The open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages and lasted into the 20th century in Russia, Iran, and Turkey.Keddie, Nicki R. Iran. Religion, Politics and Society: Collected Essays London: Routledge, 1980, pp. 186–187 Each manor or village had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acres each, which were divided into many narrow strips of land. The strips or selions were cultivated by peasants, who were either tenants or serfs. The holdings of a manor also included woodland and pasture areas for common usage and fields belonging to the lord of the manor and the religious authorities, usually Roman Catholics in medieval Western Europe. The farmers customarily lived in separate houses in a nucleated village with a much larger manor house and church nearby. The open-field system necessitated co-operation among the residents of the manor.
The lord of the manor, his officials, and a manorial court administered the manor and exercised jurisdiction over the peasantry. The Lord levied rents and required the peasantry to work on his personal lands, called a demesne.Astill, Grenville and Grant, Annie, eds. The Countryside of Medieval England Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp.23, 64
In medieval times, little land was owned outright. Instead, generally the lord had rights given to him by the king, and the tenant rented land from the lord. Lords demanded rents and labour from the tenants, but the tenants had firm user rights to cropland and common land and those rights were passed down from generation to generation. A medieval lord could not evict a tenant nor hire labour to replace him without legal cause. Most tenants likewise were not free without penalty to depart the manor for other locations or occupations. The rise of capitalism and the concept of land as a commodity to be bought and sold led to the gradual demise of the open-field system.Kulikoff, Allan From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000, p. 11 The transition took place over several centuries, especially after the 15th, in the process known as enclosure in England. France, Germany, and other northern European countries had systems similar to England, although open fields generally endured longer on the continent.
Some elements of the open-field system were practised by early settlers in the New England region of the United States.Ault, W. O. Open-Field Farming in Medieval England London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1972, pp. 77–78Powell, Sumner Chilton. (1963). Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 215pp.
Description
The most visible characteristic of the open-field system was that the arable land belonging to a manor was divided into many long narrow furlongs for cultivation. The fields of cultivated land were unfenced, hence the name open-field system. Each tenant of the manor cultivated several strips of land scattered around the manor.
The village of Elton, Cambridgeshire, is representative of a medieval open-field manor in England. The manor, whose Lord was an abbot from a nearby monastery, had 13 "hides" of arable land of six virgates each. The acreage of a hide and virgate varied; but at Elton, a hide was and a virgate was . Thus, the total of arable land amounted to . The abbot's demesne land consisted of three hides plus of meadow and of pasture. The remainder of the land was cultivated by 113 tenants who lived in a village on the manor. Counting spouses, children, and other dependents, plus landless people, the total population resident in the manor village was probably 500 to 600.Gies, Frances and Joseph Life in a Medieval Village New York: Harper and Row, 1990, pp 31, 42
The abbot also owned two water mills for grinding grain, a fulling mill for finishing cloth, and a millpond on the manor. The village contained a church, a manor house, a village green, and the sub-manor of John of Elton, a rich farmer who cultivated one hide of land and had tenants of his own. The tenants' houses lined a road rather than being grouped in a cluster. Some of the village houses were fairly large, long by wide. Others were only long and wide. All were insubstantial and required frequent reconstruction. Most of the tenants' houses had outbuildings and an animal pen with a larger area, called a croft, of about one-half acre (0.2 ha), enclosed for a garden and grazing for animals.Gies, pp. 34–36
The tenants on the manor did not have equal holdings of land. About one-half of adults living on a manor had no land at all and had to work for larger landholders for their livelihood. A survey of 104 13th-century manors in England found that, among the landholding tenants, 45 percent had less than . To survive, they also had to work for larger landowners. 22 percent of tenants had a virgate of land (which varied in size between and and 31 percent had one-half virgate.McCloskey, Donald N. "The open fields of England: rent, risk, and the rate of interest, 1300–1815" in Markets in History: Economic Studies of the Past, ed. David W. Galenson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp 6–7 To rely on the land for a livelihood a tenant family needed at least .
The land of a typical manor in England and other countries was subdivided into two or three large fields. Non-arable land was allocated to common pasture land or waste, where the villagers would graze their livestock throughout the year, woodland for pigs and timber, and also some private fenced land (paddocks, orchards and gardens), called closes. The ploughed fields and the meadows were used for livestock grazing when fallowed or after the grain was harvested.
