Talk:Open field system

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I'm confused. Why was putting fences around fields such a big deal? Josh Cherry 15:08, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It was a fundamental change to the property system - from common ownership to exclusive private ownership. It was a big social change as well, as it concentrated economic power in a relatively few people's hands. -- ChrisO 09:57, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I meant that it wasn't clear to me from the article why the need for large enclosed fields led to such sweeping economic and social changes. If changes to agriculture required it, why not just build some fences and leave economic relations unchanged? Josh Cherry 23:44, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It was not a change from common ownership to exclusive private ownership. It was a change from private ownership with some communal rights and with communal management - that is, an individual owned the strip, and had the right to the crop, but people in the community (not always all, sometimes it was restricted to other landowners only) might have a right to graze the cattle on the strips after the harvest. It was communally managed, because the manor community (in England at least) would set all the strips in one field to be fallow at the same time, so they could graze all the commoners cattle there without worrying about anyone's crop being eaten.

Open fields were originally needed because the ploughs were so heavy to cut through the heavy clay soil that it just made more sense to have as long a way to have them pulled before trying to turn them around. As for technological innovation after, there is little evidence to show that enclosed fields were more productive than open. But they were more easily sold and rented to commercial farmers, which was most important for landowners.

The reason it was a disruptive change was that a) people lost this right of grazing, b) the costs of enclosure were high enough to force many small landholders to sell their newly enclosed land because they could not afford to fence it, etc and c) it meant the community no longer worked together in land management. But many places were enclosed early, and in other places, there were very few small landholders and most landless had lost all common rights. There is a huge debate among historians right now about how disruptive/destructive to economic and social relationships enclosure was - the answer (currently) seems to be that in some places, it was a huge transformation and made peopel more wage-dependent, and in other places, those same changes had already come without enclosure, but through a concentration of landownership, and the increase in landless people. - *jb 17:39, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I also added the categories Middle Ages and Agriculture- open fields were used in many places in Europe, and contine to be. - *jb 18:02, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)