Others were only 20 feet (6 m) long and 10 feet (3 m) wide. Some of the village houses were fairly large, 50 feet (15 m) long by 14 feet (4.3 m) wide. The tenants' houses lined a road rather than being grouped in a cluster. The village contained a church, a manor house, a village green, and the sub-manor of John of Elton, a rich farmer who cultivated one hide of land and had tenants of his own. The abbot also owned two water mills for grinding grain, a fulling mill for finishing cloth, and a millpond on the manor. Counting spouses, children, and other dependents, plus landless people, the total population resident in the manor village was probably 500 to 600. The remainder of the land was cultivated by 113 tenants who lived in a village on the manor. The abbot's demesne land consisted of three hides plus 16 acres (6.5 ha) of meadow and 3 acres (1 ha) of pasture. Thus, the total of arable land amounted to 1,872 acres (758 ha). The acreage of a hide and virgate varied but at Elton, a hide was 144 acres (58 ha) and a virgate was 24 acres (10 ha). The manor, whose Lord was an abbot from a nearby monastery, had 13 " hides" of arable land of six virgates each. The village of Elton, Cambridgeshire, is representative of a medieval open-field manor in England. Each tenant of the manor cultivated several strips of land scattered around the manor. The fields of cultivated land were unfenced, hence the name open-field system. The most visible characteristic of the open-field system was that the arable land belonging to a manor was divided into many long narrow furlongs for cultivation. The outlines of the medieval strips of cultivation, called selions, are still clearly visible in these now enclosed fields. Description The method of ploughing the fields created a distinctive ridge and furrow pattern in open-field agriculture, seen here at Wood Stanway, Gloucestershire. Some elements of the open-field system were practised by early settlers in the New England region of the United States. France, Germany, and other northern European countries had systems similar to England, although open fields generally endured longer on the continent. The open-field system was gradually replaced over several centuries by private ownership of land, especially after the 15th century in the process known as enclosure in England. The rise of capitalism and the concept of land as a commodity to be bought and sold led to the gradual demise of the open-field system. Most tenants likewise were not free without penalty to depart the manor for other locations or occupations. A medieval lord could not evict a tenant nor hire labour to replace him without legal cause. Lords demanded rents and labour from the tenants, but the tenants had firm user rights to cropland and common land and those rights were passed down from generation to generation. Instead, generally the lord had rights given to him by the king, and the tenant rented land from the lord. In medieval times, little land was owned outright. The Lord levied rents and required the peasantry to work on his personal lands, called a demesne. The Lord of the Manor, his officials, and a manorial court administered the manor and exercised jurisdiction over the peasantry. The open-field system necessitated co-operation among the residents of the manor. The farmers customarily lived in separate houses in a nucleated village with a much larger manor house and church nearby. The holdings of a manor also included woodland, often managed through coppicing, and pasture areas for common usage and fields belonging to the lord of the manor and the religious authorities, usually Roman Catholics in medieval Western Europe. The strips or selions were cultivated by peasants, often called tenants or serfs. Each manor or village had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acres each, which were divided into many narrow strips of land. The open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages and lasted into the 20th century in Russia, Iran, and Turkey. The mustard-colored areas are part of the demesne, the hatched areas part of the glebe. Generic map of a medieval manor, showing strip farming. Prevalent ownership and land use structure in medieval agriculture
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