[294] _e.g._ Whitecote (Salop) 40 acres, and at Wyndeferthing (Norf.) 25 acres are enclosed by the _villata_ (see Leadam, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. vi.).
[295] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_. At Washerne nineteen out of twenty-one customary tenants held separate pieces of meadow and pasture, the largest 7-1/2 and the smallest 3-1/2 acres, but usually almost equal. At Donnyngton, twelve out of thirty-two customary tenants had pieces of land "extractum de communia." R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancaster, Bdle. 3, No. 29, Agarsley (Staffs., 1611).; here the pasture appears to have been divided up among the copyholders, but there are considerable inequalities in their shares.
[296] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.
[297] _Northumberland County History_, vol. ix. In this case enclosure was carried out by the freeholders. But the procedure is similar to that at Ewerne. The allusion to "justice and right" shows what the reason for the intermixing of strips had been.
The procedure followed by the freeholders of that township was to get their land surveyed by an expert, to divide it into two great portions, and to agree that each man should have an allotment in one or other of the two divisions proportionate to the holding which he had occupied in the open fields, due regard being had to the quality as well as the acreage of each holding, "so that some have not all the best ground and others all the worst, but that each man have justice and right." Such instances may prove to be exceptional in the sixteenth century; it is our impression that they were, and that the attempts which the peasantry made to overcome the difficulties associated with the open field system of cultivation more often took the form of individual exchanging of strips, than of a formal agreement to abandon one method of cultivation and to adopt another. But, even though exceptional, they are of some interest as offering complete examples of changes which have been going on more generally on a smaller scale and in a less systematic manner. They afford a striking contrast to the enclosing by the manorial authorities which we shall examine in a future chapter, and offer an analogy to the enclosures which were carried out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They resemble the latter in being a deliberate attempt to make a clean sweep of the old system of open field agriculture. They differ from them in being the outcome of voluntary agreement among the tenants, not of legislation.[298]