VILLAGE BY-LAWS 49

agreement often meant no more than the sanction given by
old-established custom. Often a path ran from one point to
another because it had always done so, or the occupant of one.
holding knew that for as long as the oldest memory could look
back that particular holding could not be ploughed till every one
else had finished, and passed with their ploughs and teams across
his particular strip for the last time. Common sense and give
and take were at the back of such arrangements, which led in the
course of time to the more formal common agreements which
were enacted by the peasants in concert, and enrolled at the
lord's court so as to give them permanent and added prestige.
Mr W. O. Ault has investigated these "village by-laws ", one of
which may serve as an example: " No-one", says the Halton
(Bucks) by-law of 1329, " shall have egress from his close over
another man's land ; and if his egress be over his own land he
shall save his neighbour harmless" (i.e. he shall do no harm to
his neighbour's property). Or again, in the same list: " No one
shall make paths to his neighbour's damage by walking or driving
[his beasts] or by carrying grain, be it by night or by other
time." * Offenders against these by-laws were brought before the
Manor Court and fined.2 Nevertheless, Mr Ault agrees that the
more usual practice of the peasants was to rely on ancient custom,
and that by-laws and the use of the manorial machinery are a late
and comparatively rare occurrence.3

The most damning evidence of the inefficiency of the common-
field method of agriculture comes from modern observers, for
their accounts are of conditions still obtaining, despite much that
has been done for the improvement of crops since the fourteenth
century. Mr G. H. Fowler writes, "I once saw an open field at
harvest-time : on the whole the foulest land under a crop which
I ever saw",4 and the accounts given by English investigators of
the conditions of common-field farming in parts of Germany, in
1870, disclose a frightful state of affairs.5

Such a system was so patently difficult to work that every here
and there we find men sufficiently wideawake to attempt reform,
and this clearly could most easily — and most effectively — be

1 E.H.R. XLV, 2i2ff. a Ibid. 220-1.
3 Cf. Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, 184.
4 Catalogue of Maps (Bedford County MSS.\ ed. G. H. Fowler, 7 n.
5 See, for example, Land Tenure Reports, 306, 386, 436, etc.