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This paper has nothing to do with the Celtic, Roman, or Teutonic origins of the ancient field-systems of cultivation. Even if those controversies had not been decisively settled by air-photography and its latter-day discoveries, I possess no special competence for the task. I am here concerned with the form of the plots or fields themselves in which these cultivation-systems were carried on. And we possess abundant evidence that what are classed by competent investigators as ancient ‘ Celtic-fields ’—irrespective of whatever methods of cultivation or of crop-rotation prevailed within their borders—were quite frequently of the same irregular shapes as the later English fields ; of which countless numbers may still be seen.
1 See various plans and illustrations in ANTIQUITYI,, 261-89, 456, 460, 463, 466, 469 ; IV, 80-95 ; VI, 389-406 ; VII, 296-97 ; IX, 472-73.
2 Among many such, I have seen nothing better than the beautiful photographs of earthworks, etc., in Northern Ireland. Ibid. IV, 453-59 (Dec. 1930).
3 Economic Interpretation of History, 7th ed., 1909, p. 20.
4 Harrison, : — ‘I haue to saie of our husbandmen … that they were neuer so excellent in their trades as at this present … ’ Description (ed. Furnivall, F.J. New Shaksp. SOC 3vols. 1877) 1, 136.Google Scholar
5 SeeCunven, E.C. on this, ANTIQUITIY, 1, 268–72, 287.Google Scholar
6 Cobbett, Rural Rides (Everyman ed.), I, 128.
7 ‘ … land refuses to be cut into parallelograms, each of which is 40 rods long and 4 wide … ’ Maitland, F.W. Domesday Book, pp.379, 380. Or– ‘ each of which is good soil or bad’.Google Scholar
8 Notes and Queries, 1859, Ser. 2, vm, 440. Perhaps with some such consequence in mind, it was ordained at Coventry in 1421 : – ‘And that no man do make any hegge be viij foote nyghe the foresaid diche (the town ditch) within ne without be vj fotte, ne that no man dig ne lede thens any cley … ’ Coventry Leet Book, ed. Mary Dormer, Harris 1907–9, 1, 30.Google Scholar
9 N.&Q. Ser. 2, VII, 485.
10 Sketch in Seebohm, English Village Community, p. 5 ; photo, reprod. in Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce (5th ed., 1910, frontispiece). In Seebohm’s sketch the ‘terracing’ is much steeper and more pronounced than in Cunningham's photo, by Miss E. M. Leonard ; but compare the scale-profile in E. C. Curwen, ANTIQUITY, I, 274. Vinogradoff notes linchéis in Anglo-Saxon charters ; Kemble, Cod. Dipl. ann. 931, 938, 959 : (English Society in the Eleventh Century, p. 279).
11 My own father and mother reached Red Deer with $10 : July, 1894.
12 A deed cited by Maitland (Ely : temp. James I.) ‘ … the acre 4 poles in breadth … and by length as might happen by reasons of the configuration of the fen … ’ (Domesday Book, p. 383). See my FIG. I, field E.
13 Wm. Cobbett, A Year’s Residence in America (The Abbey Classics, c. 1929).
14 ‘Blaze’=a white vertical gash on the trunk, visible from one such to the next ; the same sense as in a ‘blaze-faced’ horse.
15 ‘Hag’ =a section for a year's felling in a wood : thought by Thorold Rogers to be very old (Agriculture and Prices, 1, 21). Found in Duffield Frith, 1581: Cox, Royal Forests, p.198; cf. Forest of Dean, 1705:Google Scholar Nisbet, J. Eng. Hist. Rev. xxi, 445–59. Hagg as a ' division ', in place or field-names at Selby, Yorks.:Google Scholar Bogg, E. Forest of Elmet, p.236. Scotland, c. 1825: – ‘working on a hag ’, (an oak-felling and bark-peeling job):Google Scholar Gamier, R.M. British Peasantry, pp.321–8. Not to be confused with the Border ‘moss-hags’.Google Scholar
16 ‘Ten-oaks field‘, Bucks (1227, 1573 ; now ’Tinick’; Bucks, Eng. P.N. Soc. 1925, p. 10), may have been such an instance, when it was named.
