434 THE CULTIVATION OF CLOSES July Furthermore George Sibley is ' to leave well and husbandlike fallow ' in the last year of his tenancy three closes which are specified, their area being 25 acres. By an indenture made 1662, Richard Warren, a husbandman of the same village, leases a farm and appurtenances containing by estimation 80 acres, for twelve years, the annual rent being £60.^ The land is apportioned among closes, though their number is not given, but the hedges around these closes are not to be repaired except
- when the closes whereunto such hedges doe belong are so wen
with wheate and rye '. The information afforded by this lease supplements that noted above. It is, for example, of value to learn that compost had to be bestowed upon grass land in the proportion of two loads of dung for one load of hay carted, but the indenture assumes more than usual interest when it recites the rotation of crops to be employed. The tenant shall not cross cropp the above demised premises or any part thereof but shall and will keepe the ordinary and usuall seasons of tilladge thereof duely and orderly according to the course of good husbandry and the custome of the cuntry wherein the premises doe lye, that is to saye, the first yeare for fallowe, the second year for wheat rye or barley, and the third yeare for lent come. Finally, a lease bearing date 1637 in respect of a messuage called Naskett in the parish of Watford, about seven miles west of Shenley, gives the information that the tenant ' during the last seaven yeares of the said term permitt and suffer the full thirde parte of all the arrable lande used in tillage hereby demised to lye fresh and fallowe '.^ This evidence, therefore, suggests that in the cultivation of enclosed farms in the first half of the seventeenth century fallows were still used to give a period of relief to the land, and that the yearly proportion of fallow was one-third the arable acreage of the farm. That is, the principles underlying the cultivation of land in an area which seems to be reduced to severalty are essentially the same as those governing agrarian arrangements in an open-field village of the three-field type. Until the middle of the seventeenth century at least, indications seem to suggest that the methods employed on a compact farm could hardly have been markedly superior to those which governed the administration of a scattered holding. The independence of the farmer holding solely or largely in closes was not so complete in practice as we are apt to imagine : the * custome of the cuntry ' is still a force to be reckoned with. Tradition is almost as binding in regions of old inclosure as in an open-field village. S. A. Peyton. > Englefield Papers, £. 60. Ibid. 72/A.
