As we walk the fields of England, we can often see, especially in the East Midlands, relics of the past written across the land’s surface. When the open-field-system was swept away in the 18^th and 19^th centuries and replaced by enclosed pastures, left behind were ridges and furrows that can be seen, particularly when low sun-light casts shadows along the line of ridges or when the furrows become water-logged. They are relics of mediaeval farming. They mark the lines of the ploughed strips or furlongs.

But how old are they really?

We can often be sure when they ended. For my village of Keyworth in Nottinghamshire the end came when the Enclosure Act was passed in 1798. The following year the village’s open-fields were ditched and hedged. But when had the system been first laid out? It was clearly in place by the time of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The depopulation caused by the plague led to the desertion of many villages. In Leicestershire much grassland retains the ridge and furrow of villages that died in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. So these traces of the old field-systems must go back at least to the thirteenth century when the population was growing during a time of favourable climatic conditions.

But could the open-field system date back to an even earlier age? Could it date back to the pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon period?

Eric Kerridge in his 1992 book ‘The common fields of England’ argued the common fields ‘originated in early and remote times‘. Common fields formed a fundamental feature of the open-field system for a village would commonly possess two or three such fields, subdivided each year into strips (furlongs) and then cropped in rotation. The strips would be allocated variously to peasant farmers of the village to cultivate and then, after harvest, given to common grazing. Kerridge found evidence to support his argument in the Laws of Ine, King of Wessex between AD688 and AD726. He concluded ‘that the introduction of common fields in (but not throughout) England started before 726 and had run much or most of its course by about the year 1000.’ (p22)

The particular law of Ine reads as follows:

Gif ceorlas gærstun habben gemæne oððe oþer gedalland to tynanne 7 hæbben sume getyned hiora dæl sume næbben 7 etten hiora gemænan æceras oððe gærs gan tha þonne þe ðæt geat agan 7 gebeten þam oþrum þe hiora dæl getynede hæbben þone æwerdlan þe ðær gedon sie.

The key words here are ‘gemænne‘ and ‘gedalland‘. Clark Hall’s dictionary tells us that ‘mǣne‘ translates as ‘common, … owned in common or held in common’ while ‘dālland‘ translates as ‘land under joint ownership or common land divided into strips’. This would indeed appear to be a reference to an open-field or common field system.

Kerridge translated the law as:

‘If churls have common meadow or other deal-land to fence and some have fenced their deal, some never, and their common plough-acres or grass be eaten, go they then that own that gap and make amends to them others that have fenced their deal for damage that there be done.’ (Kerridge p17)

The law reveals a system of communal farming of both arable and pasture but Debby Banham, writing in ‘Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming’ (2014), was not so sure that the law did indicate a fully developed open-field system in operation. She wrote:

‘The peasants evidently do not work together on fencing, since some have completed theirs while others have not, and it is not clear if cultivation is cooperative. Most importantly, we are not told how the land is laid out, but we are talking about a plot small enough to fence, not the huge expanses of open fields. The mere existence of shared or common landholding does not have to mean open fields.’ (Debby Banham & Rosamond Faith  Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming p69)

She did note that some Anglo-Saxon charters included the phrase describing land as ‘lying acre under acre’, or some similar expression and accepted that ‘the easiest way to visualize what they describe is as large fields divided into strips and furlongs.’ (Banham & Faith p69)

So as we walk over surviving ridge and furrow in our local meadows, we should be cautious before assuming that our feet are touching relics from Anglo-Saxon England. We may only be walking over traces of a system only fully elaborated in the 11^th, 12^th or 13^th centuries. Nevertheless features of that developing system, such as the mouldboard plough, and the cultivation of bread wheat, had certainly appeared by the pre-Conquest period. The Open-field system of the High Mediaeval centuries certainly had its roots, if perhaps not its full articulation, in innovations that began in the Mid Anglo-Saxon period and that became widespread in the period before the Norman Conquest.