One of the two or three fields was fallowed each year to recover soil fertility. The fields were divided into parcels called furlongs. The furlong was further subdivided into long, thin strips of land called selions or ridges. Selions were distributed among the farmers of the village, the manor, and the church. A family might possess about 70 selions totalling about scattered around the fields. The scattered nature of family holdings ensured that families each received a ration of both good and poor land and minimised risk. If some selions were unproductive, others might be productive. Ploughing techniques created a landscape of ridge and furrow, with furrows between ridges dividing holdings and aiding drainage.
The right of pasture on fallowed fields, land unsuitable for cultivation, and harvested fields was held in common with rules to prevent overgrazing enforced by the community."Medieval fields in their many forms" British Archaeology Issue no. 33, April 1998; Ault, W. O. "Open-Field Farming in Medieval England" London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1972, pp. 15–16
Crops and production
The typical planting scheme in a three-field system was that barley, oats, or legumes would be planted in one field in spring, wheat or rye in the second field in the fall and the third field would be left fallow. The following year, the planting in the fields would be rotated. Pasturage was held in common. The tenants pastured their livestock on the fallow field and on the planted fields after harvest. An elaborate set of laws and controls, partly set by the Lord of the manor and partly by the tenants themselves regulated planting, harvest, and pasturing.Hopcroft, Rosemary L. Regions, Institutions, and Agrarian Change in European History Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 17–20; Astill and Grant, p. 27
Wheat and barley were the most important crops with roughly equal amounts planted on the average in England. Annual wheat production at Battle Abbey in Sussex in the late 14th century ranged from 2.26 to 5.22 seeds harvested for every seed planted, averaging 4.34 seeds harvested for every seed planted. Barley production averaged 4.01 and oats 2.87 seeds harvested for seeds planted. This translates into yields of 7 to 17 bushels per acre harvested. Battle Abbey may have been atypical, with better management and soils than typical of demesnes in open-field areas.Brandon, P. F. "Cereal Yields on the Sussex Estates of Battle Abby during the Later Middle Ages," The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 25, No. 8 (Aug 1972), pp. 405, 412, 417, 419–420 Barley was used in making beer – consumed in large quantities – and mixed with other grains to produce bread that was a dietary staple for the poorer farmers. Wheat was often sold as a cash crop. Richer people ate bread made of wheat. At Elton in Cambridgeshire in 1286, perhaps typical of that time in England, the tenants harvested about twice as much barley as wheat with lesser amounts of oats, peas, beans, rye, flax, apples, and vegetables.Gies, pp. 60–62
The land-holding tenants also had livestock, including sheep, pigs, cattle, horses, oxen, and poultry. Pork was the principal meat eaten; sheep were primarily raised for their wool, a cash crop. Only a few rich landholders had enough horses and oxen to make up a ploughing-team of six to eight oxen or horses, so sharing among neighbours was essential.Gies, pp. 82, 145–149
History Much of the land in the open-field system during medieval times had been cultivated for hundreds of years earlier on Roman estates or by farmers belonging to one of the ethnic groups of Europe. There are hints of a proto-open-field system going back to AD 98 among the Germanic tribes. Germanic and Anglo-Saxon invaders and settlers possibly brought the open-field system to France and England after the 5th century AD.Hopcroft, p. 40 The open-field system appears to have developed to maturity between AD 850 and 1150 in England, although documentation is scarce prior to the Domesday Book of 1086.
The open-field system was never practised in all regions and countries in Europe. It was most common in heavily populated and productive agricultural regions. In England, the south-east, notably parts of Essex and Kent, retained a pre-Roman system of farming in small, square, enclosed fields. In much of eastern and western England, fields were similarly either never open or were enclosed earlier. The primary area of open fields was in the lowland areas of England in a broad swathe from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire diagonally across England to the south, taking in parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, large areas of the Midlands, and most of south central England. This area was the main grain-growing region (as opposed to pastoral farming) in medieval times.
The population in Europe grew in the early centuries of the open-field system, doubling in Britain between 1086 and 1300, which required increased agricultural production and more intensive cultivation of farmland.Ault, pp. 15–16, Oosthuizen, p. 165-166 The open-field system was generally not practised in marginal agricultural areas or in hilly and mountainous regions. Open fields were well suited to the dense clay soils common in northwestern Europe. Heavy ploughs were needed to cut through the soil and the ox or horse teams which pulled the ploughs were expensive, and thus both animals and ploughs were often shared by necessity among farm families.Ault, 20–21