ABSTRACT
The field landscape of a typical Midland township, simple and straightforward though it may at first sight appear, is the culmination of a number of changes in design which can take back over at least a millennium and a half of agrarian history, and perhaps even further than that. An understanding of the arrival of the system should provide the firm basis which is needed for an exploration of earlier field and farmstead groupings in Midland townships. This chapter provides a survey of the previously published work bearing on the dating of and processes behind the adoption of the two- and three-field system. In sources from between 1250 and 1350 a second regular feature of the Midland system may be observed, namely the allocation each year of one of the fields as fallow grazing which was the dominating principle of the system. H. L. Gray drew too bold a boundary line around the territory of his Midland field system.
