Open Field System - History

History

Open fields appear to have developed in the medieval period, and were particularly well suited to the very heavy ploughs that were used to cut through the heavy clay soils common in north-western Europe. The ox teams which pulled the ploughs were very expensive, and thus tended to be shared among the families of a village. This form of settlement is sometimes referred to as champion land.

Each village would be surrounded by several large open fields, usually not physically divided from each other, with each field containing a different crop as part of a three-field crop rotation. The fields would be split into sections a furlong (220 yards, about 200 metres) wide, each of which would be subdivided cross-wise into strips covering an area of half an acre (about 0.2 hectares) or less. Under their commoner's rights, each villager was allocated a set number of strips in each field (traditionally about thirty) which they would subsistence-farm. The strips were generally allocated by lot in a public meeting at the start of the year. The individual holdings were widely scattered, so that no single farmer would end up with all the good or bad land. The land was usually managed using ridge and furrow cultivation.

In addition to the three fields, there would be large common meadows (allocated in strips in a similar way), common pasture land or waste where the villagers would graze their livestock throughout the year, woodland for the pigs and for timber, and a communal village green for social events. There was also some private fenced land (paddocks, orchards and gardens), called closes, and often also a park for the use of the owner of the manor for hunting. The ploughed fields and the meadows were also used for livestock grazing outside the growing season.

As populations increased, the land available for each family diminished as more strips were required. From the late Middle Ages onwards, a gradual movement towards consolidation took place as small plots were amalgamated into fewer but larger holdings, with a corresponding increase in the power of the landowners.