harvest the grazing of the common arable fields and of the meadows. The common pasture was early 'stinted' or limited, the usual custom being that the villager could turn out as many stock as he could keep on his holding. The trouble of pulling up and taking down these fences every year must have been enormous, and we find legislation on this important matter at an early date. About 700 the laws of Ine, King of Wessex, provided that if 'churls have a common meadow or other partible land to fence, and some have fenced their part and some have not, and cattle stray in and eat up their common corn or grass; let those go who own the gap and compensate to the others who have fenced their part the damage which then may be done, and let them demand such justice on the cattle as may be right. But if there be a beast which breaks hedges and goes in everywhere, and he who owns it will not or cannot restrain it, let him who finds it in his field take it and slay it, and let the owner take its skin and flesh and forfeit the rest.'
England was not given over to one particular type of settlement, although villages were more common than hamlets in the greater part of the country.