share, so that, for instance, a virgater had the right to send two cows and eight sheep to the pasture, while the owner of a bovate could only send one cow and four sheep, and so on. The use of wood for building purposes, of hedges for fuel, of turf, and other profits drawn from the common and undivided fund of the village, were regulated by rules or by-laws of the same kind. In regard to meadows, which were scarce and highly valued, the communalism of the village found a suitable expression in the division of these meadows into a certain number of strips according to the number of households taking part in the community: these strips were then allotted to one after the other of the households in a customary order or by casting lots. The arable did not change hands in the same way. As a rule, the strips of the arable were owned by each household in hereditary succession, each generation entering into the rights of the preceding generation in this respect. But, even in the case of the arable, there were many facts to shew that it was considered dependent on the community, though held to a certain extent in severalty by the households. To begin with, the holding in severalty existed on the land only for one part of the year. The tenant had a particular right to it while it was under crop, that is, when it had been ploughed up and sown, and while the harvest had not yet removed the proceeds of the individual labour and care which the tiller had bestowed upon it. As most fields were cultivated in medieval England on the three-field or on the two-field system, the households of shareowners obtained private rights over their arable strips while winter corn or spring corn grew on the soil, and these separate rights were marked off by narrow lines of turf between the strips, called balks, while the whole of the sown field was protected from the inroads of cattle by a temporary hedge.
But after harvest had been gathered the hedges fell, and the whole field returned to the condition of waste to be used for pasture as a common: a condition which took up the whole of every third year in a three-field and the whole of every second year in a two-field husbandry, besides a considerable part of the years when the field received seed. Private occupation of the strips emerged in this way from time to time from the open common field, an arrangement which not only kept up the principle that the arable was, after all, the property of the village as a whole, but had direct practical consequences in hampering private industry and the use of private capital in cultivation: it rendered, for instance, manuring a very complicated and rather exceptional process. Nor is this all: the householder did not only cease to cultivate his plot as soon as harvest was over, but he had, even before then, to conform in the plan and methods of cultivation to the customs and arrangements of his neighbours. The arable of his holding was generally composed of a certain number of strips in proportion to the importance of his share, and these strips lay intermixed with the strips of other villagers so that every one came to own patches of land, acres and half-acres in all the