By Geoff Littlejohns, January 2024

Addendum April 2024

Further light is thrown on this question by David Stocker’s volume in the English Heritage ‘England’s Landscape‘ series (2006). His brief is the East Midlands, not the usual assemblage of counties, but a swathe of land running from the Humber southwards to the Chilterns and into Oxfordshire. One characteristic that pulls this sprawling zone together is its common history as ‘Planned Countryside’ carved by the 18^th & 19^th century enclosure movement and by the earlier Open-field system, along with the associated nucleated villages.

Stocker argues for a distinct moment when the Open-field system came to the region. The crucial evidence comes from pottery. If ancient individually-farmed hedged closes were pulled together into extensive, open fields while dispersed human dewellings were drawn into nucleated villages, the distribution and density of pottery scatters around local settlements can suggest to us the timing of these changes. Dense concentrations of pottery fragments can reveal the site of human dwellings. Field-walkers have identified them across what are known to be once-farmed common fields. Stocker writes: ‘In both Northamptonshire and Leicestershire dense concentrations of pottery, indicating the existence of former settlements in the common fields, always dated from between the 5^th and the 9^th centuries. Furthermore, a very high percentage of such sites have no pottery of later periods.’ (Stocker p62)

Stocker draws the conclusion that: ‘the common-field systems were therefore not in existence between the 5^th and the 9^th centuries’. He notes also that: ‘pottery of later dates (from the late 9^th century onwards) is found instead, in a uniform scatter, indicating that it has been spread across agricultural land with manure’. (ibid) The uniformity shows that the manuring was carried out over an extensive common-field rather than in a small individually-owned enclosure. The significance of the late 9^th century as the moment of change is confirmed by pottery found under the nucleated villages that exist in the region today. Stocker notes that: ‘although some of today’s villages clearly had earlier origins, the pottery sequence in most parts of them begins in the late 9^th century onwards. In Leicestershire, 90 per cent of pottery of 9^th-11th century date comes from sites in, or adjacent to, modern villages, while in Northamptonshire the equivalent figure is 80 per cent.’ (ibid)

If the time of these far-reaching changes in agriculture and settlement was the late 9^th century, we are drawn to the Danish settlement as an explanation. Stocker, however, rejects this on the grounds that the region of the Open-fields extended way beyond the Danelaw into shires such as western Northamptonshire Warwickshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Perhaps the expansion of the realm of the Wessex dynasty in the 10^th century was the time, but this would face the same objection. Stocker hazards the suggestion that communities just came to grasp the advantages of the new arrangement, particularly after the ‘introduction, apparently in the 9^th century, of the wheeled plough, which allowed large teams of draught animals to plough even the toughest claylands efficiently’. (Stocker p64)

I feel that the Danish settlement may still be a valid explanation, albeit as an indirect rather than a direct cause. We know that in Lincolnshire, the Trent Valley and the North Midlands it had an enormous economic effect. The region was drawn into a network of North Sea and Baltic trade and this stimulated the sudden growth of urban life where there had been little before. In the 10^th century the growth in trade triggered off the establishment of mints, marking the appearance of a mass coinage. A market economy had blossomed. This surely provided the impetus to agricultural re-organisation, with the turn to the intensive communal management of village fields. Surplus production could now be swiftly and profitably marketed.

Stocker observes that in places the transition was rapid. ‘Studies in Northamptonshire show that most, if not all, of the county’s common-field systems, were in existence by the year 1000, and they seem to have been created quickly, over a period of less than a couple of generations in the 10^th century.’ (Stocker p62) In Oxfordshire, north of the Chilterns, the change took longer to develop. This would fit in with a pattern of the Danish-settled districts responding first to the new market opportunities with communities beyond the Danelaw taking somewhat longer to appreciate the possibilities.

Because of the scarcity of documentary evidence and historical reference, this is a transformation that is often overlooked, particularly as it was not so pronounced in other parts of England, such as the North West, the West Midlands, the West Country, the South East and, surprisingly, East Anglia – but the surge in agricultural production that was achieved in the East Midland region between the 10th and the 13^th centuries was surely of enormous significance for our whole national history.