Читать книгу The Industrial History of England - Henry de Beltgens Gibbins - Страница 43

—It must always be remembered, however, that the arable land in a manor was “communal”—i.e. each tenant held a certain number of furrows or strips in a common field, the separate divisions being merely marked by a piece of unploughed land, where the grass was allowed to grow. The ownership of these several strips was limited to certain months of the year, generally from Lady Day to Michaelmas, and for the remainder of the year the land was common pasture. This simple and rudimentary system was utterly unsuited to any advanced agriculture. The tenants, however, also possessed “closes,” some for corn, others for pasture and hay. The rent of a close was always higher than that of communal land, being eightpence instead of sixpence per acre. Besides the communal arable land, and his close, the husbandman also had access to two or three kinds of common or pasture—(1) a common close for oxen, kine, or other stock, pasture in which is stinted both for landlord and tenant; (2) the open (“champaign” or “champion”) country, where the cattle go daily before the herdsmen; (3) the lord’s out-woods, moors, and heaths, where the tenants are stinted but the lord is not. Thus the tenant had valuable pasture rights, besides the land he actually rented. But the system of holding arable land in strips {44} was very cumbrous and caused many disputes, since often a tenant would hold a short lease on one strip and a longer lease on another; or confusion of ownership would arise; while in many ways tenure was made insecure, and no encouragement was given to advanced agriculture.