238 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
hence an elaborate system of manorial and other local courts acted as regulators
and policemen within the community. Access to the outcome of farming, to the
food itself, also had to be equitable. As in modern societies, so also in the past,
there was a basic requirement for secure and adequate food. To that extent we can
invoke Sen’s modern theory of entitlements. This he related to famines in which
supply was not the problem, rather it was the equity of access to that supply that
was put at risk. So also in the English open-field village basic output was also
adequate but in time there developed a problem over the equity of access to that
output (Sen, 1981, 1986).
The Experience of Open-Field England
The textbook management system of the English open fields suggests they oper-
ated in a rotational process involving three fields. This simple characterization
hides the flexibility and variation within the system. In a study of the organization
of Leicestershire church property in the 17th century, Beresford (1949) found that
9 per cent of the parishes for which he had information were more simply arranged
in two rather than three fields, 79 per cent were in three, and the remainder in
combinations of four, five and more fields. In 18th-century Northamptonshire 57
villages were in four or more fields (Hall, 1995, pp157–164), and although the
Nottinghamshire village of Laxton, which incidentally is the last unenclosed exam-
ple of open-field husbandry to survive on any scale, was a four-field village it was
worked on a three-course rotation (Beckett, 1989, pp43–45). Generally in the
midland counties each field was divided into a multitude of other units known
variously as furlongs, strips and lands, not all of which would necessarily be under
the same land use as their neighbours at any one time. For example, at Husbands
Bosworth in Leicestershire in 1770, the North Field was divided into 109 arable
strips, 56 under temporary grass leys, and 46 in more or less permanent meadow.
In the South Field there were 105 strips of arable and 67 in leys, and in West Field
there were 102 in arable and 74 in leys (Beresford, 1949). Such divisions within
fields made more complex cropping patterns possible, but if we simplify things we
recognize three basic ‘units’ of rotation, the corn crops, the pulses and the fallow.
The corn ‘unit’ was typically sown to barley, wheat or rye (Leicestershire Archives,
DE 783/78; Northamptonshire Archives, IL 16).
For much of the early part of the period barley was the most common crop. In
Leicestershire, between 1558 and 1608, the acreage of barley averaged between 35
and 40 per cent of the cropped arable. Wheat varied between 8.5 and 14 per cent
and rye declined from 8.5 per cent to an insignificant amount by the early 17th
century (Hoskins, 1950, pp168, 171; Thirsk, 1954, p212). Barley had the advan-
tage of flexibility in its end use because it could be used for bread and beer produc-
tion, and also as animal feed, and its straw made fodder and other products.