Welsh Journals

THE OPEN FIELDS. By C. S. and C. S. Orwin. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1938. Pp. xii. and 332. Illustrations and maps. Price 21s. The purpose of this review is not to assess The Open Fields as a contribution to economic history, but rather to indicate the interest of its contents to readers in Powysland. Its title is misleading, because the greater part of the text (231 out of 318 pages) is given to a study of the open field system in one parish-Laxton in Nottinghamshire, the only place in the British Isles where the system is still carried on in all its essentials. The authors had access to records of unique interest. At Thoresby Park in the muniment room of the family of Pierrepont (which has held the estate continuously since 1640) not only are there maps and terriers giving cross-sections of the economy from 1635 on at intervals of a century, but also manorial and parish records from which the consecutive story can be filled in. With one of these surveys, that of 1635, Part III. of the book (pages 199-318) is completely taken up. There is a faithful transcript of the terrier and a complete reproduction of half-scale tracings of the companion map, published in folded sections at the end of the volume. Incidentally the original map, on a scale of 8 inches to the mile, is of beautiful craftsmanship, and is embellished with several drawings of contemporary agricultural and sporting scenes. In Part II., entitled The Open Fields cf Laxton," the authors analyse the information given in the map and terrier and in other documents. The chapter headings give sufficient indication of the contents of the section: The Manor and sub-Manor; From Domesday to 1625; The Survey of 1635; The Structure of the Fields; Freeholders, Tenants, and their Holdings; Farming and Administration; Reclamation, Inclosure, and Redistribution. The preceding 66 pages of text, Part I., are occupied with a general discussion on The Open Fields of England." The authors approach the subject from a new angle; they say that open fields and scattered strips are the outcome not of an allotment of land on a pre-considered basis of equitable distribution, but are due rather to the fact that each villager naturally and without ordered planning shared in any new territory as it was reclaimed a little at a time from the waste. They attribute, too, the apparently haphazard lay-out of the strips to a necessity of aligning the furrows up and down the slopes for drainage, the pattern of the strips thus conforming to the contours of the countryside. From the foregoing sketch the general interest of the book will be obvious, but to us in Wales it may prove to have an unsuspected value. Evidence is accumulating that the Open Field system was not as unknown in the Principality as some writers-for instance the authors of the work under review (see p. 59)- would have us believe. A detailed study, such as is set forth in The Open Fields, will thus be invaluable for comparative reference. H.N.J.