ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, large areas of England were still cultivated under the system of ‘open’ fields. This system, which predated the Norman Conquest, involved organizing the arable land around a village into two or three large fields. In order to ensure an equitable distribution of land of differing qualities, each farmer worked a number of strips of land which were widely scattered about the large fields. Usually, one of the fields would be devoted to fallow, and the other(s) to corn crops. There resulted a two-or three-course rotation, which served to maintain crop yields. Animals would be kept on the common land of the village, on the stubbles left after harvest, and on any available waste land.
