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Ploughing and Field Shape

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Michael Nightingale
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Extract

The French scholar, Marc Bloch, describes two open field systems in France; the one with long narrow strips grouped in furlongs and ploughed by a long wheeled plough la charrue, the other with small rectangular plots ploughed by a short wheel-less plough, l'araire. R. G. Collingwood has taken up Marc Bloch by suggesting that in England, in Romano-British times, the charrue (carnea) was used on the Villa farms, whilst the araire (aratrum) was employed in the small plots of the villagers, the so-called ‘Celtic Fields’. He further suggests that the Celtic Fields were enclosures.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 27 , Issue 105 , March 1953 , pp. 20 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1953

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References

1 Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931).

2 Collingwood, R.G. and Myres, J.N.L. Roman Britain and the English Settlements (Oxford History of England) (1936), pp. 210, 211.Google Scholar

3 Husbandry, ed. E. Lamond (1890), p. 8.

4 Ridge and Furrow and the Open Field, E.H.R., 2nd series, vol. I, no. I (1948), p. 34.

5 Now in the British Museum, 54.12.27.76. The blocks for plate III were kindly lent by the Editor of the Brit. Arch. Institute’s Arch. Journ. Ed.

6 Georgics, Book I, lines 169-75.

7 Res Rusticae, Book 11, Ch. 2, para. 25.

8 Now in Rochester Museum. For a report of its discovery and evidence of its antiquity, see Arch. Cant., vol. XVII, pp. 189-92 and vol. XVIII, pp. 189-95.

9 To be published in Arch. Cant., vol. LXV.

10 B. M. Cottonian MS., Tib. B.V. (part 1), fol. 3.

11 Archaeological Journal, vol. CIV (1948).

12 Husbandry (1523), para 2.

13 The English Improver Improved (1653).

14 p. XLII.

15 A general view of the Agriculture of the County of Kent (1796), p. 45.

16 Illustrated in C. S. Orwin, The Open Fields.

17 W. Stevenson, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Surrey (1809), p. 118 ; W. Marshall, Rural Economy of the Southern Counties (1798), 11, p. 368 (for Sussex Downs) ; Chas. Vancouver, General View of the Agriculture of Hampshire (1810), p. 94.

18 Roman Britain and the English Settlements, pp. 210, 211.

19 The Open Fields, p. 43 et seq.

20 English Village Community, p. 5.

21 The Open Fields, pp. 319-22.

22 W. Marshall in Rural Economy of the Southern Counties (1798), 11, p. 301, discusses the formation of lynchets on the downs between Petersfield and Farnham.

23 ANTIQUITY, no. 86 (1948), pp. 79-81.

24 J. Hutchins, History of Dorset, 11, p. 809.

25 From general enquiries that have been made it appears that the turn-wrest plough was used extensively on the light downland soils of Dorset.