Agricultural Sustainability and Open-Field Farming in England 237Successions of farmers mimicked nature but they did this by a process of chance
and folk experience rather than by the grand designs that are available in modern
agriculture.
The second core element was economy, which is recognized as a critical issue in
modern literature (Heap, 1992; Gregorich, 1995; Pannell and Schilizzi, 1999).
Self-evidently no system is sustainable if farmers go out of business, but the rural
community also maintained many other groups and individuals, including land-
lords, through traditional landlord/tenant relationships, and armies of service pro-
viders. The English village evolved as a community of responsible, self-regulating
partners, with a duty not simply to the present but also to future generations.
Obviously the potential legacy had to be tempered by current need, including a
direct income to each generation of farmers. To this extent our characterization of
the village community may seem idealized, but periodically the community was
subject to risks of shortage and sometimes the ultimate penalty when poor harvests
had ensuing mortality consequences. The troughs of hardship were broken up by
long periods of, not necessarily plenty, but a less romanticized sufficiency which
made communities think about their long-term survival strategies. There have
been well-defined periods in English history when the ultimate calamity in agri-
cultural supply resulted in deepest famine and mortality crises, but in the period
on which we concentrate, the link between food shortage as measured by adjust-
ments in the relationship of crop and food prices and mortality is statistically weak
(Wrigley and Schofield, 1981, pp371–372). We contend that this was because the
management of resources, and thus the sustainability of the agricultural system,
was successful not least because of the strengths of the communal organization of
agriculture. To this extent we are certain that our understanding does not fall foul
of a romantic view of the past that tends ‘to presume that “tradition” is somehow
“good” for ecosystem maintenance’ (O’Riordan, 2003, p8). If communal decision
making, very often based on tradition, is still very much a feature of non-Western
agriculture, then perhaps therein lies a strength rather than a weakness which can
be built upon (to this extent many of the modern-day examples in Uphoff, 2002,
are built on a tradition of community ownership and participation).
The third core element is equity. Farmers were the stewards of the environment
they inhabited. In their contemporary language they were judged on whether they
cared for the land in a husbandlike manner, or with a care for the well-being of the
farming habitat. This has always implied ensuring that the soil would retain its
fertility. In practice this involved farming in a manner agreed to be the best prac-
tice in the locality. However, not all farmers behaved in the same way and with the
same attitude of care. Moreover, the resource that delivered the product – the soil
itself – was communally administered and subject to a good deal of communal
sharing. Therefore good husbandry must not always be assumed, it might have
been enforced – through lease covenants for example. Nevertheless, the reward was
equitably derived in that all participants shared in both the ownership and/or the
management of local resources. Disputes over equitable access to these resources
were the most common ways in which sustainable agriculture was compromised,