17 See FIG. i, field H. ‘Island’ … ‘is used of any piece of ground isolated from its surroundings … ’ A Mawer, Chief Elements of Eng. Place-Names, p. 38. ‘Frencholm’, 12th cent. ‘… a wood, surrounded by a ditch’ (the meaning being sought : N.&Q. Ser. 8,1, 247). Carlyle (no etymologist in English, though occasionally in German) describes (Frederic, vili, 44), an open space in the woods as an ‘island’. A similar place, ‘Monmouth’s Close’, New Forest, where he is said to have been taken in 1685, called ‘ The Island’. N.&Q., Ser. 1, 1, p. 4. ‘ Holme Island’ (i.e., ‘island island’) : Westmorland Gazette, 5 May 1923.
18 See FIG. i.
19 See FIG. I, fields c, D, E, H.
20 See FIG. i, at large.
21 See Curwen, E.C. ANTIQUITY, I, 261-89, particularly, p.278, O.G.S. Crawford, ‘Our Debt to Rome’:Google ScholarIbid, n, 173-88.
22 In France, 1388, an ordinance states that ‘ hedges and brambles have greatly encroached on the roads, that there are even some in the midst of which trees have shot up ’: Jusserand, Wayfaring Life, p. 85. The Hebrew writer knew what follows war : ‘ … all the land shall become briars and thorns ’: Isaiah, vn, 24 ; cf. Lorraine, 1728 : Carlyle, Frederic, 11, 180.
23 Cf. Medehamstead (Peterboro) in 852; burnt by the Danes, 870; in 963, ‘nothing there but old walls and wild woods’: A. S. Chronicle, sub ann. That is the Fens; on 27 July 1929, near Naseby, the watershed of England, in the two years or so since the last trimming, I found growing between the road-macadam and the hedge, a thicket containing almost every English tree. Imagine ninety years of it ! See also a similar ‘reversion to nature’ in a recognized ‘Celtic-field’ area, Cranborne Chase; O.G.S. Crawford, ANTIQUITY, II, 174, 186. Geology may delimit the occupational areas of any one tree; is there any soil in England in which no tree will grow ? I doubt it.
24 Psalms, Lxxx, 13 (cf. ibid, LXXX, 12; Ixxxix, 40, etc.). It is not improbable, in woodland regions, that the first fence around a new piece would be of the nature of an abattis, felled in ‘windrow’ when marking off their new field or ‘hagg’, like the ‘ brush fence’ or ‘slash fence’ of Ontario and other woodland regions. It seems fairly certain, from the shape of the old fields, that very seldom would more than two sides of a new plot need fencing at once, as the adjoining plots would constitute the other sides; and the timber tops and brush would probably furnish sufficient for such a purpose from the clearing of the same year. The permanent hedge could be planted inside this, and grow awhile under its protection. The term ‘quickset’ (hedge) points to a distinction between the transplanting of live bushes or slips (‘setting quick '; as in the Catechism— ‘the quick and the dead ’); and the mere piling up of dead thorns or underbrush. Hunter quotes a deed which (if his interpretation be correct) carries back what must have been live hedges to an early period, in Hallamshire, between ‘S(h)efeld and Eglesfeld’, 1161; ‘sicut sepes antiquitus ante combustionem fuerunt (“ as the hedges anciently were before the burning ”)’ ; thought by Hunter to refer to William's harrying of the North, in 1069-1070 (Hunter's Hallamshire, orig. ed. 1819, p. 20; cf. Eastwood, Hist, of Ecclesfield, 1862, pp. 81–83). Probably old then ; and certainly no mere abattis, which could not possibly (after burning) remain as a (legally) recognizable landmark for anything like a period of ninety years. Prof. E. C. K. Gonner notes a method (recommended by Tusser and his editor) of making what a prairie farmer would call a ‘ windbreak ’ rather than a hedge. The common English hedgerow is no ‘ rod or much more in width ’ : Common Land and Inclosure, 1912, pp. 30-31 ’ The high banks in the extreme west and elsewhere (in England) have been interpreted by some as the necessary means of protection adopted when land was directly enclosed from a wild state and required defence against the depredations by wild animals . . . . ’ Ibid. p. 100. Dr G. G. Coulton cites one of the Berkeleys (Thomas in, 1326-61) ‘ whereas the part fence had hitherto been of thorn, new-made every three years, Lord Thomas went to the expense of an oaken paling ’ . . . . (Coulton, Chaucer and his England, 1908, p. 198). It seems incredible that this could have been quickset, unless it was a new one needing much cutting back, and the oak paling was to protect the defenceless park while it was growing. Possibly only an abattis. The correspondent of iV.&Q. (Ser. 2, VII, 373) who initiated the discussion, recognized this progressive reclamation of the waste, and almost had his finger on what I have suggested as the explanation.
