"If churls have a common meadow or other partible land[15] to fence, and some have fenced their part, and some have not, and (cattle stray in and) eat up their common corn or grass; let those go who own the gap and compensate to the others who have fenced their part the damage which there may be done, and let them demand such justice on the cattle, as it may be right. But if there be a beast which breaks hedges, and goes in everywhere, and he who owns it cannot restrain it, let him who finds it in his field take it and slay it, and let the owner take its skin and flesh, and forfeit the rest."
The picture this law presents is that of fields divided by temporary fences, in which, if the three-field system were in use, two would be under cultivation and the third fallow. One great field of thirty acres would have sixty distinct strips, with a narrow margin of turf serving in each case as the line of demarcation. To each servile holding in the Confessor's time the landlord assigned a pair of oxen with which to work it; and these may have been combined into a powerful team of eight or twelve, similar to manorial teams, though plough-teams varying in numerical strength are recorded, and the efficiency of some of them may well be doubted.
If there were oxen, it is clear that provision must have been made for their support; and this consisted in the hay from the meadow, in the pasture of the common waste, and that of the fallow field and the other fields in the interval between harvest and seed-time. The question whether the tillers were bond or free probably made no difference to the way in which agricultural operations were conducted.
The collapse of this system may be attributed to the scarcity of labour brought about especially by the Black Death. When men could not be had in sufficient number, the necessary consequences was the expansion of pasture and the contraction of tillage; and this dual process was assisted by the stampede of labourers to the towns and the policy of enclosure to which landowners resorted as a remedy. Deprived of their quit-rents, and not having resources for the payment of wages on an adequate scale, supposing that labour was obtainable on reasonable terms, the landholders fell back upon the only expedients that remained to them. They had land, and they had stock; and, as an escape from absolute ruin, they let the land to tenants who took over the stock and, probably, as the need arose, replaced it with their own beasts. This revolution, already in full swing in the fourteenth century, paved the way for the present order of things, under which the tenant pays a fixed rent for the use of land and buildings, and finds the capital for farming.