This intermixture of strips in the open fields is also characteristic in another way: it manifests the working of a principle which became obliterated in the course of history, but had to play a very important part originally. It was a system primarily intended for the purpose of equalising shares, and it considered every man's rights and property as interwoven with other people's rights and property: it was therefore a system particularly adapted to bring home the superior right of the community as a whole, and the inferior, derivative character of individual rights. The most complete inference from such a general conception would be to treat individual occupation of the land as a shifting ownership, to redistribute the land among the members of the community from time to time, according to some system of lot or rotation. The western village community does not go so far, as a rule, in regard to the arable, at least in the time to which our records belong. But even in the west, and particularly in England, traces of shifting ownership, 'shifting severalty,' may be found as scattered survivals of a condition which, if not general, was certainly much more widely spread in earlier times.(22*) The arable is sometimes treated as meadows constantly are: every householder's lot is only an 'ideal' one, and may be assigned one year in one place, and next year in another. The stubborn existence of intermixed ownership, even as described by feudal and later records, is in itself a strong testimony to the communal character of early property. The strips of the several holders were not divided by hedges or inclosures, and a good part of the time, after harvest and before seed, individual rights retreated before common use; every individualising treatment of the soil was excluded by the compulsory rotation of crops and the fact that every share consisted of a number of narrow strips wedged in among other people's shares. The husbandry could not be very energetic and lucrative under such pressure, and a powerful consideration which kept the system working, against convenience and interest, was its equalising and as it were communal tendency. I lay stress on the fact: if the open-field system with its intermixture had been merely a reflection of the original allotment, it would have certainly lost its regularity very soon. People could not be blind to its drawbacks from the point of view of individual farming; and if the single strips had become private property as soon as they ceased to be shifting, exchanges, if not sales, would have greatly destroyed the inconvenient network. The lord had no interest to prevent such exchanges, which could manifestly lead to an improvement of husbandry,. and in regard to his own strips, he must have perceived soon enough that it would be better to have them in one compact mass than scattered about in all the fields. And still the open-field intermixture holds its ground all through the middle ages, and we find its survivals far into modern times. This can only mean, that even when the shifting, 'ideal,' share in the land of the community had given way to the permanent ownership by each member of certain particular scattered strips, this permanent ownership did by no means amount to private property in the Roman or in the modern sense. The communal principle with its equalising tendency remained still as the efficient force regulating the whole, and strong enough to subject even the lord and the freeholders to its customary influence. By saying this I do not mean to maintain, of course, that private property was not existent, that it was not breaking through the communal system, and acting as a dissolvent of it. I shall have to show by-and-by in what ways this process was effected. But the fact remains, that the system which prevailed upon the whole during the middle ages appears directly connected in its most important features with ideas of communal ownership and equalised individual rights.
These ideas are carried out in a very rough way in the mediaeval arrangement of the holding, which is more complicated in England than on the continent. According to a very common mode of reckoning, the hide contains four virgates, every virgate two bovates, and every bovate fifteen acres. The bovate (oxgang)shows by its very name that not only the land is taken into account, but the oxen employed in its tillage, and the records explain the hide or carucate (23*) to be the land of the eight-oxen plough, that is so much land as may be cultivated by a plough drawn by eight oxen. The virgate, or yard-land, being the fourth part of a hide, corresponds to one-fourth part of the plough, that is, to two oxen, contributed by the holder to the full plough-team; the bovate or oxgang appears as the land of one ox, and the eighth part of the hide.(24*) Such proportions are, as I said, very commonly found in the records, but they are by no means prevalent everywhere. On the possessions of Glastonbury Abbey, for instance, we find virgates of forty acres, and a hide of 160; and the same reckoning appears in manors of Wetherall Priory, Westmoreland,(25*) of the Abbey of Eynsham, Oxfordshire,(26*) and many other places.
