Agricultural Sustainability and Open-Field Farming in England 253and also some permanent adjustments to be made without unbalancing the whole
system. But that could not go on forever. The nature of demand developed
throughout society with a rise of commercialization in manufacturing, a greater
circulation of money, an extension of markets, and a greater variation in the
demand for food away from mere survival needs to something more varied. This
encouraged agricultural specialization, placed severe strains on traditional open-
field agriculture, induced questions and decisions about land use and land access
on a big enough scale to threaten the conditions of equity in the community, as
well as putting the ecological balance of resources at risk. The resulting removal of
collective responsibility at enclosure shifted the burden for sustainability from the
community to the individual.
Sustainability is always threatened by crises, and sometimes short-term com-
promises are necessary. But in the longer term contemporaries understood and
acted on the basis that agriculture must be sustainable. They may not have used
the same terminology, but they understood that farming had to meet the needs of
any particular generation without compromising the ability of future rural genera-
tions to meet their own needs. This is not some pie in the sky romantic view of the
past but a realistic and honest assessment of the workings of the rural village econ-
omy. When they looked to make changes they did so cautiously, ensuring at each
stage that the economic demands on farming did not compromise the ecological
and equity considerations too much. Only under the stress of war were such con-
siderations shuffled to one side. There are surely echoes of the traditional collective
rural village economy in modern approaches to biodiversity, sustainability and
communities (a play on words deliberately employed from the title of O’Riordan
and Stoll-Kleemann, 2003 and further elaborated by O’Riordan in his introduc-
tion and partial summary of subsequent chapters, especially pp16–26).
Three hundred years ago in England the organization of the open fields more
or less ensured that resources were used in a manner which was self-evidently good
for the wider environment and community. This has also been illustrated in analy-
ses that have a modern contemporary agenda as well as a historical focus (Skipp,
1978; Pearce et al, 1989; Soule and Piper, 1992; Pretty, 1995; MAFF, 1998).
Moreover, the language of collective action has been employed recently to illustrate
in other countries and in recent times how equitable solutions in rural communi-
ties have met the needs of local development in a sustainable fashion (Pretty and
Ward, 2001; and many of the examples in Uphoff, 2002). Our point is that the
history of open-field farming in England, and no doubt also in much of western
and northern Europe, probably provides a laboratory of similar experiences from
which modern analysts might derive some well-developed but perhaps now forgot-
ten solutions. In this context it should not stretch the imagination to suggest that
there are lessons to be gained from this passage of history to apply to the recent
past, or indeed for application to present and future societies. Communal and
quasi ‘public good’ resources can be managed even against the mounting odds
posed by demographic and other internal and external pressures (such as war) that
impinge upon them. The New Institutional Economics approach to common or