44 THE MANOR
becomes clear that immediately in front of us is a large arable
field. Unlike a modern farm it seems to have no boundaries—at
least there are no hedges, dividing one part from another, and
nothing to prevent us from walking across its length and out into
the grazing lands beyond. A closer examination, however, will
show us that this great field is, nevertheless, divided up into a
number of compartments or large divisions. These go by many
names—furlongs, shots, dells—and each of these compartments
is again subdivided into a certain number of strips (or selions),
each divided from the other by raised balks of unploughed land.
The strips run parallel, one to the other, the whole length of the
furlong or shot, and are generally found to contain half an acre or
one acre of land. At right angles to them run the "headlands"
—unploughed portions which give access to the strips in that
furlong, and also to the other parts of the great field.
As we shall see, the peasant did not hold all his strips in one
convenient block, but had them allocated to him in various parts
of this, and of the other great fields of the manor. This was a
principle of great antiquity: it is of the essence of these peasant
holdings that they shall each be of comparatively small size and
scattered over the whole of the common fields.
The very term, "the common fields*', reminds us that much
medieval farming was a co-operative affair. But we are by no
means as dear as we should like to be as to how far this was so
in actual practice. The generally accepted theory envisages the
peasants carrying out all the principal occupations of agriculture
in common. Reasons will be given later for thinking that there was
more individual enterprise than has been imagined, but we may
begin by admitting that the fields were cultivated according to a
plan which had the sanction of time immemorial, or of general
village consent, and that everyone had to fall in with this. Indi-
vidual cultivation of any particular crop was almost impossible
and had to be reserved for the little " closes " round the home, or
for the "assart" land newly brought into cultivation by the
peasant, and which lay outside the "common fields" and was
generally on the outskirts of the manor. In the common fields,
however, when oats were sowed by one they were, perforce, sown
by all. The most considerable operation, of course, was ploughing,
and how far this was a communal affair it is hard to teU. Clearly,