ABSTRACT
If we compare the thirteenth-/fourteenth- with the fifteenth-/sixteenth-century patterns of land-use and settlement, we immediately become aware of both continuities and discontinuities. Most of the arable worked in the central middle ages was still worked in the late middle ages; but some went out of cultivation and some new land was taken in. Noticeably, the land that went out of cultivation was sometimes high (a fifth of these fields were above 70m, as against the Fabric 1 mean of 11%), and sometimes on north-facing slopes (29%, as against a mean of 23%). The land that came into cultivation anew was more likely to lie at 200–400m from water than the norm and, in Transect M especially, included land that subsequently reverted to lande (see Fig. 6.6). When changes came, they were slight: some retreat from exposed high land, then later some 15% expansion of the earlier arable maximum; and some tendency to choose new land to exploit, especially land farther from water (see above, p.129). 1