25 Cf. Maitland — ‘ … readers of the English Chronicle will doubt whether there is any village in England that has not been once, or more than once, a deserted village’. Domesday Book, p. 364.
26 See the photo of the ‘ Haywood Oak ’, Blidworth, Sherwood: Cox, J.C. Royal Forests, p.220.Google Scholar The ‘brood oak ’ or ‘brod ooke’ which gave its name to Bradock or ‘Brodewok-waste’ in Coventry, 1410, 1423, etc. (Coventry Leet Book, 1, 18, 46 ; 11, 439, 440 ; cf. 1498 : ibid, HI, 588). Cf. Hunter on enormous oaks : one in Sheffield Park, branches 45 feet each way from the trunk, capable of sheltering 200 horsemen. ‘ Greendale Oak ’, Welbeck, 33 feet girth; the ‘ Lord’s Oak ’, Rivelin Park, 36 feet girth; top and branches (1690) yielded 21 cords of wood (8 ft. X4 ft. X4 ft.=128 cubic feet), Hallamshire, p. 116. Cf. ‘ Hatfield Broad Oak’, Essex.
27 A list of 71 ‘ furlongs ’ (field-names) into which the open arable fields of the parish of Whitchurch, near Stratford-on-Avon, ‘had been divided, prior to the inclosure of 1867, from time immemorial’: Smith Woolley, T. (the surveyor): Notes and Queries, Ser. 5, vili, 192–3. Cf. the often early dates of field-names in the Eng. Place-Name Soc. volumes.Google Scholar Kemble, J.M. c. 1850: — ‘Since the happy down-fall of the corn-laws, which were a bonus upon bad husbandry, hedges are being rooted up in every quarter, and fields of 40 or 50 acres may now be seen, where they were not thought of a few years ago....’ Saxons in England (2 vols. ed. Birch, London, 1876), 1, 100.Google Scholar
28 Gonner, Common Land and Inclosure, pp. 82-83, 284 ; also Garnier, R.M. English Landed Interest 1, 104.Google ScholarIbid, n, 173-88.
29 Gonner, op. cit., p. 285.
30 Some rather meagre information on this in Gonner, op. cit. pp. 82–3.‘ As late as the beginning of this (twentieth) century there were districts whose hedges still showed traces of the pastoral or forest state, being apparently of great age, following crooked or irregular lines, and composed of underwood similar in variety to that in the adjoining woodlands, from which they had evidently been collected … ’ Gamier, English Landed Interest, 1, 104. Apparently Marshall’ s ‘ old coppice hedges, of age beyond memory’ (in Gonner, op. cit., p. 83). Kemble, J.M. — ‘It is very remarkable how many modern parishes may be perambulated with no other direction than the boundaries found in the Codex Diplomaticas (Mvi Saxonici; ed. Kemble, 5 vols.). ‘To this very day the little hills, brooks, even meadows and small farms, bear the names they bore before the time of Alfred, and the Mark may be traced with certainty upon the local information of the labourer on the modern estate… ’ (Saxons in England, 1, 246).Google Scholar Cf. Crawford, O.G.S. ANTIQUITY, 11, 179–80. This fact is the foundation of modern place-name study, as the annual volumes of the English Place-Name Society bear witness.Google Scholar
31 Gonner, Common Land, pp. 255–8 ; and cf. his various tables and maps (pp. 448–57).